In The Spirit Of Crazy Horse

  Reading history related books about Native Americans can be difficult for me.  For one, there's that old axiom that "the winners write the history books."  As you can imagine then, a lot of history out there is skewed for a non-Native perspective.  I just wish a lot I've read to this point was a little more objective.  I've seen some scholarly tomes that were just painful to read.  Well, there are some scholarly historic books out there that have a Native voice too.  So, if you've never been skewed before, check out these brief excerpts:

In The Spirit Of Crazy Horse, Peter Matthiessen, Penguin Books, 1983

 

  Early in 1876, in open contravention of the Fort Laramie Treaty, in which the government had pledged its honor to keeping peace, troops were sent into the Great Sioux Reservation in pursuit of those "hostiles" most likely to resist the voice of reason, especially Sitting Bull's Hunkpapa and the "wild" Oglala under Crazy Horse, who was camped that winter not far from Custer's trail to discourage trespassers in Paha Sapa. By spring, Crazy Horse had joined forces with Sitting Bull, who said that year, "Tell them in Washington, if they have one man who speaks the truth, to send him to me, and I will listen to what he has to say." The one man who met this description was George Crook, the greatest Indian fighter in American history in the opinion of General Sherman, and also the only leader of the whites whom the Indians could trust to keep his word. But General Crook had been sent not to speak truth but to wage war.

  Before leaving Apache country in March 1875, he was asked if it was hard not to go on another Indian campaign, to which he made the famous answer, "Yes, it is hard. But, sir, the hardest thing is to go and fight those whom you know are in the right."

 

  In A Century Of Dishonor (1881), which deplored the mistreatment of the Indians, Helen Hunt Jackson...argued that the native peoples should be "civilized" by assimilation through land ownership and education into the nation's economic life, a well-meant idea that was seized upon by those who wished to assimilate the reservation lands as well. As General Sherman, never an Indian lover, had long since noted, a reservation was "a parcel of land inhabited by Indians and surrounded by thieves," and a few congressmen, at least, saw through the General Allotment Act, which was, one said, "in the interest of men who are clutching up this land, but not in the interest of the Indians at all." Another said, "The provisions for the apparent benefit of the Indian are but the pretext to get at his lands. If this were done in the name of greed, it would be bad enough; but to do it in the name of humanity, and under the cloak of an ardent desire to promote the Indian's welfare by making him like ourselves, whether he will or not, is infinitely worse."

  These voices were lost in the general clamor of a nation hell-bent on westward progress. "They must either change their mode of life or they must die!" one senator cried.

 

  From the beginning, those Indians willing to obey the government agents and missionaries fared much better than those who held to traditional Indian way. "These people on the reservations are fat from the white man's food and foolish from his religion," the acerbic Dr. [Charles] Eastman observed at the turn of the century, in the first of his several valuable books about his people. "They are only a shadow of what it really means to be an Indian."

  Full-blood traditionals sometimes refer to the mixed-bloods as "breeds" and to themselves as "skins" (short for 'half-breeds' and 'redskins,' respectively), but...these terms refer less to actual blood ratios than to cultural attitudes. Older traditionals who speak Lakota call the mixed-bloods iyeska, or "those who speak white," the name given to the scout-interpreters of the 19th century, most of whom had a "squaw man" for a father. Many traditionals lived "out in the districts," in small outlying communities far from the bureaucratic trough, which was all but empty for those people who did not wish to send their children to government or mission schools, where the Lakota language and customs were forbidden. Despised and exploited, the traditionals--many of them full-bloods who spoke little English--were the people who suffered most from despair and apathy, poverty and unemployment, alcoholism, and the random angry violence that besets depressed Indian communities to a degree almost unimaginable to most Americans, who still suppose that "the government takes care of the Indian." In truth, the government takes care of the "progressive" Indian who does not resist the assimilating policies of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Among traditionals, it would be difficult to find a family without an alcoholic or a member in jail, a recent suicide or car-wreck victim, a woman sterilized by the Indian Health Service without her consent, or a child removed to a government boarding school or foster home against the family's will. And almost everywhere, these people have been subjected to vicious racism that would not be tolerated by the public or the courts toward any other minority in the country.

 

                                                                                    Peter Matthiessen

                                                                                    Born in New York City, 1927

                                                                                    Writer, naturalist and explorer