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The most significant thing about Brown's book was that it was truly the first of its kind. He was way ahead of the social and historical revisionist curve in bringing to the public notice accounts of white encroachment into the body of the continent and the tragic abuse of the American Indian by Europeans as they spread westward. The volume struck an immediate chord, appearing as it did (1970) at the height of the Civil Rights/Social Consciousness movement, and it's probably not too much to say that it was a seminal factor in the launching of the entire impulse toward a more sympathetic attitude toward American Indians and an awareness of the history of their plight. It is not incidental, I don’t think, that the American Indian Movement was organized two years later, and that the impetus toward tribes organizing to assert antique treaty rights over land and water and other elements of agreements violated by various United States governments also took off almost immediately after the book was published.

The problem is that even at the time, people took Brown’s history at face value and never questioned either its accuracy or its completion. The thing is that they probably should have. Brown was a prolific but fairly minor and, outside the West, virtually unknown writer prior to the book’s release. He had been steadily writing and publishing material on the West for more than thirty years before Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee came out, including nearly a dozen novels and several young adult volumes, as well as some work for hire, such as his history of Hot Springs, Arkansas. Although many readers (and reviewers, oddly enough) immediately assumed that he was of Native American extraction, he was not, although he had grown up and lived in western Arkansas and had a number of personal connections with the Cherokee Nation. Regardless, the book was such a sensational success, it made him a national celebrity--virtually an icon; and the book almost utterly launched the revisionist movement in Western American History, a field that had been more or less dominated by a handful of older historians such as Henry Nash Smith previously.

But as a text, the book suffers, and truly, it doesn’t hold up well under close scrutiny. The major problems really are three. First of all, Brown was not a professional historian. He was essentially a very well read librarian who wrote books. As a history, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee lacks both the scope and the accuracy of a well researched, professionally written historical text. Fraught with sentimentality, it is anything but objective. Although much of what Brown offers is accurate, his "sins of omission" are also numerous and profound. He tends to dwell on the more sensationalist aspects of Native American history without delving much into the background of any of them, and he just plain skips over or utterly fails to note major historical individuals, events, and movements that were no less significant than many he details. In some cases, events he does not discuss were more important than those he chooses to display. Some of his oversights are, incidentally, carefully chosen enough to suggest that they were deliberately left out for fear of contradicting his overall thesis that American Indians were always and totally victims of mindless white cruelty and unbridled bigotry.

Secondly, his personal bias in favor of the Indians informs the whole book. There are gross misstatements throughout, not the least of which is his flat declaration that there was no documented evidence of any unprovoked Indian attack on white settlers. This is patently absurd on the face of it, as Indian attacks and horrific depredations pockmark histories from Wilbarger's famous 19th century text on. Even prior to that, accounts of Indian tortures, mutilations, and out and out slaughter of white captives were well documented. Even Captain John Smith’s journals about Jamestown Plantation include a graphic depiction of a white captive being flayed and dismembered alive, something Powhatan himself confirmed later on. Similar atrocities can be found throughout colonial history and into the era of the Republic. The French missionaries to Canada recorded human sacrifice and even cannibalism among tribes they encountered, and early trappers and explorers from Cabeza de Vaca on record horrendous depredations, some inexplicably cruel, throughout Euro-American history.

True enough, the operative word in Brown’s treatise may be "provoked," if one sees the first European toe to step foot on American soil as a hostile and bellicose act; but there are almost countless incidents of violent raids, attacks, rapine and pillage that could be attributed to Indians from the earliest Indian settlements on. The French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the Seminole War, the Creek War, even the American Civil War and other official governmental armed conflicts are rife with examples of Indians raining terror and hell on white soldiers and civilians. (The Indian name for George Washington, by the way, was "Burner of Villages," a sobriquet he acquired because of his vindicating attacks against the Iroquois Nation in the wake of their incessant raiding and murder along the frontier.) Whereas, Brown graphically makes the point that many, perhaps most white depredations and attacks were motivated by nothing more than greed and bigotry and utter indifference to the humanity of Native Americans, he fails to present a balanced picture that really indicates that what happened in the Americas from 1492 on was a clash of civilizations, with the larger, stronger, and more technologically sophisticated group ultimately, for better or worse, triumphing.

Thirdly, Brown more or less established in the American consciousness the notion that genocide was a principle tactic of Manifest Destiny. There is no question that white Americans regarded the Native American as an inferior human being and that the extirpation of Indians by any means--however inhumane--was a desirable goal, this attitude has to be viewed in the context of the time. For more than a millennium, Europeans had the same attitude toward most Asians, Polynesians, Arabs, Jews, and Africans, as well as the Japanese and Chinese. (Up until the 19th Century, Protestants and Catholics had that same attitude toward each other; in some ways, that continues to exist in Northern Ireland.) The terms "little brown brothers" and "white man's burden" were coined by these same people. That such a philosophy was embraced by Euro-Americans isn't surprising and shouldn't be shocking. That's not to say it's justified, only to say that in the broader context of Western Civilization, it wasn't particularly unique to white-Indian relationships. Brown's book seems to suggest that it was upheld as a deliberately chosen wrong and rationalized later on, and that it was a particular weapon devised to be used against the American Indian. That's nonsense on the face of it. Europeans had been using the same tactic to slaughter one another for fifteen hundred years. It was turned against Muslims, Jews, or anyone else they happened to consider "in the way" or in possession of something they wanted, like the Holy Land, the Iberian Peninsula, the Balkans, or merely money and property wherever it was in non-white, non-Christian hands. Even the definition of “Christian” was occasion for massive and bloody slaughters of millions of innocent people whose only crime was an adherence to a particular faith or way of life. The fact is that the impetus to eradicate the Native American was fueled as much by Christian sectarianism as by deliberate brutal government policy. It was systemic in European culture and society, and it was really a pretty simple matter to apply in the Americas. But bluntly, the European/Americans wanted the land the Indians occupied. They had the means to take it, and they subscribed to a handy philosophy that suited their world view and justified their taking it by any means necessary. The Indians, after all, were neither white nor Christian nor, by the definition the Europeans used, civilized.

More recently, we did the same thing in Vietnam. We're doing the same thing in Iraq right now. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose. Geopolitics based on race, religion, and power is not an invention of the twentieth century. The Romans, as it happens, were very good at it, too. So were the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the ancient Chinese. Fundamentally, so long as there is one rock and two groups who want it, such conflicts are a natural response of human nature.

But in the end, Brown's book over sentimentalized the whole Native American issue. As many as eleven million Native Americans existed on this continent at the time of Columbus. By the battle of Wounded Knee, their numbers were reduced to a few hundred thousand, scattered from Alaska to Florida. They were entirely dispossessed, deprived of both human and civil rights, and were well on their way to extinction as both culture and integral social units. It’s not too much to say that they had been starved, deliberately infected with mortal diseases, rounded up and killed in mass executions, driven into the wilderness and left to die. All of that is true, and all of that is a shame. From a white, Christian civilization standpoint, it’s our legacy of shame.

But at the same time, the Indians themselves were by no means a bunch of peaceful bucolics sitting around making pots and weaving baskets when the whites showed up to teach them warfare and cruelty. Many of the tribes were warrior societies and had long traditions of brutal fighting dating back centuries. They raided and warred on other tribes, and their culture included slavery, ritual cannibalism, unimaginable torture and harsh brutality, at least by European standards.* In many cases, Indian tribes tried to adapt, but they failed to do so in a way that made assimilation into a world where being non-white, non-Christian meant being second or third class citizens even slightly attractive. Other tribes made no effort to bend their cultural priorities to the encroaching white culture; and in some cases, they were as much victimized by their own greed, bigotry, and narrow world view as they were by any outside influences from Europe or anywhere else.

It’s also important to realize that Native Americans were not one people—in truth, they were not one race. They were a richly diverse group of individualized civilizations and societies evolving at different paces and levels and spread over a vast geography that did not even admit knowledge of one another when proximity was denied. If the Europeans were guilty of a significant moral blunder that contradicted their own philosophical narrow mindedness, it was that they failed to make distinctions among the various nations and tribes of North America in the same way they could easily make the same distinctions among their own nations on the European continent, or even among many Asians and Middle Eastern people.

What happened at Wounded Knee was a tragedy, an event that was the almost unavoidable consequence of an attitude of hostility, ignorance, suspicion, and fear of one group of people toward another. It didn’t spring up suddenly or full blown out of nowhere, but it was, in a sense, the climax to a long and complex tragedy on the North American continent that had been played out for more than three centuries. Who was right or wrong, in the final analysis, doesn’t really matter. What matters is what we might have learned from it and what we are prepared to do with those lessons. If a casual perusal of a contemporary newspaper or magazine is any indication, we haven’t learned much and we’re not about to do anything to change a thing. About all that is certain is that there’s nothing we can do to change the past, to made amends for human ignorance, cruelty, and fear. If we want to rectify that, what we probably should do is look to our own knitting and see how we can be better people than we once were. Sitting around wringing our hands over the sins of the past gets us nowhere.

The point is that the period that saw the white expansion into the West was a different world, and it was a different time. In Europe, sectarianism had fostered such events as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the massive arrest and execution of Catholics by Protestants and Protestants by Catholics throughout the period. As for ethnic cleansing and such atrocities, there was also the expulsion of the Jews from Spain (coincident with Columbus’s voyage, by the way), and other manifest horrors and numerous other bloody pogroms and horrific reactions sponsored by such benevolent and highly civilized institutions as the Inquisition that were part of the European philosophy about how to deal with people who were different and suspicious threats to the status quo.

By our more enlightened standards, it's impossible to justify any such depredation as Wounded Knee massacre. Or Sand Creek, or the Washita Creek, or the Cherokee Removal and Trail of Tears. But by the standards of one to two centuries ago, to do such a thing was no more unthinkable than dropping bombs on civilian targets in Baghdad or Hiroshima, than allowing millions to die in the Sudan or turning our backs while genocide and mass starvation takes place anywhere in the world, often at our behest. I suspect that had General W. T. Sherman (famous for his "The only good Indian I ever saw was dead." quote, and whose March to the Sea did not spare civilian property or life) been made aware of the devastation of modern warfare, he probably would be disgusted by the indiscriminate application of military force to innocent victims.

But that's just my opinion.

So I will probably watch the film when it’s aired, and I may have a tub of popcorn handy. But I’ll also have some salt to take along with it.


*I always find it amusing to consider that one of the justifications for the extirpation of many Indian cultures, including those of the Iroquois and the Aztecs, was their practice of human sacrifice to their gods, which the Europeans found repugnant. At the same time, though, these same Europeans who were so shocked by the Indian practices were condoning the burning alive of heretics, Jews, and witches throughout Europe. This was called an "auto de fe" or "act of faith" to please God. I've never thought that, at bottom, there was much of a difference. Dead, after all, is still dead. And God, after all, is still God.