Cankpe Opi, the winter came and coldness settled in your valley.
On that day when blood fell upon the snow and the rivers flowed with human tears, your name that was to be, is now the name it is.
The wounded was formed and cries out in pain. It scratches at our hearts and cries out to be healed. Like a wound that does not heal, so it has continued to hurt. The people and the land and all the relatives and their friends hurt from your wound. Some could not take the pain and sickness and we was scattered off into four directions. Not matter how far and isolated we were, the wound is still there 116 years and it still hurts.
So I pray for you Cankpe Opi. To pray for the healing to go out from your epicenter, To pray that the rivers will flow with the spring rains again and not with tears, that the spring time will come and the morning dew will form.
The spring rains will descend on happy hearts and dew of joy will be carried by the four winds unto all those who have scattered and cried for you. That people will dance a joyful memory for their ancestors. Tunkasila, go over the land and breathe on your people. Let knew life go forth with new blessings and unified vision. Lift the heaviness, remove the burden, may there be peace.
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The Contrarian and I watched “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” last night. I’m sure many of you have already seen it. We see most movies quite a while after their release. This has to do with Vietnam and is not essential to this story, so enough said. It is a powerful film, one that should not be missed. It is painful, somber, and there is little in it that will bring a smile.
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It is, as you may recall the story of the last years of the Lakota Sioux in the Dakotas and the Black Hills. It is the story of a peoples trek to near extinction. It is but one of the stories that clutter our historical landscape with uncomfortable accounts of the demise of great numbers of native peoples across our land, the result of white people’s insatiable desire for land and its produce.
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I make no claim that there was not fault on both sides of the equation. This is undoubtedly true of nearly every conflict, yet as we all know, some are much more lopsided than others. This is one of the more lopsided ones to be sure. The facts are clear, that here as in other instances, the United States entered into treaties it either blatantly violated when it suited it, or which were created with loopholes one could drive the proverbial truck through in the first place. Driven to live lives that were alien and hardly possible, the Indians rebelled and in the end always lost.
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Of course we didn’t learn much if anything about this as children in our schools. Indian “issues” were treated summarily at best, and with quick apologetic sentences that barely touched the surface of the deeply shameful conduct of our government and our people. The film depicts the entirety of the sordid affair of the plight of the Lakota Sioux after the battle of the Little Big Horn, where Indians triumphed and had killed the entire army of George Custer. Of course General Custer was intent on destroying them in the first place.
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That there were well-meaning whites involved in the process that lead to the near destruction of the Sioux is undisputed. The film is quite fair in its portrayal of those “good” men and women. Though good in their intentions, their mindset was still that Indians were heathen, uncivilized, and barely human. They saw clearly that Indians would either change to American “ways” or die. They were largely correct in this assumption. But they also believed that they were bringing a civilizing element to these near-animals, something the Lakota should be grateful for. It is easy to see why the methods of deceit, casual killing, and land grabbing might be seen by the Lakota quite differently.
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That not all the Native Peoples acted with perfect morality is also not in dispute. Sitting Bull is portrayed as a man who did his best, but often succumbed to the lure of fame and money while on the road with Buffalo Bill Cody. He rose to the occasion in the end, rejecting the governments final “offer” for their land to build rails to the mines in the Dakota territory. He was among the first casualties at Wounded Knee.
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The story is told in some respects through the eyes of Charles Alexander Eastman, whose true name was Ohiyesa (Oh hee’ yay suh). As a young boy, he had come upon the fighting at Little Big Horn, and managed to kill a soldier and acquire his first feather. He had stood bravely for his people, yet his father had been out East with the whites, and upon his return he sent Ohiyesa to “school.” The school mistress refused to acknowledge his presence in the class until he chose a “white name.” He became in the end Charles. He was sent East, and went to school there, and acquired a medical degree. He returned to the reservation.
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Ohiyesa tried mightily to bridge this gap between white and red. More and more as time went on he realized that the US government had much more interest in the land than the people. He slowly began to see that doing the right thing was standing for his people. He was unable to continue working effectively for policies he no longer believed in.
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America today claims moral leadership in the world. We have not been granted that status, we have assumed it ourselves. We revere and cite with pride our beginnings, fighting for religious rights, and freedom from oppression, whatever the source. We undoubtedly have some claim to this position. Yet we are not without sin. Far from it. Some may attempt to limit our errors to a blip on the screen, that pesky thing slavery, finding in it somehow the seeds of something so alien that it can be shrugged off as some massive aberration that cannot and did not happen anywhere else. That is simply untenable and wrong.
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We did it first to the Native peoples of this land. This land that was theirs and not ours. This land that we assumed by God given right, and soon justified with social Darwinian elan, belonged to proud and numerous tribes scattered throughout the lower 49. We are still just beginning to understand how civilized they really were. We took it because we had bigger and better weapons, simply put. We took it because we wanted it and saw riches beyond riches and we wanted them. Native peoples had no concept of land ownership, and no tribe as far as I have been told had a word for land ownership, so alien was the concept.
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We did it and we justified it by all sorts of nonsense. Mostly we just considered them savages, not fully human. We did the same to Africans we captured and sent to America to work our fields and tend our homes. We did it again to Japanese citizens who found themselves carted off to concentration camps during WWII for no reason other than they were Japanese and “might” pose a threat. We did it in smaller measure to immigrants like the Italians and Irish. We like to declare that others are uncivilized. It makes for a clean little self deception that works for an excuse and justification for acting badly.
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It was not that long ago, when people spoke of Chicanos and Latinos or at least Mexicans. We now have cloaked them with the invisible appellation “illegals.” We are quickly reaching a point where we don’t differentiate between illegals and immigrants or citizens of Mexican descent. The same can be said of Muslims these days. Islam is a false religion we are told by some, and increasingly the average American is nodding his/her head in agreement, forgetting that for centuries on end we have regarded Muslims, Christians and Jews as having the commonality of “People of the Book.”
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Are we heading down the road of slavery, Wounded Knee, and Japanese Internment Camps once again? Time will only tell, but we will not if we, those who have bothered to know our history, have any say in the matter. We need to remember what really happened in our past, lest it happen again.
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Tonkasila, go over your land and breathe on your people.
