Prologue This book tells the story of what Indians in the United States have been up to in the 130 years since the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota: what we''ve done, what''s happened to us, and what our lives have been like. It is adamantly, unashamedly, about Indian life rather than Indian death. That we even have lives--­that Indians have been living in, have been shaped by, and in turn have shaped the modern world--­is news to most people. The usual story told about us--­or rather, about "the Indian"--­is one of decline and death. Our story begins in unchecked freedom and communion with the earth and ends in confinement and perpetual suffering on reservations. Wounded Knee has come to stand in for much of that history. But what were the actual circumstances of this event that has taken on so much symbolic weight? In the 1860s, the U.S.

government had been trying to solve the "Indian problem" on the Great Plains with a three-­pronged approach: negotiation, starvation, and warfare. Open war on its own had not been going too well. The Plains Indians had won decisive victories and forced the government to the treaty table. In 1868 the Lakota secured a large homeland on the Great Sioux Reservation in southwestern South Dakota and northern Nebraska. Then gold was discovered in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The Lakota tried to enforce the terms of the 1868 treaty and throw out the gold-­seekers who rushed in. Their attempts led, directly, to the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry were wiped out on June 25, 1876. During the final hours of the battle, the Lakota and Cheyenne dismounted, put away their guns, and killed the remaining cavalry with their war clubs and tomahawks in a ritual slaughter.

Some Dakota women, armed with buffalo jawbones, were given the honor of dispatching the soldiers with a sharp blow behind the ear. After that defeat, the U.S. government switched tactics. Instead of confronting the Indians headon, it encouraged widespread encroachment by settlers, reneged on treaty promises of food and clothing, and funded the wholesale destruction of the once vast buffalo herds of the Plains. By the late 1870s, an estimated five thousand bison were being killed per day. Without the bison, the Lakota and other Plains tribes could not hope to survive, at least not as they had been surviving. Their reservations might have been designed as prisons, but now they became places of refuge.

With the vast buffalo herds gone and a growing white population of ranchers, hunters, railroad workers, prospectors, homesteaders, and soldiers hemming them in, the Plains Indians did what many disenfranchised people have done when threatened on all sides: they turned to God. The Indians, however, turned to God in the form of the Ghost Dance. The Ghost Dance religion started among the Paiute in Nevada. It promised a payoff: if Indians lived lives of harmony, worked hard, and danced the Ghost Dance, they would find peace on earth and be reunited with the spirits of their ancestors in the afterlife. As the religion spread from Nevada, it changed. The Lakota believed if they did the Ghost Dance the right way and lived by its rules, they would find peace in this world and the next and all the white people would be washed away. If Indians returned to their traditional ways of life and forms of religious observance, the natural world would be restored and returned to them. The Ghost Dance movement brought Indians together in large numbers.

This greatly alarmed the U.S. government, which redoubled its ongoing efforts to disrupt Indian lives and break up Indian families. It dismantled the Great Sioux Reservation into five smaller reservations, including Standing Rock and Pine Ridge. The Ghost Dance religion was banned, and government troops near the Pine Ridge Reservation were increased. Trouble came. In December 1890, Sitting Bull, who had led his people to victories against the U.S.

military and who had helped wipe out Custer''s Seventh Cavalry at the Little Bighorn, was arrested on the Standing Rock Reservation. Authorities feared that the famous Hunkpapa Lakota chief would use his considerable influence to promote the Ghost Dance. In a scuffle during the arrest, Sitting Bull was shot and killed by Indian police officers who had been sent in by the reservation''s Indian agent, a white U.S. government official. Hearing this news, Spotted Elk (also known as Chief Big Foot) grew afraid for his life and the life of his Lakota band, which also lived at Standing Rock. Spotted Elk and 350 followers left the reservation. They headed for the sanctuary of Pine Ridge.

En route, Spotted Elk and his band were intercepted by a detachment of the Seventh Cavalry and escorted five miles to a camping spot on Wounded Knee Creek. It was bitterly cold. Before dawn the next day, the rest of the Seventh showed up and set up four rapid-­fire cannons around the Indians. The soldiers searched the camp and rounded up thirty-­eight weapons. One of the young Lakota men got upset and urged others not to give up their guns so easily; a fight broke out. What happened next is unclear. Some reported that the Indians opened fire on the government soldiers. Others said that a deaf elder didn''t understand the command to give up his rifle; a soldier grabbed the gun to take it away and it went off.

Then five young warriors shrugged off their blankets and exposed concealed rifles. They shot at the soldiers. The soldiers opened fire on the entire camp with their rifles and the cannons. The Indian men put up a desperate resistance but were mowed down. Spotted Elk was killed. The rain of fire from U.S. troops also claimed the lives of many of the soldiers, in one of the deadliest incidents of friendly fire in U.

S. military history. The Lakota women and children took off running down the frozen creek bed. The soldiers mounted their horses, chased them down, and killed them. The fighting lasted an hour, and when it was over, more than 150 Lakota lay dead or dying in the snow. The actual number of dead is still in dispute, with some putting the number at over three hundred. More than half were women and children. A cavalry general toured the scene of the carnage after a three-­day blizzard had shrouded the dead in snow.

He was shocked by what he saw. "Helpless children and women with babes in their arms had been chased as far as two miles . Judging by the slaughter on the battlefield, it was suggested that the soldiers simply went berserk. For who could explain such a merciless disregard for life?" The massacre at Wounded Knee Creek was covered by more than twenty newspapers. Response to the killings represented something more than sympathy for Indians on the one hand, and bitter and bloody American progress on the other. Rather, both sides saw the massacre as the end not just of the Indians who had died but of "the Indian," period. The frontier was closed, Indians were confined to reservations. The clash of civilizations seemed to have wound down.

The myths and meaning of America had been firmly established. Perhaps this is why the massacre at Wounded Knee became so emblematic. It neatly symbolized the accepted version of reality: an Indian past and an American present and future. This version of history remained largely unquestioned through World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the 1950s. Then came the 1960s: as the fight for civil rights heated up, so did protests against the American involvement in the Vietnam War. Activists grew concerned about the environment and the toxic effects of industrialization and consumerism. Some people questioned whether mainstream culture was the only culture; interest in a counterculture spread--­and the story of "the Indian" surfaced with new intensity in the American consciousness. This awareness was popularized by a highly influential book.

Published in 1970, eighty years after the massacre, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West appeared as news reports of Indian activism were playing out on TV screens across the country, and at a time when many Americans were looking for some other way of being. The book, written by Dee Brown, a white academic librarian, was an enormous success. To date it has sold more than four million copies, and has been published in seventeen languages. It has never gone out of print. The "greatest concentration of recorded experience and observation" of Indian lives and history, wrote Brown in the opening pages, "came out of the thirty-­year span between 1860 and 1890 . It was an incredible era of violence, greed, audacity, sentimentality, undirected exuberance, and an almost reverential attitude toward the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it. During that time the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed." Beneath Brown''s effort to speak truth to power, however, he relied on and revived the same old sad story of the "dead Indian.

" Our history and our continued existence came down to a list of the tragedies we had somehow outlived without really living. As for present-­day Native life, Brown wrote only: "If the readers of this book should ever chance to see the poverty, the hopelessness, and the squalor of a modern Indian reservation, they may find it possible to truly understand the reasons why." I remember, vividly, reading that passage while in college in 1991, and I was doubly dismayed by Brown''s telling. I was far from home, on a distant coast. I was homesick--­for the Minnesota Northwoods, for my Ojibwe reservation, for the only place on earth I truly loved. I was also dismayed because I felt so insignificant in the face of the authority and power with which Brow.