And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
From: David Rider <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [FN] The Politics of Hallowed Ground
The Politics of Hallowed Ground : Wounded Knee and
the Struggle for Indian Sovereignty
by Mario Gonzalez, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
An editorial by Indian Country Today editor Avis Little Eagle
appears in last week's ICT on this book, which Barbara first
brought to our attention. Little Eagle calls it a "must read"
for academics, and she encourages all "thinking people" to read
it, guaranteeing that "you will come away enlightened."
"The story's power is in its stark truth", she wrote, and I
agree with her very positive assessment of the book. Mario
Gonzalez (Oglala) is co-author and attorney who has fought for
return of the Black Hills, a formal apology for the Wounded
Knee massacre, and federal designation of Wounded Knee as a
historical site, along with federal money to build a monument
for the murdered who lie in a mass grave there and reparations
for the descendants of the murdered and the survivors of WK.
Little Eagle quotes Gonzalez: "I don't know why non-Indians believe
the Lakota are a conquered people. It is just being fought on
another battlefield. We now battle the U.S. government in the
courtrooms, the halls of Congress and at the United Nations. The
Lakota people won every major military engagement with the United
States in the 1860's and signed a peace treaty with the United
States in 1868."
You may recall my remarks to that effect at a talk I gave at
Xavier last fall; the U.S. signed that 1868 Treaty as a defeated
nation, giving enormous concessions to the Lakota/Cheyenne/Arapaho
Alliance that humiliated them on the battlefield. And as I have
said many times before, the "Indian Wars" aren't over...
Authors Gonzalez and Cook-Lynn (Santee/Yankton) speak well of
Sally Roesch Wagner and her work in Aberdeen and elsewhere.
But the authors tell a "stark truth" of South Dakota
politicians, including Bill Janklow, Tim Johnson and
Tom Daschle. All are anti-Indian while doing
their best to disguise it. According to Gonzalez, "Daschle and
Johnson are no more for the rights of Indian people than David
Duke is for black people in the South. In fact, Daschle is the
Duke of the North" (p. 73). Seems I recall that comparison from
the news a few years ago...
On the "year of reconciliation" that Governor Mickelson ushered
in for 1990, Cook-Lynn writes: "Instead of admitting to a history
of murder, theft, and oppression, the general white population
of the Northern Plains continues to believe that it can escape
its history if only Indians and Whites can 'get to know' each
other and 'reconcile.' What Indians want Whites to know is that
ten years after the Supreme Court decision called the theft of the
Black Hills a 'most ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealing,'
the state and federal governments, private landowners, and
corporations still 'occupy' the Sioux sacred lands and that efforts
on the part of tribes to force land reform legislation on local
and national levels of government have met stiff resistance" (p. 70).
I do think it's a good read...Both authors offer stirring
critiques at the way history is told in the United States, both
by the largely ignorant masses and the well respected phud
historians. History telling, they argue, empowers the colonial
government to continue its oppressive ways and protects themselves
from debts incurred by their genocidal past.
It is a book, I suspect, that may also instill some anger and
hatred. But anger and hatred, as the authors tell us, inspire
action and resistance. We are all for that, yes?
dave
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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