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49 pages 1 hour read

Dee Brown

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1970

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Chapters 15-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 15 Summary: “Standing Bear Becomes a Person”

Amid all the turmoil of the plains nations in the 1860s and ’70s, the Ponca nation on the Niobrara River lived relatively undisturbed, having benefited from an early agreement with the US and an agrarian culture that fit the territorial conceptions of US policy better than did the ranging habits of hunting nations. Because of bureaucratic negligence in Washington, DC, however, the Ponca lost their land. First it was mistakenly signed over to the Sioux as part of the settlement in Red Cloud’s treaty of 1868; then in 1876 the Ponca were included in a list of northern Plains nations to be driven south to Indian Territory in response to Sioux resistance, even though the Ponca had had nothing to do with that conflict. Several Ponca leaders, including White Eagle and Standing Bear, were sent to Indian Territory and stranded there. They then walked 500 miles on foot back to their own lands only to be told that it was time to deport the whole nation to Indian Territory. In May 1877, soldiers arrived to force them on their way, and they had no other choice. For a month and a half they traveled south, burying the weak and the children who died along the way. At their new reservation, they were affected by deadly diseases and nearly a quarter of the nation died. In 1878, the Ponca were assigned a new reservation, to which they had to walk another 150 miles. Standing Bear reflected on the events of those years: “I thought God intended us to live […] but I was mistaken. God intends to give the country to the white people, and we are to die” (359).

The Ponca situation sparked widespread sympathy. In 1879, a civil-rights case was brought on behalf of Standing Bear, arguing that he was a person with all the rights and benefits relayed by the US Constitution. The presiding judge agreed, and Standing Bear’s band was given a small reservation back on their own lands on the Niobrara, but other Ponca members remained stuck in Indian Territory. When Standing Bear’s brother Big Snake attempted to secure permission for the others to return north, he was told that the legal result did not extend beyond Standing Bear’s specific case. Big Snake was assaulted and killed while in custody. “The Poncas of Indian Territory had learned a bitter lesson. The white man’s law was an illusion; it did not apply to them” (366).

Chapter 16 Summary: “The Utes Must Go!”

The Ute nation inhabited the Rocky Mountains in present-day Colorado. They had been less disturbed by white settlers’ violence than the Plains nations in the 1860s and 70s but were just as susceptible to takeovers of their ancestral land. As mining interests rose along the front range of the Rockies, US officials in Colorado met with Ouray the Arrow and several other Ute leaders to negotiate a settlement. All the land east of the continental divide was to be given over to settler and mine interests in the area, and the land west of the continental divide to the Ute nation. A familiar pattern soon repeated itself, however: “Five years later, the white men of Colorado decided they had let the Utes keep too much land” (368). In a series of negotiations, Ouray arranged for two large reservations to be made for the Ute nation. These new reservations were big enough to be self-sustaining, at least until a new agent, Nathan Meeker, introduced a series of reforms ostensibly intended to “elevate and enlighten” the inhabitants (372). Meeker published unsubstantiated reports portraying the Ute nation’s idyllic self-sufficiency as an unrefined communism that made poor use of the Indian Bureau’s resources—a conclusion that was seized upon by Colorado politicians, who launched a campaign pushing for the Ute inhabitants to be expelled to Indian Territory.

Misinformation about the Ute nation abounded in the Colorado press, which painted them as responsible for forest fires. In September of 1879, the army dispatched a column against one of the Ute reservations. Ute leaders saw this as a fulfillment of the threat of deportation and resisted the soldiers. In response, the US government created a new reservation 350 miles away, on unwanted land in Utah, and the Ute nation was forced to leave its Colorado homeland.

Chapter 17 Summary: “The Last of the Apache Chiefs”

In Arizona, trouble was stirring around the Chiricahua Reservation, where the Apache nation’s proximity to Mexico made the reservation a way station for raiding parties in both directions. This unrest played directly into emerging US strategy: “By 1875 the US government’s Indian policy was turning toward concentration of nations either in Indian Territory or on large regional reservations” (393). In 1876, orders were given to dissolve the Chiricahua Reservation and move the Apache people to a new reservation on less desirable land. Many Apache leaders submitted to the order, but some fled. One such resister, Geronimo, launched several successful raids, and then allied with another Apache leader, Victorio. Evading capture by US forces, Victorio established a base in Mexico and gathered a guerilla army to resist US encroachments. He was killed in combat shortly thereafter, but the spark had been lit, and in 1882, Geronimo launched a campaign to free the Apache people from their reservations and bring them back to his stronghold in Mexico. Unfortunately, the fleeing Apache column found itself caught between a US cavalry pursuit and a Mexican infantry regiment, a catastrophe that reduced the Apache nation to just a few guerilla bands.

General George Crook, who was relatively sympathetic to Indigenous rights, stepped forward to champion reforms and worked to make reservation life fair and sustainable. These reforms were insufficient, however, and discontent arose again. In 1885, after Geronimo and his band left their reservation to go back across the border, Crook was deployed to pursue them. A year later, after two separate attempts to capture him failed, Geronimo finally gave up the fight. Many of the remaining members of the Apache nation were ripped from their ancestral lands and sent to live in captivity in the east of the US.

Chapter 18 Summary: “Dance of the Ghosts”

Sitting Bull and his Sioux band were still living in relative freedom in Canada, but without support from the Canadian government. Little by little, his people were forced to trickle across the border and surrender themselves at US forts. In 1881, Sitting Bull and the last remnants of his band rode back to the US and gave themselves up at Fort Randall. There, to Sitting Bull’s surprise, he found that he was famous, drawing flocks of newspaper reporters who wanted to interview him. During the early years of the 1880s, as local politicians were pushing for even more territory to be taken away from the Great Sioux Reservation, Sitting Bull’s dominant voice made their plans more difficult: “Nothing could have dismayed the commissioners more than the thought of the Sioux rallying around a strong leader like Sitting Bull. Such a development endangered the entire Indian policy of the government, which aimed to eradicate everything Indian among the nations” (424). Nonetheless, Sitting Bull’s popularity grew, and he was used as a figurehead at public events, where he gave accusatory speeches in Sioux that most of the audience could not understand. He even traveled for a summer with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show but returned to debate proposed changes to the reservation land treaty in 1888. The US government was pressing the Sioux chiefs to sell much of their reservation, and despite Sitting Bull’s opposition, the fragmentation of their land was accomplished in 1889.

Following this final blow to their territorial possessions, the Sioux rallied around a new religious movement. A leader named Kicking Bear claimed to have received a vision from Christ, and he taught that if the Sioux learned to dance what he called “the Ghost Dance,” then the ghosts of all the departed Sioux would return to the earth and the world would be given back to its Indigenous peoples. Sitting Bull was skeptical of the new movement but had no objection to his people learning the Ghost Dance. To US officials, however, the peaceful religious movement looked like the beginnings of a violent revolt, and army units were dispatched. Sitting Bull was assumed to be involved, and he was shot and killed during an attempted arrest.

Chapter 19 Summary: “Wounded Knee”

With Sitting Bull’s death and rising unrest in response to the US repression of the Ghost Dance movement, many Sioux decided to move toward the Pine Ridge reservation, where the old leader Red Cloud still lived. One of these, Big Foot, was apprehended with a large group of Sioux as they traveled. Since Big Foot was on the government’s list of possible fomenters of Ghost Dance disturbances, he was ordered to turn himself in at the cavalry encampment at Wounded Knee Creek. Big Foot and the 350 people who were with him—mainly women and children—went without resistance but were unsettled by the fact that US troops set up huge gun emplacements on the hills around Wounded Knee. The following morning, as the Sioux were being disarmed by US soldiers, a single gun discharged. In response, the emplaced guns on the hills opened fire into the undefended camp. One of the survivors recalled later, “they shot us like buffalo. I know there are some good white people, but the soldiers must be mean to shoot women and children. Indian soldiers would not do that to white children” (444). Some scholars estimate that up to 300 of the Sioux in Big Foot’s group died in the attack. Brown closes the book with a final quote from an Indigenous leader, captioning a photograph of Red Cloud in old age: “They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it” (449).

Chapters 15-19 Analysis

The last set of chapters brings a sense of finality to the tragedy of the Native American nations’ experience from 1860 to 1890. The narrative is now dominated not by tales of resistance, but by wave after wave of suffering. In Chapters 15-19, the only significant acts of resistance are those by Geronimo’s Apache band, but even he was only a small remnant of a nation that was reduced to just trying to survive the continued depredations of white settlers. After so many devastating losses, the will to fight had gone out of most of the nations depicted here, even the Sioux. Sitting Bull reappears as a defiant but thoroughly defeated figure, as much a sideshow for public entertainment as the leader of a great people.

In these chapters, perhaps more than in any others throughout the book, the sting of the Tragedy of Cultural Eradication is most keenly felt. The Ponca, Ute, and Apache nations were forced completely off their own lands and sent to distant territories not their own. Though there was a partial restoration in the Ponca case, it extended only to Standing Bear and his circle, while the rest of the Ponca nation remained in exile. As for the Sioux, their reservation lands continued to be whittled down by government pressure and coercion until only small fragments of the original settlement remained. Here the reader is confronted with the heartbreaking reality that the Indigenous nation that offered the most consistent and courageous resistance against outsider invasion was now resigned to the fact that their strength was insufficient to stop the dispossession. Even the new religious movement, a peaceful, Christian-syncretistic belief that Christ would deliver them and restore their lands via the Ghost Dance ceremony, led to more devastation at the hands of US forces.

Another theme, that of Deception and Broken Promises by US Authorities, also recurs in the context of the Ponca, Ute, and Sioux stories. In the Ponca case, the broken treaty promises were the result not of malign intentions, but of bureaucratic ineptitude. Even so, the Ponca were made to bear the burden of those mistakes. In the Ute case, the smallest of pretexts were used to renegotiate vast tracts of land away from Indigenous inhabitants. These recurrent acts of coercion and treaty manipulation were motivated both by greed and by prejudice, which played up white settlers’ overblown fears of Native American hostility. As for the Sioux, the US government directly conspired to force them to sell vast portions of their reservation land, coercing them with the implicit threat that the land would simply be taken if it was not sold. The theme of broken promises is underscored by the book’s final quote, in which an Indigenous leader reflects that the only promise white settlers kept to the Native American nations was the promised threat that the settlers would take their land.

As has been observed in many of the preceding chapters, the ongoing tragedy of what the Indigenous nations suffered was often exacerbated by the failure of US officials to understand or appreciate Indigenous cultures. This dynamic is seen once again in the case of the Ute nation, whose virtue of self-sufficiency was interpreted as a vice (communism and the squandering of Indian agency resources). Similarly, US officials immediately assumed the Ghost Dance movement among the Sioux represented a threat of violence, though had they taken the time to learn about the religious underpinnings of the movement, that assumption would have been immediately dispelled. Instead, as so many times before, they interpreted a change in behavior as a hostile sign and met it with an escalating use of force. This culminated in the massacre of hundreds of innocent lives at Wounded Knee, which once again underscores the ever-present theme of tragedy in Brown’s narrative.

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