Land Theme Analysis

Three hundred people in the wagon train. Two hundred and ninety-five killed. Only five survivors. It’s a great story. The only problem is, it never happened. You might assume that something must have happened in Almo, maybe a smaller massacre or a fatal altercation of some sort that was exaggerated and blown out of proportion. Nope. The story is simply a tale someone made up and told to someone else, and, before you knew it, the Almo massacre was historical fact.

Almost immediately after word reached the world that Custer had got his ass kicked in Montana, America’s artistic class went to work. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Frederick Whittaker, and the like lifted Custer out of the Montana dirt, hoisted him high on their metered shoulders, and rhymed him around the country in free verse and heroic couplets. At the same time, artists began recreating and reimagining the story with paint and canvas.

But if you look at the sculpture a second time, you can easily reason that the horse is resisting. Its front legs are braced and its back legs are dug in. American expansion be damned. This pony is not about to go gentle into that good night. Such a reading might be expanded to reimagine our doleful Indian as a tired Indian, who, at any moment, will wake up refreshed, lift up his spear, and ride off into the twenty-first century and beyond.

Whites have always been comfortable with Dead Indians.

Dead Indians are dignified, noble, silent, suitably garbed. And dead. Live Indians are invisible, unruly, disappointing. And breathing. One is a romantic reminder of a heroic but fictional past. The other is simply an unpleasant, contemporary surprise.

This idea, that Native people were waiting for Europeans to lead us to civilization, is just a variation on the old savagism versus civilization dichotomy, but it is a dichotomy that North America trusts without question. It is so powerful a toxin that it contaminates all of our major institutions. Under its influence, democracy becomes not simply a form of representative government, but an organizing principle that bundles individual freedoms, Christianity, and capitalism into a marketable product carrying with it the unexamined promise of wealth and prosperity. It suggests that anything else is, by default, savage and bankrupt.

Throughout the history of Indian–White relations in North America, there have always been two impulses afoot. Extermination and assimilation.

Pratt’s plan was a simple one. North America would have to kill the Indian in order to save the man. “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” was the exact quotation, and while it sounds harsh, it was an improvement on Philadelphia lawyer Henry Pancoast’s 1882 suggestion that “We must either butcher them [Indians] or civilize them, and what we do we must do quickly.”

At the end of the twenty-five-year trust period, each allottee would own their own allotment free and clear, and Indians, who had been communal members of a tribe, would now be individual, private land owners. Reservations would disappear. Indians would disappear. The “Indian Problem” would disappear. Private ownership of land would free Indians from the tyranny of the tribe and traditional Native culture, and civilize the savage.

Ignore the past. Play in the present.

What happens next is complicated, illegal, and sleazy. But, given the history of Indian affairs, not unexpected. The states, along with the federal government and private interests, made it quite clear that while tribes might have the legal right to run gaming enterprises on their reservations, that right could be tied up in the courts until hell froze over. What we need, tribes were told by the powers that be, is a compromise. Compromise is a fine word. So much more generous than blackmail.

If Native people are to have a future that is of our own making, such a future will be predicated, in large part, on sovereignty.

But instead of pursuing the American dream of accumulating land as personal wealth, the tribes have taken their purchases to the Secretary of the Interior and requested that the land they acquired be added to their respective reservations and given trust status. This is not merely a return to a communal past. It is a shrewd move to preserve and expand an indigenous land base for the benefit of future generations.

The issue has always been land. It will always be land, until there isn’t a square foot of land left in North America that is controlled by Native people.

For non-Natives, land is primarily a commodity, something that has value for what you can take from it or what you can get for it.

And as they had done in 1875, the Lakota refused the settlement. Money was never the issue. They wanted the Hills back. As for the money, it stays in an interest-bearing account to this day.

Ignorance has never been the problem. The problem was and continues to be unexamined confidence in western civilization and the unwarranted certainty of Christianity. And arrogance. Perhaps it is unfair to judge the past by the present, but it is also necessary.

So long as we possess one element of sovereignty, so long as we possess one parcel of land, North America will come for us, and the question we have to face is how badly we wish to continue to pursue the concepts of sovereignty and self-determination.