Wounded over ‘Bury My Heart’

Joe Orso

Like a wise man told me, it’s important to remember that native people’s history is not all dates and wars and tragedy. It contains a rich cultural and spiritual story that continues to speak. But to hear the full boom of those voices, we must look back, be silent and reflect on the devastation committed here not so long ago.

I once knew an Iraqi man who first learned of the Holocaust when he was an adult, traveling in Israel.

It was shocking to think that anyone on earth might not know this story, and the experience gave me a deeper appreciation for the power of education — and miseducation.

But while that was disturbing, I have been even more disturbed to find myself in the same position as the Iraqi man this past month.

Of course I’d learned something about Native American history growing up, and had a vague sense of tragedies and broken treaties. But it was not until reading “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” that I saw the enormity of the genocide that happened on this continent — an enormity on par with the tragedies of German history.

“The rich and beautiful valleys of Wyoming are destined for the occupancy and sustenance of the Angle-Saxon race,” reads a quote in the book from an 1870 edition of the Cheyenne Daily Leader. “The Indians must stand aside or be overwhelmed by the ever advancing and ever increasing tide of emigration … The same inscrutable Arbiter that decreed the downfall of Rome has pronounced the doom of extinction upon the red men of America.”

But it wasn’t only newspapers that printed such devilish rhetoric. The organized destruction of native peoples and cultures involved gold-diggers, Christian ministers, military officials and statesmen like Sen. John Logan, who once told Sitting Bull: “The government feeds and clothes and educates your children now, and desires to teach you to become farmers, and to civilize you, and make you as white men.”

As I was pondering my own ignorance on this subject, wondering how I could have gotten through schooling without knowing this story, I wondered how our teachers are educating students about this today.

A series of phone calls led me to Richard Frost, 62, an eighth-grade American history teacher at Longfellow Middle School known for his passion on this subject.

Frost said with Act 31, educators today are probably better now at teaching this story. Act 31 requires Wisconsin educators to teach about native peoples in Wisconsin, with resources like “500 Nations,” a video series that teaches history from the Native American perspective.

When Frost introduces the Native American experience to his students, he asks them if they’ve heard the word “genocide,” and they respond with stories about the Holocaust. He then asks them to consider whether the word applies as they study the history of Native Americans.

While he doesn’t share his perspective with his students, he agreed to share it for this column.

“What has been done here to the Native Americans is genocide,” Frost said during a phone interview, and he added that it came from a belief that Indian people were inferior to whites.

While Frost acknowledges the necessity of presenting history from various perspectives, he says not talking about genocide in regards to Native American history is also a value statement.

“If you don’t tell the story, that’s as much of a political statement as telling the story,” he said.

Dee Brown’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” is almost 40 years old now, a classic of American history. The story need not generate guilt or statements denying our country’s genocide — as so pitifully happens with those miseducated about the Holocaust.

Like a wise man told me, it’s important to remember that native people’s history is not all dates and wars and tragedy. It contains a rich cultural and spiritual story that continues to speak.

But to hear the full boom of those voices, we must look back, be silent and reflect on the devastation committed here not so long ago.

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Source: http://www.lacrossetribune.com/news/local/article_1f2f5692-d725-11de-918e-001cc4c03286.html?print=1
Illustration: http://people.ucls.uchicago.edu/~snekros/2007-8%20webquests/encounterswithothers34/WoundedKneeMasacre.jpg