Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee(2007)

The perfect movie for this Memorial Day

I recently watched this excellent film about the American ethnic cleansing campaign against the Lakota, and given what’s happening in Palestine right now, it has a lot of perspective to offer.

Aidan Quinn portrays a Lakota boy who starts the movie being swept up in the famous Battle of the Little Bighorn where Custer met his demise. Shortly afterwards, his father sends him to the white man’s schools to learn the white man’s ways because he has figured assimilation is the only way forward for the Indians.

And he does, and he is, to a point, but he never forgets where he came from. The movie takes a deep dive into both the intentions of and the corruption inherent in the reservation system, as well as how the US government routinely broke its treaties with the Indians whenever that suited the interests of capital and/or white settlement.

For me, it is the dialogue which is most important, and not even the dialogue of the chief protagonist. The different attitudes of the Indians themselves are shown, but what’s most interesting is that of the whites, especially of General Miles and Senator Dawes, both real historical figures.

Miles lays it all out at a peace conference with Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull declaims how the Black Hills are his people’s ancestral lands, sacred to them, and guaranteed to them by the US government via treaty. Miles comes back and says the raw, unadulterated, unpleasant truth. (below: Nelson Miles)

He points out that the Lakota took that same land from the Pawnee and the Abenaki, and had even used weapons supplied by the whites to do so. He lectures Sitting Bull that the history of the tribes is one of war, conquest and displacement, and declares that it is now the white man’s turn.

Sitting Bull can only glare. He has nothing to say because there is nothing to say. Every word Miles said was true. Like the Israelis today, he was brutally honest: We’ve decided to take that land y’all are on, and we’re gonna do it. You decide how we’re gonna do it. Here are your choices.

At least Miles casts no illusions. Senator Dawes, OTOH, cloaks white conquest and settlement in the feel-good liberalism of the day. He was even from Massachusetts. How perfect is that?

Chances are he genuinely believed that the white ways of farming and private property ownership were better for the Indian, and ceaselessly and fruitlessly tried to convince them to live just like the whites, and then to force them after they refuse. (below: Senator Dawes and his Indian Act)

For their own good, of course. Never mind the fact that Dawes was no doubt grifting off the reservation system for his own benefit. Nearly every politician who was involved with it did back then. The effect was to make the Indians entirely dependent on the US government for handouts, which were nearly always inadequate for basic human needs because of the grift.

As far as Dawes is concerned, of course, that grift is unfortunate, but just the way it is(an early version of Obama’s “baby steps”), and it’s really the Indians’ fault for refusing to give up their old ways and adopt the clearly superior white way of life. Why will they not take land allotments? Why will they not learn to farm? Why won’t they become, well, white?

Dawes simply could not conceive of an economic system where land was held in common. For him, that had been destroyed in England over two centuries before. The only property he could think of was private property, which was something that was completely irrational to the Indian way of looking at things. The movie shows this impasse clearly, with neither side understanding the other due to different views about how human society works.

In the end, when faced with the choice of using military force to get what he wants or of risking his career to defend the existing treaty with the Lakota his people want to break, Dawes of course lands on the side of military force. If only the Indians had listened to his reason. Their fault. Sad.

The end, of course, is the massacre of several dozen Lakota at Wounded Knee by soldiers armed with Gatling guns. The survivors went back to the reservation, where some of their descendants still live today, and there is the most fundamental difference between the centuries-long ethnic cleansing campaign in America and the decades-long one in Palestine.

Senator Dawes and his ilk wanted to assimilate the First Nations people, like they did with European immigrants, to incorporate them into American society. Neither he nor General Miles ever wanted to exterminate them or to drive them off every square inch of land within the borders of the United States.

Oddly enough, it was the demise of the free American Indian that was the beginning of the nostalgia for them with the whites. After they were gone, the whites began to realize they had lost something of themselves.

That’s one reason Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show was so popular—it was a celebration of something we were in the process of losing forever.

This is very different from what is happening in Palestine. Not morally good, mind you, just materially different. The Israelis are quite clear—they want every Arab gone from the land they claim and they aren’t at all picky about how that happens.

Israelis don’t want Arabs to assimilate and become Arab-Israelis like we have Native Americans or Mexican-Americans; they want them completely gone.

The Gaza Genocide isn’t anything like what happened on the American frontier. It’s not centuries of small clashes and skirmishes with a few pitched battles of a few hundred on each side thrown in, with the conquered peoples now owning their own land and able to participate in the larger society if they so choose.

No. It is the deliberate incarceration of an entire ethnic group into concentrated enclaves so that its members can be efficiently exterminated. Even General Miles would never have countenanced that.

Remember Sitting Bull and the Lakota this day. Remember the soldiers who fought them, especially the officer at the end who finally understands the pointless horror of it all.

Remember the crimes of those now long dead can never excuse the crimes of those now living. Remember that the crimes were different, and those living criminals now, aware of the lessons of the past, are even more culpable than the likes of General Miles and Senator Dawes because they do know better; they just choose to do genocide anyway.

And enjoy the movie! The acting is first rate, the cinematography spectacular.

Thank you for reading, good day or night, and good luck.

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