The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Chapter 1

THIS BOOK IS WRITTEN out of the simple, fierce conviction that our cultures are not dead and our civilizations have not been destroyed. It is written with the understanding that our present tense is evolving as rapidly and creatively as everyone else’s. In a sense, it is a selfish project. I want—I need—to see Indian life as more than a legacy of loss and pain, because I want to pass on to my beautiful children a rich heritage and an embracing vision of who we were and who we are. But I have not allowed myself to conjure alternative (hopeful but false) realities out of the desire to make up for a traumatic past or to imagine a better future. Looking at what actually was and is, beyond the blinders that the “dead Indian” narrative has imposed, means reckoning with relentless attacks on our sovereignty and the suffering it has created. But it also brings into view the ingenious and resourceful counterattacks we have mounted over the decades, in resistance to the lives the state would have us live. It has allowed me to trace the many varied paths Indians have forged where old ones have been closed off or obscured.

age of exploration

There is a tendency to view the European settlement of North America, and the corresponding decimation of many tribes and cultures, as sudden and inevitable. It was neither.
There is a tendency to treat Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean and the subsequent colonization of mainland North America as of a piece. Certainly, the narrative still included in many textbooks is that Columbus sailed west to see if the earth was round and “found” Indians; then Europeans who loved freedom and were fleeing tyranny came over, bringing the Old World and the New into a long, friendly handshake. There is another, more recent version, that the colonists arrived intent on genocide and were largely successful at it. Neither account is true. Columbus sailed west for money. The colonists came for money and they stayed for money. Indigenous peoples, for their part, resisted, helped, hindered, played, and constantly negotiated the changes brought by colonization and dispossession.

columbus 🖕

Columbus was a hired gun. The Spanish crown needed someone to advance its interests. Like a gun, Columbus, as a representative of power, quickly became an agent of violence.
the Indians stayed in the Caribbean because “the Indians of Española were and are the greatest wealth of the island, because they are the ones who dig, and harvest, and collect the bread and other supplies, and gather the gold from the mines, and do all the work of men and beasts alike.” In short, while Columbus found gold and silver and other natural resources, the indigenous lives and bodies were the greatest natural resource he came upon.

north american colonization

cosmology and civilization

Most Indians do not see themselves as merely the first in a long series of arrivals to North America; they see themselves as indigenous. And the belief in tribal indigeneity is crucial to understanding modern Indian realities. The rhetorical stance that Indians are merely one group of travelers with no greater stake than any other clashes with Indians’ cultural understanding that we have always been here and that our control over our place in this world—not to mention our control over the narrative and history of that place—has been deeply and unjustly eroded.
Over these homelands various empires and nation-states—Spanish, British, French, Dutch, and, later, American—have crawled, mapping and claiming as they went. But neither these maps nor the conquests enabled by them have eradicated or obscured the fact that immigrants made their homes and villages and towns and cities on top of Indian homelands. Any history that persists in using the old model of New World history as something made by white people and done to Indian people, therefore, is not a real history of this place. Rather, as the historian Colin Calloway has suggested, history didn’t come to the New World with Cabot or Columbus; they—and those who followed—brought European history to the unfolding histories already here.
Science tells us only that the humans of the New World arrived a long time ago, and likely in many different ways. Culture and history tell us something more profound: that New World tribal people emerged here, as cultures and as people. No one else can make that claim. Columbus and Cabot and the rest didn’t discover the New World or new peoples. They met Indian people with distinct histories, homelands and technologies, and deep—and deeply considered—concepts of themselves and their place in the world.

the atlantic coast

Despite the best efforts of the government and the millions of dollars it spent, the Southeast was never entirely freed of Indians, and it likely never will be. They lived on in the swamps of Florida, the hills of southern Appalachia, the bayous of Alabama and Louisiana.

Spanish colonization

The Indian response to the Spanish was determined to a great extent by three constants of first contact: the spread of disease, attempts at slavery, and the spread of information.

“Removal” (Trail of Tears)

So it wasn’t merely “germs and steel” that spelled the end of the “red race.” The Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and many others had weathered disease and rebounded. Moreover, they had done almost everything “right” by the standards of the new republic. They had fought for the government (including under Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend). They had devoted themselves to farming and trade, developed court and legislative systems—they had proved themselves socially and culturally adaptive. And this had done nothing to assuage the determination of the colonists and settlers to seize their land and resources. “Neither superior technology nor an overwhelming number of settlers made up the mainspring of the birth of the United States or the spread of its power over the entire world,” writes historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. “Rather, the chief cause was the colonialist settler-state’s willingness to eliminate whole civilizations of people in order to possess their land.”

The Seminole Wars

American Northeast

Algonquian tribes

Iroquois Confederacy

Great Lakes and Ohio River Valley