Brown’s history the years between 1850 and 1900 (or thereabouts) documents the brutal genocide of band after band of Native Americans (whom the book calls Indians as was common in 1970) by whites who wanted the land they occupied. It’s a difficult read, but a crucial one for anyone who values a deep and complex understanding of the past as part of an understanding of the present and the future. A few thoughts:

- By the halfway point in the book, even the most dense reader will have uncovered the pattern:
1. Whites arrive in an area occupied by a band of Native Americans, demand a piece of the land for their own. The band either agrees or fights. If they fight, the whites kill them mercilessly, or bring in bigger and bigger military forces until they can. In the treaty for the land, whites promise rations and annual payments in exchange for the land the band gives up.
2. Whites fail to deliver the rations and/or payments that were promised. Often, new settlers in the region begin encroaching on the reservations for mining, hunting, or general settlement. If the Native Americans react to these violations in any way, they’re blamed and held solely responsible.
3. Whites decide they want the reservation land too, and send “peace commissions” to negotiate further sales of the limited land. Return to step 1.
Brown writes the book from the Native American perspective, using language like ‘pony soldiers’ for cavalry and ‘one star chief SoandSo.’ This distinct style choice continually reminds the reader of the perspective and experience being documented.
- The sheer volume of tribes on whom the land grab / extermination was practiced is grueling and mind-numbing to contemplate. By the end of the book, it’s painful to continue reading. Sometimes well-intentioned individuals managed to scrape together reasonably solid situations for the tribes for whom they mediated, so the reader could foster hope for a moment. But inevitably, other individuals driven by greed, arrogance, and a system that favored whites over natives in every way upset these situations, driving the Native Americans mercilessly until they rebelled, and then bringing in the Army to kill them.
- I was particularly sad to read the chapters on Minnesota, as I’d learned nothing of the treachery my ancestors brought along when they settled the land of 10,000 lakes. The particular brand of betrayal we used was to persuade natives to settle on reservations and promise to give them rations and money in annual installments, then forget or refuse to pay them the rations and money. Then, when they got mad about being lied to, my ancestors killed them. As I said above, this happened in nearly every encounter between White Americans and Native Americans. But somehow, I wanted to think Minnesota was different. Of course, many places in the state are named after the men and peoples they killed: Shakopee, Wabasha, Minnetonka.
- Two “fun facts” I’ll take away from this book are: 1. The Native Americans who encountered George Custer (a particularly brutal military leader who well-deserved what he got at Little Big Horn) called him “Hard Backsides” because he could ride for hours without a break. 2. Sitting Bull received a trick pony from Buffalo Bill Cody after he toured with Cody’s Wild West Show. The pony was trained to sit down and raise one hoof at the sound of a gun shot. When Sitting Bull was killed in a scuffle that triggered the massacre at Wounded Knee, his horse performed its trick right on the field next to the dying Chief.

Two books came to mind as I read this history. First, Jared Gardner’s Guns, Germs, and Steel helps explain the historical accidents that gave some cultures (Western Europe, particularly) a leg up in the technological race that determined the outcome of so many battles. But it doesn’t explain the attitude that accompanies them, the idea of ownership and conquest that drive the people who arrived from North America and proceeded to murder the people already living there.

Second, Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael suggests that the modern world has been swept, in the last 5,000 years or so, by the mindset of the takers rather than that of the sharers (it’s been a long time since I read that book, so forgive me if I’m using the wrong language here). He suggests that the equilibrium developed by many societies hinged on an idea of shared ownership and communion with the land, but that this perspective conflicted with the new perspective of takers, who believe in ownership and dominion over the land. This latter perspective fosters greed, etc, and also provides an incentive to overwhelm one’s neighbors. The clashes in North America and Australia represent two of the more recent encounters between takers and sharers, with the takers brutally sweeping the sharers aside.

I also can’t help but notice what a strong role the belief in religious superiority had in shaping the white political and military actions. (Usually greed was the first role, with miners and settlers encroaching on land the government had already ceded to the Native Americans.) Usually the whites believed their Christian views gave them moral superiority–even the “manifest destiny”–from which they could decide the fates of the tribes with whom they dealt. It also gave them the justification to punish the tribes who had come to live on reservations. Often, almost immediately after the tribes had given up their land, their agents and the legislators who funded them resented the “handouts” they had to give the reservation residents, conveniently forgetting that these were not charity, but payment owed for land purchased. Already by the 1880s, the U.S. was welching on its debts.

The big question, for me, is not how we can recuperate these moments, as we’ve tried to do with films like Dances with Wolves or Avatar (the latter of which strikes me as a science-fictional Native American revenge fantasy--despite being tainted with the White Messiah plotline–-that should be shelved right next to Inglourious Basterds at the video store). Instead, I would like to know how we can move forward while both accepting that our culture is built on that horror, and acknowledging that no individual should be punished for the sins of his/her parents. That said, the systemic poverty on reservations stems directly from the actions of the government and its agents in the years since the treaties were signed.

This isn’t a question I have a satisfying answer to yet, I’m afraid.