The Wounded Knee Massacre – Record-Keeping vs. Story-Telling

While growing up in India, my grandparents used to tell medozens of stories every day, some fables, some mythological, some cultural,some religious and many more. All of them had a common goal to transferknowledge. Civilizations have used one of the two methods to educate the nextgeneration and build a cultural knowledge base: story-telling andrecord-keeping. Eastern civilizations, including India, are primarilystory-telling, while the western world puts more emphasis on record-keeping.

During my travels to different Native American reservationsand festivals, I was surprised by the similarities between Indian and NativeAmerican societies. Both had many different cultures, languages, religions,festivals, and relationships. Traditionally, each culture or tribe used to callthemselves nations. Both were story-telling civilizations. Spiritual practiceswere at the heart of many cultures, both in India and in ancient Americas. Ironically,Native Americans were called Indians.

The National Museum of American Indian in Washington, D.C.has an exhibition called Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United Statesand American Indian Nations. Through few historical instances, the exhibitiontells the story of treaties, broken promises, coerced agreements and overalldiplomacy between the US and Native American Nations. Although the exhibitionoutlines broken and coerced treaties by the United States, at the heart of itwas record-keeping vs. story-telling. The Natives viewed each treaty as apromise, while the US went through a process of ratification, debate andconverting a treaty to a record. In that lengthy process, the original treatywas often changed. For Native Americans promise of the person was importantthan the language of the treaty. That resulted in many altercations. Thestanding rock protests in 2017 in North Dakota over the oil pipeline also hadan element of coerced treaty. Read Smithsonian blog on it - https://blog.nmai.si.edu/main/nation-to-nation/

On a trip through Rockies and Dakota plains, I spent acouple of days at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The site of theWounded Knee Massacre is in that reservation and is a designated NationalHistoric Landmark. The massacre led to the death of almost 300 men, women andchildren of Lakota at the hands of the United States Army on December 29, 1890.25 soldiers were also killed. According to an account, midst the tensionbetween Lakota tribes and the US, the US army’s 7th cavalry surrounded a Lakotaband near Porcupine Butte in present-day South Dakota and escorted them toWounded Knee creek in a camp. The army was carrying out a disarmament operationwhen a bullet was fired resulting in the army opening fire on Lakota. The tribefought back, but most of their weapons were confiscated and, thus, Lakotasuffered heavy loss. In 1990, US congress passed resolutions to regret themassacre formally on its centennial.

Today, the Wounded Knee Massacre site is a large plain. Asign telling the brief story is at a corner of it. When I read the sign, Ifound it objective and fair. The sign was carefully constructed from therecords. On a small hill across the road was the mass grave of all Lakota men,women and children buried by the army after the massacre. A tombstone and fencehad been built around the grave. Many Lakota decedents pay their homage at thegrave and tie fabrics to the fence in remembrance. A tribesman from nearbywounded knee camp walked up to me. Yes, they still did not have a proper townor village. They still lived in a subsidized camp, entire band under one roof.He told me the version of the massacre that had been told in the tribes.According to him, the US army planned for this massacre to avenge General Custer’skilling, as General Custer was as important as the President. They made surethe tribal band was disarmed and then a soldier covertly fired a bullet tocreate an impression of Lakota’s aggression. The army fired machine guns ondisarmed tribe. The soldiers tossed children in the air and shot them astargets. Then the army dumped all dead and some who appeared dead into a ditchand called it the mass grave.

The tribesman was hopeless. He told of no employment, nofuture and corruption on the reservation by tribal chiefs. I could see thedifference between the reservation and the outside world. It was liketime-traveling 100 years back: minimum infrastructure, minimum activities, anddeserted plains. He desperately believed that they were still discriminatedagainst and said, “I wish we were treated as slaves like blacks. We would havebeen accepted into the society, at least, by now.”

The record-keeping way of advancing knowledge allowed theUnited States to move on from the mass shooting of Wounded Knee, while thestory-telling made sure that Lakota tribes held on to their history. Lookingclosely, record-keeping drains the emotions out of the knowledge, while thestory-telling transfers the emotions to the next generation as well. There liesthe difference. The holiday season is here and next week I will describeholiday celebrations at St. Louis botanical gardens.