The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee Quotes

“If you want to know America—if you want to see it for what it was and what it is—you need to look at Indian history and at the Indian present. If you do, if we all do, we will see that all the issues posed at the founding of the country have persisted. How do the rights of the many relate to the rights of the few? What is or should be the furthest extent of federal power? How has the relationship between the government and the individual evolved? What are the limits of the executive to execute policy, and to what extent does that matter to us as we go about our daily lives? How do we reconcile the stated ideals of America as a country given to violent acts against communities and individuals? To what degree do we privilege enterprise over people? To what extent does the judiciary shape our understanding of our place as citizens in this country? To what extent should it? What are the limits to the state’s power over the people living within its borders? To ignore the history of Indians in America is to miss how power itself works.”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“Watching him then, I simply couldn’t think of him doing anything other than winning. Loss wasn’t the norm, it couldn’t be. I didn’t have the words for it then, what it felt like to watch my cousin, whom I love and whose worries are our worries and whose pain is our pain, manage to be so good at something, to triumph so completely. More than a painful life, more than a culture or a society with the practice and perfection of violence as a virtue and a necessity, more than a meanness or a willingness to sacrifice oneself, what I felt—what I saw—were Indian men and boys doing precisely what we’ve always been taught not to do. I was seeing them plainly, desperately, expertly wanting to be seen for their talents and their hard work, whether they lost or won. That old feeling familiar to so many Indians—that we can’t change anything; can’t change Columbus or Custer, smallpox or massacres; can’t change the Gatling gun or the legislative act; can’t change the loss of our loved ones or the birth of new troubles; can’t change a thing about the shape and texture of our lives—fell away. I think the same could be said for Sam: he might not have been able to change his sister’s fate or his mother’s or even, for a while, his own. But when he stepped in the cage he was doing battle with a disease. The disease was the feeling of powerlessness that takes hold of even the most powerful Indian men. That disease is more potent than most people imagine: that feeling that we’ve lost, that we’ve always lost, that we’ve already lost—our land, our cultures, our communities, ourselves. This disease is the story told about us and the one we so often tell about ourselves. But it’s one we’ve managed to beat again and again—in our insistence on our own existence and our successful struggles to exist in our homelands on our own terms. For some it meant joining the U.S. Army. For others it meant accepting the responsibility to govern and lead. For others still, it meant stepping into a metal cage to beat or be beaten. For my cousin Sam, for three rounds of five minutes he gets to prove that through hard work and natural ability he can determine the outcome of a finite struggle, under the bright, artificial lights that make the firmament at the Northern Lights Casino on the Leech Lake Reservation.”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“This book is meant to tell the story of Indian lives, and Indian histories, in such a way as to render those histories and those lives as something much more, much greater and grander, than a catalog of pain.”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“...we have to show up to get up. Cynicism isn't a politics. Neither is irony. We have to participate, at cost and peril, in shaping our government and thereby shape its processes....The hard work of the civil rights movement wasn't engaged to change city busing in Montgomery; those protesters meant to change the laws and heart of the country for themselves and future generations....[T]he success of the civil rights movement was vested in the degree to which activists voluntarily endured injustice and injury by marching in the street and by encouraging others to march into classrooms, and county boardrooms, and colleges and law schools, and the voting booth.”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“American did not conquer the West through superior technology, nor did it demonstrate the advantages of democracy. American "won" the West by blood, brutality and terror.”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“As brutal and bitter as the winters are in the northern reaches of the Ojibwe homelands, there is a kind of peace that falls over the land in February and March. Or if not a peace exactly, a kind of watchful waiting: April and May will erupt with their usual vernal violence soon enough.”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“it is impossible not to feel a kind of sickness at the thought that the government stole Indian land in order to fund the theft of Indian children.”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“In a series of rulings known as the Marshall Trilogy, the court affirmed the rights of the Cherokee and ruled the removal of Indians unlawful. Andrew Jackson did it anyway.”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“teams of phrenologists were sent to Indian country. Using the theory and practice of craniometry developed by Samuel George Morton (which determined “scientifically” that Caucasians had the largest brain capacity—1,426 cubic centimeters versus a paltry 1,344 for American Indians and 1,278 for blacks), the phrenologists set about measuring skulls,”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“Whether this strategy was better for Indian communities than fixing the more traditional reservation system is open to debate.”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“To each head of a family, one-quarter of a section; To each single person over eighteen years of age, one-eighth of a section; To each orphan child under eighteen years of age, one-eighth”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“In 1891, the Indians who remained everywhere poked their heads aboveground and surveyed the desolation of their homelands and asked the question Indians had been asking since the beginning: What can we do next to survive?”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“What is life?” he mused. “It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“To treat the lives lost on that cold South Dakota day in 1890 as merely symbolic is to disrespect those loves. It is also to disrespect the more than 200 Lakota who survived Wounded Knee and lived on to experience the pain of loss, yes, but much else as well. They survived to live and grow, to get married, and have babies. They survived to hold on to their Lakota ways, or convert to Christianity and let those ways recede. They survived to settle on the reservation and later, to move to cities. They survived to go to school, and to college, and to work. They survived to make mistakes and to recover from them. They survived to make history, to make meaning, to make life.

This book is about them; and it is about Indians of other communities and tribes around the country who survived their own holocausts and went on to make their own lives and histories and in so doing, to make and remake the story of the country itself.”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“A fascinating index of the system’s success is the spread of the turkey vulture, which had previously been confined to the southeastern states. The interstate highways functioned as a kind of moving buffet for them; as they followed the long lines of roadkill north and west over the next two decades, they came to inhabit every part of the country.”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“is that we created a government that is doing this to us. It”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“the Indian “must be imbued with the exalting egotism of American civilization so that he will say ‘I’ instead of ‘We,’ and ‘This is mine’ instead of ‘This is ours.”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“Perhaps no other aspect of Indian education during the sixty years of the boarding school era is more tragic than the fact that the school grounds at Carlisle and Haskell and all the other schools included graveyards”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“Many Cherokee and other tribal people bought and kept black slaves,”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“Any Indian or mixed-blood who shall pay or offer to pay any money or other valuable consideration to the friends or relatives of any Indian girl or woman, for the purpose of living or cohabiting with said girl or woman,”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“wound down in 1842 at a cost of nearly $60 million”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“We are, for better or worse, the body of our republic. And we need to listen to it, to hear - beyond the pain and anger and fear, beyond the decrees and policies and the eddying of public sentiments and resentments, beyond the bombast and the rhetoric - the sound (faint at times, stronger at others) of a heartbeat going on.”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

“We were contented to let things remain as the Great Spirit Chief made them. They were not; and would change the rivers and mountains if they did not suit them. . . .”
― David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present