FINDING MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE

“FINDING MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE”

            There is a legend in Decatur where I live that there was a loose boundary at the Dekalb County courthouse square between the Cherokee and Creek Indian tribes.  There would obviously be skirmishes around those boundary lines, but it was also a place where diplomatic, economic, and political exchanges could be made.  In this Decatur square is also a monument (erected in 1908) to the Confederacy, which both the Decatur City Commission and the Dekalb County Commission have now voted to remove.  Also in this same Decatur square is a “cannon” monument, a “relic of the Indian Wars of 1836,” erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1906.  It celebrates the defeat of the Creek Indians and the beginning of the Creek Trail of Tears, driving them out of Georgia and Alabama.

            I’m thinking about these things as I contemplate Native American Heritage Month now in progress.  As a boy growing up in the segregated South, I drank the Kool-Aid on many issues, and the history of Anglos and Native Americans was one of those issues.   Watching double feature westerns at the movies on Saturday afternoons in the segregated movie house as a boy in Helena, Arkansas,  I was frightened to the depths of my soul by the Indians of the West.  They were portrayed as being so savage that I could not imagine why any white person would ever go West, and I could not understand how any white person ever survived their savagery.   Those portrayals were part of a larger story that were the narrative of the manifest destiny of Anglos to take the land.  

            As Robert Frost put it in his poem “The Gift Outright,”  which he recited at the inauguration of John Kennedy as President in 1961: “The land was ours before we were the land’s.”   The “our” in this poem are not Native Americans but Anglo-Americans.  In my young adult years I discovered this poem, and I loved it because of its connection between life and land, of its connection to the idea of the “city on a hill” image from John Winthrop’s sermon in 1630 as the English approached Massachusetts on the ship Arbella. Then I encountered Dee Brown’s book “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West.”  My eyes began to be opened on yet another front to discover the powerful racism that I had learned (and had believed) from good white people.  It was yet one more part of a huge turning in my soul, in which I became aware of my captivity to the power of the prince of the air, to use the powerful metaphor from Ephesians 2:2.

            Wounded Knee was the site of a slaughter of Sioux people by Anglo troops in South Dakota in December, 1890.  It was partly in response to the “Ghost Dance” movement that was sweeping through the Native American tribes of the West.   One of the principal beliefs was that Christ had returned as a Native American and that the end times were near, with Native Americans finally receiving justice from God.   This movement frightened Anglos on many levels, but some Anglo agents advised a cautious approach.  Yet in our usual “shoot first, ask questions later,” approach in both domestic and foreign policy (sound familiar today?), Sioux leaders were rounded up, jailed, and many were lynched.  The final blow was a slaughter of Sioux people at Wounded Knee, including a few men but mostly women and children, and the killing was during the Christmas season in 1890.

             It is reminiscent of the response of King Herod to another messianic vision in Matthew 2.  When Herod hears that a new leader of the Jewish people may have been born in Bethlehem, his response is not caution.  He sends the soldiers to Bethlehem to kill the baby, and while a vision to the baby’s father Joseph enables the baby Jesus to escape as a refugee to Egypt, all the other baby boys in Bethlehem are killed by Herod’s soldiers.  Matthew’s Gospel responds with this quote from the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children…”  The killing at Wounded Knee in the season of this baby Jesus resonates with the same lamentation.

            So, I’ve had to reconsider the narrative of my life and of our life together.   In my formative years,  I severely misunderstood the truth of American history.  It turns out that the savages of the West were not the Native Americans but my Anglo ancestors.  In our consideration of Native American Heritage Month, we must all start here.  More next time, but I’ll close with a quote from Chief Seattle that must be the beginning point, as he addressed Anglos in the area of Washington now named for him:  “We may be brothers {and sisters} after all.”  It turns out that we are, and there we must begin.