[August 6th
marks the 75th anniversary of the bombing
of Hiroshima. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that fraught moment and four
other histories of U.S. military massacres.]
On three
distinct attempts to raise our national awareness of a horrific event.
It’s nothing
short of a national travesty that we don’t better remember the 1890 massacre at South Dakota’s Wounded
Knee Creek, perhaps the most egregious and symbolic violence committed
against Native Americans by the US military (although that’s a long and
tragically competitive list). That’s my take, but it’s also one of the central
arguments of Dee
Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
(1970), among the truly pioneering works of Native American history and
studies, multiculturalism, and ethnic and American studies. As its subtitle
suggests, Brown’s book covers much more than just Wounded Knee—but throughout,
his overt and impassioned purpose is to force such events into our collective
memories and histories, to use his recovered sources and scholarly analysis to
change Americans’ awareness and perspectives.
Obviously I’m on
board with such a project, and Brown’s book was a
best-seller for more than a year, suggesting that his message reached far
more readers than do most scholarly works. But it’s also possible to imagine
that most of those readers were already sympathetic to Native American
experiences and voices, and thus that while his book might have enriched and
enlarged such perspectives, it didn’t necessarily change them. Genuine and
sweeping change, this argument might go, requires more aggressive actions, ones
that demand national attention and response on both political and social
levels—actions like those undertaken by members of the
American Indian Movement, including their 1973 “occupation” of Wounded Knee.
That 71-day occupation, the resulting federal “siege,” and the accompanying and
subsequent threats and even acts of violence, eerily mirrored certain aspects
of the original Wounded Knee massacre—but that, as much as anything, was precisely
AIM’s point: that so
long as we don’t engage with histories and communities such as those connected
to Wounded Knee, we will simply continue to replicate and reinforce those
histories and further destroy those communities.
I couldn’t agree
more, and despite the legal and
controversial challenges that significantly derailed AIM’s efforts later in the
decade, the group most definitely brought such awareness to Native American
voices and histories. Yet as the Wounded Knee occupation illustrates, they did
so in an explicitly confrontational manner, one likely to create as much anger
as empathy in broader American audiences; while such activism is entirely
appropriate and even necessary, it’s worth considering whether and how it can
be complemented by efforts to entertain as well as educate those broader
audiences. To that end, I would point to Michael Apted’s film Thunderheart (1992), a murder
mystery and thriller that stars Val Kilmer and Sam Shepard, features a great
deal of humor and suspense, and is in many ways a Hollywood movie. Yet at its
heart, the film centers on, and connects the spiritual and
psychological awakening of Kilmer’s protagonist to, two historical events:
a fictionalized representation of AIM’s efforts; and an accurate engagement
with the Wounded Knee Massacre. Thunderheart’s
broad American audiences wouldn’t necessarily know they were learning about
Wounded Knee and its related histories and contexts—but there’s no question
that they, like Kilmer’s character, would come away with significantly
strengthened perspectives on those questions.
Next massacre
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other histories you’d highlight?
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