Comments on: HBO’S “BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE” A KEEPER

By: Rick Moran

Rick Moran — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 22:00:54 +0000

JHB:

I’ve read Utley and found him quite reasonable as you say. And as I mention above, Bury my heart…was an indictment. There was no effort to be balanced or nuanced although I also thought that the screenwriter drew the white people more than one dimensionally.

That said, those settlers forced politicians and the army into taking steps that some of them did not want to take with regard to treaties and military actions. (And some of the politicians and military people were more than happy to steal lands and kill Indians.) And even Utley decries the forced assimilation, the deliberate destruction of Indian culture. Part of that was religious but more than that, it was the recognition that tribal culture - especially for the Plains Indians - was like a drug that was impossible to kick. Destroy the culture - save the savage.

The point is, there would never have been a good answer to the Indian problem except for white people to leave or never to have come. Tragedy was inevitable from the moment Colombo sited land.

By: J.H. Bowden

J.H. Bowden — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 21:46:54 +0000

I must dissent.

While we should sympathize with American Indians, is it wrong to sentimentalize them. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is a cartoonish sob story about the death of the Noble Savage. I would recommend Utley and Washburn’s Indian Wars as a more sober and detailed presentation the actual history involved. Hell, if the United States systematically used the tactics American Indian tribes used on one another, there would not be any American Indians left today.

The real conquerors of the west were not the soldiers of the United States army, nor were they Christian missionaries. They were the thousands (and later millions) of immigrants that made tribal life impossible, who then by their sheer numbers (along with illegal immigration on Indian terrories) made upholding previous treaties on the frontier impossible.

How people reacted to this matters too. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were warlike religious fanatics, while Black Kettle is an example of a more rational approach to the changes of his time. But you really don’t get the details and the feel for the people involved in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which is geared toward making guilty people have orgasmic grief-offs, rather than analyzing the events in the historical record in a coherent manner.

By: ed

ed — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 21:18:51 +0000

Darn. Just when I was finally ready to write you off, you write something like this. Simply brilliant. It really IS possible to be a compassionate conservative. As you may know, Jared Diamond also wrote “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.” This is a wonderful treatise of both modern and ancient societial failures and successes and explanations for them. Must reading for any informed person.

By: grognard

grognard — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 16:50:45 +0000

I went through sort the same thing, after years of John Wayne movies is was an eye opener that there was another side to all this. One thing Whites did not understand was â€œhorse stealingâ€. When the horse [mysteriously for native Americans] appeared on the plains the tribes that had them found themselves not only more mobile than in the past but also far more militarily powerful. To keep up with the neighboring tribes there was a huge incentive for tribes to acquire horses, at first just for survival. This changed over time. The warrior who had many horses had a considerable amount of prestige, horses not only gave him mobility but also measured his courage in that they were usually acquired in dangerous practice of raiding another tribe. What developed was a â€œ gameâ€œ of taking and loosing horses between tribes, not done so much to inflict damage on the other side but to show courage and wealth. Native Americans certainly would trade for horses but, in a way, that would be cheating at the game, acquiring horses for prestige without the danger of raiding. The Europeans never understood this, theft of a horse was a serious economic loss and you certainly did not steal from someone else to offset what was taken and to gain prestige. For us Native Americans were thieves too lazy to work.