The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

But you will not by any means listen to [any] overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected. . . . Our future security will be in their inability to injure us . . . and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire [them].”

They also, like so many Americans of all origins, wanted something more from their lives and their country than simply the chance to get rich.

“Neither superior technology nor an overwhelming number of settlers made up the mainspring of the birth of the United States or the spread of its power over the entire world,” writes historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. “Rather, the chief cause was the colonialist settler-state’s willingness to eliminate whole civilizations of people in order to possess

Jefferson sketched out a plan by which Indian tribes in the Southeast could be disappeared: To promote this disposition to exchange lands which they have to spare and we want for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, becaus

Until 1978 it was, technically at least, illegal for Indians to practice their various and varied religions. The nineteenth-century laws prohibiting

luring Osceola into a parley under a flag of truce and then arresting him.

It is no accident that non-Natives own the majority of the lakeshore on all the best lakes in Minnesota, or the richest farmland with access to water in Nebraska, Montana, and South Dakota.

Lieutenant Colonel Custer—he was ranked a general only temporarily during the Civil War—led

The Oneida contributions to American victory and the promises that had been made to them, as well as their homelands, had faded away.