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

bending to a common purpose is more important than arising from a common place.

that Indians need not accept their position of disenfranchisement, and, even more radical, that simply “being Indian”—choosing to be Indian—constituted a social good.

Adding injury to injury, the annuity payments and food promised by treaty and on which the Dakota depended were rarely delivered, or were late and of substandard quality. The government’s policy had also been to deliver the annuity payments to traders in the territory rather than directly to the Dakota. The traders would skim, falsify records, and

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

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

pain. I have tried to catch us not in the act of dying but, rather, in the radical act of living.

(Native students are almost four times more likely to drop out than whites), and so far he’s avoided jail (Indian men are twice as likely to end up there). In Minnesota in 2002, Indians, who made up only 1 percent of the state population, were 6 percent of the prison population.

It was estimated that within a couple of decades, as much as 95 percent of allotted Indian land would pass into white ownership.

He was hanged in hastily erected gallows near Lake Steilacoom, a site that is now a housing development, the travesty of his life marked only by a small plaque next to a strip mall in Lakewood, Washington.