Wounded Knee Massacre, Oscar Howe (Dakota), 1960

This commentary was originally published in Indian Country Today January 2, 2014, but since the reorganization of the publication, was removed from the website. I think it still has valid things to say on this time of the year for Dakota and Lakota people — and for all Native people who have faced off against the United States. I honor and think about every Christmas holiday on how my Dakota ancestors dealt with both the Minnesota Sioux Uprising, the Dakota 38, and Wounded Knee. Also, I recommend watching this video on the Dakota hymn "Wa­kan­tan­ka ta­ku ni­ta­wa" sung at the gallows by the Dakota 38.  #RememberOurRelatives #RememberWhoYouAre

by Jacqueline Keeler

There are always things happening in Indian Country that never make it into the mainstream news, and we Indian people are used to it. We never expect the issues near and dear to our hearts to be covered 24 hours on CNN or to trend on Twitter or Buzzfeed. And yet, this year, I felt it more than usual.

As we entered the holiday season it felt good to see, on my Facebook and Twitter feeds, hundreds of posts, videos, and retweets hailing the Dakota 38 riders as they began their 330-mile trek on December 10th, riding on horseback down snowy roads from Lower Brule in South Dakota to Mankato, Minnesota. It was here, the day after Christmas in 1862, that 38 Dakota men were executed in the largest mass hanging in U.S. History for rising up in an insurrection against the Americans who had taken their land. President Lincoln signed the orders, reducing the number to be executed from 303 to the 38 who were hung that day.

The United States had failed to fulfill their part — i.e., monetary compensation — of the treaty agreements with the Santee in exchange for the surrendering of up to 24 million acres of hunting grounds; without the ability to hunt, their children were starving. Reportedly, the money owed the Santee was reallocated by Congress to cover the costs of Mary Todd Lincoln’s redecorating the White House and sunk into years of graft by Indian agents. A trader, Andrew Myrick, refused to release any food from his stores without payment and famously said, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass — or their own dung.” Myrick was the first white man killed in the uprising, and his body was found days later with grass stuffed in his mouth. General Jon Pope was dispatched to Minnesota to quell the insurgency (Pope’s assignment was in part a demotion for losing the 2nd Battle of Bull Run against the Confederacy); he wrote, “It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so.”

Then this recent Sunday came the anniversary of the Wounded Knee massacre, just three days after the Dakota 38 riders reached Mankato bearing gifts for reconciliation for the town. A tweet by @williamcander of the image of the burial of the frozen victims’ bodies was retweeted hundreds of times with my twitter name attached to it. My Twitter stream became filled with that painful image repeated ad infinitum regarding the December 29th, 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota: “123 years ago today,150 #Lakota men/women/children were massacred by the US 7th Calvary @ #WoundedKnee H/T @jfkeeler.” Each time someone would retweet it would show up again on my timeline. And so, even though I clicked on the image only once, the long rectangular hole dug for mass burial with the bodies of Lakota people strewn in it kept reappearing before me. Over and over again, I saw those waiting frozen on the ground while white men pose, holding guns or with their hands at their hips as if for a job well done — and I am a descendant of someone who was there.

That image is filled with all those things that, as Native people, we cannot name, and remains a symbol of all the ways in which we are not allowed to be ordinary Americans simply living our lives in the most powerful nation in the world. December 29th, 1890 is the date when we became a marginalized people denied the comfort of being part of a nation that recognizes our experiences and commemorates them with us. We live out our American lives in a twilight existence where the only time other Americans, our compatriots, remember us is as we were then when we truly separate from them and each member of our own nations. Then they dress up “like us” with feathered headbands made in China and cheer for their sports teams on weekends named to “honor” us all the time, not remembering us as we are today, as our encounter with them has made us. But still, after all this time, we are different because we remember; we remember Wounded Knee, and Mankato, and The Long Walk, and every broken promise that we must, for our own good, put aside to live in our new country, the United States. It only makes it harder that they do not join us in this; it makes what we lost, the millions of acres and lives of our loved ones feel cheapened and unappreciated and forgotten and makes their present-day ignorance of us even harder to bear.

So, as we Native people mourn and reflect upon these painful events in our history, we do so very much apart from the rest of the country. There is no national 24-hour news coverage of the Dakota 38 riders. No one is following their journey down icy roads and freezing temperatures except for us who look for updates on their Facebook event page and watch their YouTube interviews, creating our own piecemeal media coverage that does not exist elsewhere. Instead, on that Sunday on the 123rd anniversary of Wounded Knee, a Washington Redsk*ns football game was what was on TV.


Seeing photos of Redsk*ns and Chiefs’ and Braves’ fans dressed up in fake eagle feather headdresses, I think of a photograph of Owl Man, my great-grandmother’s grandfather, as he stood with a delegation of Yankton Dakota headmen at the White House in Washington, DC in 1868 to sign the Yankton treaty with the U.S. Government. A diminutive President Andrew Johnson stands in frock coat in the balcony above the Yanktons, and he is flanked by the Miami tribe’s delegation who tower over him in turbans and eagle claw necklaces. My ancestor is easily identifiable as he is the only one wearing the full eagle feather headdress. I think what he would have thought of all this. Each feather is said to have represented the confidence the people had for the leader. It was something very precious, but it came with a great deal of responsibility and accountability to the people. When the headmen returned home, the women chastised them for signing away the salt mines which they needed to preserve the meat. Even then, there were no good deals to be made in DC. The people were focused on securing their survival, to live, to protect and raise the young, and sometimes, like at Wounded Knee, even that was an impossibility.

Yankton Sioux Delegation at White House, 1867

Looking at this image of Wounded Knee I want to run — run like the Ihanktonwan man my dad used to tell us kids about at dinner. He was at Wounded Knee visiting, and despite being shot through the middle of his body, he ran all the way across the state of South Dakota to our people. We kids would pepper our dad with questions about the story, “How could he run all the way across the state with a gunshot wound in the middle of his body?” “They were just tougher back then.” “But, why did he do it?” “Because he thought our people really needed to know. It was important to the people.” I want to run like him and running, carrying the story with the pain still lodged inside of me. The worry and the doubt eating me up. And only by putting my feet to the ground and feeling the tempo of my movement, a heartbeat upon the body of my mother, Maka, can I shake loose the overwhelming despair of the assault on our people. I suppose a lot of Native people feel this way, and this is why we share our stories with each other on social media. Because these things are terrible and the country we are supposed to be part of cares not at all, or it cannot care without assuming guilt, and it is unwilling to do that because of Manifest Destiny. In their minds, it was all for the greater good of creating this country that our nations were buried in the snow. And so, we live in a country where Wounded Knee and the Mankato 38 does not receive the same amount of broadcast time as does a perpetually losing NFL team’s flailing weekly on the field.

And even as we mourn, publicly for the first time in a long time, on social media sites like Twitter, we are confronted by those who would tell us to “get over it.” And they refuse to see that we cannot as long as our concerns remain shunted off to the side of our daily American experience. We are mourning the dead, but also the death of our own centrality in the story of our lives. We are surrounded by stories of white men and boys overcoming obstacles and triumphing in their quests to get the woman of their dreams, to save the world, become rich on TV, in films and books.

One white guy had to respond to the tweet of the photograph of Wounded Knee by saying it was okay because Indians were not Noble Savages and did far worse to each other, so we should stop remembering. In rejecting one stereotype, he had embraced something even worse. The notion that unless Native people are better than any other people in the world they do not deserve basic human rights accorded to every other people in the world is the most dehumanizing thing anyone can say against us. Does he mean that we, having fallen off our pedestal, must endure any atrocity against us, even against unarmed women and children—even infants? In his myopic attack on the Noble Savage, he has returned full circle to the mindset that initiated the genocide on this continent. It reminded me of Col. Chivington’s words to his soldiers before the Sand Creek Massacre, “Kill them one and all, nits make lice.” I think the truth is to Americans like this gentleman; we are just an annoying reminder of the true price paid for this land, a reminder that needs to be silenced. It is so important to him that he’s willing to make his point grandstanding on top of a massacre. Something that even the Dakota 38 descendants recognize is wrong. Jim Miller, the Dakota man who had the vision for the memorial ride, has said that part of the ride’s purpose was for the Dakota to be the first to apologize for their role in the historical tragedy. Another organizer, Dakota veteran Peter Lengeek explained, “We’re trying to reconcile, unite, make peace with everyone because that’s what it means to be Dakota.”

On YouTube is a video of Redbone, the Native rock band singing in 1973, “We were all wounded at Wounded Knee for Manifest Destiny,” but I’d take it even a step further than that. As a people, a living, vibrant culture, we all died that day. Even if your tribe had no runners present to bring them the news, that was the day that, as Black Elk said, the tree was cut. Both the Minnesota Sioux Uprising and Wounded Knee affected two members of my father’s family in ways that marked them the rest of their lives. The first was Owl Man. After the Dakota fled Minnesota, they came and sought refuge amongst our people, the Yanktons, and as we were their cousins, we took them in. When the U.S. Military found out, they sent Colonel Sully who demanded we fulfill the treaty and kill them or he would return to “kill us all.” The headmen met, and, in the meeting, Owl Man was chosen to kill one of the Santee in order to fulfill the treaty. He had had a vision as a boy that he would do this when he received his powers as a medicine man. So he killed the man, and then went up on a hill and sat for four days and four nights without any weapons proclaiming that any Santee who wanted to come and kill him could if they wished. None did, and the Santee were able to remain, another massacre was averted, but it bothered my great-grandfather for the rest of his life. He claimed to be haunted by the spirit of the man until he died.

My grandmother told me about the second relative her uncle, the Rev. Charles Cook. One day, we were in her attic, and she unrolled a large portrait-sized daguerreotype of a young, handsome Indian man. She told me he was the Episcopal minister at Wounded Knee during the massacre. It was the holidays, so the church was decorated for Christmas; desperate to save the people, he and Dr. Charles Eastman, a Dakota, turned it into a hospital for the wounded and dying. They were both young, educated Dakota men still in their 20’s, working tirelessly to save the lives of their people. I asked her what happened to him, as I had never heard of him spoken of before. She said quietly, “Oh, he died a few years later, they say, of a broken heart by what he saw that day.” Funnily enough, in the HBO movie done about Charles Eastman’s life a balding, middle-aged white man portrayed him. However, Eastman is more accurately depicted by Canadian Saulteaux actor Adam Beach.

I think of those young men, educated to be leaders in this new way of life their people were supposed to assume. And how they found themselves, instead of building this new society of churches and hospitals, patching together the bloodied bodies of their own people torn to bits by U.S. soldiers. Dr. Charles Eastman was embittered by the experience, noting the banner inside the church which read “peace and goodwill to all men.” My great-great uncle, could not reconcile the two, and even Owl Man, a seasoned warrior, was wracked with guilt by the choices he had to make to save the most people possible. I highly recommend reading a wonderful blog post written by Cutcha Rising Baldy, (On telling Native people to just "get over it" or why I teach about the Walking Dead in my Native Studies classes... *Spoiler Alert!*) where she explains why we cannot just "get past" these experiences by using The Walking Dead and survival of a zombie apocalypse. In it, she notes just how like American invaders were like a zombie swarm, and how our people were unable to get them to see our humanity. When Baldy asks how the great-grandchildren of the Walking Dead will be able to "get past" the terrible things that happened to their ancestors, all her students understand that in this fictional zombie universe that it is not possible to do so.

So as social media brings me the annoyed rantings of a white man on Twitter telling Native people to "get over it," and yet another on Facebook carrying on about the terrible hardships of giving up his enjoyment of the Washington, DC football team mascot he loves because of whiney Native people—I am reminded of these very real decisions my ancestors had to make for our survival. I remember these decisions were not made for these white men’s benefit, nor for their comfort, it was made for me, for us, their descendants. We are the reason they did these things and made these hard choices. It was for the hope that we would be alive, their descendants living today and loving life, the sun on our faces, and even the blistering snow on a long ride as we remember them. I write these things down, these family stories in an attempt to preserve the dignity of their actions because no one else will. No one in the American media cares as much as we do about these things. And ironically, it is because social media provides these communal spaces to grieve and remember and to take courage in the acts of Reconciliation that riders like the Dakota 38 do, that make me feel even more the great, yawning distance between my experience, as a Native woman and mother, and that as an American citizen. I wish the two were closer together. The distance is a part of the pain, and being told to be silent about it makes me think others know it, too.

Native family at an anti-Redsk*ns protestors in Minneapolis in 2014--Washington Post poll claims they and the 5,000 others Natives at this protest were an aberration in their community.

I have been pushing for more of a political definition of Native American identity in line with nationality for several years now. I think it is the fuzziness of Native American identity that makes it so easy to assume by others. It also causes a great deal of distress to Native youth. The fact is, any American can walk up to a Native person and tell them they are “not Native enough” to suit them. It happens all the time and this is traumatizing to youth and adults.

This identity “fuzziness” was purposefully done and is the result of hundreds of years of policy carried out by both colonial and U.S. governments to erase the political existence of Native American nations. These Indigenous nations because they have claims to the land and resources constitute a very real threat to the political integrity of the United States and any settler colonial state. So our true identity as pre-existing and persisting nations of North America is clouded as a matter of national policy.

This policy is evident in the denial of infrastructure to our remaining sovereign lands which drives Native families from their homelands to seek economic and educational opportunity. It can also be seen in the wholesale remove of Native youth from their families, both in the boarding school years and now, under the guise of foster care and adoption. The mass removal of children from an ethnic group constitutes an act of genocide under the Geneva Convention.

The pollsters could have also used the definition the United Nations and the International Labour Organization have outlined a few characteristics of an Indigenous person:

● Descended from the pre-colonial/pre-invasion inhabitants of a region.
● Maintain a close tie to land and both cultural and economic practices.
● Suffer from economic and political marginalization as a minority group.
● A group is considered Indigenous if it defines itself that way.

Native protestors at a Washington Redsk*ns game in Santa Clara, California

The survey would also have had to provide proper line of questioning to be certain that the respondents’ understanding of Native American identity is what the pollsters mean. This was not done and the Post editor who answered our questions before The Nation article came out stated that he did not believe anyone would lie about their identity, so they certainly did not structure the survey for that contingency.

I think this whole poll brings to light very clearly the nature of misrepresentation of Native people in the United States. It also shows how far apart we are that '9 out of 10’ would seem remotely credible to the Washington Post staff.

My article came out on Wednesday in The Nation about the poll the Washington Post released last week which claimed that out of 28,000 folks they called a little over 450 said they were "not bothered" by the ethnic slur 'Redskins.' These folks claimed to be Native, although the Post failed to verify this.

Before my article was published The Washington Post responded to emailed questions about its poll. I found the Post's responses disappointing in the extreme and responded in an email point by point--however, there was not enough room for my responses in The Nation article, so I am sharing it here.

From: Jacqueline Keeler
Date: May 24, 2016 at 6:46:45 PM PDT
To: "Clement, Scott" <scott.clement@washpost.com>
Cc: Dave Z.
Subject: Re: Questions 

Thanks Scott, I appreciate your answers. The U.S. Census does allow self-reporting of Native American identity but its own population estimates of Native Americans are 29% lower. Should 29% be struck from the total? 

Misreporting, whether purposefully or not, is very common when it comes to Native American ancestry. It is not always mean-spirited or malicious but the result of the history of this country, genocide and the romanticization of Native American people that has occurred. See how Elizabeth Warren has been lambasted for proudly believing a family story of Cherokee ancestry that it turned out had no basis in fact. 

Also, you did not check to see what respondents understood “enrollment” to mean. Their understanding of the terms provided is essential to the value of their answers. They may have assumptions that are not what you expect. 

Also, your number of respondents is too small to allow for oversampling or undersampling by age or region. 

Fully 50% of the Native American population is under the age of 29. Native Americans have the lowest life expectancy—Native American men in particular. How can you account for, even with weighting, fully 54% of the respondents being over the age of 50?
As only 76 respondents were under the age of 29 and 274 were over 50 years old, how many more phone calls would you need to make to achieve a significant number of respondents under 29? I understand 28,000 calls were made to achieve the 76. Social scientists I spoke to felt that 1,500 respondents would provide a better picture. Since it took 28,000 calls to receive 504 self-reported Native Americans, wouldn’t that require 90,000 or more phone calls? And even then, that would only at this rate provide you with 228 respondents under the age of 29. Doesn’t it seem like there are more effective ways to reach the Native American community? 

Also, 35% of the respondents were from the South--an area with few Native Americans since most of the tribes were force marched out of the region during the Trail of Tears in the 1830s. This seems like a gross oversampling. And the percentage of college graduates (25%) does not match that of the Native American population—9%. It’s 150% more. 

Professor Fenelon’s study was a qualitative one and not a quantitive one, this is true. But social scientists have developed accepted mathematical tools to analyze the data. His work was presented at the American Sociological Association and qualitative surveying is regarded as acceptable in social science as is quantitative methods like phone calling. Perhaps more so in this case because with your survey you have no idea whether the respondents are truly Native or not. Also, the 12 you chose to feature in your paper, was a qualitative sampling of data obtained quantitatively. This is not acceptable social science practice without clearly stating the methodology for selecting these 12 and giving real reason why to provide more weight to their opinions. 

Your response to NAJA’s statement, which clearly cites the APA resolution still ignores the harm mascotting at this level causes to Native Americans and to all Americans (as recent studies have shown-University of Buffalo 2015) and is to abrogate a trust to minimize harm to your readers in your coverage. An example of this care can be seen in the coverage of individual suicides. Studies show that such coverage causes a copycat effect and so most newspapers do not cover suicides individually to protect their readership. Likewise, the science clearly demonstrates the negative, cumulative effect of mascotting on the Native American population. A Stanford study also found that Native Americans who claimed to be okay with mascotting actually suffered measurably greater loss of self-esteem after being exposed to Native American mascots than those that said they were not okay with such mascots—the exact opposite of the inference you have drawn from your survey. How can you ignore findings that directly negate the very meaning of your findings? 

-Jacqueline


On May 24, 2016, at 6:07 PM, Clement, Scott <scott.clement@washpost.com> wrote: 

Dave and Jacqueline, 

Below are our responses to your questions. 

Best,
Scott

1) Why no verification of tribal enrollment, just taking people at their word that they are Native American?

The survey of Native Americans was conducted as part of five months of ongoing weekly surveys of U.S. adults conducted on cellular and landline phones by Social Science Research Solutions, a firm in Media, Pa. During those surveys, which interviewed more than 25,000 adults overall, respondents were asked what race they consider themselves. The 504 individuals who identified as Native American were immediately asked our poll’s questions about tribal enrollment, the Washington Redskins’ team name and Native American imagery in sports. 

Self-identification is a survey technique that is accepted, common and time-tested in measuring personal attributes -- in political polls as well as official surveys covering a wide range of other issues. The Census Bureau uses self-identification to measure race, and this method is also used in surveys reporting on health and other characteristics of the Native American population. 

The Post survey used self-identification as a starting point for compelling methodological reasons. This approach made it possible to compare the demographic makeup of the survey’s sample with Census Bureau statistics, allowing us to identify and correct for differences, which is a best practice in the survey industry (Described here). Using self-identification was also important to conducting a systematic national sample of the population, 95 percent of which can be reached through conventional or cellular telephones. 

To analyze whether attitudes differed among relevant subgroups, the Post poll asked respondents whether they were members of a tribe and, if so, which one. It also collected information on whether respondents lived on or near reservations. As it turned out, there was little variation in the responses to questions about the Redskins’ team name given by those who said they were enrolled in a tribe and those who said they were not. Similarly, there was little variation in responses from those who lived on or near reservations and those who did not.

We see little reason to suspect respondents would intentionally misreport their racial identity or tribal status to a confidential survey. The overall poll results suggest respondents understood a distinction between racial identification and tribal membership, given that a majority of self-identified Native Americans said they were not enrolled. The substantive questions about the team’s name came at the end of polls on other subjects and after survey respondents already had self-identified, leaving no motive (or even opportunity) for individuals to self-identify as Native American when they learned that the questions would center on the team’s name.

2) Given how young the Native American community is, why speak to no one under 18? 

Our national surveys typically interview the adult population both for its relevance to voting and political participation and practical difficulties in reaching respondents who are younger than that age (i.e. ethical considerations about obtaining parental permission to participate). 

[My Response: This lack of representation should have been noted, as 50% of Native Americans are under the age of 29 and the data qualifed with that statement. Qualitative studies of Native American youth's feelings on the subject are available and could have been used to balance out the conclusions. In my article I note the White House Initiative on American Indian and Alaska Native Education report which contains testimony by hundreds of Native youth about the difficulties they face in school--including their feelings about being mascotted.  2,000 American high schools still mascot Native Americans.]

3) Why we're only 12% from mountain region where 18 out of 20 most populated Native reservations live?

The unweighted percentages of respondents by region are a function of the share of respondents who identified their race as Native American. Because of the geographic concentration of Native Americans in certain regions, the Post survey was weighted to match 2014 American Community Survey benchmarks for the population’s regional makeup. While the survey employed a weighting protocol designed to correct for relevant demographic and regional differences from the Native American population, the impact of weights on findings was minimal. In this case, respondents in the Mountain region were among the most likely to report enrollment with a tribe (67 percent did so), but the share who said the Washington Redskins’ team name was offensive was little different from the overall results (8 percent).

4) Why no mention of James Fenelon's survey, after he says he was contacted by reporters and asked if his was biased because he had Native Americans doing poll?

Dr. Fenelon’s survey was not based on a systematic national or regional sample of any population, but among a sample of attendees at selected pow wows and related events in the Cleveland area, as reported by Indian Country Today. We cannot use results from an unsystematic sample to make generalizations about the Native American population at-large.

5) how do you respond to NAJA statement? " “By framing this story as simply a matter of public opinion,” the NAJA/UNITY statement says, “the Post has willfully ignored the harm – referenced by the APA – that will inevitably result from its coverage. The reporters and editors behind this story must have known that it would be used as justification for the continued use of these harmful, racist mascots. They were either willfully malicious or dangerously naïve in the process and reporting used in this story, and neither is acceptable from any journalistic institution.”

The Post pursued this poll without any idea as to how it would turn out and had no vested interest in the outcome. When activists argue that Native Americans are offended by the name – and when debate over the name is at the center of a major public policy debate -- it’s entirely appropriate for a news organization to conduct a survey to test any assertions made about the breadth and depth of offense among Native Americans. This is customary for any other public policy issue.


From: Dave Z.
Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2016 11:17 AM
To: Clement, Scott
Cc: Jacqueline Keeler
Subject: Questions 

Hello Scott. Thank you for agreeing to respond to Jackie's article. 

The questions are as follows. We are on deadline. Please get back today if at all possible. Jackie, please add questions if I am missing anything. 

1) Why no verification of tribal enrollment, just taking people at their word that they are Native American? 

2) Given how young the Native American community is, why speak to no one under 18? 

3) Why we're only 12% from mountain region where 18 out of 20 most populated Native reservations live? 

4) Why no mention of James Fenelon's survey, after he says he was contacted by reporters and asked if his was biased because he had Native Americans doing poll? 

5) how do you respond to NAJA statement? " “By framing this story as simply a matter of public opinion,” the NAJA/UNITY statement says, “the Post has willfully ignored the harm – referenced by the APA – that will inevitably result from its coverage. The reporters and editors behind this story must have known that it would be used as justification for the continued use of these harmful, racist mascots. They were either willfully malicious or dangerously naïve in the process and reporting used in this story, and neither is acceptable from any journalistic institution.”

Navajo Code Talkers being honored at a Washington Redsk*ns game in November 2013.

I've had the good fortune of being asked to be an editor at The Good Man Project a site I've been admiring for some time now. Joanna Schroeder the Executive Editor brought me on and I am so excited to share the work of Native writers and thinkers with a larger audience.