Anthropology and the Sioux People - Essay Example

The Sioux people once lived naturally, without borders, roaming and hunting wild buffalo over a wide tract of land that covers a region that now forms multiple states in the American West. "Prior to the agreement of 1876, buffalo and deer were the main support of the Sioux. Food, tents and bedding were the direct outcome of hunting. And with furs and pelts as articles of barter or exchange, it was easy for the Sioux to procure whatever constituted for them the necessities, the comforts, or even the luxuries of life. Within eight years from the agreement of 1876 the buffalo had gone, and the Sioux had left to them alkali land and Government rations." (Brown, 1970) By the time of the beginning of the 20th century, Indians across the continent had been pushed by European settlers and the American army into settlements, reservations, and camps that heavily restricted their traditional nomadic lifestyle. The Sioux Indians were warriors in the original sense, forming one of the largest cohesive tribes of Native Americans, with their own language, dialects, social and cultural complexity rooted in a tribal culture that traced thousands of years of history. The Sioux organized one of the strongest resistances of the American Indian tribes to the expansion of European settlers and the army in the West. As the great Sioux warrior Crazy Horse said, "I was hostile to the white man...We preferred hunting to a life of idleness on our reservations. At times we did not get enough to eat and we were not allowed to hunt. All we wanted was peace and to be let alone. Soldiers came...in the winter..and destroyed our villages. Then Long Hair (Custer) came...They said we massacred him, but he would have done the same to us.” (Brown, 1970) The warriors adopted imported technology such as the gun and horse from the Europeans that allowed them to violently resist European settlement of their lands, through military engagements with the army or attacks on isolated settlers’ homes. By 1890, the American army was entering the last stage of “Indian Wars” in the West, a genocidal pattern of cultural elimination in which entire tribes of Native Americans were slaughtered by armed forces, and forcibly resettled on reservations sealed with treaties. History remembers of the hundreds of treaties negotiated by the American government with indigenous Indian tribes, not one has been honored as to terms, and thus we have a situation where Native American culture, once thousands of tribes, thousands of languages, each with their own unique cultural identity and wisdom, eliminated through a genocide that is one of the largest on record. Census results suggest that by the turn of the 20th century, fewer than 250,000 Native Americans from all tribes still survived. Scholars debate on the original numbers of Indians who lived in the Americas at the time of Christopher Columbus and his arrival, estimate vary from around 15 million to 150 million people. In this context the Ghost Dance religion in Native American culture appears in a millennial, apocalyptic form, spreading across various tribes and language groups to become a popular movement in America among Indians witnessing the last days of their culture through a series of violent massacres and attacks coming one after another. The Ghost Dance was officially founded by a Paiute holy man who had visions and instructed the Indians to dance, in a traditional manner, and sing, chant the old holy songs of the ancients as they stood together across Indian cultures in solidarity during the last times of a people. The settlers in America slaughtered entire villages of Indians, men, women, and children indiscriminately. This happened not only in one battle, but continually over a two to three hundred year period of time, where the European viewed the Indian as sub-human and without any natural rights whatsoever. In addition to violence, disease, alcohol, and conversion to Christianity was used by the European settlers to destroy Indian culture. For the Sioux massacred at Wounded Knee, the tribe as it existed was truly on the verge of cultural extinction. Other Indian tribes experienced the same, what remained of their community in 1890 was fragmented, they literally knew not the day whites would ride into their village and shoot entire villages while they slept, poisoning the water, or simply catching individual Indians walking and subjecting them to harassment, humiliation, and torture. Women, children, holy men, elders, no Indian was spared from this racism, and no Indian was safe from attack. In battle after battle, the best, brightest, bravest, and strongest Indians had been killed by the U.S. army and settlers, time and time again. The Indian tribes were in no way ignorant – their wisdom and understanding stands the test of time. Thus, they could see the ravaging effects on their communities in a daily manner, experiencing the last days of a two to three century genocide daily in their lives, with all the horror and suffering that entailed psychologically conflicting with their identity and what they knew to be good and true in life. It is heartbreaking. In this cultural context the Ghost Shirt religion spread from the Paiute across Indian tribes until it also became known and practiced among the Sioux. As one of the largest and most warlike of the indigenous tribes of America, the Sioux were fighting for their cultural survival in 1890 and losing. The proud spirit of the people, their deep knowledge and wisdom contrasted terribly with being under attack, defeated, and exterminated. What people could really endure this type of genocide without experiencing massive levels of grief and sorrow, as the Cherokee and so many others had on the Trail of Tears? As all Indian shared this common experience of racism and attack, so too all Indians understood traditional indigenous values in America, the shared world view and lifestyle all Native American peoples and tribes held in common. It is in this common ancestry, experience of repression, and cultural worldview that the Ghost Dance was able to unify Indian tribes and bind them together in a new experience of religion and identity. However, when the religion reached the Sioux reservations in the Dakotas, the tribe was surrounded by the U.S., contained in what was planned as America’s “Final Solution” to the Indian Wars. Where other Indian tribes might practice the Ghost Dance in remote locations removed from the eyes of the European settlers, all gatherings and movements in the Sioux were watched by agents of the U.S. government whose official policy was to destroy and eliminate Indian culture. Thus, the main difference with the Sioux and other Indian tribes who practiced the Ghost Dance at the same time was that the Sioux were practicing it literally in the midst of being surrounded and at war with the U.S. army in the Dakotas, and that the U.S. government was aiming for a symbolic military defeat of the Sioux. In “Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee,” one reads the story of the last days of the great Sioux and Apache chiefs in America. One learns of the human rights violations, atrocities, and inhumanities inflicted upon the Indians, and to abhor the values that fuel this type of genocidal racism. In Peter Nabokov’s account of relations between white settlers and Indians, one reads the original words of the families who experienced these attacks, and the heart simply breaks, forcing one to wonder how America could be responsible for such a history, and what can be done in our own time to resolve the injustice. In many ways, we can never change the past, what has been done, but we can correct historical wrongs through recognition of patterns in society and reform. Yet, the reason “Wounded Knee” and the stories of the Native Americans collected by Nabokov resonate so strongly in our minds today, is we can see and hear the last words of a people as they are attacked, killed, and pushed into cultural extinction before our eyes. As history, as fact, as atrocity on a scale far larger than the mind can conceive, we feel the tragedy of the Native American but also our own helplessness in letting it pass. The same emotions fueled the expansion of the Ghost Dance as a religion across Indian cultures in the late 19th century, and unique reaction of the Sioux has become a larger symbol of this time in American history as the defeat of the last great chiefs of the Sioux and Apache tribes signified the end of an era. Sources: Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2001. Nabokov Peter (Editor), Deloria Vine (Foreword). Bury Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-2000, Revised Edition. New York: Penguin, 2000. Read More