Like most kids during the sixties, I played a lot of "cowboys and Indians". Sometimes I played with my brother and sometimes I played with my friends. We used sticks or just our fingers as our pistols and rifles. By the time we got old enough to own BB guns, we had lost interest in the game. Probably just as well.
While playing cowboys and Indians, I preferred, like any red-blooded Caucasian citizen of the United States of America, to be the cowboy. I wanted to be the "good guy." But since somebody had to be the Indian, I took my necessary turns as the "red man."
In my history courses through my secondary education, the American story was always told through the eyes of the colonists and the American frontiersmen. From the beginning of the American story, the Indians, "the savages," needed to be tamed or eradicated. We appreciated what the Wampanoag did for the colonists that first Thanksgiving, but within a few years we went to war with them and wiped most of them out. Each year on Thanksgiving Day, the Wampanoag observe a national day of mourning at Plymouth Rock.
As the early Americans began to spread west, "the Indian" was a huge problem. Again, the history I was taught was from the perspective of the pioneers and not from the natives.
Back in the summer of 1985, I spent a week on a Navajo reservation in Farmington, New Mexico. I got bitten by the "Indian bug" in a big way. I immediately became a student of all things American Indian. Through my readings about Indian warfare, culture and religion, I was introduced to a Lakota Sioux medicine man called Black Elk. From there I read volumes about the Lakota Sioux. I devoured books about Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Dull Knife, Red Cloud and others. The more I read, the more I sided with the Indians against the Cavalry. Given a choice between being a cowboy or an Indian, I was now an Indian every time. You know, "a good guy."
There were a multitude of atrocities on both sides. The most notable - from the perspective of the Indians - was the massacre at Wounded Knee on the morning of December 29th, 1890. The Indians did their share of merciless killings as well. But the Wounded Knee massacre will always be a testimony to the malicious nature of men, even men in uniform.
Again, the Indians were also horrible. Many of them didn't just kill the pioneers, settlers and the soldiers, they tortured them in unthinkable ways and left their mutilated bodies for the animals and birds to finish off. The more pain and suffering that they inflicted, the more glory in battle, I have learned that the Comanche and the Sioux were particularly heartless. Their brutality staggers the imagination of what humans can do to other humans.
It has been an eye opening experience for me to learn that my beloved Lakota Sioux were ruthless killers. What I've learned is that the Indians were scalping each other for centuries before they were scalping the white man. Counting coup was a right of passage for any young warrior. A goal of any warrior was for his tribe to dance and sing songs about his bravery. Long before the Indians were stealing the soldier's horses, they were stealing horses from each other. The Lakota Sioux claimed that Wakan Tanka had given them the Black Hills. The truth is that the region had been inhabited for centuries by the Arikara, Cheyenne, Crow, Kiowa and Pawnee. The Sioux drove the Pawnee from their homes and claimed the "sacred hills" for themselves. Seems that Wakan Tanka had a little help.
So does that mean that the U.S. Cavalry was justified in what they did at Wounded Knee? That they had every right to surround women, children and old men with Hotchkiss machine guns and cut them down in cold blood while they were running and screaming in terror? Following the directive from Washington of General Philip Sheridan that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian, the soldiers of the US Cavalry chased the survivors through the snow-covered woods shooting as many women and children as possible covering the white snow with crimson. They bashed the babies' heads open with their rifle butts. God bless America!
So then who are the good guys, the cowboys or the Indians? Depends on which cowboy and which Indian. Kit Carson was a good guy. Black Elk, a holy man, was a good guy. Lewis and Clark were good guys. Crazy Horse was a decorated warrior, but for me he's a good guy. Bill Cody was a good guy. Sitting Bull, another great Sioux warrior, was a good guy. Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone were good guys. Who was the good guy, Cain or Abel? They were both good guys. But both of them had one very bad day.
Human beings are capable of near divine acts of love and kindness. Human beings are capable of doing unthinkable atrocities to one another. My brother and I didn't need BB guns. From the beginning of time sticks and stones have been breaking bones. It's what men do.
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