"In a little depression there lay outstretched a stalwart Sioux warrior, stark naked with the exception of a breech clout and moccasins. I could not help feeling a sorrow as I stood gazing upon him. He was within a few hundred yards of his home and family, which we had attempted to destroy and he had tried to defend. The home of the slayer was perhaps a thousand miles away. In a few days the wolves and buzzards would have his remains torn asunder and scattered, for the solders had no disposition to bury a dead Indian." Private Taylor, a survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn (Custer's Last Stand).
When I was a kid and we played cowboys and Indians I, of course, wanted to be a cowboy. Cowboys were the good guys and Indians were the bad guys. Like General Sheridan, US Cavalry said, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."
In the summer of 1985 I helped organize and execute a mission trip to Farmington, New Mexico. There our group completed repairs and construction projects at a Navajo mission school. The Navajo not only worked beside us, but spent a lot of time with us during our leisure time. Three Navajo in particular, two males and a female, made a lasting impression on me. Chuck did something with a feather that affected me deeply. To this day I pick up random feathers from the ground and remember what he said about each tine of the feather. Since that summer people have told me that I was bitten by "the Indian bug."
I just pulled from my bookshelf some of the books I have read about American Indian history, culture and religion. I've given away more books than survive on my shelf, but these are, in no particular order of publication or reading, North American Indian Reader, The Heart of Everything That Is, Lost Bird of Wounded Knee, The Black Elk Reader, Black Elk's The Sacred Pipe, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn, The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian, Crazy Horse, and The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge. I have also read Black Elk Speaks more than once, but I must have given it away (again).
An irony of my research and reading is that most of it has pertained to the Lakota Sioux. I have read very little about the Navajo.
I've read so much over the years from the Indian's perspective that I became an Indian. I took their side in the great Indian wars. I shared their sorrow in their lost wilderness, their lost buffalo and sacred hunting grounds, their lost villages and way of life, their lost culture and people. I was angered by the aggression of the United States government, its soldiers and weapons of war. I was disgusted by our attempts to convert Indians of every tribe to the "Christian way of life". We told them to forget their religion, forget their language, forget their ways and settle down and become civilized like we were. I felt that the cavalry,settlers and gold miners got what was coming to them. They shouldn't have been there in the first place.
The quote above is from The Earth is Weeping by Peter Cozzens, As I read this book now, I realize that I have come full circle. I'm a cowboy and an Indian. Indians are good people and cowboys are good people. Indians are horrible people and cowboys are horrible people. Indians need food, clothing and shelter and cowboys need food, clothing and shelter. Over the years I have also come to realize that people enjoy killing each other. People not only don't mind killing each other (for whatever reason), but are capable of inflicting unthinkable atrocities on one another. Men in particular like things that explode in other people's faces. The Indians, the cavalry and the Texas Rangers inflicted hideous and gruesome cruelties toward men, women and children (for whatever reason). Apparently we are genetically engineered toward aggression and cruelty. I don't have to read Indian books to believe this is true, I only need to watch the evening news. In Syria, who are the cowboys and who are the Indians? Are the government bombs good bombs or the rebel bombs? When Syrian families are displaced and children are blown to bits, was it by a good bomb or a bad bomb?
Although 264 US soldiers, civilians and Indian scouts died on the government's side of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Private Taylor was touched by the remains of one fallen Sioux warrior. I'm quite sure that he didn't mean to be disrespectful of his own fallen and certainly did not mean to be a traitor, I think he was just being a human being. He was grieving the fact that humans kill each other. The Indian had a home and a family. The soldier who killed him and later died had a home and a family.
Of all the American Indians who I have come to respect and to admire, my Native American hero of heroes is Black Elk, a holy man of the Lakota Sioux. In his biography Black Elk Speaks I found a kinship with Wakan Tanka that has become a part of my personal prayer and devotional life. I've never smoked an Indian pipe, but I sensed its power and its peace. I've never played in a drum circle but I have vibrated with its power and majesty. I just learned from Cozzens that at the Little Bighorn the eighteen year old Black Elk scalped an American soldier while he was alive and then shot him between the eyes. I didn't know that.
So should I now look for a different Indian hero? Moses killed an Egyptian, but that didn't disqualify him from leading his people out of bondage. Men kill each other. That's what men do.
"I could not help feeling a sorrow" Taylor said. Maybe that's the key. As long as we "feel a sorrow" there's hope for the human race. As long as it still matters that one warrior was lost (for whatever reason). That Sioux warrior regarded the US soldier as his enemy. The soldier regarded the Indian as his enemy. They both would be wrong. Black Elk eventually gave up the pipe and picked up the Christian Bible. He spent the last forty years of his life practicing the ways of God as a Catholic catechist, a non-ordained priest. But on his deathbed he said that he never left the pipe. He never stopped following Wakan Tanka. And of the massacre at Wounded Knee which he also survived, he said, "And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream."
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