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509 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1970
Crazy Horse and the other decoys now jumped on their ponies and began riding back and forth along the slope of the Lodge Trail Ridge, taunting the soldiers and angering them so that they fired recklessly. Bullets ricocheted off the rocks, and the decoys moved back slowly. When the soldiers slowed their advance or halted, Crazy Horse would dismount and pretend to adjust the bridle or examine his pony's hooves. Bullets whined all around him, and then the soldiers finally moved up on the ridgetop to chase the decoys down toward the Peno Creek. They were the only Indians in sight, only ten of them, and the soldiers were charging their horses to catch them...
with about three thousand Sioux and Arapahos, the Cheyennes moved northward, exiled into a land that few of them had seen before. Along the way they had fights with soldiers who marched out from fort Laramie, but the alliance was too strong for the soldiers, and the Indians [sic] brushed them off as though they were coyotes snapping at a mighty buffalo herd.I cannot imagine two communities joining together in friendship that increases over time in my culture. It's not only to find out what's wrong with us, what we've done, that I read books like this, not only to try to create (by being the change) a culture of remembrance that learns from its bad past, but also to figure out what should be done and learn ways of living and being which may have been destroyed or driven out of sight of or protectively hidden from the white gaze, to know that it doesn't have to be like this. To know the past is re-membering (putting back together, opposite of dismembering) to use in (re)making...
When they reached the Powder River country, the Southern Cheyenne were welcomed by their kinsmen [sic], the Northern Cheyenne. The Southerners, who wore cloth blankets and leggings, traded from white men, thought the Northerners looked very wild in their buffalo robes and buckskin leggings. The Northern Cheyennes wrapped their braided hair with strips of red-painted buckskin, wore crow feathers on their heads, and used so many Sioux words that the Southern Cheyennes had difficulty understanding them. Morning Star, a leading chief of the Northern Cheyennes, had lived and hunted so long with the Sioux that almost everyone called him by his Sioux name, Dull Knife.
At first the Southerners camped on the Powder about half a mile apart from the Northerners, but there was so much visiting back and forth that they soon decided to camp together, pitching their tepees in an old-time tribal circle with clans grouped together. From that time on, there was little talk of Southerners and Northerners among these Cheyennes.
"The Cheyennes do not break their word," One-Eye replied. "If they should do so, I would not care to live longer."The majority of the USian powerful had racist attitudes, believing in "manifest destiny", and simply wanted to wipe out the original population of the land. They expressed violent intentions and carried them out. Sometimes in these stories, white men with some power behave sanely or ethically, attempting to honour some treaty or informal promise or convention of engagement, or else they become sympathetic towards "Indians" in general or some in particular, and try to help them. Quite often the actions of these individuals backfire, causing the people they wanted to protect being put in more vulnerable positions, leading to their slaughter or capture. This shows how difficult it was to intervene in the overall trend. Politicians and treaty makers wheedled and tricked the land and rights away on a road paved with all kinds of intentions, but the logic of white supremacist capitalist settler colonialism was relentless.
I have heard talk and talk, but nothing is done. Good words do not last long unless they amount to something. Words do not pay for my dead people. They do not pay for my country, now overrun by white men... Good words will not give my people good health and stop them from dying. Good words will not get my people a home where they can live in peace and take care of themselves. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I think of all the good words and broken promises... You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases.
- Chief Joseph of the Nez Perces