The Plains Sioux and the Empire of Liberty

Jeffrey Ostler: The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

 

At the end of this history, Jeffrey Ostler lays his political cards on the table: “The beginning of the twenty-first [century] holds the possibility of an end to economic and political colonialism and the reemergence of fully sovereign Indian communities in Sioux country and throughout North America,” a possibility that will require “non-Indians to recognize the legitimacy of Native aspirations and to alter powerful structures that continue to constrain their realization.” Specifically, respecting the Lakota Sioux, this would mean return of the Black Hills territory in South Dakota. Although a 1980 Supreme Court decision offered monetary compensation for “the United States’ theft of the Black Hills,” the Sioux rejected this offer and demanded the land itself.

This, then, is a political history not only in the ordinary sense—an account of struggles over who rules a land and a people—but a work of political advocacy. Should the Black Hills and other lands formerly ruled by American Indians be returned to their full control? Are such “Native aspirations” in fact legitimate? Ostler provides substantial information to his readers, enabling them to make their own independent judgments, irrespective of the rhetorical nudges he delivers along the way.

He begins with the Louisiana Purchase, the centerpiece of President Jefferson’s policy of extending the “extended republic” of the United States. Jefferson called this an “empire of liberty,” meaning the self-government of American citizens in territories that would ascend to the status of states in the Union, not mere colonies subordinate to a metropole—as the British regime had regarded its American holdings. According to Ostler, this was scarcely an empire of liberty, at least not for all, inasmuch as it defined citizenship as white and male. He is mistaken. There was nothing in the United States Constitution that so defines American citizenship, and as Thomas G. West has shown, free blacks and some women were entitled to vote in some states. [1] According to Ostler, the “theorists of the American nation” thought “that the United States embodied principles that demanded universal adherence,” such as property rights held by individuals. This, too, isn’t exactly true. The Founders held it to be self-evident that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, including the right to hold property, inhere in individuals by nature; their regime aimed at securing those rights. But they recognized that many peoples throughout the world faced serious impediments to doing so. Unlike the Americans, they had no experience in self-government at all; more profoundly, the truth of natural human equality of rights were not self-evident to them. On the contrary, persons living in many regimes had not conceived of the idea of ‘rights’ or even of ‘nature’ at all. Their ignorance of nature and of rights did not mean that nature and the rights endowed by its Creator did not exist; their ignorance did mean that they did not know that government should secure such rights or, in some cases, they did not know how to frame such governments. 

Ostler claims that the Founders believed that “Indians had no right to continue wasteful and inefficient uses of land or to perpetuate barbaric social and religious practices once civilization made its demands.” This is a somewhat garbled statement of John Locke’s argument, with which the Founders did indeed concur. Locke contends that no people has the right to continue wasteful and inefficient uses of land; this contentious, it should be remarked, is shared by ‘environmentalists’ today, although they define waste and inefficiency rather differently than Locke does. To defend the Indians’ claims, Ostler eventually cites the predictions of contemporary Indians that modern attempt to conquer nature, initiated by Europeans, must fail, and that Indians’ ways of using the land, supporting small human populations, will soon be vindicated. The prediction, brandished by many ‘Whites’ today as well, remains to be realized. As for barbaric social and religious practices, the Founders would never say that they became morally wrong “once civilization made its demands”; they were always wrong, but for millennia human beings hadn’t known that. “Thus,” Ostler writes, “although U.S. policy recognized Indian tribes as nations with limited sovereignty and made treaties with them, American leaders envisioned nothing less than the eventual extinguishing of all tribal claims to land,” as distinguished from property rights, which can be individual, corporate, or political. That is, the Americans intended to extend a modern state in addition to a commercial republican regime.

To do so, the Indians would need to be “assimilated.” As Ostler sees, “assimilation was antithetical to racial thinking, since it presumed that Native Americans possessed the same innate mental and moral capacities as Europeans.” Their “ways of life were inferior”—their regimes and their tribal organizations—but not their natural rights and abilities. Unfortunately, this judgment of political inferiority became “lined to increasingly systematized theories of racial classification and hierarchy.” Exactly so: the same abandonment of natural right theory for ‘race science’ or ‘race theory’ also bedeviled the cause of slave emancipation, which the Founders had championed. This may be seen in the writings of John C. Calhoun and the many other advocates of perpetuating the enslavement of African Americans. According to the new generation of “American elites,” Indians “were an inferior race that was inevitably destined to perish,” even as the European Americans were ‘manifestly destined’ to triumph. ‘Manifest Destiny,’ a historical claim, began to replace self-evident rights discovered in nature. But that is tantamount to saying that many among the second and third generations of Americans abandoned the philosophic, theological, and legal principles of the Founders.

“Early American imperial thought, then, denied the necessity for colonialism in the sense of rule over others. Settlers would move west, but, in sharp contrast to the colonies under the British empire, they would enjoy the same freedoms as eastern citizens,” forming states legally equal to the original thirteen. “Nor, according to American theorists, would expansion require permanent rule over subjugated people.” Rather, Americans expected “to exercise very moderate forms of authority over temporarily enclaved Indian communities,” preparatory to “the larger process of dispossession and absorption.” Things didn’t work out that way in practice because United States citizens “consistently overstated their capacity to subdue armed resistance and severely underestimated the pervasiveness of non-violent Native resistance to dispossession and assimilation. Consequently, building an empire of liberty required the conquest of Indian people as well as the systematic and enduring exercise of power over subjected Indian communities.” Our own contemporaries will recognize this as the problem of regime change or revolution. The Founders solved it by making war against—killing or exiling—American colonists loyal to the British Empire and its regime. The United States Congress to an important degree failed to solve it when it attempted to ‘reconstruct’ or revolutionize the oligarchic regime of slaveholding plantation owners in the South. President Washington had met with some success in this strategy respecting the Five Civilized Tribes of Amerindians in the deep South, but the local populations, especially in Georgia, undermined his policy a generation later, leading to the infamous ‘Trail of Tears.’ It is noteworthy that the major struggles pitted whites against whites. That is because these were regime struggles first and foremost, not simply struggles over ‘race.’

Often, even usually, American Indians “clung tenaciously to community and tribal affiliations,” even as they reconfigured them, adapting to changing circumstances. “They refused to accept assimilation, refused to go away.” This was nowhere more evident than in the plains of South Dakota, among the Sioux. 

President Jefferson sent Merriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the northwest tributaries of the Mississippi River, especially the Missouri River. There they encountered the Sioux, with whom they quarreled; the Sioux demanded more gifts of tribute than the explorers were willing to part with. The Sioux generally had found Europeans unimpressive, having dealt with French, British, and Spanish traders for years. They themselves were relatively recent arrivals to the area, having lived there “probably no more than two generations,” since the early 1700s. From Minnesota they had moved west, “using guns acquired through trade” to displace the Omaha, Otoe, Iowa, Missouri, and Ponca tribes. By Lewis and Clark’s time, the westernmost groups of Sioux “had acquired horses and were becoming a buffalo-hunting people.” In subsequent decades, “the Plains Sioux waged intermittent war against Kiowas, Crows, Shoshones, Assiniboines, and Skidi Pawnees to gain access to new hunting areas, and by 1850 their population numbered about 15,000, ruling “much of the vast region between the Platte and the Yellowstone.” That is, the Sioux had their own strategies of empire and regime change.

It is worth pausing to consider this information, as it rather spoils the moral foundation of any Sioux claims to the Great Plains. The tribes they displaced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries all had prior claims to the land. Most had arrived there because they had been driven from their previous lands by more powerful Indian nations. It should come as no surprise that human beings in North America acted more or less as human beings did in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America: fighting over territory with no particular respect for natural right, an idea discovered by philosophers, not warriors. Like the Americans later on, they practiced a policy of assimilation, capturing women and children in attacks on other tribes and ‘adopting’ them.

Knowing that such facts damage his case for the Sioux, Ostler is at pains to tell us that “unlike European Americans,” the Sioux “did not divide the world’s people into the civilized and the primitive and imagine an inevitable and total triumph of the former over the latter,” and had no “ideologically articulated commitment to an empire that would encompass the entire continent.” Nor were their incursions “planned very far in advance,” centrally coordinated from a distant capital. Of course, all this means is that the Sioux, unlike the people of the United States, lacked ‘modernity.’ They had no modern state and little in the way of modern technology, except for the guns they obtained from Europeans. Their imperialism was less impressive than that of the Americans because they lacked the population size, political organization, and technological power of the Americans. They were surely no less intent on grasping for power over the land, and no less successful until the bigger fish swam along. This doesn’t mean that the Sioux have no legal claims to territory on the Great Plains; in the course of the nineteenth century they signed treaties with the Americans, and the Americans violated them more than once. But to say that they enjoy some sort of moral advantage over the ‘Whites’ is rather silly. Ostler wisely attempts no formal argument on that point. 

Ostler deftly sketches the political organization of the Sioux nation. They consisted of seven groups they called the Seven Council Fires. The Council wasn’t “a political entity” but rather “an identity based on a shared language, culture, and history,” its internal relations characterized by fluctuating alliances, rulers, and locations. Each of the Council Fires was in turn divided into oyate, “a term that can be translated as tribe, people, or nation,” and each oyate “consisted of several tiyospayes or bands of a few hundred people linked by kinship. “There is little evidence of large multiband councils before the 1850s.” Each band had a chief who could be removed by the people. The total population of Sioux increased dramatically in the nineteenth century, doubling between 1850 and 1880. 

That is, the organization of the Sioux resembled the ancient European societies described by Aristotle and Fustel de Coulanges, societies predating the establishment of poleis or ‘city-states,’ much less the modern state. Their religion also resembled that of many other peoples of antiquity and indeed of today. According to the Sioux, the Wakan Tanka rules the world. Although this term has often been translated as ‘God’ or ‘Great Spirit,’ it is no creator-God, nor is it a person. Wakan Tanka refers to “the spiritual powers of the universe,” immanent in all things, not holy or separate from them. In moving to the Great Plains and “becoming a Buffalo Nation,” the Sioux believed themselves to be a people favored by the Wakan Tanka. “They continually reminded people of their dependence on the life-giving powers that suffused the world.” This amounts to a sort of Hegelianism without rationalism, and Ostler duly notes the tendency among some nineteenth-century Americans to abandon the Founders’ natural-rights Christian rationalism for newly fashionable historicist Christian rationalism, a democratized and Christianized Hegelianism. This is indeed an ideational difference, drawn from radically different sources, but not so much of a moral difference, when you come right down to it. By 1846, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton could win applause by intoning that the “White race” was obeying God’s command to “subdue and replenish the earth.” In the eastern United States, Indian “tribes that resisted civilization met extinction,” and the same fate would hold for the Indians of the West. It seems that the Sioux had held similar opinions of the peoples they had defeated, lacking only the political and technological means to enforce them so successfully.

Avid for modern “weapons, ammunition, metal tools, clothing, decorative ornaments, sugar, coffee, clay pipes, blankets, and tobacco,” the Sioux began “willingly hunt[ing] more bison than necessary for subsistence” in order to provide the Americans with robes and hides. “Hunting bison for the market was one of many causes that contributed to the decline of bison populations in the 1840 and 1850s.” The Sioux also traded furs for alcohol, which led to some violence, but this was not widespread among them. The Americans brought with them not only tradeable goods but smallpox; it must be said, and Ostler does say, that before the disease had spread they inoculated many of the Sioux. In all, “Plains Sioux in the 1820s and 1830s had little reason to think Americans would pose a serious threat.” Even in the 1840s, the increasing numbers of Americans they saw were only passing through to points west, and they could be charged fees for their consumption of game, grass, and timber. 

However, in that same decade such diseases as cholera and measles, along with smallpox, increased. The Sioux may have regarded these epidemics as forms of magic inflicted upon them by the American travelers or as punishments inflicted by the Wakan Tanka for transgressions of taboos and improper performance of rituals. However, the main pressure was political. By midcentury, the Americans (who had substantially increased their southwestern territories by defeating Mexico in the 1848-49 war) began to attempt to settle Plains tribes into reservations, a move preliminary to assimilation into American civil life. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 “specified the territory of each tribe and called for intertribal peace,” the latter having been scarce enough for many centuries. The Plains Indians “recognized the right of the United Sates to establish roads and military posts within these reservations and pledged to respect the passage of emigrants” in exchange for U.S. annuities to the tribes for the next fifty years. To distribute these monies, the United States government placed officers at “agencies on or near each tribe’s reservation.” As Ostler admits, “It is difficult to know for sure what the Sioux understood they were doing when they signed this treaty,” but in any event it “failed to take into account…the decentralized and voluntary character of Plains Sioux political organization.” The signers “did not necessarily represent all the bands within these oyate, and they certainly did not represent other oyate.” 

Understandably, a series of wars followed, beginning in 1854 and lasting into the 1890s. At the same time, Americans attempted to change the regime of the Sioux much as Washington had done with the Five Civilized Tribes, decades earlier—exhorting them “to take up the plow” instead of their (relatively recent) way of life based on hunting bison. This policy was enforced primarily by government annuities, the manipulation of which gave government agents considerable sway. But the military side of the policy intensified in the 1860s, when the eastern Sioux, still in Minnesota, thought to rebel against Minnesota settlers when the vast majority of U.S. forces were engaged in the Civil War. It didn’t work; the Americans pushed the eastern Sioux onto the Plains and in 1863 the U.S. military pursued, intending “to subjugate the Sioux once and for all.” After the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman led a larger force into the region, but without much success. The Sioux had honed their own military skills for decades while fighting rival tribes on the Plains; the U.S. Congress wanted to cut funds for the Army in the wake of the Civil War; Reconstruction in the South required about 20,000 soldiers there; and many of the former Abolitionists now turned their attention to the suffering of the Indians at the hands of corrupt agents in the Office of Indian Affairs. Army officers, led by the decidedly unsentimental General Sherman, faced off against these “Indian lovers,” as they styled these Christian reformers. They would frustrate one another for the next three decades, but not to the advantage of the Sioux.

President Grant attempted to resolve the matter by establishing the Indian Peace Commission, which consisted of four civilians and three army officers. Some Sioux signed treaties proposed by the Commission, others did not. And once again, even the Sioux tribes that signed the treaties may not have fully understood them. True to their longtime intention of changing the regime of Indian tribes and nations, “the words of [the principal] treaty were designed to erase Sioux ways of life” by encouraging agriculture and by privatizing communal lands. Such militants as Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull refused to sign any treaty at all. The geographic center of military resistance to the United States formed between the Yellowstone and the Black Hills; “if the U.S. army tried to invade the region it would face a formidable alliance of all northern Plains Indians still willing to fight.”

In so organizing, the militant Sioux did exactly what European monarchs had done in the sixteenth century. They “attempted to create new forms of centralized authority to resist a sustained invasion”—something along the lines of a modern state—with Sitting Bull as “War Chief—Leader of the entire Sioux nation.” Sitting Bull soon faced the same troubles as the kings of England and France had experienced. “Sioux decision-making processes remain would remain decentralized” and political union “was difficult to sustain.” The North American equivalent of feudal lords would have their say, as indeed the American equivalents of such lords, based on the plantations of the South, had had their say in Congress in the decades before the Civil War. This notwithstanding, the militants “had ample cause to think they could prevail.” Large herds of bison remained in the region they ruled; up to now, they “had an impressive record of avoiding destructive engagements and checking the American advance”; and “they had reason to think that the spiritual powers of the universe, accessible through ceremony and proper moral behavior, would continue to assist them.” Materially, militarily, and spiritually, they seemed to themselves well-armed. The four main U.S. government agencies for the western Sioux “could do little except try to persuade and cajole Indians to take up farming or wear ‘civilized’ clothing.” Assimilation had not advanced much.

One agent, J. C. O’Connor, realized that agriculture wasn’t the best use of the Great Plains, anyway. The Plains were home to the bison. Bison are herd animals, not vegetation. “Furthermore, since Indian men were used to ‘the chase,'” O’Connor reasoned, “and were ‘little inclined to farming operations,’ stockraising was a good match to ‘their habits.'” Quite likely so, but it was too little, too late, and too many other government agencies preferred to keep the non-militants among the Sioux dependent upon the annuities the agents dispersed or withheld. What is more, American cattlemen saw the same thing O’Connor did, moving to occupy prime grazing lands. And the Black Hills also held its real or imagined attraction to Americans, when small amounts of gold were found there. But “the Plains Sioux looked upon the Black Hills as the center of their land, indeed, as the very heart of the earth.” Yet claims of sanctity for land have never held any weight in American courts, whether animated by theories of natural right or of historical progress. The regime clash therefore continued and intensified. 

Thus “the Grant Administration’s peace policy began to wane.” It hadn’t produced peace, for one thing. With the defiance of Sioux militants, “Americans who had once favored a policy of kindness were losing patience,” even as the Reconstruction of the South was losing favor. The Panic of 1873 produced tension among workers and capitalists in the cities, farmers and capitalists in the countryside. It seemed to many Americans that they had reunified the country in 1865 only to see it threatened again in the late 1870s. To relieve these civil-social pressures in the heavily populated East, Grant hoped to induce young men to make their fortunes in the West. He sent a commission to the Sioux, offering to buy or lease the Black Hills for the substantial sum of $100,000 per year, but the Sioux would have none of that. The strategy worked up by his administration was clever: allow Americans to continue their movement into the Black Hills while withdrawing U.S. troops; wait for Indian attacks upon the miners, which “would provide a pretext for a final conquest of the northern militants.” “The government would demand that the agency Sioux sell the Black Hills at whatever price it decreed and threaten to starve them if they refused.” After that, the overconfident Sitting Bull and his militants could be crushed.

A famous setback occurred in June 1876, when General George Armstrong Custer led his men to disaster at Little Bighorn. The Great Sioux War had begun. Just as the Sioux underestimated the Americans, the Americans had underestimated the Sioux—as peoples ruled by opposing regimes so often do, and indeed had done in the previous decade, during the Civil War. In September, a U.S. delegation told the Oglala Sioux that if the refused to cede certain lands to the Americans, “Congress would cut off their ratios, the army would punish them, and the government would take the Black Hills anyway.” Only about ten percent of the adult male Oglalas signed (the treaty supposedly framing U.S.-Sioux relations had stipulated seventy-five percent), but the commissioners were satisfied. Obviously, most of the Sioux were not, and the war was on. It didn’t last long, and although the Sioux and their Cheyenne allies killed far more Americans than Americans killed Indians, the Americans’ superior manpower numbers told in the end. However, the Indians did win peace with the United States, along with the “freedom from fear and hunger” peace entailed. The settlement also ended “the ravages of intertribal warfare,” as the United States would serve as an arbiter of any disputes that arose among the Plains Indians. 

As happened many times, the United States soon reneged on one of its promises under the peace agreement, whereby it pledged to establish an agency in the northern section of Sioux territory. The American leverage over the Sioux now derived from the threat of moving many of them out of the Great Plains. Some Sioux chiefs were sufficiently intimidated by this prospect to break with Crazy Horse, the tribal chief of the northern Sioux, who demanded that the Americans fulfill their promise. Initially, the Americans temporized, but eventually Crazy Horse was arrested and imprisoned; he died in American custody. “By the late 1870s, the Sioux had become a captive people.”

Within the new terms of their political life, the Sioux continued to negotiate with the Americans, and at the highest levels. In September 1877, worried about the Americans’ intention to move them ‘temporarily’ off their now-reduced land to a location along the Missouri River, a delegation of chieftains met with President Rutherford B. Hayes. They cited the effects of alcohol in those riverboat towns, Chief Red Cloud saying there was “too much whiskey there”—a line that appealed to Hayes’s wife, an ardent temperance warrior. They appealed to the universal sentiment of patriotism, Chief Spotted Tail saying that “the country I live in is mine,” and I love what is my own. Hayes assured them that the move was only for the winter, necessitated by the threat of starvation caused by the decline of game in the territories set aside for the reservation. You must learn to become farmers, he said. With a sense of the importance of public opinion in a republican regime, the Sioux leaders next turned to the media—specifically, a reporter for the New York Herald—telling him that supplies could indeed be shipped from the Missouri to the agencies supplying Sioux populations. Returning to the White House the following day, they engaged in a bit of political theater, costuming themselves in American clothes, thereby “dramatizing their willingness to change.” Hayes remained obdurate. By now, after the stinging defeat at Little Big Horn, the American public “favored a policy of dealing firmly with the Sioux.” Under those circumstances, Hayes intended to show no weakness.

Where, then, did the regime change strategy stand at this point? “Many Sioux leaders were genuinely willing to ‘become like the white man,’ though only in the limited sense that they wanted to prosper and were willing to incorporate certain elements of American ways of life to do so.” ‘Yes’ to schooling in the English language, given the “practical advantages” of knowing it; ‘no’ to full assimilation. The dwindling bison population weakened Sioux attempts at preserving their way of life, however, as did their consequently ever-increasing dependency upon the U.S. government for their supplies. Even here, the regime difference surfaced, as the government wanted to give them only processed meat, which prevented the Sioux from using hides and other parts of the slaughtered animals for making their traditional clothing, shelter (specifically, bison hides for tipis), and ornaments. U.S. agents aimed at getting the Sioux to disperse over the prairie on farms—forming the Prairie equivalent of a Jeffersonian yeomanry—and thus diluting the tribal institutions and habits of the Sioux regimes. The Sioux prudently resisted. For example, at one settlement they took the new building materials and constructed houses along streams, “thus creating elongated villages.” And “indeed, the relative permanence of houses would make it more difficult for the government to atomize Oglalas in the future.” A regime is more than an arrangement of physical elements, and U.S.-imposed rearrangements of those elements could be reworked to preserve the old ways of life. They adapted to the disappearance of the bison by hunting other game, including elk, deer, and pronghorn antelopes not only for food but for the hides, antlers, and bones the Americans had tried to block them from obtaining. [2] Increasingly, the American agents saw J.C. O’Connor’s point, that herding cattle made more sense on the Great Plains than farming did, although Sioux kinship-based communalism continued to resist thoroughgoing adoption of American-style individual property rights.

The character of the American regime itself was changing, complicating matters further. Notions of ‘Manifest Destiny’ and ‘race science,’ which galvanized some Americans prior to the Civil War, were now coalescing into the frankly historicist constellation of doctrines whose advocates (often temperance and civil service reform advocates) were beginning to call themselves “Progressives.’ These “theories of social evolution” fed into thinking about Indian policy, further exaggerating hopes “that assimilation could be accomplished with relative ease.” “The key” to this enterprise “was to establish the proper environment and, as proved the case in many of the Progressives’ efforts, schooling was sculpted edge of that key, indispensable to unlocking the door to ‘change.’ “Armed with certain knowledge of their own superiority, boundless optimism in humanity’s plasticity, and unflappable confidence in their ability to direct social evolution, the ‘friends of the Indians’ launched the most comprehensive and sustained assault on Native ways of life in U.S. history.” Ostler finds the exemplar of the Progressive mindset in Richard Henry Pratt, who persuaded the U.S. Army to use abandoned military barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania for a school dedicated to ‘modernize’ Indian children. Pratt had the children’s names Anglicized, their hair cut, their behavior regimented in military drills and enforced by corporal punishment (seldom used by Indian parents). His intention was to return the students to the reservations, where they could work to reform their people. It didn’t work. Returning students were out of place, and “by the late 1880s, assimilationists were wringing their hands over the ‘relapse problem,'” as the Sioux clung to their guns and religion. Ostler himself wrings his hands over this American attempt at “cultural genocide”—a rather inflammatory term for regime change—but the Progressives of course did not restrict their ambitions to the ‘Red’ peoples. Whites, too, were to undergo regime change animated by progressive-historicist principles in many ways antithetical to natural-rights constitutionalism.

Regime change had been, and would have continued to be, difficult enough without the intervention on Progressives. After viewing a performance of the Sun Dance, a U.S. observer told Chief Red Dog, “Our grandfathers used to be like yours hundreds and thousands of years ago. Now we are different. Your religion brought you the buffalo, ours brought us locomotives and talking wires.” True enough, but what did that signify to Red Cloud? He preferred the buffalo. Such “heathenish dances,” along with polygamy, reluctance to send children to American schools, and giving away annuity goods seemed wicked to the Americans but not to the Sioux. Attempts to convert the Sioux to Christianity were equally futile, as they inclined to think of Jesus as one god among many, another bearer of spiritual powers, a new way “to obtain spiritual power.” Sioux religiosity wasn’t founded on doctrine but on practice; any practice might be tested for its effectiveness, and if it worked it worked. 

Depending upon Indian chiefs, yet attempting regime change many chiefs didn’t want, the Americans floundered. They never found the right balance of persuasion, inducement, and coercion. Their efforts did exacerbate factionalism among the Sioux, who divided into those who wanted some form of regime change, those who wanted to go through the motions, and those who wanted to resist.

Of the latter, Chief Sitting Bull was among the most recalcitrant. “The most experienced” U.S. Indian agent in western Sioux country, James McLaughlin, had enjoyed some success in winning over some of the previous hostile Sioux tribes. Sitting Bull was another matter. McLaughlin found him “a stocky man, with an evil face and shifty eyes, pompous, vain, and boastful.” The American nonetheless attempted to show him the advantages of the American regime by taking him to St. Paul, Minnesota. Sitting Bull despised the place, and the people who lived there. “The whitemen loved their whores more than their wives,” he sneered; they dressed them better and treated them more affectionately. They disrespected their own president. He was, he told a newspaper reporter, “sick of the houses and the noises and the multitudes of men,” telling a missionary lady that he would rather “die an Indian than live a white man.” Having observed the saloons of St. Paul and the abuse of alcohol on the reservations, he lamented, “With whiskey replacing the buffaloes, there is no hope for Indians.” At one point, Ostler pauses to deplore the fact that Americans hadn’t yet acquired the “cultural pluralism” of anthropologists like Franz Boas, going so far as to claim that the Sioux were farther along the road of toleration. But evidently not.

Sitting Bull, who by now had fled to Canada, welcomed the remnants of Crazy Horse’s people to the land of exile, where he intended to reconstitute the Sioux nation under its traditional regime. Back in the United States, the less militant Sioux bands continued to have difficulties with the Indian Office, which ignored President Hayes’s guarantees and placed its agency along the Missouri River in order to save money on transportation of supplies. Yet another U.S. commission was sent to find facts, and even one of its number conceded that the Sioux chiefs were right. The agents were making a liar out of the President. Pressures were building. As for Sitting Bull, his people suffered from harsh Canadian conditions. He returned to South Dakota in July 1881, surrendering his weapons to the United States and soon joining a ‘Wild West’ show in which he was featured along with Annie Oakley, whom he took on as an adopted daughter. He made good money, giving most of it away to needy Sioux.

As in Georgia in the 1820s, so in South Dakota in the 1880s. While the federal government in Washington continued to cast around for a formula which would make regime change work, governors and other American settlers in the territory began to push for further land acquisitions. This provoked both the Sioux and the American Progressives. The issue stalemated until the end of the decade, when Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act, whereby the Sioux could exchange more land for monetary compensation, and the United States Supreme Court ruled against tribal sovereignty in United States v. Kagama. “Against enormous pressures, the western Sioux had managed to create a unified opposition against land cession, only to see this shattered.” 

Many of them turned to a self-styled prophet, a messianic figure named Wovoka, who had been born about three decades earlier in Nevada. Wovoka reported having experienced an apocalyptic dream vision in which “God”—Wakan Tanka, in the form of Jesus—told him that if the Sioux performed a certain dance “at intervals, for five consecutive days each time,” the Whites would disappear from Sioux lands and the Sioux would reunite with their ancestors now living in another world. This was the origin of the Ghost Dance, which seized the imagination of Sioux desperate for the renewal of their way of life. After all, “if whites were the bearers of a superior way of life, how could they have rejected and killed God’s Son? By pointing out that Europeans had killed the Messiah” in his previous manifestation and then having him claim Indians as his chosen people, Wovoka and his followers hoped to reverse the flow of power. The moral powers of the universe would no longer support the strong.” The Ghost Dance would precipitate this true regime change, without the violence that had proven futile against American might.

Ostler notes that “most Plains Sioux never even saw a Ghost Dance, let alone danced in one.” As usual, the nation factionalized into those who regarded the prophecy, and the policy it recommended, as true and those who took it as rubbish. Typically, “bands with a history of strategic cooperation with U.S. officials generally rejected the Ghost Dance,” and the only bands “seriously to consider the Ghost Dance were those with a history of direct resistance to the reservation system.” Many Ghost Dancers imagined that their dresses and shirts would make them invulnerable to American weapons, in the event of any attempt to suppress the movement by force. 

The federal government was not amused. In “the largest military operation since the Civil War,” a substantial U.S. Army force moved against the militant tribes. Army officers had continued to believe that the civilians had botched the job of governing the Sioux, and President Benjamin Harrison signed off on the expedition, worried that the forces on the ground couldn’t protect the American settlers against what he mistook for a potentially violent uprising. Ostler speculates that Harrison may have recalled his father’s victory over the Tecumseh movement in 1811 in the Battle of Tippecanoe; on more solid ground, he points to the still fresh memories of Custer’s Last Stand. At any rate, “because there was no real evidence that the ghost dancers threatened settlers’ lives, the decision to send troops arguably violated Article I of the 1868 Treaty, which states that the ‘Government of the United States desires peace, and its honor is pledged to keep it.'” Obviously, Harrison and the Army officers thought they were keeping the peace, but it is quite likely that they overreacted, with bloody consequences.

“Before the military campaign began, between 4,000 and 5,000 Lakotas were living in Ghost Dance camps. A month later there were no more than 1,300 people at the three remaining Ghost Dance sites,” including Sitting Bull’s band. The threat of armed force, added to the manipulation of food supplies, discouraged the majority, who returned to Indian Agency territory. Poised to attack Sitting Bull’s position at the Standing Rock Agency, the Army halted at the news that Sitting Bull and several in his inner circle had been killed—some “would say murder[ed]”—by Indian agency police sent by his now-enemy James McLaughlin to arrest him. The remainder of his band fled. A few days later, as the Ghost Dancers at another site retreated toward the agency territory, Army troops intercepted and attempted to disarm them. Ostler judges that had the Army officers allowed them to return “without interference, almost certainly the massacre [at Wounded Knee] would not have happened.” (Unfortunately, he steers his narrative into ‘postmodernist’ territory. Quoting a report written by the captain of the Army detachment, who recounts that he found one “squaw” who was “moaning”—pretending to be ill—while concealing a “beautiful Winchester rifle” underneath her and another who “had to be thrown on her back” in order to recover the gun she was hiding, Ostler describes such language as “sexualized,” the stuff of “a rape fantasy.” One might suppose that the ensuing massacre was evidence enough of atrocity.) 

In his conclusion, Ostler tells of the continued practice of the Ghost Dance among some of the Sioux people. “In recent years, Indians have seen the increase in bison populations and the revival of traditional cultural and religious practices as at least partial fulfillment of the Ghost Dance’s potential.” More, “to many Native people,” not only the Sioux, “it is abundantly clear that western civilization will inevitably collapse under the weight of its technological madness and moral bankruptcy,” fulfilling “Wovoka’s prophecy.” That remains to be seen. Such ‘prophecies’ have been issued before. 

On the legal front, in 1980 the United States Supreme Court affirmed Sioux claims that the United States obtained the Black Hills illegally, ordering monetary compensation for the loss. This the Lakotas refused to accept, calling the Black Hills sacred land, never to be sold. Thus the regime struggle continues. ‘Sacred land’ isn’t a category under in the American regime and its constitutional law. There is tax-exempt real property owned by religious organizations which have sanctified it to their own satisfaction, but such property continues to be understood in American courts as a natural and civil right, not a sacred thing. To recognize land as sacred would be to abandon natural and constitutional right, returning to the feudal conceptions of right and of law held by the European aristocrats to whom Tocqueville compared the Indians.

As for Ostler’s political agenda, he cannot be accused of harboring aristocratic leanings. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American Left has propounded a fake cultural pluralism or relativism, predictably at the service of socialist-egalitarian sentiments. The communalism of the Sioux and other Amerindian nations appeals to them. Perhaps most of all, the prospect of breaking up the American Union with the hammer of ‘multiculturalism’ seems to them the best prospect for advancing their ideological interests. Readers who see this will adjust their sights to his rhetoric while learning a lot from the real research he has done. 

 

Notes

1. Thomas G. West: Vindicating the Founders (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).
2. Ostler points out that the Sioux might well have adapted to farming life because their hunting habits were relatively recent, concurrent with their arrival on the Great Plains. “Although Plains Sioux people (especially men) often spoke scornfully of farming as something inimical to their identity altogether (and, at best, women’s work), most could have easily found ancestors only a generation or two before with extensive horticultural experience.” When they lived near the Missouri in the late 1700s, they grew crops, and the eastern Dakotas and Arikaras had grown corn for many generations.