The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

Parker was the first Indigenous person to manage the Office of Indian Affairs during the Grant Administration. He was appointed in 1869. Of Seneca lineage, Parker was raised on Tonawanda Reservation in upstate New York. He was the fourth of seven children born to William Parker, a miller and a Baptist minister. In addition to being brought up in the Christian faith, Parker took part in Seneca longhouse ceremonies and bore the Seneca name “Hasanoanda” (107).

During his boyhood, Parker went to a missionary boarding school, where he learned English. When he was 16, he met Lewis Henry Morgan—a White man who had helped form the Grand Order of the Iroquois. Morgan helped Parker get admitted to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where the young man studied engineering.

When he was in his mid-twenties, Parker “was appointed to an important political and ceremonial position within the Seneca Longhouse” (108). After graduating from the RPI, Parker became an engineer and worked on the Erie Canal. He later befriended General Ulysses S. Grant in Illinois. When the Civil War started, Parker tried to get Iroquois men to enlist, but the governor of New York refused because the Iroquois were not Americans. Parker tried again on his own, enlisting Grant’s help. In May 1863, Parker was appointed captain and was transferred to the Military Division of Mississippi. He later served as General Grant’s adjutant and secretary and was present during General Lee’s surrender in April 1865. Parker also helped to draft and finalize “the articles of surrender that ended the Civil War” (109).

When Grant became president in 1869, he appointed Parker as commissioner of Indian affairs. With Grant’s help, they addressed the legal status of Indigenous peoples and sought a definition of their rights and obligations. Eventually, in December 1870, Grant decided that Indian affairs would be managed by religious orders, leading to the opening of the first Indian boarding schools. As a result, Ely Parker resigned from his post as commissioner in 1871, calling it a “thankless position” (110).

Chief Joseph, whose tribal name meant “Thunder traveling over the Mountains,” was the leader of the Nez Perce tribe, which had come under attack in the 1870s. Chief Joseph was born in eastern Oregon. A missionary named Mr. Spaulding gave him the name Joseph.

In 1877, the Nez Perce were displaced from their ancestral lands and forced to live on “a poorer, smaller, and unfamiliar reservation near Lapwai, Idaho” (114). Chief Joseph and his tribal band decided that they would not live in this new territory and fled to join Sitting Bull and the Lakota tribe in Canada. However, succumbing to starvation and exhaustion, Joseph and his group surrendered to General Nelson A. Miles on October 5, 1877, only 40 miles away from the Canadian border. Two years later, when he was 38 years old, Chief Joseph gave a speech in the nation’s capital to the US government and the general public. His speech is famous for depicting the despair and hopes of Indigenous peoples. He recounted how his father had tried to stand up to the US government, despite the compromises made by the chiefs of other bands within the Nez Perce.

Chief Joseph’s speech depicted the relentless greed of White settlers, detailing the abuses they committed during the Gold Rush, such as stealing horses and driving away cattle. It also detailed the numerous unfair treaties to which his tribe had been subjected. His speech was a plea for Whites to treat Indigenous people as they would treat each other and thereby allow tribes to live with the freedom that Whites enjoyed.

Born in Rushford, New York, in 1840, Pratt is credited with having constructed the first Indian boarding school, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879. Pratt was born in 1840 in Rushford, New York. When he was six, his family moved to Logansport, Indiana, before joining the Gold Rush three years later. In California, Pratt’s father “was robbed and murdered, leaving Pratt to take care of his mother and younger brothers” (132). At the start of the Civil War, Pratt immediately enlisted, and he served as a private in the Indiana Infantry (132). He rose to the level of captain before returning to Logansport, where he ran a hardware store.

Two years later, Pratt reenlisted in the Army and became second lieutenant in the Tenth Cavalry in Fort Sill, Oklahoma—a regiment comprising free Black men and freed slaves who were “used as shock troops in the escalating violence of the Plains Indian Wars” (132). Pratt fought on the Plains for eight years, including in the Red River War. When he was assigned as interviewer to arrested Indian combatants, he developed empathy for those who were captured and tried to get many of them cleared.

Attorney General Amos T. Akerman tasked Pratt with taking Indigenous captures to Fort Marion, Florida. There, he hired instructors to teach the prisoners English, art, and mechanical studies, under the belief that “if wild turkeys could be domesticated, then surely Indians could be civilized” (132). After some prisoners were released, Pratt arranged for them to attend Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, which was then an educational institution reserved for free Black men. After Pratt noticed that the former prisoners excelled at the institute, he lobbied Congress for funding, with the intention of civilizing Indigenous people. The funding went toward the opening of Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which was built “in an abandoned army barracks” (133).

Senator Henry L. Dawes was a Republican senator from Massachusetts, best known for the Dawes Act—a bill that allotted portions of reservation lands to Indigenous people with the purpose of having them cultivate farms. Dawes was a member of the Friends of the Indian, a group of White church leaders, reformers, and government officials who met at Lake Mohonk in New York and discussed ways of getting Indigenous people to assimilate to Whiteness. Dawes also regularly attended the group’s Lake Mohonk conferences.

Collier served as commissioner of Indian affairs from 1933-45 under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Under his leadership, the Indian Reorganization Act passed in 1934. Collier was born in 1884 and came from a wealthy and powerful banking family based in Atlanta. He studied at Columbia University, where he came to believe that capitalism offered no great social benefit. He served as secretary of the People’s Institute—an organization dedicated to teaching political theory to New York-based workers and immigrants—from 1907 to 1919.

In 1920, Collier went west to Taos, New Mexico, to learn about the Pueblo people. He became appalled by the government’s efforts to assimilate Indigenous peoples and spent the next decade fighting on behalf of the Indigenous. In 1923, he joined the American Indian Defense Association, and he worked almost single-handedly to fight both religious persecution and allotment policies. He helped to drive the research and drafting of the Meriam Report and quickly earned a reputation as “a fanatical Indian enthusiast” (205).

His signature legislation, the Indian Reorganization Act, also known as the Howard-Wheeler Act, ended the destruction of Indigenous homelands due to allotment and allowed Indigenous people to incorporate new lands. It also gave tribes more control over their constitutions and governments and the option of deciding for themselves if a government proposal worked.

Despite his good intentions, Collier still imagined a particular form of government for Indigenous peoples, based largely on what he had witnessed among the Pueblo. However, there were hundreds of other tribes and thousands of other tribal communities with very different ways.

Hayes was, according to Treuer, one of the most famous Indigenous people to serve in World War II. A member of the Pima tribe, Hayes was from Sacaton, Arizona, and was born in 1923. He attended Phoenix Indian School and later worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps before enlisting in the Marines in 1942. He volunteered for the paratrooper program and was accepted. Eventually, he was sent to New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands, and, finally, Bougainville in late 1943. In 1945, he was tasked with removing the Japanese from Iwo Jima. Hayes, along with four other soldiers, was photographed raising the American flag over Iwo Jima in what became the most famous image from the war.

Hayes remained in Japan for about 45 more days, fighting the Japanese. He was one of five remaining members of his platoon, for the other men had been killed in battle. When he returned to the United States, he toured the country to raise money for war bonds. He was honorably discharged from the Army after serving a final stint in Japan in December 1945.

The postwar years were difficult for Hayes. He was arrested 52 times for public drunkenness and unable to hold a job. On January 24, 1955, he was found dead in Arizona. The causes were “exposure and alcohol poisoning” (222). Treuer juxtaposes Hayes’s story with that of his maternal grandfather, who also suffered from postwar trauma.