February 28, 2019
How can you not be drawn to a movie review of an epic about the massacre of American Indians titled Serious Reservations? The body of the review, some 12 years ago, delivered as well when describing what was wrong with HBO’s Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee. Giving due where due was earned, it nonetheless concluded with the following paragraph:
But there, precisely, is the problem. Through no fault of its own except tardiness, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee seems as if we’ve already seen it. Slow to build to a horrific last half-hour, its punches have been telegraphed. Since Dee Brown published his scholarly indictment more than 35 years ago, we’ve forded this river many times—carried, of course, on his shoulders, but still: We have guilt-tripped from the insouciant artfulness of Smoke Signals to the earnest moralizings of Walker, Texas Ranger; from Dances With Wolves, in which Kevin Costner sought if not to cross over at least to cross-dress as an aboriginal, to Into the West, Steven Spielberg’s nine-hour inquiry into lynching bees, land grabs, Bible nuts, prophetic utterance, and buckskin sex. This cultural appropriation—of glass beads, turquoise buckles, and dead buffalo, as of the blues—is our principal business, the marketing of murdered difference.
http://nymag.com/arts/tv/reviews/32114/
Here is the movie: https://vimeo.com/112639971?ref=fb-share
I was reminded of that because yesterday was the anniversary of a different historical event: Occupy Wounded Knee started on 2/27 in 1973.
I did not live in the US at that time but the protest received much attention in Germany, as did all things Native American which seems to have a deep place in the subconscious of the German left – I have always wondered if that is due to the fact that we can stand up for victims without for once being counted as the perpetrator. Mere speculation, of course.
In any case, in 1973 a group of 200 or so Oglala Lakota (Sioux) activists and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) took over a tiny town known for its history — Wounded Knee, South Dakota, which had seen a massacre of 146 Native American men, women and children by white military forces 83 years earlier.
There was already trouble on the Pine Ridge Reservation when the caravan arrived and took over the public buildings. AIM had been called in by tribal leaders who tried to oust what they considered a corrupt tribal president, Richard Wilson. When impeachment proceedings failed, the U.S. Department of Justice sent out 50 U.S. Marshals to the Pine Ridge Reservation to be available in the case of a civil disturbance on 25 February 1973.
The takeover on 2/27 started a 71 day siege and armed conflict, with US marshals together with the FBI and National Guards blocking entrance and exits to the occupied town and preventing food from coming in, cutting off water and electricity. At that time it was the longest lasting “civil disorder” in US history. When a pilot tried to drop food from his plane on the 50th day of the stand-off, people ran out to grab it when agents opened fire. In the end the conflict saw two protestors dead and one agent paralyzed. As one former member of AIM told PBS, “They were shooting machine gun fire at us, tracers coming at us at nighttime just like a war zone. We had some Vietnam vets with us, and they said, ‘Man, this is just like Vietnam.’ “
Here is a summary of the time and what followed it from 6 years ago – I assume the statistics have not changed much and they are frightening.
Photographs today from the Indigenous Women’s March in PDX last year.
Music is a 1973 Redbone clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VB2LdOU6vo
And here is a description of the connection between Standing Rock and Wounded Knee from 2016, relevant in our own contemporary landscape.
