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Suing the Conqueror
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18757 |
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BOOK WORLD
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12 / 1991 |
3,734 Words |
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Ronald McCoy
Ronald McCoy is a professor of history at Emporia State
Univeristy in Emporia, Kansas. He has wrtten for The World &
I about such topics as Navajo sand painting, Hopi culture,
Plains Indian warrior art, and most recently on the sacred
clowns of the Puebloan Southwest. |
BLACK HILLS/WHITE JUSTICE
The Sioux Nation Versus the United States,
1775 to the Present
Edward Lazarus
New York: Haper Collins, 1991
486 pp., $27.50
Many Native Americans living on reservations dwell on the past, commonly perceived as a more pristine, definitely better, less jarring road than the one they travel at present.
This should come as no surprise, considering the rampant alcoholism, grinding poverty, suicide epidemics, and numbing ill health figuring so prominently in reservation life. Ironically, daydreams of a vanished Arcadian existence many actually perpetuate the very ills they are intended to alleviate. So says Edward Lazarus in Black Hills/White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States, 1775 to the Present.
On one level, attorney Lazarus' Black Hills/White Justice offers a refreshingly straightforward account of the Byzantine twists and turns attending the longest legal battle in American history: the fifty-seven-year struggle between the U.S. government and the Sioux Indians (properly, the Lakota) over the Black Hills in western South Dakota. The government claimed it bought the Black Hill, fair and square, from the Lakota in 1875; the Lakota maintained they never agreed to the sale.
The 4,000-foot-tall Black Hills (a translation of the Lakota Paha Sapa) form a granite and limestone wall running a bit over a hundred miles long and slightly less than half that wide. These hills became the heart of the Lakota homeland early in the nineteenth century, after warriors drove other tribes from the region. As Lazarus explains, Lakota see the region--its name derives from dark carpets of pine covering mountainsides--as "a holy place, a place for vision quests, home of Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit, the sum of all that was powerful, sacred, and full of mystery."
The Lakota may be the group most people have in mind when conjuring up images of Plains Indians: a teepee-dwelling, buffalo-hunting, warbonnet-wearing, vision-seeking lot; one of the most numerous of the Great Plains people, among whom such luminaries as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, and Spotted Tail flourished. The Lakota challenged U.S. hegemony in the Plains and they, more than any others, laid
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