Shifting Our Battleground Mentality: From Belligerence to Grief

Bear Paw Mountain, the site from which Chief Joseph conceded in 1877, as it looked in 1990. PHOTO: © SKIP SCHIELE

Last summer I drove east across the country. After we passed the deep-cutting rivers of Idaho and the great divide into Montana, we saw signs for the Chief Joseph Trail, one I'd crossed years before, hundreds of miles away. Here the land opened into a broad green basin, rich with June wildflowers, rimmed by distant mountains. You could practically see the buffalo of the 19th century enjoying the high grass. We turned off at a National Park Service sign for the Big Hole National Battlefield.

Like so many other "battlefields," Big Hole was a brutal slaughter ground. Moments out of the car, my friend and I both felt its horror in our bones. Joseph's people had camped here just 130 years earlier in the summer of 1877, as they too traveled east, evading the troops driving them from their beautiful Wallowa Valley in Oregon.

Because white settlers had welcomed them into Montana promising peace, they felt safe resting at Big Hole, finding food, and preparing for the march toward what they hoped was refuge in Canada.

The Nez Perces didn't realize their pursuers could telegraph ahead for reinforcements, who would attack in the deep of night, shooting sleeping women point blank, smashing the heads of babies with their rifle butts. The Park Service video told it all - oral testimony from Indian survivors and letters home from terrified young soldiers. I sobbed my way through, and bought a book to take home.

Maybe you too have picked up these regional battlefield books. Maybe you have a shelf of them - stories told by Indian survivors or by white people like Dee Brown, wanting to lift up these forgotten voices. Most of mine have come from journeys through the West; there doesn't seem to be a single beautiful place that wasn't part of it all. I read these books later. Always the details resonate with what I hear on the news.

Yellow Wolf's Story

Last year's book is Yellow Wolf: His Own Story, carefully put together by Lucullus Virgil McWhorter in 1940, then revised in 2000. The story comes from McWhorter's quarter-century of interviews with Yellow Wolf (Hemene Moxmox). Once a young warrior with Chief Joseph, Yellow Wolf later migrated from a reservation to pick hops near Yakima, Washington, camping each year on McWhorter's land.

Yellow Wolf wanted young Nez Perces, now scattered throughout the region, to know this true history. McWhorter, an amateur anthropologist who wrote about the history of Yakima and Nez Perces Indians, was eager to take up the challenge. McWhorter had wanted to see justice for the Indian people since his childhood in West Virginia. (He supplements the tale with old documents and photos of himself and Yellow Wolf revisiting the far-flung sites, even Big Hole.)

Twenty-one years old at the time and carried by a spiritual vision that he could not be killed by bullets, Yellow Wolf fought battle
after battle, heading with his companions into the mountains to avoid General Howard and his cannon.

But at Big Hole, things were different. There was no night-watch. Because they felt safe, men like Yellow Wolf slept far from their family tepees without most of their weapons. On August 9th (yes, that very date!) when the first army shot was fired at three in the morning, Yellow Wolf pulled on his moccasins and ran out with only his war club.

Meanwhile the white soldiers' savagery enveloped the tepees, many of which were set afire while children and mothers ran out, if they could, to hide in the willows along the river. In one tepee a baby had been born in the night. Yellow Wolf entered it himself:

This tepee was standing and silent. Inside we found … two women lying in their blankets dead. Both had been shot. The mother had her newborn baby in her arms. Its head was smashed, as by a gun breech or boot heel. The mother had two other children both killed in another tepee.

Amazingly, the Nez Perces were able to bury the Big Hole dead, round up the wounded, and move forward on a remarkable loop through Yellowstone. The end of September found them in the Bear Paw Mountains, just thirty miles from safety in Canada and days ahead of General Howard. Again, they could not anticipate military reinforcements. This time General Miles, who later came up against both Geronimo and Sitting Bull, attacked their camp as cold weather descended. In 1990 I visited the so-called Bear Paw Battlefield just off US Highway 2 at the northern edge of Montana. I saw the shallow pits scraped into the soil for protection.

It was here, after five days of siege and slaughter, that Chief Joseph famously conceded, "I will fight no more forever," expecting his people could return home, if only to a reservation. They were sent instead to Oklahoma, where many more would die of starvation and the harsh climate.

Contemporary Resonance

I am reading this book in spring of 2008, listening every day to the news from Iraq. One day it's the story of Nisour Square in Baghdad, where 17 civilians died in an attack by Blackwater operatives last fall. An eyewitness speaks to documentary filmmakers at the scene. In his translated account, a mother begins to scream when her son is shot and tries to pull him out of the car. She is the next to get blasted. As journalist Jeremy Scahill told Democracy Now on April 7, "the first victims in Nisour Square that day were a twenty-year-old medical student and his mother, not al-Qaeda operatives, not insurgents. A nine-year-old boy named Ali was shot in the skull; his brains splattered in his [father's] hands."

While honoring Indian voices, most of these battle books are written by white people like me, and they do carry bias. But in these times, I'm drawn to white voices that push the boundaries of their times. People who see themselves as allies can help shift the monolithic attitudes that shape our battleground mentality.

I can take inspiration from people like McWhorter, even though there's also some paternalism in his writing. Change has to start somewhere, and more of us need to speak up even though we may not have it fully right. Most important, as Katrina Brown says in Traces of the Trade, her stunning new PBS film about her connection with the largest slave trading family in New England, we begin to "make things right… not out of guilt but out of grief."

We need to feel and express grief if we dream of changing the murderous direction of our national DNA, the habit-energy we bring to solving problems. Until we look back as a nation and weep and use the profound energy of grief to change our ways, the racist violence of Big Hole, Wounded Knee, Nagasaki, and Nisour Square will continue. I think that's why I am drawn to write about these battle books.

"Battlefield" bookshelf:

Black Elk Speaks: Being a Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, by John Neihardt (U. of Nebraska Press, 1961). The book that always grounds me. Neihardt uses translated interviews with an Oglala Lakota elder who, as a young man, wrestled with his visionary calling at the time of Wounded Knee.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, by Dee Brown (Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1970). This classic covers the war against multiple western tribes from 1860-1890. Brown's own viewpoint offers a victim frame that grates on today's consciousness. Still, his book gives a passion-filled map of the territory.

Life Among the Paiutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Bishop, CA: Chalfont Press, reprinted in 1969). Though covering few battles, this book has the rare distinction for its time of an indigenous person's name on the cover, that of an outspoken woman. Winnemucca interpreted for General Howard one year after his attacks on the Nez Perces and knew General Miles. She later toured Eastern cities to speak against reservation abuses. Two Boston women helped her publish this eloquent book in 1883.

Death, Too, For The-Heavy-Runner, by Ben Bennett (Missoula Montana: Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1982). North of Big Hole is country called "Ground of Many Gifts" by the Blackfeet people. There I found this evocative book about the Marias River massacre in the winter of 1870. US troops whom Blackfeet called "the seizers" destroyed a village that was starving and wracked with smallpox, but friendly to whites. One bitterly cold January morning there, "the seizers" slaughtered 15 men, 90 women, and 50 children.

George Washington's War on Native America, by Barbara Ellis Mann (Praeger, 2005). Lest we forget events 100 years earlier in the East, here is detailed research into the "extirpation" of peaceful Iroquois villages and others in New York, western Pennsylvania, and Ohio between 1775 and 1782. The atrocities committed by Washington's troops in these villages are documented in the letters soldiers wrote home to their families.