Wounded Knee

April 26, 2010
Historian Richardson (West from Appomattox) brings a fresh perspective to the massacre at Wounded Knee in her engaging study. The U.S. Army slaughter of nearly 300 surrendering Sioux men and women was not just an appalling act of racist brutality, argues the author, it was the outcome of roiling partisan politics. Desperate to maintain their political majority as well as business-friendly tariffs, Republican lawmakers swept into the West, gaining new congressional seats and distributing patronage jobs to supporters, including posts on the newly formed Sioux reservations. Stripped of land, livelihood, and dignity, many Sioux turned to a religious movement called the Ghost Dance—misinterpreted by Republican appointees as a sign of impending insurgency. Their panic was fanned by a feckless media and the Republican political machine hungry to see its vision—a West transformed into thriving farms humming with commerce—fulfilled. Richardson describes the collision of incompetence, political posturing, and military might with elegant prose and the right blend of outrage and humanity, subtly highlighting the parallels between the disastrous partisanship of the late 19th century and the politics of today.

April 15, 2010
In her previous book, "West from Appomattox: the Reconstruction of America after the Civil War", Richardson (history, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst) argued against the view that Reconstruction ended in 1877, positing instead that it continued through the 19th-century conquest of the West. Now she builds upon that thesis by arguing that the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890) was the inevitable end result of Reconstruction politics, which featured bitter partisanship and a media establishment run amok. Despite the author's well-crafted study of the Reconstruction era, the connection to the Wounded Knee Massacre is tenuous at best. In trying to prove her Reconstruction thesis, the author apparently turned a blind eye to the fact that Europeans and their descendants had been indiscriminately massacring Native American populations for centuries. VERDICT Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" remains the best book on the massacre. For other examples of heinous violence against Native Americans, readers should consider Alfred Cave's "The Pequot War" and Kevin Kenny's "Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn's Holy Experiment".John Burch, Campbellsville Univ. Lib, KY

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2010
Richardson (History/Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst; West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War, 2007, etc.) argues that the Wounded Knee massacre was a direct result of Gilded Age political expediency.

The author examines partisan wrangling in the decades after the Civil War that observers of the current scene will find all too familiar. Looking to expand their power, President Benjamin Harrison and a Republican-controlled Congress admitted South Dakota to the Union in 1889. Few in Washington cared that much of the state's land was the Sioux reservation. The plans of railroad and mining companies, reliable supporters of the Republicans, trumped the welfare of the indigenous peoples. Enlightened whites of the day saw the"civilization" of the Sioux—by which they meant turning them into ersatz whites—as the highest goal for the natives. Others, remembering Custer's defeat at Little Big Horn, would have been just as happy to see them exterminated. Indian agents, who were usually unqualified if not outright corrupt, doled out rations stingily. So when in 1890 Sioux (and other tribes) responded to the threats to their way of life by adopting the Ghost Dance religion, which promised the disappearance of whites and the return of buffalo and open land, the whites perceived it as a rebellion. The U.S. Army was called in to stabilize the situation. The stakes were raised by an unresolved election that could determine control of the Senate and a power struggle between the Army and the Department of the Interior, which oversaw Indian affairs. The atrocity, during which soldiers mowed down some 300 Sioux men, women and children, was probably preventable, but few of those who participated seemed to know how to stop it—or made any great effort to do so. Richardson brings the actors, both Sioux and white, into clear perspective, and paints the broader context with a deft hand.

Sober but stinging account of one of the saddest chapters in American history.

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June 1, 2010
The latest scholarly analysis of the causes leading to this tragic event takes a unique tack. Richardson attributes the fate of the Minneconjou Sioux massacred at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on December 29, 1890, not only to growing tensions between the Indians and the burgeoning numbers of settlers, but also to grandstanding by President Benjamin Harrison, who was trying to attract western voters and thus secure South Dakotas U.S. senate seat for the Republican Party. To aid in this effort, he ordered a huge army presence in the state to protect settlers from an Indian uprising, despite the fact that his general saw no danger of an insurrection. Richardsons meticulously documented account includes extensive historical background of the treaties and events preceding that fateful winter, including the Compromise of 1820, the Treaty of Fort Laramie, and the Dawes Act of 1888, which drastically reduced Indian landholdings. Bitterly enough, the Republicans lost the senatorial race, and Harrison lost the 1892 election, falling into an oblivion from which he never recovered.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)