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Thirty years ago, in a time of national soul-searching as Americans suffered through a bloody war in Asia and assassinations and civil strife at home, Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" unleashed a torrent of guilt over the sins of the country's domestic conquests. A generation later, amid prosperity at home and a pax Americana abroad, introspection about the victims of our own empire building is largely a forsaken endeavor. More than a century removed from the last battle of the so-called Indian Wars, Americans seem to have lost sight again of the decades when cruelty, benevolence and misunderstanding mixed as white settlers pushed across the continent. Forgotten too are the origins of the policies that now govern U.S. relations with the tribes, the rights and responsibilities of both the conqueror and the conquered and the human figures--brave, farsighted, cruel, foolish or venal--who shaped our shared past. The defining image of Native Americans today is not their history of dispossession or even the defiance of modern-day Indian activists such as Russell Means; it is the image of the Mashantucket Pequot's Foxwoods Casino, raking in millions of dollars daily from gamblers in New England or of tiny California tribes spending more than $80 million on a voter initiative to perpetuate their gaming halls.
To their credit, the authors of " 'Exterminate Them'," "The Earth Shall Weep" and "Crazy Horse" have sought to re-excavate this history, and each volume--one general history, one collection of original sources and one biography--makes a distinct contribution. Yet with the exception of Larry McMurtry's exquisite short biography of the great Sioux war leader Crazy Horse, these works are significantly flawed. Though McMurtry wisely lets a tragic and still meaningful story speak for itself, James Wilson and editors Clifford Trafzer and Joel Hyer insist on imposing on their materials a shrill attack on all of Western culture, abandoning nuance and historical perspective in favor of the kind of stereotyping against whites that they decry when the objects are Indians.
Trafzer and Hyer, history professors in California, have subtitled their work "Written Accounts of the Murder, Rape and Enslavement of Native Americans During the California Gold Rush, 1848-68." This is a misnomer on two levels. First, the primary source material that the...