Primal Scream by Michael Slade

Author:Michael Slade [Slade, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Canada, Fiction - Psychological Suspense, Mystery & Detective, Horror, General, Psychological, Horror & Ghost Stories, Suspense, Horror - General, Thrillers, Suspense fiction, Fiction, Horror tales
ISBN: 9780451195661
Publisher: Signet

Wounded Knee

The North

Zinc Chandler, too, was engrossed in reading a police file. As he sat drinking coffee black in a Force plane winging toward Totem Lake, he scanned a report by the psychiatrist on the crisis management team, hoping to grasp what motivated the standoff rebels holed up in the sundance camp.

Wounded Knee?

In America's Southwest in 1889, a Paiute medicine man named Wovoka had a vision. One day God would cause all Indians to float up into the air, so He could cover the earth with a new land, crushing all white men; then Indians would drift down to once more hunt the buffalo. His Utopian vision, which called for patient peace, led to the Ghost Dancer movement, which quickly swept the West. If they danced and kept on dancing, Ghost Dancers believed they could dance whites away, and magic ghost shirts would make them impervious to bullets. The Sioux were steeped in the culture of war, so the ghost dance they picked up was a bellicose one. Afire with it, Big Foot led his 350 Minneconjou Sioux off the reservation. The culmination was the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, where, on December 29, 1890, the U.S. Army slaughtered 300 Sioux, 230 of them women and kids, with machine-gun fire.

Across a century, Black Elk spoke to Zinc:

"The snow drifted deep in the crooked gulch, and it was one long grave of butchered women and children and babies. When I saw this I wished that I had died, too, but I was not sorry for the women and children. It was better for them to be happy in the other world, and I wanted to be there, too. But before I went there I wanted to have revenge. I thought there might be a day when we should have revenge."

The second Battle of Wounded Knee in 1973 saw the FBI face off against the American Indian Movement for seventy-one days in South Dakota. FBI agents were shot and killed. From that sprang a new hybrid spirituality that spread in a diaspora across the United States and up into Canada. As natives emerged from the rubble that whites had made of their lives, they sought to rebuild what remained of their cultures by reviving traditions, including traditions from distant bands their ancestors never met.

Pan-Indianism.

Sweat lodge, ghost dance, and powwow were revived, but it was around the sundance—most important of all Plains tribe rituals—this hybrid spiritualism gelled. The sundance was embraced by Navajo at Black Mountain and Paiute out West, and eventually by Moses John here in Canada. A ritual of four-day fasts with pain-induced visions, traditionally it was danced by piercing chest muscles with wooden pegs strung from the top of a pole, against which dancers writhed until the pins were torn loose. A ritual of self-sacrifice and suffering for the people, it had a profound effect in weaving together political threads for natives ground down by whites and yearning for self-worth.

Chandler had walked the despair of too many Indian reserves not to grasp the pull.

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