Blood Memory by Dayton Duncan & Ken Burns

Author:Dayton Duncan & Ken Burns [Duncan, Dayton & Burns, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

In the buffalo’s place, the government supplied cattle for the Indians to kill and eat. At one reservation, steers were released from a corral, one at a time, while mounted men chased after it and brought it down, just as they had brought buffalo down years earlier. Then its carcass would be stripped and carved up in the traditional way. At another Lakota reservation, the cattle were turned loose inside a large corral, and the same mock hunt took place. Eventually, the agent put an end to that and built a slaughterhouse to kill and butcher the cattle. The Lakotas burned the slaughterhouse down.

For Native people, the devastation of their surroundings wasn’t limited to the disappearance of the bison, Rosalyn LaPier said:

We also have mining. We see the utter destruction of mountain landscapes—people using explosives to completely destroy places. This is shocking to Indigenous people. They had not seen that kind of destruction on the massive scale that they were seeing at that time, destruction after destruction after destruction that they were not just witnessing from afar, but witnessing up close and personal.

And there was mass slaughter of multiple animal species. It was not just the bison. What happened to the elk? What happened to the wolves? What happened to the grizzlies? Basically, all of the major mammals on the northern Great Plains were decimated. They saw, by that point, an almost total destruction of all of the animals that were sacred to them.

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