Book Review: The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism From Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee

Ostler, Jeffrey. The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism From Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Jeffrey Ostler’s work on the history of Lakota-U.S. interactions during the 19th century, culminating in the massacre at Wounded Knee in December of 1890 provides many new insights for those interested in Native American history. Ostler utilizes colonialism as a lens through which to view Indian agency and resistance at a time when the Lakota were experiencing many political, social, and cultural changes. What sets Ostler’s work apart is that it provides a new way of examining the impact of Lakota decision making, resistance, and accommodation practices without ignoring or glossing over the outcome of those choices. By discussing the failure of Lakota strategy along with the successes, Ostler creates a picture of Lakota society and politics that is more human, and less mythologized.

In this work, Ostler states that he wrote a history of the Lakota during the 19th century to fill in the holes of existing scholarship, especially as it relates to the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee massacre. In addition to the task of rounding out historical knowledge relevant to the aforementioned events, Ostler is also attempting to place his own perspective on the question of whether or not the Ghost Dance movement required a military response; whether or not this movement was actually dangerous. Those are two of the most important tasks of Ostler’s work.

Ostler’s book is divided into three sections, Conquest describes the early experiences the Lakota had with the United States, primarily through interaction in the fur trade and spans seven decades, up to 1877. Section two is titled Colonialism and spans from 1877 to the late 1880s; during this period most Lakota were placed on reservations which were ran by civilians with force provided by the U.S. Army. The final section is titled Anticolonialism and the State and this focuses on the emergence of the Ghost Dance movement and concludes with a discussion of Wounded Knee.

As previously mentioned, Ostler uses colonialism as a lens through which to view the Lakota and the changes they experienced throughout the nineteenth century; by beginning his work with the 1804 introduction of the Lakota and the U.S. represented by Lewis and Clark, Ostler sets up his theme and continues to use it throughout the rest of the book. For Ostler, U.S. colonialism begins with the confrontation between Lewis and Clark and the Lakota village at the mouth of the Bad River in September 1824. At this first meeting, many of the same themes that would later dominate Lakota-U.S. relations were first manifested. The U.S. attempted first to display their power and might before the Lakota by staging a sort of military parade; this was followed by the firing of a large airgun and several references by Lewis and Clark in their journals about the Lakota being “the vilest miscreants of the human race.” The references to Lakota character stemmed from the refusal of the Lakota people to settle for a pittance of an offering in goods made by the Corps of Discovery.

In chapters two through four, Ostler continues to use colonialism to discuss the agency and resistance of the Lakota to the presence of the United States on the Northern Plains. As the narrative progresses, the reader begins to understand how colonialism evolved among the Lakota, from the actions of Lewis and Clark, through the first decades of the nineteenth century when the Lakota would regularly join U.S. Army expeditions as interpreters and scouts such as the expedition in 1823 against the Arikara, on down to the 1840s when America’s imperial policy on the Northern Plains ceased to be a hypothetical and started to become a reality as the Oregon Trail brought more settlers out west.

Colonial institutions did not simply appear as functioning entities in the west, the United States built them over several decades during the nineteenth century. As Ostler attempts to explain the development of U.S. colonialism among the Lakota, he also discusses several ways that this tribe developed policies and thereby was not simply acted upon by outside influences. A good example of Lakota agency was the way the tribe reacted to the invasion of their lands by Euro-American settlers using the Oregon Trail beginning in the 1840s. According to Ostler, the Lakota began to feel the indirect effects of agrarian expansion in the 1840s as settlers and cattle destroyed or consumed the food supply of indigenous animals, especially the buffalo. In retaliation, the Lakota decided to charge settlers for the damage they were doing to their economy; this was a good policy in terms of holding those responsible for the damages responsible for fixing them, but the normal reaction of the United States was to call out the cavalry and attack local Lakota villages for “harassing” settlers.

What is unique about Ostler’s account of the history of the Lakota during the nineteenth century is the scant attention he pays the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Ostler dedicates two chapters to a discussion of the Great Sioux War and its impact on Lakota culture, economics, and society while describing the famous battle in which Yellow Hair was rubbed out in a few sentences. This is a unique choice and Ostler should be commended for seeing the battle as it was; in many ways a battle that featured several prominent personalities, several of which were killed. It’s popularity today as America’s second most popular battlefield to visit, after Gettysburg, remains largely due to the credit of the participants. In terms of the impact of the battle and the significance of the victory for the militants of the Lakota and Cheyenne tribes who fought in it, the victory secured none of the terms for which they were fighting.

While Ostler pays little attention to the first part of the military aspect of the Great Sioux War, he discusses the final months of the war in much greater depth. In the closing months of the conflict, military commanders would occasionally meet with Indian leaders, such as the meeting between Miles and Sitting Bull, which took place in October 1876. In discussing the meetings between Lakota leaders and military personnel Ostler further demonstrates how policy was formed and how demands for reservations and concessions were made to men like General George Crook and Colonel Nelson Miles. While it is true that native demands were generally only given lip service by military personnel who had no ability to make good on their promises, by discussing their demands, Ostler is able to show how the Lakota transitioned from one tribal policy to another during this period. The Lakota moved away from a policy of killing their own people for accepting rations to actually working to win their people the best deal from the U.S. government. This transition is presented as another survival strategy created following a reappraisal of U.S. power on the Great Plains. As the Lakota began to face the reality of life on a reservation, a life of not hunting the buffalo freely, and an end to armed resistance to the United States, it is easy to understand what Ostler means by saying that this was certainly a period of transition for the Lakota.

While Ostler discusses the roots of colonialism and imperial conquest he generally tends to downplay intertribal conflict on the Great Plains. An example of this can be seen in the way he compares the United States belief in manifest destiny and the desire of the Lakota to become a Buffalo People. Manifest destiny was the belief that Americans generally shared that their culture and civilization should eventually conquer the entire North American continent, as Ostler succinctly describes the process. In the nation that the United States was attempting to build, other cultures would be forced to adopt a secondary status; however, in describing the period of homeland building enacted by the Lakota contemporaneously, different words with much different significance are utilized. This is one complaint that can be made of Ostler’s work, in terms of how he downplays the way that the Lakota dispossessed other Indian tribes on the Great Plains, the Crow, Pawnee, Kiowa, and Cheyenne. The actions of the Lakota are interpreted by Ostler as magnanimous; the Lakota lived in a world “where they knew there would always be other people on the Plains”, they dispossessed tribes but for good reasons. In the end this explanation of a “good natured dispossession” seems far-fetched.

In the second part of Ostler’s book the effects of colonialism can be seen to touch nearly every facet of Lakota life. A big focus in this section is placed on the education of Lakota children at boarding schools such as Hampton and Carlisle. By sending their children to these boarding schools, and upon their return to the tribe, parents began to understand that any hope of living in peace with the United States and maintaining their own culture was impossible. According to Ostler, cultural genocide was the goal of Indian boarding schools. Students were forced to cut their hair, adopt American style clothing, and were forbade from speaking their language, among other things. The effect of these restrictions was to create a generation of Lakota that was neither white nor red and had a very hard time finding their place within society. One example of the effects of this educational policy was Plenty Horses, who killed an army Lieutenant in January 1891 in order to create a place for himself within Lakota society; before the murder took place Plenty Horses had complained that he no longer had a place within any society, white or red.

Colonial institutions brought other changes to the Lakota, including agriculture and a complete change in economy and labor. While most Lakota in the 1880s had ancestors two or three generations back that had some experience raising crops, the Lakota men of this period had no desire to become farmers. Some old men and a few younger men might eventually bow to agency pressure and take up the plow but according to Ostler, women were the primary agriculturalists of the tribe at the beginning of the reservation period. The work of men, since they could no longer hunt the buffalo, became livestock herders. Once Indian agents understood that raising livestock could meet most of the demands for food and keep the Lakota from starving at those times when rations were delayed or not sent at all, men took up the responsibility of raising the livestock. This again demonstrates Indian agency, and it is an excellent example of a decision made by the Lakota that in many ways worked. The only thing Ostler has to say negatively about the Lakota and livestock raising is that nearly half of the livestock was at one point owned by eight half breeds; however, by the end of the nineteenth century Ostler states that almost every family on Standing Rock Agency had livestock or access to them.

In the final section of The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism Ostler discusses the Ghost Dance movement as an anticolonial response by the Lakota following a decades long trend of the loss of sovereignty. Throughout this section Ostler attempts to answer important questions that he feels have been left unanswered or poorly answered by other historians. Ostler is attempting to make sense of why the military was called out to deal with a seemingly pacifistic revitalization movement. In relation to the previous question, Ostler seeks to answer Mooney and Utley who both wrote in their own histories of Wounded Knee that the Lakota had militarized the teachings of Wovoka.

The conditions that made the Ghost Dance an appealing religion among the Lakota were established following the Pratt and Crook Commission in 1888-89. The Lakota were promised rations and concessions in exchange for agreeing to the imposition of the Dawes Act on their reservations. Few of these concessions were honored, such as the concession of increased beef rations and the creation of better systems of economic cooperation with the United States government. Soon the “accommodationists” among the Lakota began to realize that by agreeing to divide up their land individually and to cede the remainder to the United States in the hopes of appeasing a land government were false hopes. In addition to these negative events, drought conditions were taking their toll on Lakota agricultural efforts, disease and sickness was spread throughout the Great Plains, and the winter of 1889-90 was a very hard one. The conditions were indeed ripe for the implantation of a message of hope, which arrived in late 1888.

The “new messiah” as he was called was a Paiute named Wovoka and word of his deeds was spread far and wide in late 1888 and throughout 1889. The Lakota on Pine Ridge and several other agencies appointed delegations to go west, past the Rocky Mountains and visit with Wovoka, to see if the rumors were true. Unlike Mooney who attempted to place Wovoka in the same category of Christ or Buddha, Ostler believes that he should be placed in a category labeled “prophets of rebellion”. While advocating peace, Wovoka also was teaching his followers that a cataclysmic event was coming which would wipe out, or remove completely, the Euro-Americas of North America. Ostler does a fine job of presenting Wovoka and his teachings at face value. While arguing later on that the Ghost Dance was the product of pacifistic teachings, Ostler does not try to make Wovoka look innocent at this point either, he fully admits that an apocalyptic message was central to Wovoka’s teachings.

As mentioned, the content of the Ghost Dance itself was quite peaceful. The songs sung by Ghost Dancers included themes such as a father, or other family member, and the return of the Buffalo. What Ostler is attempting to do in this section is to argue against the claims of James Mooney and Robert Utley that the Lakota militarized the teachings of Wovoka. According to Ostler, the only basis for this belief lies in the account of Short Bull. Some secondhand accounts state that Short Bull might have uttered a reference to “kill all the soldiers and there won’t be any whites left” at a gathering of several thousand Lakota in 1889. The statement was briefly circulated in the media and then dropped for more interesting news. However, this statement was dug up and circulated widely following Wounded Knee to back up the position of the U.S. Army that the Lakota were militant and wished to kill soldiers, thereby attempting to excuse the guilt of the army for what transpired. Ostler argues that the account, which quotes Short Bull, no longer exists in original form; today it can only be read as part of other quotes and in newspapers following the massacre. The absence of documentary evidence in a period where many records still exist seems highly unlikely to Ostler.

While Ostler is making his argument against the Short Bull narrative he continues working on his larger goal of understanding why the United States ordered military action to be taken against what in reality was assumed by many people to be a peaceful religion and movement. Ostler has performed an in depth survey of many newspapers from this time period and he has searched them all with the purpose of discovering whether or not white settlers were editorializing their fears about Indian attacks from any of the Lakota reservations in Dakota Territory. What he discovers is enlightening but troublesome at the same time. Ostler was unable to find any description of fears concerning impending Indian attacks in any newspapers around the Lakota reservations; this is troublesome due to the fact that the question remains unanswered. Why did the United States believe it was necessary to send armed troops to put down a nonviolent anticolonial movement?

Ostler can think of several probable reasons for why this took place; one of the simplest being that the primary concern of Washington officials was the ghost dancers’ defiance of the agents’ authority and a desire to put the Lakota in their place. However, the answer that Ostler eventually settles on and the one that he gives the most credence is that Nelson A. Miles was to blame for the massacre at Wounded Knee. Miles, as commander of the Division of the Missouri, was the man most responsible for drafting the plan of attack that led to the deaths of several hundred people. Ostler heavily criticizes Miles’ decision to draw up a plan of attack against one reservation when it would have been more effective and the chance for violence would have been lessened if the available troops were spread out over three reservations. The fact that Miles also wrote a report encouraging the belief that the Ghost Dance movement was likely to turn violent against Americans after he had supported the belief that the movement was peaceful also counts against him, according to Ostler. Miles believed (and rightfully so) that the Lakota were suffering greatly and that at that moment they had more reason to take up arms against the United States, and the ability to do so, than ever before.

In the end, Jeffrey Ostler’s answer as to why the massacre took place and those he blamed for the fighting are compelling reasons. Certainly his explanation of a peaceful Lakota interpretation of the Ghost Dance movement is fascinating for how he differs from the classic accounts of Mooney and Robert Utley, both of whom supported troops on the reservation due to what they saw as the militancy of the movement.