Picking a Version of History

Attempting to understand and decipher history - real history - is hard.

We read, we question, we read some more, we check our sources for ideological bias, we read someone else’s revision of canonical sources, we sniff around for hidden motivations and contingencies...

And when we think we’ve got to the deepest level of interpretation, there is always another angle to consider.

Consider the massacre at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890.

For those unfamiliar with this piece of American history, the bare bones of what happened is this:

The US government had signed treaties with the Lakota, primarily to protect colonizers passing through Lakota territory on the Oregon Trail to the American Northwest. 

The government of the US of America undertook to enforce a restriction on US citizens settling on Lakota territory.

The government of the US of America did not honor its undertakings as per treaty.

The discovery of gold in the Dakotas led to a mass influx of ruffians, squatters, and miners.

The introduction of forts and railroads on and over treaty-protected Lakota territory led to further conflict.

As part of its policy of ethnic-cleansing, the US encouraged and facilitated the shooting to near extinction of the Great Plains bison, which were the main source of sustenance for Indigenous peoples of the Plains.

[Hill of bison skulls gathered in Rougeville, Michigan]

As part of its policy of ethnic-cleansing, the US allowed the mass settlement of Scandinavian immigrants in the Dakotas.

Under-employed veterans from the Civil War and newly enlisted men were sent west to put down Lakota resistance.

These early military expeditions against the Lakota and their Dakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho allies were failures, with half of the 7th Cavalry Regiment under George Armstrong Custer being wiped-out near the Little Bighorn River in the summer of 1876.

But “Custer’s Last Stand” is probably the worst name for any historical event in US history. 

It really should be called “The Lakota’s Last Stand”, for their battlefield victory at the Battle of the Greasy Grass would precipitate the US throwing its full weight behind neutralizing the Lakota - the last entirely self-governing group of Indigenous people in the lands now called the USA.

The Wounded Knee Massacre came during the US Army’s Pine Ridge Campaign in the deep winter of 1890, at the tail end of various “mopping-up” operations by the US military, as remnant bands of Lakota were being rounded-up and forced onto small reservations.

Long story short, while force-marching a band of Lakota to a reservation, a roughneck bunch of green army recruits attempted to collect all firearms from the people being force-marched.

What happened next - the death of scores of Lakota people including women and children - is a perfect example of history which has been told from multiple angles...

1) Murica hoo-hah! version

Decent army boys (thank you for your service) just doing their job, and those darn “Injuns” went crazy, and we had to shoot the shit out of them in self defence.

2) Post-Vietnam-Era hippy version

Gentle nature-worshipping people meaning no harm are brutally slain by colonialist oppressors.

3) Historian No. 1 version

Americans already inured to violence by the Civil War, along with recent immigrant recruits eager to “prove their worth” as new US citizens, are only too happy and eager to fight wars against people they see as “savages”.

4) Historian No. 2 version

This mass shooting was a tragic and unfortunate escalation, in which army recruits (already on edge due to their misunderstanding of the meaning of the “Ghost Dance” religious movement), saw menace and danger in every aspect of Lakota behavior.

[Mass grave of Wounded Knee dead, 1891]

There is something wrong with every one of these versions.

There shouldn’t be - after all, it’s not like it’s ancient history.

Five of my own great-grandparents were alive at the time, with two of them still alive in the 1980s.

But a country which has done terrible things becomes exceptionally good at obfuscating and burying the truth of its crimes.

And only by digging, digging, digging can we hope to get a proper picture of such terrible events.

American “hoo-hah!” apologists for Manifest Destiny will point out that the Lakota were themselves a warlike people.  After all, the original homeland of the Lakota was around the Great Lakes, and they were only in Dakota Territory recently, having taken those hunting grounds from the Crow people through warfare.

What these apologists fail to mention is the much larger domino effect caused by settler colonialism, with entire tribes and communities being forced westward by settler violence, where they end up in conflict with other tribes attempting to stand their ground. This inter-Indian conflict is then encouraged and used by the settler-colonialists to further “divide and conquer”.

The hippy or “New Ager” version also ignores the political and military agency of the Lakota, seeing them in simplistic terms as little more than passive and peace-loving victims in a European-style morality play.

The so-called “proper” historical versions written by non-American Indian academics have their own specific angles of interpretation.

Almost every one of these “serious” versions of history seeks to blame, excuse, demonize, explain away or justify greed, brutality, and bloodshed.

Trying to apportion blame or explain the massacre at Wounded Knee based only on the few minutes, days, weeks, or even months leading-up to it allows us to judge violence in isolation.

It allows us to simplify a much longer, much uglier story into a stand-alone episode, in which “tragic mistakes were made” - mistakes which, on their own, might be forgiven.

This will happen again one day, when American writers, commentators, and historians will have to grapple with the fact that the USA elected a man - twice - who started a war on 28 Feb 2026 without the imprimatur of Congress.

Not that a Congress bought and paid for by corporations and the Israel Lobby would have voted to stop him...

On the first day of this unprovoked and illegal war, US forces “triple-tapped” a school full of little children.

[Bloodstained belongings of schoolchildren in Minab, 28 Feb 2026]

Americans will one day try to apportion blame or explain this mass murder, once again, in terms of “mistakes made”, while ignoring the 400 year old, 600 pound gorilla in the room.

That gorilla’s name is “US Empire”.

*****

Few humans are utterly evil.

Even fewer are saints. 

None of us beyond childhood are innocent.

But whoever we choose to see as our enemy, there is a crystal moment of clarity when we can also choose to do wrong, or try to do what is right.

There is no historical interpretation which will ever make it right, that men turned machine guns on women and children crouching for cover, terrified, in a deep ravine in mid-winter South Dakota.

It is no coincidence that the self-styled “Secretary of War”, Pete Hegseth, the butcher of Minab, has recently insisted that the 19 US soldiers who were ridiculously awarded “Medals of Honor” explicitly for their part in the Wounded Knee atrocity will not be stripped of their medals posthumously, as had long been demanded by native American groups.

Truth and justice are preoccupations of “the woke”, apparently.

And to those who insist that Wounded Knee was a tragic mistake?

On the image shared at the top of this piece, you’ll find a snatch of doggerel poetry.

People ashamed of a “tragic mistake” do not proudly pose for photos, and write such things.

The people killed in our name - in South Dakota, The Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq, Palestine, Iran - will never be able to utter another word.

It is us who are left to shrug, and gripe about the price of gasoline or the new Michael Jackson biopic (the latter also an exercise in historical airbrushing, BTW).

It is us who are left free to pick a version of history which won’t trouble us when we celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday this July.