Part Two: Lakota Resistance to the American Empire

In part two of this four-part episode, Margaret continues her conversation with Miriam about two centuries of resistance to American imperialism, from Crazy Horse to Leonard Peltier.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, your
weekly reminder that people can do good things as well
as bad things. Sometimes they do the bad thing good
good things because bad things have happened. I'm your host,
Margaret Kiljoy and with me as my guest is Miriam.

Speaker 3 (00:23):
Hi. I'm Miriam.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Miriam's one of our favorite guests. We don't have favorites,
but you're my favorite podcast to come on. Oh and
your favorite podcast to come on is produced by none
other than Sophie Lichterman.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
Heh yeah, that's me, Hi.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
And it is audio engineered by Ian Hi Ian Hian.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
We remember to do it this time.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
It's important to say hi to Ian. We almost forgot
last time, and then last episode had so much genocide
in it.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yep. Our theme music was written for us by Unwoman
and you can now find the theme song in full.
It's only about a minute and a half long on
on women's band camp.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
Un Woman is so good.

Speaker 2 (01:14):
I know. I was like, and people are like every
now and then people ask like, what's the deal with
the theme music? And I was like, I wanted something
that sounded really funny when contrasted to the shit I'm
going to be talking about.

Speaker 3 (01:25):
Can I tell you a true story about Unwoman that
makes me super happy?

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:31):
A while ago, I was I was working in a
museum that incorporated a lot of like historical building, and
some ghost hunters came to like film a TV show
or something, and they were like skulking around the historical
building hunting ghosts. It was a it was a whole thing.
But I was musing on like my social media about
how fun it would be to prank them, and this

(01:54):
ended up with Unwoman recording a ghostly like a ghost
the old timey version of Rick Astley's Never Going to
Give You Up, with the idea being that I would
conceal a small speaker somewhere to like draw the ghost
hunters to this like eerie, creepy music that when they

(02:15):
got very close they wit realize was Rick Astley's Never
Going to Give You Up, which I did not end
up doing because I think the ghost hunters were like
out of the building by the time this idea had
been hatched and this recording had been made. But Unwoman
is a fucking delight.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
Yeah, one of the first times I saw I'm not
on a woman for a while, but during the Oakland
General Strike of twenty eleven. There was on woman with
a cello performing for the people like locked to a bank.

Speaker 3 (02:43):
It was so good, got the fucking best. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
So this is part two of our four part on
Lakota resistance to the American Empire. And this first week
we're talking mostly about the nineteenth century. Next week we're
gonna talk about the twentieth century. Mostly, there's a whole
there's so many centuries that happened in the past. Do
you know that there's many twenty of them.

Speaker 3 (03:08):
Century takes about a week in my experience.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah, that's true. God, i'd be so far into the
past anyway. Sometimes I think about, like how I haven't
even been doing the show for two years, but I'm like,
it's so much stuff.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
Yeah, really, like you've covered a lot. Yeah, and you're
not going to run out.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
No, that's the other thing. I'm not worried.

Speaker 3 (03:37):
But what if you talk about all the cool people
who have ever happened, We'll just have to make some more. Well.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
It's like even like like one of the reasons you know,
I've been I've been intending to do this episode for
a long time because I specifically want to talk about
the American Indian movement because I've done so many things
about radical late sixties early seventies social movements in the
United States, and I'm like, I've gone through so many
and there's still so many more. Any American Indian movement
I knew I wanted to like really take my time

(04:02):
and like dig into.

Speaker 3 (04:03):
Yeah, I don't think. I don't think I've heard you
touch on it in any of your other episodes.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
Yea, not as much so, But that's not what we're
talking about this week where we're talking about that.

Speaker 3 (04:13):
That was a teaser.

Speaker 2 (04:14):
Yeah, we are talking about how the Black Hills is
about to be invaded by Custer and some other motherfuckers
because there's gold in it, and what a treatise matter
when there's gold and people? I love how people talk
about this like that's like a human condition, you know,
But like all of the Indigenous voices at the time
were like, what the fuck is wrong with these people?

(04:37):
Do they not know what an agreement is? We had
an agreement? Does that is that like a Do they
just not know what that word means? Like it's their word,
It's in English?

Speaker 3 (04:46):
Right, this this whole treaty signing thing was something like, yeah, not.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
That people were like wildly perfect and peaceful and whatever,
you know, strange romanticization. People want to make it right.

Speaker 3 (05:02):
We're not like, you don't need to like make this
into an imaginary utopia to be like, it's pretty fucked
up to sign a treaty and then six years later
to be like, oh, we've just new information has come
to light which makes our promises trash.

Speaker 2 (05:19):
Yeah, totally turns out we were white, therefore we were
white people. The whole toxes are actually trash. It's really
on you for not recognizing that. Oh god. Uh So
there are two kinds of officers in the US Army

(05:40):
at this time. There's guys like Custer who are just
rotten to their fucking core, right, and then there are
these like high minded noble guys who have complicated feelings
about it all and want to be gentlemanly, improper and
polite and even want to respect the treaties. But orders
are orders. The guy in charge of this campaign, General

(06:05):
George Crook, he's in the latter camp. This is not better.

Speaker 3 (06:12):
Yeah, I was gonna say, if the end result is massacres,
I don't really care how bad the person doing it
feels about it.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
Doing what you know to be wrong? Is it better
than doing wrong because you think it's right, it might
be wor parguably worse. Yeah, yeah, And like look there's
scales of that, right, Like, we all participate in capitalism
and we know it's bad, you know, And so I
think everyone knowing that it's bad is a good step, right,

(06:42):
But when you're talking about the kinds of crimes that
this man is going to directly oversee, like now, fuck him.
So he gave this famous answer. He was asked basically,
he's like, is it hard for you to gear up
to go to another Indian? And his quote is, yes,
it is hard, But sir, the hardest thing is to

(07:04):
go and fight those whom you know are in the right. Oh,
if only there were an alternative. Yeah, that's the military.
That's that's lawful neutral right there, you know, which is
the same as lawful evil. Because lawful evil.

Speaker 3 (07:22):
You I believe you have an essay called lawful Ain't Good,
which I quote at at times in gaming circles.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yeah, my theory is that there's only eight h eight
alignments because lawful good is a contradiction. It makes me
really popular.

Speaker 3 (07:37):
And yeah, you can tell we had cool childhoods.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
Absolutely. We didn't meet on a steampunk convention.

Speaker 3 (07:45):
We didn't. We met in the parking lot of a
steampunk convention.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
That's right where Miriam was dressed up as steampunk im
a goldman giving a pretty good labor speech.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
Thank you.

Speaker 3 (07:55):
Uh did you know that I got in trouble with
the operator of that steampunk convention because I got people
riled up about the fact that he was holding conventions
at non union hotels.

Speaker 2 (08:06):
Hell yeah, hell, yeah, good, which is to say, no
matter what culture or subculture you're in, you can do
fun things with it.

Speaker 3 (08:16):
Hey, you can function up anywhere. People won't stop you.
That's not true. People will try to stop you. Yeah,
but you can function up anywhere. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
You know, crime is legal. You can just do anything
you want sort of all right, So neither of us
are lawyers. Yeah, that's right, but we are your lawyer anyway.
In the Black Hills, all sorts of bands and tribes

(08:45):
and folks are gathering forces to unite against this invasion
that they know is coming. White historians call it the
largest gathering of Nati American people in history. Up to
that point. Indigenous scholars are like, no, we've had bigger
you just weren't around.

Speaker 3 (08:58):
People were gathering.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
Yeah, Sitting Bowl had a vision of blue jacketed soldiers
falling from the sky into his camp. Sometimes I see
it phrase as like like grasshoppers and and so he's like,
this is this is coming. So the indigenous rebels they attack.

Speaker 3 (09:14):
Which the like grasshoppers. That's like a image of like
and of like a devastation, right, because these those like
grasshoppers swamps that would fall out of the sky would
like eat everything. Yeah, No, that makes sense, leave bare
ground in their wake.

Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yeah, which is pretty fucking accurate. What happens. So the
indigenous rebels attack the invaders, and there are several successful battles. Uh.
The one that's in the history books is called the
Battle of Greasy Grass, only it's not under in history books.
Under that name. There's a river that the Lakota called

(09:51):
Greasy Grass, the Americans call Little Big Horn. This is
the battle on Yeah, this is the single greatest victory
in the Indian Wars for the good guy side. Arman
Custer is in charge of the seventh Cavalry and he
sees this huge indigenous village and He's like, fuck yeah,

(10:12):
let's go kidnap everyone there. Let's just like like fuck
it up. You know, We'll like we're like going to
kidnap everyone, and then we'll take all the non combat
and hostages and force their warriors to surrender. And also
he's a mass rapist and I'll talk about that more later,
and this would have been a massacre. He's like, let's
go massacre this village basically, and the rest of the

(10:33):
army was like, hey, Custer, you should lay wait for
everyone else. And Custer's like, whatever, man, I got this shit.
Fuck you dad. You know.

Speaker 3 (10:40):
Awesome, I mean, not awesome what he wanted to do,
but like awesome that he didn't wait for backups.

Speaker 2 (10:45):
Oh yeah, absolutely. It's the same fucking thing that Fetterman
did a fun like, yeah, he had a bunch of
orders like don't leave the group and don't whatever you do,
don't go over this hill, and he's just like butt
their butts. I can see their butts.

Speaker 3 (11:01):
I mean, and I mean Fetterman even Mors was like,
I only need like eighty guys, like don't even send
me more guys. And the American Army in this case
is like Custer we are literally sending you more guys,
and he's like, but I want to do murder now.

Speaker 2 (11:17):
Yeah, like it's getting dark. I don't know what time
of day it was. He had crow scouts with him,
and the crow were on the US side during most
of this because two generations prior to the Lakota kicked
them out of where they were living, so they're kind
of mad, you know. And one of his crow scouts
is a guy named half yellow Face who was like, Yo,
Custer as a bad call, you shouldn't do that. Specifically,

(11:40):
he said, you and I are going home today by
a road we do not know, and.

Speaker 3 (11:47):
That is a very very cool way to try to
advise your shitty boss not to do this shitty thing.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
We're gonna die if we do that.

Speaker 3 (11:56):
Yeah, maybe that was the problem. Maybe he was a
little to a little too flowery in his language. I know,
it was the nineteenth century, you know, but maybe Coster
wasn't quite literate enough for that metaphor and he needed
a like, yeah, you're gonna.

Speaker 4 (12:09):
Die real hard. Yeah, he wouldn't have listened. He was
an no, he absolute would not have listened. And so
they just wildly underestimated the numbers and the prowess of
indigenous warriors, and the seventh Cavalry was wiped out. Custer
had his last stand, and he did what he should
have done way earlier, which is die.

Speaker 3 (12:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:33):
No one knows exactly how his day went. There's lots
of stories around it, but no one knows exactly because
all of his buddies also died.

Speaker 3 (12:44):
Right because he The thing about getting all your buddies
killed is there's no one left on your side to
tell you the story of how cool you looked when
you died, and it's yeah, and everyone's just gonna be like, yeah,
probably pissed his pants.

Speaker 2 (12:58):
Yeah. That guy he got shot in the chest. He
also had a bullet and his skull that was probably
after he died. That was probably alike. Let's just fucking ma,
this is Custer. We should work and make you want
to make sure. Yeah, so died the man that Vine
Deloria Junior called the iikemen of the planes because he

(13:20):
was following a policy of genocide from his higher ups.
General Sherman wrote, quote, we must act with vindictive earnestness
against the Sioux, even to their extermination men, women and children.
During an assault the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between
male and female, or even to discriminate against age.

Speaker 3 (13:42):
Sounds sounds about right.

Speaker 2 (13:44):
Yeah. Custer was also a serial rapist of indigenous women,
by all accounts, including the accounts of his own men.
They didn't phrase it that way, but they described it,
so it makes it extra nice that the Cheyenn account
of the battle.

Speaker 3 (14:00):
Yeah, I was one thing. You promised me three wounds.
I've heard about two. I would like to hear about
the other way Custer died, please.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
Shayanne account of the battle says that it was a
woman named Buffalo calf road woman who knocked him off
his horse before he died. Fuck yeah, And she absolutely
was present in the battle. You know, she fought as
alongside her. Her husband, Black Coyote, fought alongside her in
that battle. Also, they brought war journalists with them while

(14:31):
they were like let's go massacre.

Speaker 3 (14:34):
These people, like like.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
An Associated Press guy was just with them, just like to.

Speaker 3 (14:41):
Let everyone know how how well this was going.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
Yeah, he died too.

Speaker 3 (14:48):
I a thing that I heard, and this is something
I like learned very recently. I don't know if you
if you also learned this in your research was that
the women present at the battle level little big Horn
stab Custers through like once he had been killed, stabbed him,
I think, like through the ear drums with their needles,

(15:09):
saying like like you will like basically next time you'll
listen good something like that, or you like you will listen,
you'll like you will hear us. Basically I could be
totally butchering that story.

Speaker 2 (15:24):
No, I mean good, and like you know, there's a
lot of accounts of the battle, but I have no
reason to no particular reason to doubt the Shian versions
or other versions of it. Like, and there's like all
these things that people tried to be like he died nobly.
He didn't. He just wrote off to go get murdered,
and he got him murdered.

Speaker 3 (15:44):
Just losing real heart sometimes gets romanticized as dying nobly,
like you know, have like that like that poem where
the guys on horses ride against tanks in the Crimean
war whatever, and it's like it's not necessarily heroic to
lose real heart, Like sometimes you're just sometimes you're just
Custer and you just suck and you die real hard.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
Yeah, Dilate he lived shitty. Another guy who fought in
that battle is a man named Black Elk, who's most
famous these days for his book Black Elk Speaks, which
was hugely influential on me when I was like a
baby anarchist, and he's gonna he's sort of a background
guy through a lot of this stuff. No good deed

(16:28):
goes unpunished, and the reprisals from the destruction of a
serial rapist genocider continue to this day. America has not
gotten over the fact that some lady fucking killed a
rapist who didn't consider her human.

Speaker 3 (16:41):
A rapist who didn't consider her human, who nobody on
the American side particularly liked anyway. Yeah, Like everybody was like, man,
that guy's a real piece of shit, and then some
indigenous people kill him and were like, hey, that was
our piece of shit.

Speaker 2 (16:54):
Yeah. Yeah. Basically, so, the US more or less declares
the eighteen sixty eight Treaty, which they've already broken the
shit out of, invalid, and they were like, but we
want to do it sort of paperworky. So they demand
that the reservation give up the Black Hills and a
ton of other land, all with like right of way
through everything for roads and shit. Anyone who doesn't agree.

(17:17):
Can fucking starve Red Cloud was forced to sign, as
were the other chiefs who weren't at war, and twenty
two point eight million acres were seated, which is a
third of the total, but the best third of this
particular reservation, and the remaining folks are forced to live
in like clearcut areas and places that have already been

(17:39):
resource extracted. There's absolutely no way that this could be legal.
Three quarters of the men could not have signed this
agreement because they didn't show up, because they were at.

Speaker 3 (17:49):
War, right, because they were actively fighting to defend that land.

Speaker 2 (17:54):
Right, and the signatures that do appear were coerced at gunpoint.
But laws only a cudgel in the hands of the powerful,
and it's never been anything but that. Sitting Bowl and
some other war chiefs and their warriors retreated north into Canada,
while Crazy Horse, Heat Dog, Little Big Man, Iron Crow
and a few of the other war chiefs. In the end,
they decided to surrender. Basically, they were like, like, I suspect.

(18:18):
It wasn't like I'm a die if I don't surrender.
It was like all my people are going to die.

Speaker 3 (18:22):
The people that I'm responsible for.

Speaker 2 (18:24):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, And they were promised that they could
live like on good hunting reservations and shit if they
would just surrender.

Speaker 3 (18:33):
And we've definitely got reason to trust those promises at
this point.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
As soon as they show up to surrender in Nebraska,
the US pretended like they had never made the offer,
of course.

Speaker 3 (18:44):
I mean, and I can understand, like why you would.
I mean, that's like that was the only thing on
the table, right.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
Absolutely, yeah, because again it wasn't just for them, it
was for the people that they're responsible for. And Crazy
Horse spent four months living in like sort of captivity
on a reservation and then he was arrested. He tried
to resist and he was stabbed to death with bayonets.
There's a lot of versions of how he died. I

(19:11):
don't have a specific really reason to believe any of
Them's a lot of arguing about it, So I'm just
going to go with he tried to resist and he
was stabbed to death bayonets.

Speaker 3 (19:20):
I mean, even whatever, whatever the particular account of his
death is, he tried to resist and was murdered by
the US army seems to sum it up.

Speaker 2 (19:29):
Yeah. Spotted Tail, one of the war leaders who'd signed
away the Black Hills. He's living large, he has a
three story house, and he starts demanding, well, he's been
demanding tribut because it's chief, but he starts demanding tribute
that of his subordinates. That is like, as far as
I can tell, new and not part of tradition. He
starts demanding women, sometimes including I believe married women, but

(19:51):
I'm not certain. But so his cousin crow Dog was like,
you know what, I'm gonna fucking kill you and then
killed him.

Speaker 3 (20:04):
Okay, yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:06):
That is one of the three motives that has been
presented for crow Dogs killing of Spotted Tail. The another
is an argument over like a specific one of the
women who has taken a tribute, which might have been
Crowdog's family. Another is that crow Dog was like doing
the US's dirty work to break up the power of
the chiefs by killing Spotted Tail. I find the first
argument most convincing, and the historians that I've read, who, yeah,

(20:33):
I find it most convincing that it was like you
have fucking you're a cellar piece of shit. You gotta
fucking go.

Speaker 3 (20:40):
It doesn't I mean, one one of the one of
the many terrible things about state repression is that it
turns any internal conflict into like somebody doing the dirty
work of the state, right.

Speaker 2 (20:52):
Like totally.

Speaker 3 (20:56):
And like which you know it's it's that you made
a convincing case that this that Krownok got a legitimate
grievance and reason to kill this guy. Yeah, and without
the US government being behind that.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
Yeah, but you know what the US government also is
behind isn't behind our ads? Some of them government no
government not only make it better?

Speaker 1 (21:19):
Are the ones that we personally approve.

Speaker 2 (21:23):
Well, did you know that we're an ad supported podcast
unless you have cooler zone media, in which case you
just get to hear us talk about ads all the
time and hopefully it's entertaining for you. I don't know
what I would do if we didn't have ads, because
I like doing my weird transitions.

Speaker 1 (21:40):
You're so good at it now.

Speaker 3 (21:42):
Yeah, you can just do the weird transitions and then
not play any ads. I mean that's also kind of
what we're doing sitting here, since it's it's not your
job to actually put the ads in there, that's right.
Do you ever feel tempted to do that in conversation?
If there's an awkward pause? Because if you do, you've
been podcasting too much and you should take a break.

Speaker 2 (22:02):
Know what I do is I do transitions while I'm
like in meetings, I'm like speaking of and then like
and Robert Evans.

Speaker 1 (22:10):
Robert Evans does this in real life. I just want
you to know.

Speaker 2 (22:18):
Oh, it's.

Speaker 1 (22:21):
Especially under the influence.

Speaker 3 (22:25):
Yeah, listen. If Robert Evans is getting sponsored while just
hanging out under the influence, more power to him.

Speaker 2 (22:33):
I know, if you want to, I'll shout out fucking
ship in the middle of a conversation.

Speaker 3 (22:41):
I'll just I'll product place.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
Yeah, totally grey, here's some ads, and we're back. And
so there's this whole big thing. There's a hole to
do about this murder, because I mean, it is a murder.
Whatever whether or not it's justified, it's not really going punished.

(23:06):
And so the federal government is like, what why can't
we punish it? And they're like, because this indigenous sovereignty
and there's none of your fucking business. So then the
federal government is like, what if it becomes our business?
By when we passed the Major Crimes Act. No, And
so this gives them jurisdiction over like fifteen specific major
crimes that happen on reservations and it's just all part

(23:27):
of stripping away. And so this is the like it
does kind of like fock spotted tail, but like whatever,
the government was going to do bad shit no matter what.

Speaker 3 (23:36):
So right, and the government having a federal jurisdiction over
major crimes on Indian land will surely they will care
about all of those major crimes. And there will not
later be an epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women
that the federal government doesn't give a shit about.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
Sorry, no, no, I just that's something I'll shout out earnestly.
There's ways to there's like groups that you can follow
that talk about the missing and murdered Indigenous women, and it.

Speaker 3 (24:11):
Is a.

Speaker 2 (24:14):
Yeah, the bad stuff continues.

Speaker 3 (24:16):
Yeah, spoiler alert. None of this goes none of this
ends in the United States being great.

Speaker 2 (24:24):
Well, that's because we're not done yet. Not well in
the United States.

Speaker 3 (24:29):
Get a little done, Margaret.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
No, no, no, But the space that the US currently occupies,
I still have a lot of hope for Oh yeah, no,
me too. So the blackaills are stolen at this point,
gold mines open. The eighteen eighty Congressional record reads one
talking about this quote. An idle and thriftless race of
savages cannot be permitted to stand guard at the treasure

(24:51):
vaults of the nation, which hold our gold and silver.
The prospector and minor may enter, and, by enriching himself,
enrich the nation and bless the world by the results
of his toil.

Speaker 3 (25:00):
Oh, shut the fuck up.

Speaker 2 (25:02):
I know what.

Speaker 3 (25:03):
You're just reading a quote. I'm not talking to you.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
No, no, no, I know, but it means that this
is Protestant work ethic genocide, right.

Speaker 3 (25:10):
And it's also like I love how it's like these
people aren't even greedy.

Speaker 2 (25:20):
Oh that's gonna It's like more.

Speaker 3 (25:21):
The criticism that has it's like, you know, when you're
like so racist that like you take the flaws of
your own society that like are recognized as flaws, right,
Like greed is a concept that people like have in
the Unite in like white among white people in the
United States, like, don't be greedy, that's a bad thing.

(25:43):
And then they're like, man, fuck these people, they're not
even greedy. We should kill them about it?

Speaker 2 (25:48):
You in two paragraphs, So this isn't enough, of course,
stealing you know this this part doesn't work ethic genocide.
The government has to wipe out the buffalo too, because
they don't want anyone to be able to hunt them. Basically,
they don't want indigenous people to continue to live as
indigenous people or like in traditional ways.

Speaker 3 (26:11):
You know, when you're so racist you wipe out an
entire environmental biome.

Speaker 2 (26:18):
Yeah, yeah, already scarce. By eighteen eighty three, the last
herd of the northern bison is wiped out by the government,
and in eighteen eighty one, the sun dance is forbidden,
which is a plain's traditional ritual of self sacrifice, the
very important part of a lot of different traditions and
the hatred of plains people was also anti communism in

(26:43):
name decades before the first Red Scare. One senator said
that it was the indigenous people's communism and holding lands
in common that was holding them back and said quote,
there is no selfish, which is at the bottom of civilization.

Speaker 3 (27:03):
Oh my god, yeah, I okay. First of all, like
I am, I'm like struggling to construct some kind of
like shitty hipster joke about like, oh yeah, I was
anti communist before Karl Marx even wrote the Communist Manifesto yeah,
or I guess Karl Marx had written the Communist Manifesto.

Speaker 2 (27:21):
Well, but they certainly were already doing that thing.

Speaker 3 (27:24):
Yeah, but there's also Yeah, it's like you're just taking
things that are normally regarded as flaws and vices and
you're like, they don't even do selfishness. They're not even greedy,
like what just like pick anything you would normally say
to be like insulting about another person, Like they don't

(27:44):
even cheat on their wives like what. Like it's just
like like you're just saying flaws as like to lack
of lack of flaws as reasons. Not that I'm saying
like anybody is flawless, but you know what I mean,
Like they're they're pointing out like a shitty thing to
be like greedy or selfish and being like, well, they're
not greedy or selfish. Guess we better kill them and

(28:05):
take their shit.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
And to be clear, I agree that selfishness is at
the bottom of civilization, but that's distinct my own negative
feelings about civilization.

Speaker 3 (28:16):
You do live in the woods with your dog.

Speaker 2 (28:19):
Yeah, Well, and again it's definitions of things, And I
also want to point out that it would be generally
dangerous to specifically take Western European concepts and apply them
wholeheartedly to different indigenous groups. It is absolutely true about
things like being held in common and them not being capitalist.

(28:39):
Absolutely it would be a I don't want to apply.

Speaker 3 (28:42):
To totally, Like I'm not trying to like put.

Speaker 2 (28:45):
No none of us, like giving them a hammer and sicks.

Speaker 3 (28:48):
I'm one hundred percent sure that there were, you know,
people that there have been people in every civilization, every culture,
every community, every house, like every every group of people
bigger than one person who is like you've got somebody
there who's the selfish piece of piece of shit.

Speaker 2 (29:06):
You know, you don't put them in charge of everything,
and you try not.

Speaker 3 (29:10):
To put them in charge of everything and give them
lots of guns and eighty guys. But like it's it's
just so fascinating to me that like in this racist
conception of indigenous people that like white Americans are coming
up with, they are saying things that would normally be

(29:32):
how you would say somebody is cool, like oh yeah,
real selfless guy would be normally a thing you'd say
about a great person.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
Yeah. Not in the Protestant worth ethic.

Speaker 3 (29:44):
Land, Yeah, not if they're doing it and not if
they're doing it on land that we want.

Speaker 2 (29:49):
Right, Yeah, okay, And while we're talking about communism or
while it's the.

Speaker 3 (29:58):
Are you gonna work the industrial workers of the world
into this story?

Speaker 2 (30:01):
Yes, but it wasn't on purpose. But what I'm going
to say is mostly right.

Speaker 3 (30:09):
Now, who's got the bingo cards?

Speaker 2 (30:12):
So we're into the eighteen eighties and labor movement in
the US is starting to pick up and starting to
kick ass. You want to know what the eighteen eighties
radicals had to say about indigenous resistance.

Speaker 3 (30:24):
I think that it was bad.

Speaker 2 (30:26):
Nothing. I can't find anything.

Speaker 3 (30:29):
Yoh, that's bad.

Speaker 2 (30:31):
Actually that is bad. That's what I'm saying now. I'm
certain it exists. I have not read every piece of
eighteen eighties thing I but I talked to my like
signal Chat of history nerds, and I like, the fuck.

Speaker 3 (30:45):
Am I not doing Signal Chat of History nerds.

Speaker 2 (30:48):
I'll talk about this later.

Speaker 3 (30:49):
This is the most unkind thing you've ever said to me.

Speaker 2 (30:55):
And what I do know is that in Mexico, we've
talked about this before on the show, indigenous folks and
anarchists are already working together, like ten years, twenty years,
before this to resist the state and doing all this
like amazing shit. In Mexico, you have the black indigenous anarchists,
Lucy Parsons, who's doing stuff in Chicago. But this is
not this is not tied into her indigenousity, and she

(31:19):
is mostly tied into the labor movement of European immigrants.
A couple decades later, the Industrial Workers of the World,
Thank You, are founded in part by Lucy Parson. I
knew it would fight for anti racist unionism with all
sorts of folks, and this will include doing a lot
of like organizing in the mines in the Southwest, with
a lot of indigenous people and indigenous miners. But it

(31:40):
is that is decades later. By and large, the thing
that European radicals were doing in the US was colonizing.
They were settling. And this was the era of utopian politics,
the idea that anarchists and socialists and communists and shit
would find quote empty areas and set up utopian societies.

(32:02):
A bunch of these happened every now, and the people
ask like, what am I going to cover this or
that one on the show? And I'm like, never been
quite sure because I'm kind of like I think they're bad,
like I think that it's cool people doing bad things,
you know. Yeah, and more or less all of these fail.
A couple weeks earlier, I should this out at the
end of the last episode on it could happen here.

(32:23):
Mia Wong covered really well how the colonize and oppressed
so quickly become the colonizers and oppressors. Like how Irish Americans. Eh,
I told you I'd bring in Irish Americans in child.
Irish Americans were so fucking shitty on colonization and race
issues in the United States right and continue to be unfortunately,

(32:44):
even while the Irish who stayed in Ireland are consistently
the only large population of white people who weren't wildly
fucking embarrassing right.

Speaker 3 (32:50):
Now, it's true.

Speaker 2 (32:53):
And in short, you've got a ton of communities that
sometimes rule like the Quakers and the anarchists, and shit out,
they're grabbing land like everyone else.

Speaker 3 (33:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:04):
Once indigenous people got more caught up into the capitalist system,
they were more involved in the anti racist unions, and
in the modern political climate, there's a great deal of
overlap between indigenous environmentalists and leftist and anarchist communities. Is
Land back and decolonization and become more and more central
to leftist anti authoritarian analysis.

Speaker 3 (33:23):
But it's often just lip service, though I know it's
something that I see a lot of.

Speaker 2 (33:31):
Yeah, it's true.

Speaker 3 (33:33):
I mean, I'm not trying to be to be like
too overly critical, but I see a lot.

Speaker 5 (33:40):
Of verbal attention paid to the idea of like doing
land acknowledgments versus you know, material change being pushed for.

Speaker 2 (33:56):
I'm speaking mostly with my experiences in kind of a
direct environmental movement which has become more and more indigenous
led and more and more like working hard to adopt
a decolonial framework, and I challenge us to continue to
do that.

Speaker 3 (34:15):
Yeah, No, it's totally out there.

Speaker 2 (34:17):
That's the culture that I'm more steeped in direct action wise.

Speaker 3 (34:21):
But I think you're right now, And if you're talking
if we're talking about people who are actually like doing
the direct action, then like, yeah, I think that's true. Yeah,
not talking about my favorite people to organize with when
I talk about the people who love to do land
acknowledgements and don't love to do anything of material help.

Speaker 2 (34:41):
Yeah, Yeah, there's a lot of complicated conversations about around
the politics of land acknowledgments. And I'll just point that
out without weighing in. I just try and kind of
keep on top of what's happening with it. But it's
so back to the nineteenth century.

Speaker 3 (34:59):
Too early to insert a plug for going to landback
dot org and giving them some money.

Speaker 2 (35:04):
No, you're never too never ever to Yeah.

Speaker 3 (35:08):
If you've ever done a land acknowledgment, go to land
back dot or some money.

Speaker 2 (35:13):
And it's not inherently bad, it's just like it's complicated. No, No,
it's a good thing to do Land acknowledgments.

Speaker 3 (35:18):
It should be accompanied by action, and in this that's
an action you can do while you listen to this podcast. Yeah,
I mean you can do a lot of actions while
you listen to this podcast. I'm not your dad. I'm
not going to tell you not to you know, do
anything else.

Speaker 2 (35:29):
But you've heard it here first, Miriam is your dad.

Speaker 3 (35:35):
I think I said I'm not your dad, but you
know I can't check. I'm not going to verify that.

Speaker 2 (35:39):
So yeah, yeah, I won't do a paternity test for
everyone in the country like I keep trying to get
you to do.

Speaker 3 (35:47):
Not until we're on live TV.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
All right, fine, all right, In eighteen eighty seven, Congress
passed the DAWs Act, designed to destroy indigenous methods of
land allocation. I mean, every male one hundred and sixty acres,
with all the surplus going to the government to be
distributed among white settlers. The surplus is most of the land.
The Lakota refused the Allotment Act successfully until I think

(36:12):
about nineteen sixteen to World War One. By eighteen eighty nine,
the government is like, can we please have.

Speaker 3 (36:18):
No Well, hang a note about those allotments that I
think is really important. The acreage given to people is
not always or even I think usually contiguous. Oh shit, really,
so like when you have one hundred and sixty acres,
it could be like you have ten acres over here
and like four over there, and like it's very far away,

(36:42):
and like you can't work with that, right, it's not
practical or even really possible to like use that land
if it's spread out like that. And so that makes
it easy for that land to be gradually sold off
to white people, because that's really the one of the
only ways to survive off of it.

Speaker 2 (37:03):
In a lot of contexts, No, that makes sense, and yeah,
there's a lot of it. This weird thing where like, oh,
we're going to force you all to be farmers, but
you also can't be farmers. We actually just wanted to
starve to death.

Speaker 3 (37:15):
We're going to force you to be farmers on shitty,
non arable land that.

Speaker 2 (37:19):
Is non contiguous.

Speaker 3 (37:20):
Yeah, not where you live.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
Yeah. By eighteen eighty nine, the government was like, can
we please have nine million of your remaining acres? And
Red Cloud and Sitting Bowl are like, what each shit?
Fuck you?

Speaker 3 (37:38):
But since you asked so nicely.

Speaker 2 (37:40):
Yeah, to quote Sitting Bowl directly, who said a little
bit more eloquently than the words I just put in
his mouth. When the white people invaded our Black Hills country,
our treaty agreements were still in force, but the Great Father,
the President of the United States, ignored it. Therefore, I
do not wish to consider any proposition to seed any
portion of our tribe beholdings to the Great Father, my

(38:02):
friends and relatives. Let us stand as one family as
we did before the white people led us astray. And
so the land didn't sell. So the US was like, oh,
that's fine.

Speaker 3 (38:14):
Yeah, they were like, okay, we respect, we respect your No,
if there's one thing we know how to do, here
in the United States, it's take no for an answer.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
Yeah, so they just took it instead. Once again, they
ignored the eighteen sixty eight treaty and President Harrison divide
up the reservation into seven smaller reservations with like with
lots of land that's no longer in it at all.
The Oglalla people were forced onto the Pine Ridge Reservation,
which is going to be central to the more of
the story next week. And everyone is forced to abandon

(38:45):
their language in old ways and send their kids to
boarding schools. And it's just more fucking genocide. Fewer and fewer.

Speaker 3 (38:52):
I'm sure most people listening No, but like boarding schools
in this context is like, oh yeah, yeah, child sized
concentration camps.

Speaker 2 (39:01):
Yeah. And it's specifically, this is the this is the
era of what it's always been. This is the era
of kill the Indian to save the man. This is
the era of like, we will strip away your culture,
we will send you, we will make sure you never
learn your language.

Speaker 3 (39:15):
What what organization better to trust your children with? The
Catholic Church.

Speaker 2 (39:21):
Yeah, Fewer and fewer folks are able to remain traditionalists
aka still doing shit the way that they've always done it.
It's also this division of their land. It's about American
fucking politics. I Like, the Republicans were losing control over
the government and they were like, well, what if we

(39:41):
made some new states, like a couple of Dakota's like
named after the people were getting rid of, like we
could hold on the power for a little bit longer.

Speaker 3 (39:48):
And over I hadn't even you know.

Speaker 2 (39:51):
That, I know, I like this one came out of
left field when I when I learned this, because I'm like,
over all, the Republicans in the nineteenth century are like
usually the the better side, right, Like they're on like
better has.

Speaker 3 (40:03):
Anyone who's ever argued with an idiot Republican knows, Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
But they were also the party of big business and
monopolies and like anti populist, and they were the most
aggressive against indigenous people because you can't win with an
American political party.

Speaker 3 (40:23):
Yeah, they're bad American political parties. They're uh yeah, yeah.
Any any that are good kind of fizzle out around
the attempting to get somebody elected to local office.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yeah yeah, point. But you know what is good unreservedly
and wholeheartedly, I can say products, Yeah, the concept of
stuff love a product the accumulation of stuff.

Speaker 3 (40:53):
You never steered us wrong before.

Speaker 2 (40:55):
I see no reason why it would. Now here you
go and we're back. So things are looking real bad
for folks out west. The new reservations aren't big enough
to support a nomadic hunting lifestyle. The land is really
shit for crops. The government isn't giving them nearly as

(41:16):
much food and food and tools as they promised. They're
just trying to kill them, all right, They're just trying
to fucking and people are really fucking down and out.
When a great shaman stepped onto the scene out west
further west with a new religious practice designed to unite
the indigenous people, stopping their intertribal and inter nation war,

(41:38):
designed to usher in a golden era of peace and
reunite people with they're dead loved ones the Ghost Dance
and the Ghost Dance is complicated and interesting. It is
almost certainly a product of syncretism, the fusing of Christian
especially Catholic beliefs, with local practices. The thing that comes

(41:59):
up constantly on the show probably deserves a Bingos square
right next to the industrial workers of the world. It's,
at the same time entirely indigenous. It does not tie
into the larger church structure from Europe at all, and
it has developed out of traditional practices, but it takes
theological concepts from Christianity. There's this northern Paiute guy named

(42:22):
Wovoka or Jack Wilson when he's dealing with white people,
and he was schooled in Christian theology as a kid,
but he is at his heart a traditionalist. He's also
renowned for his supernatural powers. Specifically, he can control the
weather during a solar eclipse. He has a vision and
has a vision of the resurrection of the dead and

(42:43):
the departure of white people from North America. All folks
had to do was live right peacefully by and large,
and perform a new dance, the ghost Dance. There's more
to it than that. About like in the sort of
theological framework that is built out of this, the country
would belong to indigenous folks under Wovoka, the other half

(43:03):
would belong to white people under the president out East.
Jesus is mentioned, but like all religious stuff, sounds silly
when you take it out of context. And I believe
very strongly in judging religions not on their stated set
of beliefs. But rather what their institutions do and what
their practitioners do. And the Ghost Dance was a traditionalist

(43:26):
revival that united various tribes and nations in the hope
of reversing colonization. So fuck you.

Speaker 3 (43:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:33):
It spread across the country, and it helped unify groups
of groups of people and helped people cope with just
the incredible amount of trauma that they've been living through.
And it came to the Lacota people and a lot
of them were into it, especially traditionalists. This was not
like universal. There are people who are like, some traditionalists
are like, now, we're not into this, you know, like

(43:56):
because it is well, it syncratic and it has like
all of these other already.

Speaker 3 (44:00):
Say what what group the originator of this was?

Speaker 2 (44:05):
You did say, yeah, roughly you was now northern California.
I believe the US freaks the fuck out over ghost Dance.
This is like Satanic panic times a million. Yeah, and
the thing that they're freaked out by is a almost

(44:26):
completely pacifist, heavily Christian influenced movement. You think that the
US government would be like, oh, this is what we want,
but they hated it because it threatened to reverse genocide
and cultural erasure because it was traditionalist and it united
all the indigenous people. You know. Also, and there's like

(44:50):
some stuff that people talk about how like people say
that wearing the ghost shirt from the dance makes you
immune to bullets, and so like that belief or the
b like gets to the white people and they're like, oh, fuck,
they're gonna attack us, you know. And there's some talk
about this leading to armed resistance against the Americans, but
most of that talk is coming from the aforementioned Americans.

Speaker 3 (45:14):
Oh that's interesting.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
Yeah, it is a resistance movement, but it is a
peaceful resistance movement, and it is about let's live right,
you know. Thousands of troops are mobilized and sent to
like the Lakota specifically, just.

Speaker 3 (45:33):
Yeah, cartoonishly evil the United States again.

Speaker 2 (45:36):
Yeah, and there's like all of these there's even some
like id En ended up writing them into the script.
But there's like occasional like I remember it's the Bureau
of Indian Affairs at this point, but there's like occasional
like government people who are part of this and like
priests and shit, who are like, no, it's fine, they're
not just leave them alone. It's fine, you know, and

(45:58):
these are not the voices.

Speaker 3 (45:59):
That get listened to, right, the US is like, we
never do that.

Speaker 2 (46:03):
Yeah, no, totally. They go to arrest sitting bowl basically
because he's a traditionalist and he's associated with ghost dancing.
So they're like, sorry, but we got to take you
to jail just just to you know, just we're gonna
show up with like a fuck ton of guys and
some machine guns just to take you to jail. Just
to jail. Don't worry.

Speaker 3 (46:19):
That's the normal way people get arrested, right.

Speaker 2 (46:21):
Yeah, I think so. I'm like thinking about the times
I got arrested. There were a lot of cops when
I got arrested, but I've.

Speaker 3 (46:27):
Been arrested a few times and there were no machine
guns in any of them.

Speaker 2 (46:30):
Yeah, yeah, totally, And so oh god, they might have
been cannon with grape shot. I don't want to like
get my machine.

Speaker 3 (46:40):
Anywhere arrest or sitting bulls.

Speaker 2 (46:42):
No, no, I sitting bulls. Yeah no. If they had
cannon and grape shot at my arrest, I uh hop
back into my time machine and to be all.

Speaker 3 (46:50):
It's gonna say, I'm surprised I haven't heard that story before.

Speaker 2 (46:52):
Yeah, no, I haven't come out of the time traveler yet.
Oh no, wait, I was trying to convince everyone I'm
a vampire has been around for a long time. I'm
gott keep my story straight. I'm going to convince anyone
of any bullshit plausible.

Speaker 3 (47:02):
All of those those tin type photographs you have of
yourself should uh yeah, should help with that.

Speaker 2 (47:07):
Yeah, exactly very few people who are born it is.

Speaker 1 (47:10):
Say, one hundred percent believable. Yeah, so unbelievably credible.

Speaker 2 (47:15):
I threw the bomb at Haymarket. That's the rumor I've
been trying to spread. I like it.

Speaker 3 (47:20):
That's a good one. I mean you, I mean and
this is this is more a function of your having
been a cool a cool punk for like a lot
of your life. But like you have enough stories then
it's like a little plausible that Like, wait a second,
is she telling me like three hundred years worth of
stories of just trying to make it sound like she
had a super wild teens to twenties.

Speaker 2 (47:41):
Yeah, totally, yeah, Like it's nineteen eighties eight, not seventeen eighties.
Don't worry, I got it.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
I got to accuse of being a vampire in high school.
But that's because Twilight was popular, and I was pale.

Speaker 3 (47:52):
Hell yeah, and Sparkle was that person hitting on you?
Because I think that's what was happening with Twilight.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
Who knows, certainly not me as a teenager would not
have known if someone was hitting on me. That's exactly
my point. I was like, who knows?

Speaker 3 (48:11):
I barely tell if somebody's hitting on me right now?

Speaker 2 (48:13):
Now enough, all right? So they show up to arrest
sitting bowl and these are Indian bureau cops, which is
they are other Indigenous folks who are now working for
the US government, which is like one of the things
actually that we had talked about, for example, is that
one of the reasons, like the British Empire, you know,
conquered half the fucking world, and they had like a

(48:35):
smaller standing army than like anyone else because they got
the Indigenous people various places to become their cops, right, right.
And so when they first show up to arrest sitting Bowl.
There's a bunch of different versions of the story, but
the one that I find most, you know, the one
I'm telling and the one that feels the most accurate
to me. They show up to arrest him and he's

(48:55):
like fine, like fuck it, I'm like fifty six or whatever.
I'm not looking for trouble. I'll come with you. And
his son is like what no, fuck that, And then
the other versions, he's like stalling. He's like, oh, let
me get my things, which is fine too, Like, don't
get me wrong, he could resist arrest as much as
he wants. I don't care. Like I'm pro him, you know.

Speaker 3 (49:13):
Yeah, I'm pro Sitting Bull, and I'm pro resisting arrest
if that's a decision you're willing to make for yourself.

Speaker 2 (49:20):
Your dad has now told you, the listener, to resist
arrest because we are not a lawyer, but we are
your lawyer. We're not yours and we're not a lawyer.

Speaker 3 (49:32):
But hell, i am your dad the lawyer, and I'm
here to say yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:36):
So a bunch of his supporters surround the hundred plus
troops who had showed up to arrest Sitting Bull, and
there's like maybe the sun shoots, like blah blah blah
blah blah. A firefight breaks out. Sitting Bull is shot
by a soldier, supposedly by accident, and he dies in

(49:58):
the ensuing battle. Eight and eight resistors, including Sitting Bull,
die and just because there's no other good place to
shoe in, shoehorn in this quote by sitting bul that
I like, I'm going to do it here.

Speaker 3 (50:12):
Every time you've stopped to read a quote, the quote
has been fucking incredible. So yeah, I'm here for it.

Speaker 2 (50:19):
What treaty that the whites have kept has the red
man broken? Not one? What treaty that the white man
ever made with us? Have they kept?

Speaker 3 (50:25):
Not one?

Speaker 2 (50:26):
When I was a boy, the Sioux owned the world.
The sun rose and said, on their land, and they
sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today?
Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them?
What white man can say I ever stole his land
or a penny of his money? Yet they say I
am a thief? What white woman, however lonely, was ever
captive or insulted by me? Yet they say I am

(50:49):
a bad Indian? What white man has ever seen me drunk?
Who has ever come to me hungry and unfed? Left unfed?
Who has ever seen me beat my wife or abuse
my children? What law have I broken? Is it wrong
for me to love my own? Is it wicked for
me because my skin is red? Because I am Lakota
because I was born where my father died, because I

(51:10):
would die for my people in my country. And yeah, yeah,
he didn't steal shit. So ghost dancers wildly impoverished Lakota
folks trying to figure out how to fucking survive. They
have some guns because they hunt.

Speaker 3 (51:31):
It's the nineteenth century. Everybody has a gun.

Speaker 2 (51:34):
Yeah, well you know how gun control really exists in
this country only for marginalized folks. Yes, the US was like,
oh shit, we can't let have these We can't let
these people who rely on hunting have guns.

Speaker 3 (51:51):
You can't let these people were trying to kill have guns.

Speaker 2 (51:53):
Yeah, exactly. So then there's a camp of people on
the Wounded Knee. It's December twenty ninth, nineteen eighty. It's
about three hundred people. They're mostly Mini Kanju Lakota, with
some fugitives from the Hunk Papa Lakota, which is sitting
both people who fled after his murder. Soldiers show up
and are like, give up your guns, you ghost dancers,

(52:16):
you evil scary ghost dancers and best again, a million
versions of what's about to happen. They go around and
they're like and some people are like, yeah, we've got
some guns here, just like some guns. And they're like,
all right, we're searching your shit. And then they like
search and they find some more guns, and they're like
mostly just old like shitty honeting rifles and stuff, right,

(52:37):
And so most of the people end up disarmed. And
there's one man. His name is Black Coyote, and there
are a couple accounts of who he was. He was
definitely young, he was probably deaf. He might have been
the deaf mute son of Sitting Bul, but I don't
believe that that's the case. I believe he was a mute. Sorry,
I believe he was deaf, but not mute. And I
don't believe he was the son of Sitting Bowl, just

(52:59):
out of most of the versions of the story do
not present him that way. But he doesn't know what
the fuck is happening, and he doesn't speak English as
far as I canna understand either, and so he's like
what the fuck is happening, and he's like waving his
gun around. He's like, you can't have this gun. It
costs me a lot of fucking money, right, But he's
not saying it English. And the soldiers probably wouldn't have

(53:21):
cared anyway, and they're like, He's like, you gotta give
me money for this gun. You can't just fucking have it.
You know. There is a struggle where they try to
take the gun. The gun goes off. I don't believe
it hits anyone full support if he just also was
like fuck you and shot them again. Whatever, But all

(53:44):
accounts say that this was an accidental discharge if it
was him who fired the first round at all. However
it started, the army opened fire. Sometimes it's called a battle,
sometimes it's not.

Speaker 3 (53:59):
And basically one side is being disarmed, like in the
process of being disarmed. Battle seems like a right, real
that's a real choice to call out a battle.

Speaker 2 (54:09):
The only reason that I sometimes like I have some
sympathy for it is to be like to not just
present people as victims.

Speaker 3 (54:17):
Totally and like people can fight back, yeah, you know,
and but like still like calling it a battle, Like
does that both sides came equally armed?

Speaker 2 (54:31):
Yeah, And so this gets framed as the deadliest mass
shooting in US history, And I think that that is
a reasonable thing to say about it, because it is
a mass shooting and is the largest one in US history. Yeah,
And it's a massacre. I've read one hundred and fifty
three and I've heard three hundred Indigenous people were killed.

(54:54):
Twenty five US soldiers got got. Most versions agree that
most either all over, most of the soldiers died from
friendly fire because they didn't like start off in battle lines.
They just were like shooting, you know, and they were like, ah, whatever,
and they're just like shooting in the crowd and there's
like cannons of grape shot and shit on the fucking hills,
like shooting into it all and like and then even

(55:18):
after the initial whatever, they are chasing people down and
murdering non combatants and infants and shit in the snows.
It's you know, at the end of December, like for
miles around, they just do. It's bad, really bad. Is
this a twenty of the soldiers were given the Medal

(55:41):
of Honor.

Speaker 3 (55:43):
Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah, I think that is a fact
that I knew at some point. It's just this isn't
like a real piece of shit country. We got a
real piece of shit nation. I don't want to say
country because I feel like that could mean like the space,
but nation, the political entity, real piece of shit. And

(56:05):
I don't. I don't think it's as good.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
No, not not into it. I'm not excited whenever people
are like, yeah, but you wouldn't be here of one
for them, Like, okay.

Speaker 3 (56:14):
Yeah, I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for a
lot of things, like.

Speaker 2 (56:17):
Or maybe I would and I just would be fine,
or maybe I wouldn't. I don't fucking care whatever, Like.

Speaker 3 (56:23):
That's a that's a weird argument that brings into question
a lot of things about causality that you, as a
time traveler, are much better rep to speak on than me.

Speaker 2 (56:32):
Yeah. Black Elk was also at this and a bullet
grazed his head, but he survived. There's no justice for it,
of course.

Speaker 3 (56:43):
Yeah. When when twenty people are being given the medal
of honor, I doubt that the other people they are
being prosecuted for their crimes. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:50):
I think later eventually the government like apologized or like
one hundred years later, but they still didn't rescind medals
of honor. You know, folks suffered badly, and I'm sure.

Speaker 3 (56:59):
There's like elementary goals named after those guys or some shit.

Speaker 2 (57:01):
Probably I don't fucking know. Oh, it's also it was
the seventh Cavalry. It was the same unit that like
got more or less wiped out in Customers Less Stand
and uh and so it was like, this is part
of why they're like fucking revenging and shit, you know, gotcha.

Speaker 3 (57:21):
Yeah, we have to take revenge for that time we
charged headlong into a thing. No, you know, everybody told
us not to do and got our asses handed to us.
We must take revenge, yeah, for our mistake.

Speaker 2 (57:34):
Yeah, someone killed a serial rapist and now we have
to go murder entire villages of people to prove that
we're the good guys.

Speaker 3 (57:41):
It's a real, real strong sense of justice at work. Obviously,
folks suffered badly. People died of tuberculosis, cooped up into
towns with no amenities. They were forbidden from sweat, lodges,
bead work, rituals.

Speaker 2 (57:54):
Of all kinds. Their children were stolen into boarding schools.
It took until nineteen twenty four for Indigenous Americans to
get American citizenship. This is, of course, also a trap
to steal all their remaining land. In nineteen twenty seven,
Mount Rushmore was announced by President Coolidge. In nineteen thirty four,
the Indian Reorganization Act was passed that gave people the
right to live in worship traditionally and give the reservations

(58:16):
a certain amount of self governance. This supposedly nice thing
also sucked. It was done for bad reasons. To quote
the book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse by Peter
Matheson quote. The traditional forms of tribal government were replaced
by Indian chartered corporations, complete with constitutions set up for
their benefit under the auspices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs,

(58:37):
and an intensely democratic people was subjected to the unde
democratic decisions of so called tribal councils that mostly reflected
the wishes of the white man's church and state. While
some tribal councils were and are strong and constructive in
forwarding the best interests of their people, too many others
became tame puppet governments. For the BIA and the Black

(59:01):
Hills is now watched over by four great white heads
carved into a holy mountain. Those mountains are in turn
watched over like.

Speaker 3 (59:10):
A fucking ugly like bullshit like novelty roadside attraction is
basically what Mount Rushmore is like. That was a not
only like a vandalism of a sacred site on landstolen
through genocide, but just real bad art.

Speaker 2 (59:29):
Yesso, No, just gaudy and it's and yeah, truly fuck it.
And those fourheads are in turn watched over by a
fuck ton of security less people determine that maybe the
mountain will look better without them there.

Speaker 3 (59:43):
Yeah, maybe maybe a big guillotine. They're on the lookout
for big guillotines, are there?

Speaker 2 (59:50):
John fire Lame Dear said, what Mount Rushmore means is quote,
it means that these big white faces are telling us. First,
we gave you Indians a treat that you could keep
these black hills forever as long as the sun would shine,
in exchange for all the Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana. Then
we found the gold and took this last piece of
land because we were stronger, and there were more of

(01:00:12):
us and than there were of you, and because we
had cannons and gatling guns while you hadn't even progressed
far enough to make a steel knife. And when you
didn't want to leave, we wiped you out, and those
of you who survived we put on reservations. And then
we took the gold out a billion bucks and we
aren't through yet, And because we like the tourist dollars too,
we have major sacred black hills into one vast disney Land.

(01:00:35):
And after we did all this, we carved up this mountain,
the dwelling place of your spirits, and put our four
gleaming white faces here. We are the conquerors. So completely
unrelated to that. You see the clip of the Israeli
media of settlers there saying that they should level the
Gaza Strip and turn it into an amusement park.

Speaker 3 (01:00:58):
What an unrelated and yes and yeah random story.

Speaker 1 (01:01:03):
Yeah, it's almost like history is important to learn from.

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
Yayh well that's part two.

Speaker 3 (01:01:17):
You're not Yeah that that's part two. Yep, Okay, you're
gonna You're gonna make me wait a week. Make Usually
usually when we like do a cliffhanger at the end
of an episode, it's fake, it's fiction. Yeah, but Martyred
is genuinely gonna leave me hanging until next week. I know,
I know that the listeners are always in that position,

(01:01:39):
but like in this case, it affects me.

Speaker 2 (01:01:40):
I know, you were supposed to be the privileged one
and here you are.

Speaker 1 (01:01:44):
I'm so sorry, Miriam.

Speaker 2 (01:01:47):
And if you want a spoiler for it, Dear, dear listener,
you can go read about Peltier and the support campaign
and the campaign to get him freed. He's been in
prison for almost fifty years and he shouldn't be and
there's a lot of stuff that's happening now that also
I think that people should pay attention to and remember that, Yeah,

(01:02:14):
this is I don't know, I don't have a good
rousing conclusion.

Speaker 3 (01:02:20):
Yeah, well, I think like it whether it sounds kind
of like you're going is to say, like, I don't know,
maybe I'm putting words in your mouth where I thought
you were going. Is like the one of the biggest
lies of American history about colonization is that like we
did it and it's done, and like we did do it,

(01:02:41):
and it is and it has been done, Like those
crimes happened and those people are dead and those atrocities
were committed. But like, colonization is not a static fact.
It is it is something that can be undone, which
I think we talked about at the end of the
episode last week because it's kind of the only thing

(01:03:03):
you can say at the end of something like this.

Speaker 2 (01:03:06):
Totally and then you know it's also worth looking at
the world at where genocide's also happening and look to
see what you can do to talk about it, to
support people who are fighting it, and to fight it
because that's just bad.

Speaker 3 (01:03:27):
Yeah, well, we're taking a bold anti genocide stance over here.

Speaker 6 (01:03:32):
You would think that wouldn't be a bold stand fucking
non controversial, right, You would think what a weird fighting
And yet I, I mean, clearly I'm the party most
affected by all of this, but it's really weird to
just suddenly be like, wait, I'm used to having like
kind of wild beliefs that most of the people around

(01:03:53):
me don't support.

Speaker 2 (01:03:54):
But there's some I thought we agreed on, you know,
like no genocide, collective punishment bad. I thought we all
knew that.

Speaker 3 (01:04:05):
I thought we were against bombing hospitals as like a species.

Speaker 2 (01:04:08):
Yeah, yeah, totally, that is what felt like a species
wide thing. It should be the exception the people who
are like that's good anyway, whatever, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:04:16):
Those people we shouldn't hang out with. Yeah, anyway, go
to m AP dot or dot slash, dot slash. You
can't add a fuck saying a URL is hard. Medical
aid for Palestinians. Go there, give them money, yeah, fuck.

Speaker 2 (01:04:35):
And support people who are. If you're not doing some
of the direct action that's happening where you live, support
the people who are doing it. Boost voices, and don't
let people make this into what it's not about. Don't
let people either claim that it's antisemitic to fight on

(01:04:57):
behalf of Palestinian people. And also don't let actual anti
Semitic ideas creep into the yeah pople around you.

Speaker 3 (01:05:04):
Both of those. But you know, if anybody says you're
being anti Semitic for saying that it's not good to
bomb hospitals, tell him your dad, Miriam, who is also
your lawyer, said that they were wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:05:14):
Yeah, all right, we'll see all the area.

Speaker 1 (01:05:20):
Miriam is dead dy.

Speaker 2 (01:05:21):
Yeah, it's true. You're gonna have You're so glad you're
not on social You're gonna be so glad you're not
you're not on Twitter because you just said that you
didn't know when people were going to hit on you.
It is so many people would hit on you based
on this.

Speaker 1 (01:05:35):
Miriam is daddy. It is known.

Speaker 3 (01:05:37):
Yeah, I made a terrible mistake, not the first, won't
be the last.

Speaker 2 (01:05:45):
All right, see everyone next week.

Speaker 1 (01:05:47):
Bye bye, cool people who did cool Stuff is a
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool
Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check
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