American Indian Culture and Research Journal

“We tried to run,” Louise Weasel Bear said, “but they shot us like we were a buffalo. I know there are some good white people, but the soldiers must be mean to shoot children and women. Indian soldiers would not do that to white children.” —Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee Social images of Indian/white relations, so typically born and nurtured in fiction, frequently seem impervious to fact, circumstance, perspective, or even argument. Despite a public that in record numbers consumed descriptions like the one that closes Dee Brown’s 1971 book, for instance, official accounts of the massacre at Wounded Knee—like nearly all official images of Indians— persistently reproduce a Manichean narrative that pits good against evil, White against Red, civilization against savagery. Why and how this is so continues to confound. The obvious, albeit simplistic, explanation is that “the winners write the histories.” A more complete understanding of how and why intercultural relations and images have sustained a moribund and at times even morbid bearing requires a more comprehensive explanation, however. In what follows we provide an explanation that merges Todorov’s concept of “finalism” with rudiments of social memory and an analysis of two days of hearings before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary in February 1976. Our central thesis is that finalism serves as a mechanism that greatly aids the development and maintenance of social amnesia about Native identities and accomplishments, on the one hand, and the calcification of social memory, on the other. Together, these elements render Indian voices not simply irrelevant but also fundamentally anti-American.