The death of the great spirit : an elegy for the American Indian
Type
Book
Authors
Category
General Library Collection
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Publication Year
1972
Publisher
New American Library, Canada
Pages
205
Subject
Indigenous peoples -- United States -- Social conditions
Tags
Abstract
""Indians! There are no Indians left now but me." - Sitting Bull 1844(?)-1890
Sitting Bull was right. His people have been loved to death.
Earl Shorris - journalist and author of two highly praised novels - has undertaken an intensely personal journey, talking and listening to Sitting Bull's scattered spiritual descendants. He has searched the available literature - memoirs, documents, poetry, legend, fact and fiction - to understand the roots of our 300-year war with the Indian. The war has been won.
The results of that battle are recorded here: the children of a way of life murdered by the cold eye of the anthropologist and the honeyed hand of the reformer; the obdurate, cumbersome Bureau of Indian Affairs; the Indian poverty not shown in the statistics; the Apache girl who cheers for the soldiers in Western movies; the Indian women who refuses to tell the name of her grandfather because "he's always referred to as chief of the most savage, bloodthirsty tribe"; the new Red Power radicals, whose grand gesture is a takeover of Alcatraz, their ancient rightful land.
Re-created at last wholly in the image of his conquerors; robbed of his land, his heritage, his history; butchered and smothered in the melting pot of our Christian industrial society; drowned in the tears of liberalism that brought him television in exchange for truth, replaced his farms with irrigation ditches, built roads where no cars travel; the American Indian has finally vanished. This remarkable book is his elegy.
Mr. Shorris offers a shocking, controversial picture of a powerless minority, "the descendants of the dispossessed, the victims of love.""--Book jacket.
Sitting Bull was right. His people have been loved to death.
Earl Shorris - journalist and author of two highly praised novels - has undertaken an intensely personal journey, talking and listening to Sitting Bull's scattered spiritual descendants. He has searched the available literature - memoirs, documents, poetry, legend, fact and fiction - to understand the roots of our 300-year war with the Indian. The war has been won.
The results of that battle are recorded here: the children of a way of life murdered by the cold eye of the anthropologist and the honeyed hand of the reformer; the obdurate, cumbersome Bureau of Indian Affairs; the Indian poverty not shown in the statistics; the Apache girl who cheers for the soldiers in Western movies; the Indian women who refuses to tell the name of her grandfather because "he's always referred to as chief of the most savage, bloodthirsty tribe"; the new Red Power radicals, whose grand gesture is a takeover of Alcatraz, their ancient rightful land.
Re-created at last wholly in the image of his conquerors; robbed of his land, his heritage, his history; butchered and smothered in the melting pot of our Christian industrial society; drowned in the tears of liberalism that brought him television in exchange for truth, replaced his farms with irrigation ditches, built roads where no cars travel; the American Indian has finally vanished. This remarkable book is his elegy.
Mr. Shorris offers a shocking, controversial picture of a powerless minority, "the descendants of the dispossessed, the victims of love.""--Book jacket.
Number of Copies
1
