Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee | May 12 2007

>feiming wrote:
> > 是的，那叫“流泪之路”（trail of tears), 一万七千切诺基部落的印第安人在杰克逊法案签署之后，走上饥馑、悲伤和死亡的旅途，很多人在路上死去。
> >但有部分人在北卡罗来纳州的深山中隐身活下来（他们被抓住有生命危险），我计划的就是到北卡的山里寻找他们的后代。据说跟以赌博或者旅游为业的印第安人不同，他们保留了最原始的东西。
>

由于扯到了印第安人，我干脆另开一线。《Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee》，这就是我提到的书名，废名可能都看过，七十年代出版时曾引起轰动。现从书中择录几句（自己敲键盘啊），争取继续。

• In 1492， “So tractable, so peaceable, are these people, ” Columbus wrote to the King and Queen of Spain, “that I swear to your Majesties there is not in the world a better nation. They love their neighbors as themselves, and their discourse is ever sweet and gentle, and accompanied with a smile; and though it is true that they are naked, yet their manners are decorous and praiseworthy.” All this, of course, was taken as a sign of weakness, if not heathenism, and Columbus being a righteous European was convinced the people should be “made to work, sow and do all that is necessary and to adopt our ways.”

• Long before the English-speaking white men arrived in Virginia in 1607, however, the Powhatans had heard rumors about the civilizing techniques of the Spaniards. The Englishmen used subtler methods. To ensure peace long enough to establish a settlement at Jamestown, they put a golden crown upon the head of Wahunsonacook, dubbed him King Powhatan, and convinced him that he should put his people to work supplying the white settles with food. Wahunsonacook vacilated between loyalty to his rebellious subjects and to the English, but after John Rolfe married his daughter, Pocahontas, he apparently decided that he was more English than Indian. After Wahunsonacook died, the Powhatans rose up in revenge to drive the Englishmen back into the sea from which they had come, but the Indians underestimated the power of English weapons. In a short time the eight thousand Powhatans were reduced to less than a thousand.

• In Massachusetts the story began somewhat differently but ended virtually the same as in Virginia. After the englishmen landed at Plymouth in 1620, most of them probably would have starved to death but for aid received from friendly natives of the New World….for several years these Englishmen and their Indian neighbors lived in peace, but many more shiploads of white people continued coming ashore…... Settlements began crowding in upon each other. In 1625 some of the colonists asked Samoset to give them 12,000 additional acres of Pemaquid land. Samoset knew that land came from the Great Spirit, was as endless as the sky, and belonged to no man. To humor these strangers in their strange ways, however, he went through a ceremony of transferring the land and made his mark on a paper for them. It was the first deed of Indian land to English colonists….by the time Masasoit, great chief of the Wampanoags, died in 1662 his people were being pushed back into the wilderness.

• When the Dutch came to Manhattan Island, Peter Minuit purchased it for sixty guilders in fishhooks and glass beads, but encouraged the Indians to remain and continue exchanging their valuable peltries for such trinkets. In 1641, Willem Kieft levied tribute upon the Mahicans and sent soldiers to Staten Island to punish the Raritans for offense which had been committed not by them but by white settlers. The Raritans resisted arrest, and the soldiers killed four of them. When the Indians retaliated by killing four Dutchmen, Kieft ordered the massacre of two entire villages while the inhabitants slept……for two more centuries these events were repeated again and again as the European colonists moved inland…...

• In 1829, Andrew Jackson, who was called Sharp Knife by the Indians, took office as President of the United States. During his frontier career, Sharp Knife and his soldiers had slain thousands of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, but these southern Indians were still numerous and clung stubbornly to their tribal lands, which had been assigned them forever by white men's treaties. In Sharp Knife's first message to his congress, he recommended that all these Indians be removed westward beyond the Mississippi. Although enactment of such law would only add to the long list of broken promises made to the eastern Indians, Sharp Knife was convinced that Indians and whites could not live together in peace and that his plan would make possible a final promise which never would be broken again. On June 30, 1834, Congress passed An Act to Regulate Trade and Intercoursewith the Indian Tribes and to Preserve Peace on the Frontiers.