Book should be on everyone's reading list

Page 13

Review

The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge: A Lakota Odyssey

By Joe Starita

388 pages, $32.50 (hc.)

or 2 cassettes, $27.50

Putnam, New York

The book opens in a nursing home in Colorado, in the room of Guy Dull Knife, Sr., who may, the book says, "live in three different centuries." He was born in 1899, and it is his history, and the history of his family, that author Joe Starita uses to tie this Native history together.

It is significant, though, that he's not alone in the room. Running about the huge old man, who remembers his father's stories of Crazy Horse, Sitting bull, Red Cloud and Custer, is his great-granddaughter. She knows all about music videos, lego and deep-dish pizza. The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge is the story of this family, told with rare perception and warmth.

The Dull Knifes are Oglala Sioux, in the 19th century the most powerful and largest subtribe of the Teton Sioux. The family's story is the story of the long fight against the encroaching government and settlement, then the longer fight against marginalization and assimilation. The story begins with the Lakota being driven westward into the prairie by the Ojibwe. The nation came to be called Sioux, "the shortened version of nadewisou, an Ojibwe word meaning 'treacherous snake.'"

By the time the Europeans were beginning to trickle into the Great Plains from the east, the Lakota had a huge domain in the northern part of what is now the U.S. They were dominant horsemen, hunters and warriors. "Of the 545 identifiable Indian tribes in North American," Starita says, "perhaps none was less suited to reservation life, to a sedentary farming existence, than the Lakota."

Starita tells the history as it was lived by actual individuals, instead of by nations and countries, bloodless and passionless as that seems. Dull Knife comes to life precisely because it is not a Lakota history, but a history of one Lakota family. In a neat reversal, it is a more effective history of the Lakota because of that.

The family stretches from the Little Bighorn to Desert Storm, through the world wars, both Wounded Knees and Vietnam. While Native people north of the border may have a lot in common with those in the U.S., it is a further commentary on American culture that the Dull Knifes measure their history in terms of wars. Native Canadians don't measure the progress of their lives in terms of the battles each generation has fought. This is particularly American.

Also American is the attitude the government brought to the Native Americans on the prairies. Extermination was always an option. And they live through a litany of broken treaties, for which racism wasn't so much the reason as was greed. But there's an attitude that still prevails, which is perhaps not so solely American.

Towards the end of the book, Guy Dull Knife, Jr., an artist celebrating what might be a big career break, his wife eight-months pregnant, and with two school-age kids, decides to move his family away from Loveland, Colo., to Hot Springs, South Dakota. Their house had been ransacked while they were away.

"About two weeks later, Guy Jr. arrived home from the foundry one afternoon and found a small plastic bag hanging on the door-knob. He went inside and opened it and found a Ku Klux Klan pamphlet and several hand-written sheets of paper with swastikas around the top and sides. The handwriting on the Xeroxed papers said Loveland had been a good community before the Indians and Hispanics started moving in and if they had any sense, they would leave town. He read the papers and glanced at the pamphlet and decided to ignore them.

"About ten days later, another bag arrived on the doorstep, the messages were more personal, directed specifically at the family. It said they were Indians and Indians belonged on reservations, not in Loveland. If they knew what was good for them, they wouldn't try to make a living in a place where they were not wanted. This was not their country. The country belonge to whites, the message said. It was signed 'Your Local Klan.'"

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Joe Straita's book is readable, intimate and moving. It is likely the best popular book on Native North Americans published in the last year, and should be on everybody's list of things to do this spring.