However, not all dead Indians were good ones, nor were all whites savage and self-righteous in their dealings with them. Brown is careful in making the distinctions. Some whites, like General John B. Sanborn, spoke out in words that one now finds sadly familiar: "For a mighty nation like us to be carrying on a war with a few straggling nomads, under such circumstances, is a spectacle most humiliating, an injustice unparalleled a national crime most revolting, that must, sooner or later, bring down upon us or our posterity the judgment of Heaven." Although from time to time, men like Sanborn protested and there were some white men who respected the Indian. Brown's point is that these men failed to convert their words and feelings into the types of action needed to prevent the destruction of the Indian, failed too often to act at all, and were themselves more outnumbered than the Indians. The great, silent majority, no less enraptured by the melodies of Manifest Destiny than was Germany by the rhapsodies of the Reich, failed to realize what the destruction of the Indian meant to them, to America as a nation, and in time, to the land itself. As a result of this political and moral breakdown, year by year, tribe by tribe, lie by lie, the destiny of "this great experiment in democratic government under the Anglo-Saxon race," as expansionist pamphleteers called it, was made manifest by men who killed for Gold and God and proclaimed, "The destiny of the aborigines is written in characters not to be mistaken. The same inscrutable Arbiter that decreed the downfall of Rome has pronounced the doom of extinction upon the red man of America."

They're playing our song. Tonto.

III

"I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream...the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer and the sacred tree is dead."   Black Elk of the Oglala Sioux

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee was for weeks the best-selling non-fiction book in America. It is difficult to say whether this is because the country, or at least that segment of the country that still has $10.95 to spend on a book, is at last willing to come to terms with its past, and more importantly, come to terms with the demands of the errors of the past on the energies of the present and future. It may be that the book-buying public, after all of the sex manuals, was prime for a non-fiction book that reads like a good novel. However, what is clear is that, in Brown's words, "history has a way of intruding upon the present." After reading the descriptions of the Chivington and Sand Creek Massacres and the slaughter at Wounded Knee, it becomes far more difficult to feign surprise at MyLai, and mumble convincingly that that's just not the sort of thing that American boys will do. One's excitement over the Pentagon Papers is somewhat diminished by Brown's account of how and why the government's Indian policy was formulated and executed. Out of it all, one begins to understand that Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee is much more than a description of events that occurred more than 80 years ago.

To be sure, Brown is concerned with as it was, yet that concern is tempered, if not totally determined, by as it is. "Americans," he advises, "who have always looked westward when reading about this period should read this book facing eastward."

Still, it remains to be seen if the moral appeal implicit in this book will evoke a response from "the land of the thief and the home of the slave," as DuBois called it; partly because, as an Indian woman who had been on Alcatraz told me recently, "People are brought up with the idea that all these things the white people have done to the Indians was done a long time ago. A lot of people don't realize that it's still going on."