Brutal History.

• Author: Sturgis, Amy H.
• Position: The Wild Frontier - Review

Conflict between whites and Native Americans didn't end at Wounded Knee.

When then-Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt walked out on his interview for the John Stossel Goes to Washington ABC special last year, he joked that he would fire whoever set up that meeting about the Bureau of Indian Affairs' mismanagement of funds. Clearly, Babbitt did not wish to explain how the bureau misplaced billions of dollars of Amerindian money--or, for that matter, why the BIA exists at all, since the 1975 Indian Self-Determination Act formally terminated its reason to exist. Despite increasing calls for Amerindian sovereignty by the American Indian Movement and other groups, the Bureau of Indian Affairs celebrated its 175th anniversary in 2000 with an apology for past behavior, but no promises of new policy for the 21st century.

In the face of this impasse in U.S.Amerindian relations, new investigations of the history between whites and American Indians are needed. Not only would such explorations help readers understand how the current situation came to pass, but better history also could inform better policy in the future. If, for example, historians properly distinguished among native nations rather than treating "Indians" as a monolithic entity, then perhaps policymakers would also come to respect the divergent political, economic, and social cultures of different indigenous peoples.

In The Wild Frontier, retired attorney William M. Osborn attempts to chronicle one of the most emotional aspects of that history. His subject is the atrocities committed during "our longest and cruelest war"--the hostilities between white settlers and Amerindian natives--from the establishment of Virginia in 1622 to the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890. Osborn's effort is noteworthy for several reasons. First, he rightly takes issue with recent stereotypes of Amerindians as tranquil, New Age, uber-environmentalist sages. His concern about ethnic stereotypes is justified because two-dimensional interpretations motivated by prejudice for or against historical actors unjustly ignore the complexity of the individuals, their decisions, their particular cultures, and their times. Old, racist caricatures and New Age adoration both tell the readers far more about the historians' era than about the era supposedly being studied.

In addition, Osborn chooses to look at atrocities from all sides, including not only settler-Amerindian and Amerindian-settler violence, but also war...