Monday was Indigenous People's Day, renamed from Columbus Day, to honor the lives and

histories lost to centuries of colonization. Often the stories shared about the first

people here are those of loss, like the trail of tears in the Massacre at Wounded Knee.

In this midweek podcast, David Troyer, and a jibway professor of literature at the University

of Southern California, offers a counter-narrative to this tragic account of Indian life in his book,

The Heartbeat, a Wounded Knee, Native America from 1890 to the present. This conversation

originally aired in 2018.

It was a pretty vanilla vision. He basically said, we have to get along with white people,

you have to work hard, you can't cheat or steal or drink. If we do all these things,

well then we will be reunited with our loved ones and ancestors in the afterworld. It was

almost Protestant and its insistence on a kind of work ethic. As it spread and grew and

other tribes interpreted it differently, some people thought if they did the dances in

the right way and wore the right shirts and did all the right things, that they would

be among the chosen and the saved and everyone else would be wiped away in a massive flood

or some kind of catastrophe. Meaning all the white people.

Meaning all the white people and all the native people who didn't do this stuff. The

ghost dance was a religion that was growing around the Pine Ridge Agency. There was a

troop build up out of fear that this religion would lead once again to open armed conflict

with the government. It was never going to go there. The increased presence of troops

put people on edge around the same time, sitting bull was murdered when they tried to apprehend

him. That scared most of the native folk at Pine Ridge. Everyone was running for cover

and contingent of the reconstituted 7th cavalry stopped Spotted Elks band Sue as well as

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