This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This Monday, some parts of the country will celebrate

Indigenous People's Day, renamed from Columbus Day to honor the lives and history lost to centuries

of colonization. What many of us know about the first people here amounts mostly to stories of

loss, like the trail of tears

and the massacre at Wounded Knee. David Troyer, an Ojibwe professor of literature at the University

of Southern California, offers a re-examination of Indian life in his book, The Heartbeat of Wounded

Knee, Native America from 1890 to the present.

He begins his counter-narrative with the confusion that catalyzed the horror in Wounded Knee, South

Dakota in 1890. Troier says frontier soldiers spilled a flood of innocent blood because they were spooked by the ghost

dance, a religion based on the vision of a Paiute spiritual leader named Vavoka.

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 our ancestors in the afterworld.

It was almost Protestant in 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. So the ghost dance was a religion that was growing around the Pine Ridge Agency.

And there was a troop buildup out of fear that this religion would lead once again to open armed conflict with the government.

It was never going to go there.

But the increased presence of troops put people on edge around the same time.

...