#norrkoping

This is not a happy story. It isn’t meant to be. Nor is it one that ends. But even more than being a recounting of the terrible atrocities white people have committed against their fellow humans, I think this is a story of the fragility of truth and history, and the importance of voice. It is amazing that these stories can even be told at all hundreds of years after they happened, and throughout the books 400+ pages, I never stopped marveling at the preciousness and delicacy of our history, and lamenting the depths of our depravity.

If you live in the United States, in reading this I think you will be hard-pressed to find at least one name in the book you won’t recognize. Having lived in both Colorado and Ohio, my own personal history is saturated with the names of people in this book. I was dismayed to know that some of our most beautiful places were named for terrible people, and both humbled and horrified to know that the cities and places I frequent were the sites of violence against Native Americans. Going into these places, you’ll find art sculptures along the road of horses, hearts, fish- but nothing to indicate the truth of what happened there, what really should be recognized about that place.

Even more surprising was seeing the names of reservations and Native Americans I have seen before- not on local maps, but in a faraway place. I saw them in the museum of Norrköping, Sweden. The museum was located at the edge of a river, in fact right beside the city’s famous Work History Museum. I used to walk by it several times a week just for the pleasure of walking by the river, and one summer before my parents were due to visit me, I saw a sign hanging outside the museum about a Native American exhibition that would be there. Surprised to find something about Native Americans so far away from America, I made a point of going to the exhibition. There were a few artifacts. But mostly it was photographs, photographs taken at the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, by a Swedish-American photographer named John Alvin Anderson. I haven’t seen his pictures anywhere else, and it’s hard to find more than just a handful on the internet.

Reading this book was an exercise in fighting the surreal. The quotes by the Native Americans in this book are all things I had not read before... in a strictly word-for-word sense. But the things they spoke of were largely not new. They were things that people still rage about today, and it’s heartbreaking to realize that after all these years, very little has changed, and the changes that have taken place were won with tooth, nail, blood, sweat, and never should have been anything that needed to be fought over to begin with.

More than that, it is knowing that the full extent of so many of the languages and cultures of these people have been obliterated and lost to time. It is not just our history that is fragile, but the way we speak, think, live, celebrate, mourn. The world has lost so much color, texture, perspective, life, knowledge, for the loss of these people, all because a handful of ignorant and hateful individuals failed at the very basics of what it is to be decent and human. And imagine, we put the same exact kind of people in power today. Imagine- the same thing could happen to you, if it isn’t happening already.

Astoundingly, there is humor in this book. Rarely will the author insert a wry comment- no, this humor comes from the Native Americans who faced these horrors and still somehow found the strength to laugh in the face of their aggressors. Sometimes literally. For some, it didn’t seem like they could cope any other way.

Not only that, the humanity of these people who were treated so inhumanely is sobering and heartbreaking. It is disturbing to know how many tribes were truly willing to simply share their land even after having been lied and betrayed so many times, and completely understandable how many of them refused to even before seeing this behavior. It is clear from a historical and modern perspective that the Native Americans were between a rock and a hard place, whether they chose to acquiesce or resist. Even those who forfeited their lands were not treated well, or with kindness. Their suffering did not end there, and that is absolutely a lesson that should be remembered today.

Although the book doesn’t delve into the intricacies of the different tribes much, through the accounts given by Native Americans it does give some very general and cursory insight. I will preface this by saying that this is the first book on Native American history I have read and am highly aware that this is a very limited representation of a wide group of peoples, and it is viewing a small portion of their history and that this observation could be an inaccurate one. However, I found it interesting that many of the Native Americans in the book seemed to make some of the choices they made, or were coerced into making them, because they did not want to be perceived as “womanly.” Even back then, and even in a different culture, many men still thought it was unmanly to cry, or to try and reach a compromise instead of for a rifle. In the end though, neither compromise nor bullets saved anyone.