After sweat lodge

Injun country

I just finished listening to Shalimar the Clown, as I rolled into the Crow Nation and the Battlefield of General Custer and Sitting Bull. Perhaps the novel put me in a dark mood about the whole thing. Perhaps it is also my nature to purposefully not visit battlefields and war sites, yet I drove here on the urging of a kind woman I bought homemade bar-b-que sauce from. As Shalimar concluded, i felt waves of shock and horror, and tears of injustice; it covered a number of social and political issues, and described in detail the methods of holocausts and ethnic cleansings in recent history. Maybe that is why when I looked at the battlefield, I saw a place where a people stood up, faught, and for a moment, won the battle against being cleansed from their homelands, from the face of the earth. And I was a little angry it didn't help them in the long run. I was angry that the site was not a celebration of their victory, but a mourning of the defeat of these troops, a memorial for this fallen general. I was confused. I suppose I was supposed to feel patriotic pride for those fallen men, but weren't the winners the Americans too? Wasn't the spirit that won the day that day (133rd anniversary next Thursday) the same that won our Revolution? Yet we do not celebrate them the same way.

As I sat in the McDonalds later, seeking my WiFi fix, I saw the people of the reservation, fattening their children in the American Way on French Fries. They are living on the reservation that Sitting Bull fought to be free of (a concentration camp? a relocation camp? a zoo?). And McDonalds moved in to feed the captive audience. Is that is American spirit?

Afterword:
I want to point out that the Americans had restraint when it came to the ethnic cleansing of the countryside. People are still alive and live to tell the tale. Their culture may be altered completely, to something unrecognizable from what it was. But perhaps culture is supposed to be fluid, adjusting with the times. It still feels too forced.