Books: The Forked-Tongue Syndrome

BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE by Dee Brown. 487 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $10.95.

On Dec. 29, 1890, nearly 500 troopers of the U.S. 7th Cavalry opened fire on a bedraggled band of Minneconjou Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek, S. Dak. When the last carbine bullet splattered to a stop and the final Hotchkiss shell exploded, more than half the 350 Indian men, women and children were dead. Many were slaughtered as they lay wounded in their tents. Others were hunted down in the surrounding gullies. The massacre concluded with a heavy snowfall that shrouded the dead and closed one of the most distorted periods in U.S. history.

After Wounded Knee, the Plains Indians never again offered serious armed resistance to the manifestors of American destiny. Decades of worthless treaties, search-and-destroy missions, pacification programs, enforced relocations and free-fire zones ended there. The remnants of the Sioux, Cheyenne, Apache and other tribes were concentrated on unfertile, game-poor reservations, where they were bilked by corrupt agents and died of disease, malnutrition and melancholia.

It is not an unfamiliar story. In the last decade or so, after almost a century of saloon art and horse operas that romanticized Indian fighters and white settlers, Americans have been developing a reasonably acute sense of the injustices and humiliations suffered by the Indians. But the details of how the West was won are not really part of the American consciousness. This is hardly unusual. Despite the need to establish credit with the future, people and nations rarely acknowledge their debts to the past.

Like a number of scholars, novelists and moviemakers, Dee Brown, Western historian and head librarian at the University of Illinois, now attempts to balance the account. With the zeal of an IRS investigator, he audits U.S. history's forgotten set of books. Compiled from old but rarely exploited sources plus a fresh look at dusty Government documents. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee tallies the broken pronrses 'tnd treaties, the provocations, massacres. discriminatory policies and condescending diplomacy.

Against this accumulation one sees the Indians' dwindling hopes, illuminated by flashes of courage and desperate efforts to res;st slow annihilation. There were the brilliantly waged wars of chiefs Red Cloud. Little Crow. Crazy Horse and Gall, as well as stoic efforts to save their people by Sitting Bull and Black Kettle.

In an attempt to see history through Indian eyes, Brown liberally enlists the embittered eloquence of the Indians themselves. Following the cliché, most of them actually do speak "with heavy hearts" about their betrayals. Some, like Chief Joseph of the Nez Percés. are sharply ironic. "We do not want churches," he told a white agent. "They will teach us to quarrel about God. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about God."