�I have spent the past several hours now thinking about the notion that masters �shall be entitled to their labor,� and at the risk of overstating, it seems to me that entitlement is key to nearly all atrocities, and that any threat to perceived entitlement will provoke hatred,� writes Derrick Jensen, in The Culture of Make Believe.

What if we are talking about systematic and codified hatred �masquerading as economics,� he asks.

Is there really a �distinction� between hate groups, for example, the KKK, and the U.S. government, specifically, since the latter claims to protect �all of society,� yet its judicial and penal systems dispenses �justice� in favor of the wealthy and powerful while surveillance technology and punishment is reserved primarily for people of color and the poor and �powerless?�

What are practices of enslavement and genocide if not atrocities revealing the extent to which the perpetrators despise the victims? If so, is it possible to recognize how the problem begins, Jensen argues, �when those [the entitled] despise do not go along with - and have the power and wherewithal to not go along with - the perceived entitlement�?

With large-scale projects, hatred is a funny thing. The longer and deeper it is felt, Jensen writes, the less it feels like hatred. It becomes �traditions, economics, religion,� hardly recognizable to the perpetrators or believers. But

Hatred is perceptible when it is no longer normal, tucked away in �tradition,� for example. But it was always there, in the rhetoric of superiority that �works to maintain the entitlement, hatred and direct force remain underground.� Let the rhetoric fail, then �force and hatred waits in the wings, ready to explode.�

Murder one Indian and the U.S. judicial system decides if the murder fits its criteria for a hate crime, but how would the same system rule regarding �the dispossession of an entire culture�? Well, �reason� supports the dispossession, Jensen writes, and reason �certainly cannot be rejected by Courts of justice.� If �the entire system is based upon injustice.� then Supreme Court is obligated to codify this injustice into law, he explains. Furthermore, �33 percent of the land mass of the continental United States was never ceded by treaty� and is therefore, �held illegally,� but this fact is not a crime of hatred for those entitled by right to possesses that which it conquers - and the conquest �cannot be questioned.�

Resistance begins with questioning regimes of State power. Defiance is �not go along with� not only the practices but the accepted reasoning, justification legitimized in the rhetoric and legal claims of the entitled. It would be �unwise,� Jensen argues, to exclude a nation from consideration as a hate group since, as a state with power, it is entitled to confiscate land, cultural artifacts, and enslave and murder, that is, �inflict violence and terror,� at will against those it despises.

The day had dawned beautifully, and �the sun shone forth bright and clear upon the camp of the Seventh Cavalry on Wounded Knee Creek.�

So begins acclaimed historian Heather Cox Richardson�s Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre, a vivid narrative of an unforgivable atrocity on the plains of Turtle Island. For such a well-documented history, Wounded Knee�s narrative has Howard Zinn smiling!

Wounded Knee contextualizes the impact on the lives of the Sioux (Lakota) in the plains with the opening up of the Western frontier. Richardson�s narrative specifically focuses on the mid-term elections of 1890, the domestic policies in South Dakota, and the economic and political expediency of Washington�s political and military leaders to hurry and get the job done and, above all, make it profitable for the wealthy financiers of democracy.

Passages in Wounded Knee make you forget the year there is 1890 and the year here is 2012 and the massacre of nearly 300 Sioux (Lakota) men, women, and children happened on U.S. soil, until you remember it has happened in Wilmington, N.C. and this brand of U.S. diplomacy was imported to My Lai, Vietnam and recently to Haditha, Iraq. It has all happened before for the policies, the corruption, of politicians (Republicans and Democrats), their wealthy financiers living then on K Street in Washington, the racism of these representatives and military personnel supported and endorsed and even embellished by Republican-leaning and liberal media newspapers.

Of course, capitalism is experiencing one of its �economic crises,� and Americans are looking around for a scapegoat.

But all roads converge in Washington, D.C., Richard argues, where the fate of the Indigenous people was sealed long before December 29, 1890. �The soldiers who pulled the triggers in South Dakota simply delivered the sentence.�

The Battle of Little Bighorn, in which the Sioux defeated General George A. Custer, lasted only 30 minutes, but the ensuing battles for the right to own the land continues to this day.

Richardson writes: �Indiana needed to preserve the land as it was to conserve the animals at the heart of their economy.� The land was �critical to the Sioux way of life.� But to the Big railroad moguls and financiers the land was money, wealth. Army incursions onto Indigenous lands were frequent, as frequent as talks were �off,� and treaties broken. After Little Bighorn, Washington and the public alike feared an �Indian uprising,� �bigger than anything �Americans� had seen before. For Washington, �progress� was developing the Western plains without or without the �hostiles,� as the Indigenous populations who resisted were called. American saw �progress� and the Indigenous were obstacles to that progress.

�Western boosters,� writes Richardson, saw a common enemy in these stubborn Indians who refused to give up their lands and, worse, continued their own economic system of survival, which left the land �undeveloped� and the animals on it free to graze and grow. From Benjamin Harrison�s administration in Washington spreads the pogrom: the �march to civilization� (well ahead of Adolph Hitler) in which Americans were encouraged by the politicians with the interests of big business moguls in mind to settle in the West. Leave the clearing of land to the government. The Indians will submit to removal from their lands onto reservations where they will be expected to be �happy and law-abiding� people - or they will be killed. A dead Indian is a �good Indian.�

In �the march to civilization� pogrom, the Indigenous people had to become - farmers!

The rations on the reservation? You can promise all day long and never have to deliver when you are superior and entitled. So, of course, the rations, as Richardson shows, were a �muddle of dishonesty.� You can only imagine how a once autonomous people were now forced to witness their children, wives, parents, and the elderly die from starvation.

No one starved at the reservation agencies which sprang up everywhere. It was big business, a source of income and a path to a great career higher up the ranks of government. Administrators and staff personnel came after real estate brokers and carpenters. The religious set up churches and chapels, doctors established clinics and teachers schools, and railroad teamsters moved supplies from warehouses to distribute food and clothes to the new settlers and to the Indigenous people. Subjugation is a prosperous enterprise!

Richardson presents newspaper ads after newspaper add and even some government official notices, enticing citizens to drop everything in the East and in the South and come start a fresh new, prosperous life in the West. And yes, they lie, they lie, and they lie some more! White settlers came and found infertile lands and endured brutally cold winters and summers when the sun burned crops. Blacks, then as now, were conditioned to expect the �American Dream� to work for them too! And they came and found the same racism experienced in the East or in the South. Americans came, as Wounded Knee shows, full of hope, for they trusted the government and believed it had their best interests at the center of the �march to civilization.� The settlers did not want to look too deeply at Washington�s �march of civilization.�

Many from the Indigenous population submitted to the civilizing process in order to fend off starvation and the brutal conditions of the reservations. The �progressives� came to work on the side of the government, (often, as Richardson points out, joining law enforcement agencies) while others served as official and �unofficial� �negotiators� to the local reservation agents. But the �hostiles,� such as Sitting Bull, remained certain that the market enterprise was not only detrimental to the people but to the land as well. For exercising his human right to lead the people and to maintain some community familiar to the Sioux, Frank Leslie�s �blamed the entire mess in South Dakota on Sitting Bull, and highlighted the terrible threat that Miles was gradually bringing under control with U.S. troops.�

In the meantime, the local, politically-appointed agents and the agents at Indian Affairs in Washington called for more military enforcement to subdue the �hostiles.� An impending �Indian Uprising� was inevitable, despite the lack of a threat of war from the Indigenous population since the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn and �the subsequent rounding up and removal of all Indians to reservations.� But in the atmosphere of the 1890 mid-term election fever, when the Republicans want to hold on to power and the Democrats want to gain control of the Congress, the parties looked to the Indians. The media invoked the images: cannibals, savages, hostiles preparing for war against white America.

Ignorance and fear abound once the Sioux take up the Ghost Dance in South Dakota. Wounded Knee shows how the dance spread from the Southwest to the plains.

The Ghost Dance had a messenger named Wovoka who �combined his traditional culture with that of the settlers,� and who claimed �God told him that the Indians must live at peace among themselves and with the settlers.� Richardson writes: �God charged Wovoka to �take charge of things in the west, while President Harrison would attend to matters in the east.�� In turn, Wovoka taught the Indians that they �must work hard and forebear lying or stealing,� and �periodically,� they must perform �a five-day dance.�

Wounded Knee argues that Sitting Bill was not enthusiastic about the Ghost Dance, however, he permitted its performance. Agents, in turn, believed they discovered proof of a conspiracy to overthrow the government, beginning with �traditionalists� such as Sitting Bull, famous, as these traditionalists are, �for their hostility to Americans expansion, the same hostility that had, in the past, left hundreds of people dead.� Agent James McLaughlin led the crusade to get rid of the traditionalists.

At the Interior Department, rumors became reports of �crazy dancers� on the warpath. The Secretary was warned: the situation was ��very critical�� and Sitting Bull was preparing for war! Frank Leslie�s reported that ��the So-called High Priest of the Indian Messiah Craze,� Sitting Bull, is �deliberately fomenting disaffection among the Sioux.�

The arrival of troops at Pine Ridge in November did not halt Daniel Royer�s missives from the agency. As shrill as ever, they now declared that �friendly Indians� see Sitting Bull and a conglomeration of tribes descending on the Americans on the plains. The Indians are coming! When: in spring! Royer, writing to the Acting Commissioner R.V. Belt at the Office of Indian Affairs, demanded that the traditionalist / Ghost Dancers be arrested immediately!

Richardson captures the confusion, blunders, and the fear of the self-terrorized leadership in Washington, and she does so without failing to inform the reader of what seat of power is at stake or what career to enhance, what voters need be garnished by swift and effective resolution of the �Indian problem.�

General Nelson A. Miles, hailed by Harper�s Weekly as a �man who understood and sympathized with Indians,� in contrast to an administration that valued �loyalty� over �competency,� disseminated Miles� concern about a pending �Indian uprising.� Miles told reporters that Indians would ��prefer to die fighting rather than starve peacefully.�� To an already hysterical community of politicians, agents, both local and in Washington, and to settlers, and businessmen, this was not good news. The time has come!

The Indigenous people did not have to ask by what criteria are these white men selected to become leaders of their people.

And it could not be a worse time for the Sioux. The �debacle� in Samoa (mid-1890 crisis in the Pacific) granted the wishes of those who championed the oceans as the �highways to new markets.� Federal funds, writes Richardson, were �redirected� away from �the army and toward the navy,� an action that threatened to reduce commands of the senior officers. This was not good news for General Miles at Indian Affairs! What would become of his �presidential ambitions�?

General Miles had to make a decision: send troops to Pine Ridge or not? According to Richardson, Miles� decision to send troops to South Dakota was more a matter of asserting the �army�s precedence over politicians.� From Miles� perspective in Washington, the army was in danger of losing funding. As Richardson shows, for Miles, the �mobilization was about the military�s very survival,� particularly in light of the crisis in the Pacific. The public and politicians alike were calling for the U.S. to strengthen the navy.

Miles tried to blame others such as Col. James W. Forsyth, but in the end, he pointed to President Harrison. As Miles later recounted, the president �forced him to chose between the Sioux and his hopes for a political future�adding these considerations his anxiety about the nation�s commitment to the army.�

In other words, Richardson writes, General Miles decided on what is best for the nation as a whole.

And the U.S. Army lived on to tell its story:

So, are confused again as to what era is this? Do we see the U.S. today as a product of �progress� and the �march to civilization�? We have, as so many �freed� people like to inform us, a �Black� President Barrack Obama now. Oh, the nonsense of the �progressives� these days!

The last words of Wounded Knee are given over to a man who worked �his way through white schools� and served as a mediator �negotiating the terrain between Sioux and post-Civil War Americans.� �Ohiyesa� became Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman, �the Sioux doctor.�

(Dr. Eastman was not a �hated� Indian, or was he?)

Eastman married reformer Elaine Goodale, who, as he later wrote, never tired of condensing to him, and whose �unflagging insistence that Indians must adopt,� led to his divorce. But on December 30, 1890, the day after the massacre, Eastman led a group of �fifteen white men, reporters, and photographers,� to the field where the dead and wounded fell.

�In the end, the Sioux doctor condemned the America he knew.� He gave up his traditional ways and found �prejudice and butchery in the name of economic progress.�

�� [A]nd nothing was ever lost as the love remained�� (Leslie Silko, Ceremony)

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.