I’ve long had the sense that my house is built on other peoples’ graves. I’m not trying to sound all “woo-woo” spooky as if I’m telling a ghost story. My parents built this house ten years ago on a partially-cleared acre of land in northern Wisconsin. Within the last 100-200 years, it seems very probable that Native Americans were forced off this land so white settlers could set up camp and become lumberjacks and dairy farmers.

The sad part is that I don’t even know the history of this area. I grew up in western Wisconsin, which was and is sparsely) populated by the Ojibwe tribes. We learned a little about the Ojibwe in school but I honestly don’t have a clue what tribe(s) populated the area I live in now. I realize how pathetic my ignorance is as I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. BMHAWK chronicles the systematic extermination of Native American tribes across the areas now known as the United States in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Simply put, white people were cruel and inhumane murderers who directly or indirectly slaughtered the relatively few thousands of Native Americans left after nearly four centuries of European colonization.

I am ashamed to be white when I read how my white forefathers basically stole land from the Cheyenne and Navaho and Sioux, forcing them them to live on ever-shrinking plots of land without enough game for hunting. If the soldiers didn’t kill the Indians in battle, disease, malnutrition or starvation did.

For much of the book, I’ve wondered how any of this tragedy could have been avoided. Then I realized I am part of the problem. I was still trying to figure out a way for whites to coexist with Indians in North America. It probably wasn’t possible. White people from the United States had absolutely no rights to the Native Americans’ lands but we thought we did. We didn’t respect them or their rights of ownership – they were here first, after all – but I’m not entirely sure why. Was it our belief in white supremacy? If gold had been discovered in territory owned and actually occupied by other white people, say the French or Dutch, there is simply no way we could’ve gotten away with stealing white people’s land through manipulative, fraudulent treaties. We would have respected them too much.

Why didn’t we respect Native Americans’ rights to the territories now known as the United States? Were the Indians’ nomadic ways simply too foreign to us? If North America had been divided into what we knew as legal territories and “owned” by the various tribes (who had what we thought of as “documentation” to prove it) would that have changed anything?

I don’t have the answers. All I have are questions. To my Native sisters and brothers, if I may call you that, I am truly sorry. If only that were enough.