Cozzens points out that the tribes were at such odds with each other that many even allied themselves with the Army to defeat their historic foes, other Native Americans. That Native Americans were united as a people in opposition to the United States. Cozzens says the Government never had such a policy, though in practice the army carried out numerous examples of what we would now call ethnic cleansing.ģ. That the Government’s policy was exterminationist. Cozzens says that many members of the Army’s high command as well as those posted to the frontier were, on the whole, personally sympathetic to the plight of the Indians.Ģ. That the army was hell-bent on killing Indians.
But I never read what was certainly the most influential book of my generation about America’s treatment of the Native Americans, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” though I did read many years later another very influential book, “Little Big Man,” a terrific read later turned into a terrific movie starring Dustin Hoffman.Ĭozzens is very clear in his public statements that he wrote the book as a corrective to “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” and to what he terms the three most egregious myths about this period:ġ. Everything I knew came from casually seeing things in the popular culture, including movies, TV, the counterculture of the ‘60s and, not unimportantly, the new age mythologies about Native Americans since then. I knew little about native Americans or the Indian Wars prior to reading this book. Rivken award of the American Foreign Service Association for officers who have “exhibited extraordinary accomplishment involving initiative, integrity, intellectual courage and constructive dissent.” He was a career foreign service officer, recently retired, who has written or edited some 17 books on the Civil War and Indian Wars, all while serving in the Foreign Service. Author Peter Cozzens is one of those guys someone like me can only look upon in wonderment.
This is a terrific book and a great read about an important era in American history, one that shapes our view of ourselves as Americans to this day.
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