Across America: Wounded Knee was where the Indian wars ended. On the icy morning of December 29th, 1890, the US 7th Cavalry mowed down 300 fleeing Indian men, women and children with Hotchkiss guns installed on the high ground.
The fighting spirit went out of the Indians; they allowed themselves to be rounded up and held in prison camps by the US army until 1924. Then the prison camps became reservations.
By coincidence, the atrocity occurred in the very place where Chief Crazy Horse's father and mother buried his heart and bones in 1877, after he was arrested and bayonetted with the help of traitors working for the White Man.
In the middle of the mass grave stands a grey marble column engraved with the name of the perpetrator, Col James W. Forsyth. His victims had names such as Shoots the Bear, Picked Horses and Chase in Winter. "Many innocent women and children who knew no wrong died here," the chiselled letters conclude.
Prairie grass grows wild over the knoll. The artificial flowers are faded by the sun and caked with dust. "It's a disgrace, the way they leave it," I hear a tourist from California say. "The locals asked me to put food up here, for the spirits," another tells her companions.
In the Third World, it is the children who beg; in Indian country, the beggars are grown men. Paul Long Woman approaches me, his long black hair in a ponytail, a baseball cap on his head, his breath reeking of whiskey.
His ancestors from the Hunkpapa and Lakota tribes survived the massacre. Could he have $40? He has three children and his wife is pregnant and they are out of propane gas. They live just over there, in the trailer homes that make up Wounded Knee village.
"It's really bad for us here. There's no jobs on the reservation." Tribal leaders and a group called Four Directions are leading an unprecedented drive to encourage Indians to vote on November 2nd.
"Politics is no good here," Long Woman says, alluding to local elections on Pine Wood reservation, which coincide with the national poll. "I'm gonna vote for a Democrat," he continues. "Bush is too hard, going around and bombing everybody - like the 7th Cavalry killed us."
The comparison with Iraq comes up again, two hours' drive to the east, in Rosebud. Though 75 men of his tribe of 24,000 serve with US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, Charlie Colombe, the president of the Rosebud Sioux tribe, is suspicious of the Bush administration's motives.
"We got two oilmen in the White House," Colombe says, referring to Bush and Vice-President Cheney. "And they've got a helluva lot of oil. I think we ought to create a Bureau of Iraqi Affairs (an allusion to the unpopular Bureau of Indian Affairs), put oil in trust and give them a constitution that cannot work, a situation where nobody's held accountable, where the breadwinner of the family is probably the woman via a welfare system, and they will fight amongst themselves forever and we can just pump the oil and not count most of it."
Except for women breadwinners, it sounds pretty much like what the US has done so far in Iraq. "Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, all have coal and oil," Colombe continues. "The Black Hills were the largest gold mine in the world for 100 years; the 1868 Treaty gave them to us forever, but we never saw the royalties. Oklahoma was Indian territory until someone discovered black gold there. In the 1960s the federal government was still selling off Indian land on this reservation and not paying us for it."
With such a legacy of betrayal by the White Man, does Colombe trust candidates to keep promises? "I trust them to be what they have been," he says. "But we cannot whip 'em, so we best join 'em. More can be done from the inside than looking through the window and crying."
In South Dakota, the Indian vote determined the 2002 senatorial election, which a Democrat won by 524 votes. Last June another Democrat won a congressional by-election by 3,005 votes, again with Indian support.
Indian turnout tripled during that two-year period, largely due to the efforts of an Irish-American named Bret Healy, a former Democratic congressional aide and former executive director of the Democratic Party in South Dakota.
As a leader of Four Directions, Healy has put 60,000 miles on his Dodge 4 x 4 in the past year, criss-crossing South Dakota in the effort to get Indians to register. At present he is racing against time and bureaucracy to establish absentee polling stations where they can vote for five weeks prior to November 2nd.
Although the vast majority of Indians vote Democrat, Healy insists that the goal of Four Directions is to empower the Indians. He quotes Cecilia Fire Thunder, a candidate for the presidency of the Oglala Sioux tribe, who exhorted Indians to vote in June saying: "You may always be poor, but your children don't have to be."
The Indian vote is too small to make or break George W. Bush's re-election. But South Dakota is crucial for another reason. Congressional elections also take place on November 2nd. The House will probably remain in Republican hands, but the Democrats stand a chance of winning a majority in the Senate. And the most powerful Democrat in the Senate, the minority leader and White House bugbear Tom Daschle, is standing for re-election in South Dakota. Daschle faces a serious challenge from a former Republican congressman.
So Daschle is campaigning hard, reminding Indians that he obtained $5 million to fight the prairie dogs which destroy the grass the cattle of the Cheyenne River Sioux graze on, and another $8.5 million to rebuild bison herds on reservations. "A strong voice for Indian Country," say the Daschle signs that dot endless plains.
Under the Bush administration, per capita healthcare spending for Indians, at $1,900, is half what it is for prisoners. Bush has slashed funds for Indian schools by 15 per cent. "Some of our schools are 90 years old," says tribal leader Colombe. "Some were condemned 40 years ago; they have asbestos in them."
The Republicans know they can't win the Indian vote in the Senate race, so they are trying to discredit Indian voters. In June dozens of Indians were turned away because they did not have photo IDs, though the law clearly says an affidavit is sufficient.
And to Colombe's fury, Randy Frederick, the GOP chairman for South Dakota, has just reiterated accusations that the 2002 Senate race was "stolen" from the Republicans. "He should be tarred and feathered," Colombe says. "He's destroying the little bit of rapport between whites and Indians that the Governor established.
"Proving that we're voting in a fair way is more important than the results of the election," Colombe continues. "All I want is for people not to malign and harass Indian voters, not to create division for political purposes." To this end, Colombe, other tribal leaders and voting activists are appealing for outside auditors so the Republicans will not be able to say the vote was rigged on the reservations.
I wanted to ask Colombe about something else: the blight of alcoholism among American Indians. Because alcohol is banned on the reservations, the whiskey-pedlars have set up shop just across the state line in Nebraska. That morning at White Clay, I had seen Indians staggering and lying unconscious by the roadside. "Hey sis," the drunken men I tried to talk to slurred. "Give us some money." A higher percentage of Indians than any other ethnic group in the US serve in the armed forces, and the wretches in White Clay were all veterans. Chris Chief Eagle was just coherent enough to tell me he had participated in the 1983 invasion of Grenada.
Colombe did not seem to mind the question. "It's a case of people who gave up hope," he said. "It's that friggin' simple. How do you stop it? Give people the opportunity to work. America is built on the opportunity to work. Indians have not got there yet."
Tomorrow: Churchgoers in Colorado Springs, "the Vatican of the Evangelicals", believe a vote for Bush is a vote for God.
