Does anyone read Henry David Longfellow anymore? Why would they?
"By the shore of Gitchee Gumee, by the shining big sea water, stood the wigwam of Nokomis, daughter of the moon, Nokomis..." I don't think anyone's forced to memorize those lines anymore. Not only does it border on poesy, it's probably not all that PC either. Nevertheless ...
A few years ago I picked up a copy of at the Longfellow House in Cambridge. I was in company with an old friend of mine who was in a battle, since lost, with cancer. We walked through the gardens, I bought the book, and then we went for hot chocolate.
Here's a bit that struck me. A poem entitled "To the Driving Cloud."
"Gloomy and dark art thou, O chief of the mighty Omahas ..."
Apparently some such chief had visited the Boston of the 1840's, and Longfellow wrote his romantic vision of what that chief represented. Which became more interesting to me when he included the following:
"Ah! 'tis in vain that with lordly looks of disdain thou dost challenge
Looks of disdain in return, and question these walls and these pavements,
Claiming the soil for thy hunting-grounds, while down-trodden millions
Starve in the garrets of Europe, and cry from its caverns that they, too,
Have been created heirs of the earth, and claim its division."
I don't say it represents a justification for what followed, for the claiming and division of native lands. It's just a snapshot of one moment in time in one man's imagination. In that imagination, Native Americans are the lords of the earth. It is the Europeans who starve and cry. Longfellow died in 1882, eight years before Wounded Knee.