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Indian Yell: The Heart of an American Insurgency
by Michael Blake
2006, 170 pages, $21.95
Northland Publishing

Michael Blake, author of Dances with Wolves, and Northland Publishing of Flagstaff should be very proud of Indian Yell. The book chronicles the seizing of the immense western landscape and the subjugation of its free-roaming inhabitants from 1864, when a settler’s “decrepit cow” wandered into a Sioux encampment, leading to the massacre of 86 Sioux - mostly women and children - by US infantrymen, until 1891, when soldiers slaughtered several hundred Sioux - again mostly women and children - at Wounded Knee.

Photographs and Blake’s storytelling bring to life the Indian leaders who were as great as many men in White history: Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Satank, Geronimo, Cochise, and more. We catch glimpses as well of White men who were downright lowlifes and of some who might have been great had they not been caught up in such a dirty campaign. One name resurfaces throughout the book: Custer.

General George Armstrong Custer “identified deeply with [the Indian’s] way of being and especially their wild, unharnessed way of living,” Blake said. Yet he led march after march against the Indians for a government intent upon annihilating that which he admired. The Indian wars and Custer himself manifested a dichotomy that plagues human society and human psyche: the clash between wildness and civilization, between freedom and encumbrance, flow and form, need and greed, passion and control.

Custer died facing the enemy, the death that every warrior he fought against dreamed of for himself, and “civilization” won the Indian wars - with acts of treachery and unbridled savagery. Now, time and the hindsight afforded from a position of victory allows us to admire those great Indian leaders. As poet Wayne Dodd says about Satank, there is “something fine” about a 70-year-old warrior who will tear away his own flesh to escape manacles and die facing the enemy rather than be sent to rot on the reservation.

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