After the massacre of Wounded Knee, the Indians eked
out a miserable existence on uncultivated and divided territory. Those who had
worked for the Wild West Show returned after a few years, but their luck didn’t
improve. The Redskins were viewed as the remnants of an old world, and the
watchword was now assimilation.
The destruction of a people always happens by degrees, and each phase, in its
own way, is innocent of the preceding one. The spectacle which seized upon the
Indians in the final moments of their history was not the least of the violence perpetrated
against them. It casts our original consent into oblivion. In every case, the
initial infatuation lasted no more than an instant. Then, each time, there
followed the same un-containable destruction. And no words were ever able to
generate its world of things.
So now let’s look. Yes, let’s look very hard, with all our might. Let’s look at
them, from the vantage point of our outrageous ease and prodigality.
And then let’s imagine for a moment – oh, just a brief moment – that everything we have around us, our houses, our furniture, our kit, even our names, our memories, and then our friends, our jobs, everything, absolutely everything could be taken away from us, jeered and confiscated. ‘Oh, of course,’ we say, ‘Yes, yes, we’ve thought about it’, and ‘Obviously we knew about it. ’But it’s all abstract, just words, a hypothesis. Yes, it’s a hypothesis. Other people. A hypothesis. Well, let’s try harder, just a little but harder, to see if we can deduce anything from it. Let’s try telling ourselves, now, that this hypothesis has been going on for a very long time, in fact, my God, it’s been going on forever.
And the people in this photograph no longer have a home, and most of their memories are gone. For them, it’s not just a hypothesis. Look more closely. Yes, you know them, in fact, you know them very well, you’ve seen them a hundred times, two hundred times. Oh of course, they’re not exactly the same, not exactly the same as these people, and yet, if you look carefully, you’ve seen them before.
Let’s take another look. You don’t just feel a strange unease at the sight of their destitution, you also feel a sort of sympathy. It’s existed since the dawn of time, but where, in God’s name, does this sympathy come from? No one knows. It’s something that courses through your body, your eyes, it takes you by the throat and fills your breast with tears. It’s a strange phenomena, sympathy. We must be little like these poor wretches. Because poor wretches is what they are, always the same frail figures, the same cluster of children, the same rags.
Yes. Let’s take another look at them. At the time their history is coming to an end, and ours is beginning. Ah! It’s both moving and painful to look at them. And if we find it painful, if we feel a dull angst, its because, despite the smile we detect on the man’s face, we know, yes, we know very well that they’re going to die. And because they are going to die, and we know it, sensing without seeing it, we suddenly feel very closer to them, like them; except that we are not actually dying; we hardly ever die.
Let’s look at them: they’re the survivors of Wounded Knee. They must be in some sort of camp, a few days after the massacre, a few hours before the grand spectacle takes hold of them and delivers them up to us. And they look at us: the women, the children and the fellow on the right with his funny fur hat, his sad smile, his sorrowful eyes and his US Army jacket snatched, perhaps by an irony of fate, out of a need to cloth himself.
A photograph is a peculiar thing. Truth lives within it as if it were inseparable from its sign. And, all of a sudden, I seem to see not just these poor wretches, but the very incarnation of poverty – as if this testimony exceeded its occasion. And I say to myself: These are Big Foot’s Miniconjou, and will be to the end of time, they’re the performers in the Wild West Show, they’re poor devils, and they belong to the same family as the people who hold out their hand to us, anywhere we find ourselves, outside the cathedral or McDonald’s. Yes, it’s still the same fellow and the same few women sitting on the ground with the ugly face of poverty.
May the fellow from Dakota forgive us, and if he can, return from his past narrative tense with his beggar’s pouch of worries, where shards of History lock together like jaws. Let us take one last look.
Let us love his sorrow: we share his incomprehension, his children are our own, his funny hat suits us! Let’s take a good look at him. It’s a sleepless night. Whisper to me what I must write. But please don’t show me your face anymore, don’t look at me. The earth sorrows, the body is alone. I can’t see anything now. And there you are, a destitute king because you picked the wrong card.
