num_pages: 418
description: Jennings C. Wise added a new dimension to our understanding of the American Indian when he wrote of their history in religious and political terms, as a part of the world drama of conflicting religions. The Red Man in the New World Drama, his carefully documented saga of the Indian people, was first published in 1931. Now revised and updated by Vine Deloria, Jr., Wise s seminal work is a fascinating chronicle of a past marked both by tragedy and by greatness, and a witness to a present actively seeking new definitions and manifestations of tribalism.In Wise's perspective on the early history of America, leaders such as Dekanawida, Hiawatha, and Tamenend stand out against a background of treachery and bloodshed stemming from pervasive Jesuit interest in obtaining and settling new lands. Although the Proclamation of 1763 marked the transit ion of the Indian tribes from vassals of the British Crown to political dependents of the United States, Wise demonstrates how men like Colonel Joseph Brant, Little Turtle, Tecumseh, John Ross, and Osceola were unable to prevent their tribes from becoming pawns in the diplomatic machinations of Great Britain, France, and the United States.As a recurring symbol of the cycle of broken treaties, retaliatory attacks, new treaties broken again, Wise uses the seventy-six-year struggle of the Yankton Sioux to regain the Red Pipe Stone Quarry in Minnesota, a traditionally sacred ground. The government s claim on that land led, in Wise s view, to the so-called Minnesota Massacre, the Sioux Uprising of 1874, the death of Custer, the killing of Sitting Bull, and the Massacre at Wounded Knee. It was not until 1927, with Wise as legal counsel, that the Supreme Court upheld the original contention of the Sioux, though they were irrevocably divested of their shrine.Continuing from Wise's sweeping narrative, Deloria examines not only the later inn ovations made by the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 and the establishment of the Indian Claims Commission in 1946, but the birth of the American Indian Movement in 1966 and the seizing of Alcatraz in 1970 by Indians of All Tribes. The Red Man in the New World Drama is vitally relevant today for the insight it offers into the past and the nature of the relationship that has existed between Indians and white America. In the words of Mr. Deloria, "It should be considered the opening wedge by which questions of ancient import are introduced into the contemporary world... [so that] people will be inspired to reject conventional histories of the American experience and to search for a theory of history that will encompass the struggles of all groups in American society."
language: English
title: The Red Man in the New World Drama: A Politico-Legal Study With a Pageantry of American Indian History
titlecomplete: The Red Man in the New World Drama: A Politico-Legal Study With a Pageantry of American Indian History
ratings_count: 1
publisher: MacMillan