Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, & Dachau

As I was reading Alexie's poem "Inside Dachau," I realized that I had run across Sand Creek and Wounded Knee mentioned in Lies My Teacher Told Me, as well. In chapter four of his book, Loewen briefly writes about how he is glad that many textbooks no longer portray Native Americans as "savages" and how many "are careful to admit brutality on both sides" (115). The examples he gives of white brutality is the massacres of Native Americans at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee. Later, Loewen writes about how textbooks misrepresent and minimize the American Indian wars and again mentions the massacre at Wounded Knee. This time he claims the 1890 massacre as the end of the "Indian resistance" and wars (119-120).

Sherman Alexie's poem "Inside Dachau," is about Alexie and his wife, Diane, visiting Dachau, a German concentration camp. I looked it up briefly and found that was Germany's first concentration camp opened in 1933. It is now a memorial and a museum, which Alexie refers to visiting on a cold, winter morning. Alexie compares the Nazi concentration camps to the death camps and massacres of the United States. Those aren't known like the German camps are. He even refers to this in his poem: "Mikael said, 'but what about all the Dachaus / in the United States? What about the death camps / in your country?'"

I also feel like Alexie is comparing how he and Diane lied to their German hosts, Mikael and Veronika, to how the United States covers up the death camps in its history and the Native massacres unlike the highly publicized faults of Germany. He points to this idea again when he says "...What have we come to see / that cannot be seen in other countries? / Every country hides behind a white door." He also mourns that unlike the Jews and others' whose murdered relatives and ancestors have museums and memorials, his own people and other Native tribes in the U.S. don't have those things: "What do we indigenous people want from our country? / We stand over mass graves. Our collective grief makes us numb. / We are waiting for the construction of our museum."

In the last lines of his poem, Alexie broaching a topic that I think coincides with the purpose Loewen had in mind when writing his book when he says "I wonder which people will light fires next / and which people will soon be turned to smoke. / Dachau was so cold I could see my breath. / I have nothing new to say about death." Alexie is talking about how "history repeats itself" as the saying goes, and he's wondering what people will get massacred or tortured to death next and in what country it will happen. Such needless and cruel death is the same wherever it happens even if people see it differently due to its presentation or lack thereof. Loewen wrote his book on the same premise that history repeats itself yet I think it is his belief that knowledge can change that. He think history only repeats itself when it is ignorant and deceitful history that is taught to future generations. If people know about Sand Creek and Wounded Knee like they know about the Nazi concentration camps, maybe things in the future will be different.