1992, Bantam, NY, 862 pages
In this novelized account of the life of Tecumseh of the Shawnee, whose name means Panther-passing-across, Eckert presents the best footnoted historical novel I have read. The amplification notes alone amount to a reference book. Tecumseh is the most Tribal man that this North American continent has yet produced. To save his people and preserve their way of life and the very environment they occupied, he made a life oath, which he kept, to die fighting the whites. He was the fourth in a band of anti-white warrior-fanatics, after his father, his brother and his adopted white brother. His older brother wrote him the following letter—yes, in English, the Shawnee had been in contact with whites, for 200 years, and knew them well.
In the following letter the modern paleface will, perhaps identify with this stern red man who was called upon by a great white nation to abide by the very laws designed to eliminate him. Note his criticism of the politically correct speech and double-standards of the white elite of his day and compare it to those twisted, yet sacred words, of those elites of our own day. This letter is a treasure that reflects the timeless struggle of free people battling slave societies, a struggle that is always lost, but won’t finally end until the last battle.
“When a white man kills an Indian in a fair fight it is called honorable, but when an Indian kills a white man in a fair fight it is called murder. When a white army battles Indians and wins it is called a great victory, but if they lose it is called a massacre and bigger armies are raised. If the Indian flees before the advance of such armies, when he tries to return he finds the white men are living where he lived. If he tries to fight off such armies, he is killed and the land is taken away. When an Indian is killed, it is a great loss which leaves a gap in our people and a sorrow in our heart; when a white is killed, three our four others step up to take his place and there is no end to it. The white man seeks to conquer nature, to bend it to his will and to use it wastefully until it is all gone and then he simply moves on, leaving the waste behind him and looking for new places to take. The whole white race is a monster who is always hungry and what he eats is land.”
-Chicksika, elder brother of Tecumseh, to Tecumseh, March 19, 1779
Chicksika and Tecumseh both died fighting their sworn enemies in the teeth of the execution of George Washington’s successful policy of killing all wild life and felling all forests—the precursor of the campaign to wipe out the buffalo, which occurred on a large scale in Kentucky—that would lead to the defeat of the trans-Mississippi tribes. Ironically, these men, who were so much more masculine then their enemies that it was as if two different species contended for North America, once slain, left behind the lesser, quitting, half of their people, with the result that American Indian resistance leaders are now committed feminists, who cannot even tolerate the white veneration of the warriors of their racial past.
That is victory as a wasteland, as predicted. Ironically, the cause of freedom and tribal autonomy for which Tecumseh died for is continually attacked by modern mixed-race Native Americans who have bought only the material artifice of their past and stand rank and file among the white monsters of the State to which they eagerly enslave themselves. It occurred to me some time ago, that when the bodies of the great Indians were killed, their spirit did not live on in their bloodline, but in the haunted minds of those who fought them on their own terms in service to something they revered less then their enemies.
A Sorrow in Our Heart is the story of all tribes who have been crushed by the machinery of civilization, is brilliantly done, and should be read by any tribal reconstitution leader or masculinity advocate.
