Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1998
Citation
American history is full of fantastic and important stories like those of the Buffalo Soldiers, stories with the power to spellbind audiences-even audience of difficult seventhgraders- while revealing what America has been about and, to a degree many would wish to deny, continues to be in the present.
Black Valor is another book about heroification, a degenerative process (much like calcification) that makes people over into heroes. Through this process, the American educational media turn flesh-and-blood individuals into icons, perfect creatures whose conflicts, pain, ambiguities, and human frailties are polished out of existence. This is another example of a hidden curriculum that denies the humanity of Indians and produces propaganda casting them as the "bad guys," "marauding Indians," "wild Indians," or just plain "enemies" in the American saga. The essential story, however, is the nastier one of the US Government using one group of oppressed people to disenfranchise another, with both the Indians and Buffalo Soldiers seriously compromised and demoralized in the process. Discussions of historical truths in the US are rarely glamorous because we have inherited a colonialist past that subjugated human dignity and freedom in the name of manifest destiny.
Abstract
Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska- Lincoln
Comments
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 4, Fall 1998, pp. 346-347