Buffalo or Corn? Corn or Buffalo? Who’s on First?

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Hunt Buffalo! Plant Corn! Hunt Buffalo! Reap Corn! The Solutions to the “Indian Question” fly fast and furious. But wherever there is land, only one solution will do…


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By corn-planting time, two thousand Kiowas and twenty-five hundred Commanches were settled on the new reservation. For the Commanches there was something ironic in the government’s forcing them to turn away from buffalo hunting to farming. The Commanches had developed an agricultural ecnomy in Texas, but the white men had come there and seized their famrlands, focing them to hunt buffalo in order to survive. Now this kindly old man, [Indian Agent] Bald Head [Lawrie] Tatum, was trying to tell them they should take the white man’s road and go to farming, as if the Indians knew nothing of growing corn. Was it not the Indian who first taught the white man how to plant corn and make it grow?

Dee Brown
Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee
1970