The Try-Works

Holocaust hucksters and racist shitheels who make their living by defrauding the poorest people in the nation.  Sounds just like Joseph Trimbach’s kind of people, don’t it?

Eight decades after the massacre, the village of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation was known mainly by its trading post.  The post was a descendant of one of the many franchises the Indian Bureau had granted white businessmen to keep Indians in food (usually rotten), clothing (usually thin), and hardware (usually frail).  General William Tecumseh Sherman had observed in the nineteenth century, “A reservation is a parces of land inhabited by Indians and surrounded by thieves,” but the trading post franchises brought the thieves onto the reservations.  The Wounded Knee Trading Post was a superior specimen.  Its owners, the Gildersleeve and Czywczynski families, had strewn billboards for seventy-five miles that announced, SEE THE WOUNDED KNEE MASSACRE SITE, VISIT THE MASS GRAVE.  POSTCARDS, CURIOUS, DON’T MISS IT!  The postcards showed slaughtered Indians, including Chief Big Foot, frozen in the 1890 snow.  The traders enlivened their commerce with beadwork, quilts and other cuious bought low from Oglalas and sold high.  A Catholic priest once watched Mrs. Czywczynski barter a beader to a stingy $3.50 for an exquisite work, then turn around and sell it for $12.00.

The traders doubled as creditors, lending their Indian patrons $10 at humble interest of $2.25 a week.  As village postmasters, they also offered a rudimentary auot-payment–opening the mail of customers who had run tabs, cashing their checks without asking, paying their bills at the post, and calling other shopkeepers across the reservation to see if debts were owed them too.  There had been calls to boycot the post, but none had worked.  The post was the only story for a dozen miles, and the many carless Oglalas of Wounded Knee had no choice but to buy groceries and other wares at its inflated prices.

Steve Hendricks — The Unquiet Grave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country.