Page 77 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

Yes, let’s take another look at them, at the time when their history is
coming to an end, and ours is beginning. Ah! it’s both moving and painful to
look at them. And if we find it painful, if we feel a dull angst, it’s because,

despite the smile we detect on the man’s face, we know, yes, we know very
well, that they’re going to die. And because they’re going to die, and we know
it, sensing it without seeing it, we suddenly feel very close to them, like them;
except that we are not actually dying; we hardly ever die.
Let’s look at them: they ’re the survivors of Wounded Knee. They must be
in some sort of camp, a few days after the massacre, a few hours before the

grand spectacle takes hold of them and delivers them up to us. And they look
at us: the women, the children and the fellow on the right with his funny fur
hat, his sad smile, his sorrowful eyes and his US Army jacket snatched,
perhaps by an irony of fate, out of the need to clothe himself.

A photograph is a peculiar thing. Truth lives within it as if it were inseparable
from its sign. And, all of a sudden, I seem to see not just these poor wretches,
but the very incarnation of poverty—as if this testimony exceeded its
occasion. And I say to myself: these are Big Foot’s Miniconjou, and will be

until the end of time, they’re the performers in the Wild West Show, they’re
poor devils, and they belong to the same family as the people who hold out
their hand to us, anywhere we find ourselves, outside the cathedral or
McDonald’s. Yes, it’s still the same fellow and the same few women sitting
on the ground with the ugly face of poverty.