Title: “The Indians Won” Author: Martin Cruz Smith Published: Belmont Productions, 1970; UNM Press, 2024 Publisher: University of New Mexico Press, unmpress.com Paperback: 172 pages ISBN: 978-0-8263-6604-7
“At one magical moment in your early childhood, the page of a book that string of confused alien cyphers - shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.” Alberto Manguel, “A History of Reading”
Native defeat was not the inevitable outcome of confrontations between Anglos and the Indigenous people of North America, according to author Martin Cruz Smith.
Before I write about The Indians Won, here is a very brief history highlighting a few of the interactions between the European/Anglo and the Indigenous People of North America.
Vikings discovered Greenland, Labrador, and Newfoundland circa 1000 BCE but all Greenland settlements were abandoned between 1450–1480 BCE.
Approximately 40 years later, the colonization of the Americas began on Hispaniola. This was the result of the 1492 voyage of Genoese [Italy] mariner Christopher Columbus who arrived in the Caribbean under a license from Queen Isabella I of Castile, Spain.
Almost four centuries later the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes defeated the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the U.S. Army in the 1876 Battle of the Greasy Grass, Little Bighorn River on the Crow Indian Reservation, in what is now southeastern Montana. Also known as the Battle of the Little Bighorn and Custer's Last Stand, it was an overwhelming victory for the Native tribes.
Fourteen years later, the Army murdered approximately 300 Lakota people in the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota.
And Cruz Smith wrote The Indians Won eight decades later. His futuristic novel was published just three years before the 1973 confrontation between American Indian Movement activists and U.S. Federal Marshals at Wounded Knee, Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
I was living in the Midwest during the early 1970s. I remember the 1973 standoff at the Pine Ridge that lasted more than 70 days.
Leonard Peltier, one of the 200 American Indian Movement activists at Wounded Knee, was released from a Florida federal prison in February 2025. Peltier had served 50 years of a life sentence for allegedly killing two FBI agents during the blockade at Wounded Knee. He was 80 years old when he returned to his home on the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indian Reservation, North Dakota, south of the Canadian border.
The Indians Won is an alternative-history novel that envisions a sovereign and independent Indian Nation where the traditional values of self-determination, liberty, and equality are the central tenets of daily life.
The storyline is divided into two sections - the first part features the 1880s and the fictional account of how the Indigenous tribes united to create an independent Indian Nation in the central section of the continental U.S. Their successful collaboration brought peace and prosperity to the residents of the sovereign Nation.
Cruz Smith describes one of the gatherings that led to this melding of Indigenous cultures.
“Along the Canadian border, the Siksika were not roaming in small families as usual. In antelope shirts almost pure white, in bright leggings made of Hudson’s Bay Company blankets, the tall Siksika, the ones called Blackfeet, were coming together instead. The eight bands of the North Siksika, the fifteen bands of the Bloods, the twenty-five bands of Piegan were all coming together and heading south over the Sweetgrass Country. By the time they assembled in Montana Territory, [chief] Big Lake would count six thousand of his people.”
The other half is focused on how Western officials interact with the Indian Nation leaders. The Indian Nation has developed their own arsenal of nuclear weapons.
The author quoted a National Geographic article that claimed Indians “could not change . . . and deplored the fact that despite their accomplishments, the Indians still had not grasped the benefits of Western civilization. Their logic was different, their colors, their emotions, their needs, even their definition of what was real or unreal was inferior.”
Cruz Smith disagreed and described the philosophy of Indian Nation leaders, “The new [Camp of Nations] chief will use his discretion in employing nuclear weapons any time he feels that the integrity of the Indian Nation is in jeopardy. He feels that this position . . . will disarm those extremists who might push for a preventive strike against Indian forces.”
Fifty years later world leaders continue to view preventive nuclear strikes as a feasible option for settling international disagreement.
The UNM Press, Native Edge, reprinted The Indians Won in 2024; it had been out of print for decades.
Martin Cruz Smith, nee Martin William Smith, was born in 1942. He chose to use Cruz, his paternal grandmother's surname, as part of his pen name. His ancestry includes Puebloan, Spanish, Senecú del Sur, and Yaqui.
He earned a Bachelor of Arts in creative writing, University of Pennsylvania, 1964.
This prolific writer has used several pen names including Martin Smith (two books), Simon Quin (six), in addition to Jack Logan while writing 14 other books plus the Arkady Renko series (ten).
His most recent novel featuring Renko, Independence Square, published in 2023.
Smith received the British Crime Writers' Association award for Gold Dagger.
He won the Dashiell Hammett Award from the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers twice; once in 1996, Rose, and in 1999, Havana Bay.