Social images of Indian/white relations, so typically born and nurtured in fiction, frequently seem impervious to fact, circumstance, perspective, or even argument. Despite a public that in record numbers consumed descriptions like the one that closes Dee Brown's 1971 book, for instance, official accounts of the massacre at Wounded Knee--like nearly all official images of Indians--persistently reproduce a Manichean narrative that pits good against evil, White against Red, civilization against savagery. In this article, the authors provide a comprehensive explanation that merges Todorov's concept of "finalism" with rudiments of social memory and an analysis of two days of hearings before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary in February 1976. Todorov identifies "finalism" as a communicative and historical form of reasoning aimed at closing interpretation, thwarting challenges to the existing order, and sustaining elements of social memory. The authors' central thesis is that finalism serves as a mechanism that greatly aids the development and maintenance of social amnesia about Native identities and accomplishments and the calcification of social memory. In the Senate hearings they have examined, they have found out that on the social level, finalism thereby serves to disempower entire groups of individuals since elites ingest and reconfigure history in their own image, cultural identity--and with it the cause for opposing the dominant ideology--dissipates and reemerges as a comfortably consistent element of social memory. (Contains 85 notes.)