Wounded Knee

If you know me in real life, you know that i am passionate about justice, about raising a voice for those who have been silenced, about fighting white privilege. Yesterday i couldn't find the words to talk about this subject----the massacre at wounded knee--because my heart was heavy, full, laden with grief over the hatred of those who conquered the americas.

Here are some Lakota stories of this incident: http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/eight/wklakota.htm

My friend Layli wrote a brief blog about this as well: http://samimi-extremie.blogspot.com/2011/12/and-about-wounded-knee.html

As always, history is written by those in power---and the truth so rarely is reflected in these histories. For example:

"There is nothing to conceal or apologize for in the Wounded Knee Battle - beyond the killing of a wounded buck by a hysterical recruit. The firing was begun by the Indians and continued until they stopped - with the one exception noted above."

"That women and children were casualties was unfortunate but unavoidable, and most must have been [killed] from Indian bullets...The Indians at Wounded Knee brought their own destruction as surely as any people ever did. Their attack on the troops was as treacherous as any in the history of Indian warfare, and that they were under a strange religious hallucination is only an explanation not an excuse." ...excerpts from an official investigation of Wounded Knee initiated at the behest of Congress, written by General E. D. Scott http://www.dickshovel.com/WKmasscre.html

So today i ask you all to do what our forefathers could not bring themselves to do in the first place: honor our Indian brothers and sisters, send prayers for the souls of those who have gone before, those who lost their lives to the racism of the descendants of Europeans, those who were stripped of their culture, placed in boarding schools, beaten for speaking their native tongue and lost their heritage, and those who continue to battle the ramifications of alcoholism and racism on the reservations and throughout this land they so honor and cherish.