Monday, May 10, 2010

US Aggression against Sacred Lakotah Lands

On December 29th, 1890, as the United States rounded up the last bands of Sioux Indians for confinement on the reservation, a small group of lightly armed natives fell victim to the Executive Ordered genocide of their people in a little known event called 'The Battle at Wounded Knee', or more popularly 'The Wounded Knee Masacre'. Wounded Knee was the United State's revenge for Custard at Little Big Horn, and an act of aggression that finally broke the backs, and the spirits, of the Lakota People, the Sioux. The US Army's 7th Cavalry, with orders to eliminate the native population of the plains and the Black Hills, committed acts of mass genocide, including hunting down fleeing women and children, often times leaving their corpses on the prairie to rot. On this particular day, the 7th Cavalry encircled the Sioux and unleashed hell with automatic style weapons until nearly half of the Sioux encampment was dead - a band who had already surrendered and who was in the process of disarming. An act of murder, an act of genocide, and an act of cowardice. The bodies of the men, women, and children were left exposed to the winter weather of the plains for some time and eventually placed into a mass grave - known now as the Wounded Knee Memorial on the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation.

The aggression, unfortunately, has not subsided. After more than 100 years, many court battles, Supreme Court Rulings, and a current rise in education and activism by the Sioux, the tensions between the Lakotah and the US Military is still extremely high. Most recently the US Army sent a delegation from the 7th Cavalry to the Wounded Knee site, which was met with protest and 'Counting Coup' - an act of challenging your enemy by running up to him and tapping him before battle. Reference the following video:


There are many questions involving this occurrence. To begin, if the US Army intended to plan an arrival on the reservation, what purpose does it serve to send blackhawk helicopters - vehicles of war? What purpose was served by sending the 7th cavalry - the same group responsible for the massacre of the Sioux Population? What purpose was served by landing the helicopters on the burial site of the massacred Sioux - a most sacred and hallowed ground?

The answer is simple - In Obama's Inaugural speech he specifically stated that "The Lines of Tribes shall soon dissolve"... In America, there is only one group of people who define themselves as 'tribes' - those being the native peoples indigenous to this land.

Such an act of disrespect and aggression is on point with Obama's policy toward the tribes. The imagery was intentional - the warbirds of the 7th Cavalry returning home to their grounds of conquest, showing continued US Military dominance over the tribal peoples of the Lakotah. An attempted desecration of hallowed ground was no accident, rather a message that the people buried there deserve no respect from the US Government.

And so it goes across the land, where the few struggle to maintain their sovereignty and dignity, the federal government rushes in with force and intended imagery: We are everywhere, and we control you.

Battle on, brave Lakotah Warriors. Protect the land that is hallowed by the blood of your ancestors. Battle on for your people, for my people, and for the dark pages of American history that make slavery seem small potatoes. Maintain your culture, your land, and the pride of being Sioux.

2 comments:

  1. Great post, Steven.

    BTW, the Alaska Natives own much of the State (they were here first, after all) but have been denied "nation" status; nor are their villages considered reservation land. The fed.gov treatment is very uneven, isn't it?

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  2. Well, Obama is wrong about "tribes" in more ways than one. His is imperial-multiculturalist fantasy; Pat Buchanan recently spoke of the reality:

    "New Tribe Rising"?

    http://townhall.com/columnists/PatBuchanan/2010/04/20/new_tribe_rising

    [[Ethnonationalism -- the recognition of an embryonic people that they are different from their neighbors, and the concomitant drive to live apart -- is, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote 20 years ago, a more powerful force than any ideology, be it communism, fascism or democracy.

    Ethnonationalism is the pre-eminent force of the age we have entered, the creator and destroyer of empires and nations. Even as Schlesinger was writing his "Disuniting of America," Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were disintegrating into 22 new nations, along the lines of ethnicity. In Dagestan, Ingushetia, Chechnya, Ossetia and Abkhazia, the process proceeds apace.]]

    "Battle on for your people, for my people, and for the dark pages of American history that make slavery seem small potatoes. Maintain your culture, your land, and the pride of being Sioux."

    Amen.

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