Wounded Knee Anniversary

This is the anniversary of a dark day in American history, but one that we should never forget.

It was on this day in 1890 that the massacre at Wounded Knee took place, when hundreds of native people were killed by American forces.

The history is not apparently so well known by most Americans, but it should be. If we are ever to overcome or even make progress towards the problems of a racial past anytime in the future, we need to be aware of chapters in our history like this, even if (or perhaps especially if) it makes us uncomfortable.

Here is what I originally wrote in 2013 on the occasion of the anniversary of Wounded Knee:


Belated, But Still Powerful originally published December 29, 2013:


I wanted to commit an entire blog entry to Wounded Knee, but this has been a hectic time for me, and my focus is not where perhaps it should be.

That said, I wanted to make sure to do something to commemorate the memory of a very important and tragic event in American history, one that many people don't seem to know about, and even more do not want to talk about or acknowledge.

But it happened. We might not be comfortable with that fact, but that does not change that it is an undeniable part of our history.

And it is important to keep the memory alive. To learn what lessons are available for us to learn from the event. We marvel at the memory of Custer's Last Stand, and many of us (myself included, admittedly) grew up with westerns, where Indians were more often than not portrayed as mindless savages, almost as just another inconvenient part of a rugged and untamed landscape that needed to be conquered and subdued. Seeing things in this light, they were hardly viewed as human beings at all.

It is easier to commit atrocities against people when you first dehumanize them. In fact, perhaps it is necessary to do so. After all, how can you commit mass murder or genocide against people that you now intimately, that you value and respect, as individuals and as a community of people?

So, we need to remember what American soldiers did not on that frigid day in late December at Wounded Knee some 123 years ago, or in the hot jungle of Vietnam at My Lai on March 16, 1968. We need to understand that we share a common humanity with all other people, and that we never have the right to summarily and indiscriminately kill masses of people in a huge massacre.

Here is a link that might help us to understand what happened at Wounded Knee better:


Wounded Knee 1890 @ Ya-Native.com:

http://www.ya-native.com/timeline/WoundedKnee1890.html