From Sunday, March 8
A recording of Lakota flute music woke us up at 7 am this morning, a concession to our long day traveling the day before. From here on out wake-up call will be at 6. And yes, it turns out Daylight Savings IS observed on the reservation - answering the first of my many pre-trip questions.
I watched the students resist consciousness with long-practiced denial. They finally emerged one-by-one from their bedsheets like sloths on the ground. They reached for their make-up, they reached for their hair-dryers, fumbling in the early morning light for the correct pairing of casual, non-work shirts to pants. We ate our breakfast in companionable misery, our minds straddling the realm of the sleeping with the anxious reality of the day to come. We had arrived on the Rez.
Tom, the Re-Member director, gave us an abridged history of the Native American civilizations from the time of Columbus to today. I quickly caught on that the story of the Lakota is not one of simple poverty - it's one of genocide. This is a culture struggling to survive in the face of systematic, focused annihilation on the part of the European settlers and later the US government, a FEW examples of which I've listed below:
- the US government has broken every single treaty ever signed with the Native Americans
- by law, there should be about 300 police officers for the reservation, which covers an area of 90 miles x 50 miles, but thre are only about 40. Dial 9-1-1 and you're lucky to get a response within a few hours
- violence against Indians is rarely prosecuted
- the General Allotment Act parcelled out land on the reservation at the rate of 160 acres per head of household in an attempt to turn a nomadic hunting community into farmers. Any "extra" land was given to white settlers.
- the public transportation system, non-existent until a few months ago, only transports Indians to the casinos to spend money they don't have trying to get rich
- grant money enabled the tribal government to purchase fire equipment, but no money exists to establish a volunteer fire department
All this, just from the orientation.
We travelled eight miles across the plains to the site of Wounded Knee. We know it as a battle. The Lakota know it as a massacre. We stood on the hill where 300 largely unarmed Lakota men, women and children were slaughtered. The women were hunted down without mercy, their babies still wrapped in their shawls as they succumbed to death, their private parts cut from their bodies to be kept as souvenirs. There, said Tom, was where the solders chased down the elderly, the wounded, the children, as they ran, shot them in the back and buried them in trenches after urinating on the scalped remains.
Twenty medals of honor were awarded that day. The wounds left on the soul of the Lakota people have never healed.
I can see the guilt on the faces of my travel partners, the great majority of them white and all now fully awake. I begin to feel that we were not called here to this reservation to undo the great harm that continues to be perpetuated on these people - the lack of preventative care or even adequate health care, absence of public transportation, red tape that makes building homes and wind turbines difficult or impossible and government trust funds set aside for Indians that have never been distributed to the people. We are not here to provide hope. We are here to spread the word.
I watched the students resist consciousness with long-practiced denial. They finally emerged one-by-one from their bedsheets like sloths on the ground. They reached for their make-up, they reached for their hair-dryers, fumbling in the early morning light for the correct pairing of casual, non-work shirts to pants. We ate our breakfast in companionable misery, our minds straddling the realm of the sleeping with the anxious reality of the day to come. We had arrived on the Rez.
Tom, the Re-Member director, gave us an abridged history of the Native American civilizations from the time of Columbus to today. I quickly caught on that the story of the Lakota is not one of simple poverty - it's one of genocide. This is a culture struggling to survive in the face of systematic, focused annihilation on the part of the European settlers and later the US government, a FEW examples of which I've listed below:
- the US government has broken every single treaty ever signed with the Native Americans
- by law, there should be about 300 police officers for the reservation, which covers an area of 90 miles x 50 miles, but thre are only about 40. Dial 9-1-1 and you're lucky to get a response within a few hours
- violence against Indians is rarely prosecuted
- the General Allotment Act parcelled out land on the reservation at the rate of 160 acres per head of household in an attempt to turn a nomadic hunting community into farmers. Any "extra" land was given to white settlers.
- the public transportation system, non-existent until a few months ago, only transports Indians to the casinos to spend money they don't have trying to get rich
- grant money enabled the tribal government to purchase fire equipment, but no money exists to establish a volunteer fire department
All this, just from the orientation.
We travelled eight miles across the plains to the site of Wounded Knee. We know it as a battle. The Lakota know it as a massacre. We stood on the hill where 300 largely unarmed Lakota men, women and children were slaughtered. The women were hunted down without mercy, their babies still wrapped in their shawls as they succumbed to death, their private parts cut from their bodies to be kept as souvenirs. There, said Tom, was where the solders chased down the elderly, the wounded, the children, as they ran, shot them in the back and buried them in trenches after urinating on the scalped remains.
Twenty medals of honor were awarded that day. The wounds left on the soul of the Lakota people have never healed.
I can see the guilt on the faces of my travel partners, the great majority of them white and all now fully awake. I begin to feel that we were not called here to this reservation to undo the great harm that continues to be perpetuated on these people - the lack of preventative care or even adequate health care, absence of public transportation, red tape that makes building homes and wind turbines difficult or impossible and government trust funds set aside for Indians that have never been distributed to the people. We are not here to provide hope. We are here to spread the word.
0 comments:
Post a Comment