Image: Coming and Going

Remembering Wounded Knee

On a cold morning 132 years ago today, the US cavalry massacred more than 250 disarmed Lakota men, women, and children near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. A few days earlier they had murdered the great chief Sitting Bull.

The massacre at Wounded Knee was one of the final and most vicious military acts in the government’s century-long plan of genocide against native Americans, and twenty soldiers earned the Medal of Honor for their part in the brutal affair.

Frank Baum, who would later write the Wizard of Oz, wrote with sadness the following in response to the massacre:  “Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”  Luckily, some of them survived

We should never forget that the strength of the United States was built on the genocide of its native peoples, and the slavery of another race, and when American statesmen complain about ISIS or Al-Qaeda or other so-called “terrorists”, they are mouthing an unspeakable hypocrisy.

We must never forget that the American’s vaunted Manifest Destiny was colonialism of the most brutal kind and meant death for millions of indigenous peoples.