This is a time for my silence while others speak.
"For a long time, there has been a debate in Indian Country about how, whether and when to engage this president when he mocks Indian people in his quest to embarrass Elizabeth Warren," Wright wrote.
"Today, we say, ‘No more.’ We, with all Great Plains tribes and Indian Country, demand an apology from this president and a return to the government-to-government relationship between tribes and the United States — headed by this president."
"Once again, President Trump has lowered the dialogue regarding Indian people to a new low with a tweet invoking the Battle of Little Bighorn and the Wounded Knee Massacre, one of the bloodiest massacres in the history of the United States, where women, children and Native men were brutally murdered after surrendering their weapons," Wright said.
ROSEBUD RESERVATION – On January 13, 2019, President Donald Trump referred to the Wounded Knee Massacre, one of the darkest and tragic chapters in the history of the Sioux Nation, to mock president candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D. Mass.). Historical estimates of three hundred or more unarmed men, women and children, including infants, were rounded up and shot by a detachment of U.S. Army 7th Cavalry soldiers on December 29, 1890, and buried in a single mass grave at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.
One hundred years later both Houses of the United States Congress passed a joint resolution expressing “deep regret” for the massacre.
I write this statement on behalf of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe to condemn President Trump’s racist and disrespectful tweets about one of the most infamous and brutal incidents against any nation of people.
Sunday, Jan 20, 2019 · 3:54:51 AM +00:00 · Winter Rabbit
Meteor Blades tells us:
For those who don’t know about Wounded Knee, my post from last month:
For the Lakota, December 1890 was disastrous: Sitting Bull was shot; 300 were killed at Wounded Knee:
On December 15, 1890, the U.S. Indian agent at Fort Yates of the Standing Rock Agency in North Dakota ordered 40 Native police to go to the Lakota medicine man Sitting Bull’s cabin and arrest him. The fear was that the old leader was going to leave the agency with the Ghost Dancers, whom the government viewed as acting to renew fighting that had mostly ended on the Northern Plains a dozen years before. Together with family members, Sitting Bull—Tathanka Iyotake in the Lakota language—resisted. In the ensuing fight, six Native policemen and seven men of the Hunkpapa Lakota, including Sitting Bull, were killed.
Fearing reprisals, most of the Hunkpapa fled to join Spotted Elk’s Minneconju Lakota. Later known as Big Foot, Spotted Elk decided to move his people to Pine Ridge and live under the protection of Red Cloud. On December 29, hundreds of troops of the 7th Cavalry arrived at Spotted Elk’s camp near Wounded Knee and began disarming the Indians. In the process, a rifle was discharged and a slaughter ensued that took the lives of as many as 300 Lakota, many of them women and children. Days later, their frozen bodies were buried in a mass grave. Except for minor skirmishes as late as 1918, the massacre marked the end of the Indian Wars.
The year that ended so badly for the Lakota, with consequences that still affect them today, hadn’t started off so well either. […]