Break My Heart at Wounded Knee

Few things in the World will break your heart like the story of the destruction of the Lakota Sioux Nation. It is a story that rings with parallels today. You want to know why you, or anyone else for that matter, shouldn't trust your government? Read this story.

In 1874, George Armstrong Custer invaded Sioux territory with miners, geologists and 100 wagon loads of bad juju. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Badlands lie between I-90 and the Kansas border, and between Eastern Wyoming and Central South Dakota. A lot of it looks like this:

This shot is just west of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation Visitors Center:

Wounded Knee is near the Southern border of the state in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation

This monument sits atop the mass grave of 276 men, women and children massacred there.

Here is a National Archive photo (and by the way, calling it a "battle" is a prime example of the truth that the victor gets to write the history):

It wasn't the last straw, and several other fights took place after the massacre in several places in and around the Pine Ridge Reservation. But, it was pretty much the end of the Sioux Nation. In "Black Elk Speaks" Black Elk describes the Sioux Nation in terms of an endless hoop, in quarters --Black in the West, the home of the thunder beings; White in the North, source of the Cleansing Wind; Red in the East, the source of wisdom and the Morning Star; and Yellow in the South, the source of growth. When the Souix Nation was defeated, he says, the hoop was broken. The pieces of the broken hoop in the picture below are not an accident, or mischief, they are a statement:

And, I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't read the book.