Posted on 06/25/2003 1:13:13 PM PDT by Land_of_Lincoln_John
CROW AGENCY - The descendants of Crazy Horse trotted across 360 miles of prairie for a chance to charge up Last Stand Hill early this morning.
The 20 riders of the Great Sioux Nation Victory Ride set out June 9 from the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. They wanted to take a slow, contemplative path to the battlefield where their ancestors found victory 127 years ago.
It was a chance to remind the tribe's young people of the one unmistakable outcome of the battle, rider Doug War Eagle said.
"We're still here," he said.
Tuesday night the riders pitched tents in a cottonwood grove along the Little Bighorn River, about 400 yards from where Crazy Horse and his family camped. Not far away camps were filled with horsemen and women from other tribes.
They will all be galloping across the battlefield today to mark the Indian Memorial dedication. Horses were vital in Plains Indian culture, and it's only fitting they play a starring role in the dedication, said Kitty Belle Deernose, curator of the battlefield museum.
"Indian people are still very much a horse culture," she said.
The Crow are sending 200 riders, including one riderless horse to honor Pfc. Lori Piestewa, a Hopi soldier who was mortally wounded in a March 23 ambush in Iraq. She was the first American Indian servicewoman killed in action.
The Oglala Sioux have sent 39 riders. The Northern Cheyenne will decorate 20 horses before riding up to the monument to honor their fallen warriors. The Cheyenne-Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma have also sent a horse, Deernose said.
Mel Lonehill, of Batesland, S.D., is part of the Oglala delegation, "Lokal Oyate Kawilau," which translates to "Gathering of the Traditional People." The group began riding on battle anniversaries 10 years ago.
"We honor our ancestors by riding," Lonehill said.
Horses came to the Plains Indians with the Spanish conquistadors. The Sioux called them the "holy dog," Lonehill said. "The horse came to our people and said he would travel with us if we would respect him."
Re-enacting a horse charge up Last Stand Hill is an amazing feeling, Lonehill said. If the rider is focused and spiritually prepared, he can visualize oncoming enemy warriors, even with tourists as spectators.
The Cheyenne River Sioux riders used their horseback journey to the battlefield as a chance to educate young people on traditional values. During the two weeks of the Great Sioux Nation Victory Ride, the descendants of Crazy Horse camped in sites once covered by their ancestors' teepees. They told stories each night and paid respects to their traditional allies, the Northern Cheyenne.
A support crew drove ahead each day to set up camps. The riders raised their own money but received food and places to stay along the way. The horses spent every third day at rest in a trailer, said rider Scott Dupree. The riders weren't always so lucky.
"I was sore by the time we got here," he said.
The days were long and hard, but spirits surged at the sight of the Deer Medicine Rocks outside of Lame Deer, said rider Floyd Clown. The group was given permission to camp next to the sacred rock formations, which bear prophetic drawings of the battle and the eventual murder of Sitting Bull.
The ride was mostly to infuse traditional values in the young people, Clown said. Marking the Indian memorial dedication is just a side event.
"Our monument is already there," Clown said. "That big, white monument up on Last Stand Hill shows our victory. It shows that our grandfathers were here."
Rummel, in Death by Government, puts the Indian death toll for the period from the Constitution to the end of the Indian wars at about 3000. I don't see any evidence to increase that number. That is less than 30 per year, not exactly evidence of genocide. Some of those deaths were on purely punative missions or in clearly defensive roles.
In the middle of this period the United States took a time out and killed 600,000 of our own. We had the capacity to obliterate any and all Indian tribes at any time we chose to do so. We did not. Read the Eastern newspapers of the time. The Indians had very powerful defenders and the sympathetic ear of the people.
And so is hiding behind a flag of truce. We just lost some good folks when the Iraqis did that. An Indian camp was more of a base than a city. People were always coming and going to hunt, to visit, to raid. Some of those in the Sand Creek camp had just come from butchering whites on the Eastern Slope.
I spent some time in the area when I was younger and mothers would command obedience from their children by threatening to "skin them alive". That was a holdover from the deep fears of the settlement days.
The nation was aghast at what happened at Sand Creek. I think that the broad reaction was a better reflection of the state the country's morals than what a few drunken bums did at Sand Creek.
We could not tolerate the continuation of these barbaric stone age cultures. The murders had to be stopped. We did a fair job, at least in concept, of providing for them. The Reservations were not designed to keep the Indians in, they were designed to keep whites out. There were broken promises and outright crookedness in some cases but the policy was in the right direction.
I can promise the Greenies that the Clinton created National Monuments will be sancrosect as long as the grass shall grow . . .
Then again, the response of the Indians was to slaughter entire wagon trains of pioneers with such savagery, using live prisoners for target practice, or butchering the men while alive, flaying them etc. and gang raping the women until they died from loss of blood.
The operative philosophy of the US Govt at the time was "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." To some extent, they brought it on themselves early in our history. There were friedly tribes and warring tribes. The warring tribes sometimes sacked entire small communities. Their philosophy requiring that they kill 10 enemy for every brave lost in battle.
Well, the Judeo-Christian Western society developed to generally sparing non-combatants, women and children. The warring tribes sometimes sacked entire small communities -- their philosophy requiring that they kill 10 enemy for every brave lost in battle. It didn't take too many instances of seeing multiple massacres of women and children to convince the general public that Indians were "savages" (so called because they weren't baptized Christians) and their fate was sealed with a decision to mass exterminate all members of the warring tribes.
I remind my liberal friends of these good old days when they tell me modern Americans are so uncivilized. I agree, but only with respect to the 40 million aborted (murdered) babies since 1970.
In the West we have our own various versions of the Trail of Tears, Chief Joseph, the Navajo's Long Walk, forcing the Apaches onto San Carlos. The overarching policy was to stop the depredations but to be fair to the Indians.
In acquireing these vast areas from the French or the Mexicans we acquired JURISDICTION over them. No one could accept maurauding and murder under their jurisdiction.
You are right the real cultures are far more complex and fascinating than what has been painted by even the most knowlegable pundits.
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