Remembering In a World of Forgetting

A mass grave stretches thirty feet across the center of Wounded Knee cemetery. Bones of the elderly, women, and children mowed down attempting to flee U.S. calvary gunfire rest there. Those bones forever render December 29, 1890, an infamous day. I look at that trench, knowing it’s one of the biggest blood stains of injustice on the cloth of American history. I walk here to remember the dead. An ancient ancestor of mine is buried with the rest of those slain 120 years ago. Number 19 on the government memorial is my name, my blood spilled. When I view photos of the dead, I know that I am looking at a precursor to myself. My whole family might not exist if a woman did not escape with her kids into ravines sheltering them from Hotchkiss cannon fire. Her kin, my kin, are the ones heaped unceremoniously in the snow in the famous pictures.

Wounded Knee is a place permeated with reflections for a Lakota. Thoughts about who we are, who we were, electrify the air. Something quivers in my stomach when I think of those below the dirt. The women and children marching with Chief Big Foot were already dying, ravished by illness and cold. Theirs was no hostile band of warriors. Theirs was a caravan of refugees hoping to live long enough to reach a warm place with a scrap of food. I bring a quote penciled onto notebook paper. It is one of the only firsthand accounts I know of the massacre, by a man named Dick Fools Bull. It seems to have special power read aloud on these grounds.

There were dead people all over, mostly women and children, in a ravine near a stream called Wounded Knee Creek. The people were frozen, lying there in all kinds of postures, their motion frozen too. The soldiers, who were stacking up bodies like firewood, did not like us passing by. They told us to leave there, double-quick or else. Old Unc said: “We’d better do what they say right now, or we’ll lie there too.” So we went on toward Pine Ridge, but I had seen. I had seen a dead mother with a dead baby sucking at her breast. The little baby had on a tiny beaded cap with the design of an American flag.

The story of this place is overwhelming. I can almost feel the bloodstains, seeping through a century of history. Somehow, all I can do is repeat four words over and over. It’s the only thing that seems right.

“You are not forgotten. You are not forgotten.”

I look at that monument and think, “Ain’t that the U.S. government for you.” Blow people to smithereens like ants before a firecracker. Toss what’s left into a trench. Then, years later, reflect somberly about the tragedy. All while sneaking about, trying to seize thousands of acres to build a national park so tourists can come gawk at what you did back in1890. In two sentences, that summarizes 200 years of Indian policy.

Wounded Knee is a lesson to the world on what happens when you stand in the way of lands an imperial power wants. A lesson on what happens if you follow a different god than the Christian lord of manifest destiny. A lesson on what happens if you’d live free in nature, rather than cooped in industrial factories. Nothing was ever atoned and the way of the world hasn’t changed. The butchers in military garb at Wounded Knee went home with medals of honor. The people slaughtered went into the cold December plains. Their relatives fill the political prison of the reservation today.

Standing before the grave, I understood for the first time a great struggle that has continued over centuries. Reverberations of that struggle whispered in the line of blood, trickling from Wounded Knee all the way into my modern veins. I had to remember, I had to learn everything I could about who we used to be, about our people snuffed out before their time.

If I didn’t, who would? Who even remained to care? Alone on Wounded Knee hill with a glint of sunset shearing the empty plains, I caught a glimpse of one of life’s three big questions. “Where do you come from?” Like falling dominoes, the answer connected to that second big question “who are you?” Perhaps it even nudged the angle of my journey closer to figuring out that final question “where do you need to go, what do you need to do with yourself?”

Tom Swift Bird is an Oglala Lakota writer, musician, and activist. He attends Oglala Lakota College, where he majors in information technology and English/communications. He seeks to inspire creativity in others, while writing about issues facing the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. He hopes to use his education to fill a need in his community.