Wounded Knee Quotes

“I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream...”
― Black Elk

“It was never the poverty that deterred me, never the disease, unsanitary conditions, bugs or garbage, those things were never even a thought in my head as a reason for not staying. I kept looking for the good and always found it each day. I was happy on the reservation.
It would have all worked out if Chief could have been a little nicer to me. The only thing I was missing was love and respect from my partner. Maybe he had changed.”
― Little White Bird, The Dark Horse Speaks

“I firmly believe that American society would not endure ten years if subjected to half the trials and tortures we’ve put Natives through. And yet Native peoples have not been utterly destroyed, not by the world’s strongest military. They have not been totally assimilated, not by the world’s largest religion. Native religions are indeed concerned with being a good person, respecting one’s family, ancestors, community, and the Earth—and when these principles are lived, there is great strength.”
― Israel Morrow, Gods of the Flesh: A Skeptic's Journey Through Sex, Politics and Religion

“On March 12, 1973, a big day, Wounded Knee declared itself a sovereign territory o the independent Oglala Nation. Anybody of goodwill, Indian or white, could become a citizen. Whatever one might say about AIM, it was never racist. As Crow Dog expressed it: "We don't want to fight the white man, but only the white man's system.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“¿Sabes que ese manzano fue plantado
con la tierra robada a los Rodilla-Herida
por el gobernador del estado?
¿Acaso tú conoces que su savia
se nutre con los huesos y pelos prisioneros
de San Quintín?

Did you know that apple tree was planted
on land stolen from Wounded Knee
by the governor of the state?
Perhaps you know how its sap
is nourished with the prisoner bones and hair
of San Quentin?

(de Un Manzano de Oakland, para Angela Davis)”
― Nancy Morejón, Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing: Selected Poetry

“I am Mary Brave Bird. After I had my baby during the siege of Wounded Knee they gave me a special name Ohitika Win, Brave Woman, and fastened an eagle plume in my hair, singing brave-heart songs for me. I am a woman of the Red Nation, a Sioux woman. That is not easy.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“When I came out of Wounded Knee I was not even healed up, but they put me in jail at Pine Ridge and took my baby away. I could not nurse. My breasts swelled up and grew hard as rocks, hurting badly. In 1975 the feds put the muzzles of their M-16s against my head, threatening to blow me away. It's hard being an Indian woman.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“I am not afraid to die.
If I die at Wounded Knee,
I will go where Crazy Horse
and Sitting Bull
and our grandfathers are. -Crow Dog”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“In that ravine, at Cankpe Opi, we gathered up the broken pieces of the sacred hoop and put them together again. All who were at Wounded Knee, Buddy Lamont, Clearwater, and our medicine men, we mended the nation's hoop. The sacred tree is not dead!”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“He was the last maker of traditional Sioux flutes, which all ended in a bird’s head, the sound coming out of the open beak. He himself could play the flute beautifully. These were instruments for courting, making the love music. Uncle Fool Bull died in 1975, almost one hundred years old. He still remembered the massacre of some three hundred Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, in the winter of 1890.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman