UPDATE MONDAY: Please read Debra White Plume's article on what happened and why, when the helicopters attempted to land at Wounded Knee:
http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2010/05/debra-white-plume-military-helicopters.html
From Alex White Plume, Lakota:
"A large number of people from three rezs came to defend the ground of Wounded Knee at 11:45 am. Three helicopters appeared above Wounded Knee. We were all in shock, it was true, the 7th Calvary. I saw women and children running under the killing machines to keep them from landing. One chopper landed 50 feet from the cement. A society leader stood his ground, and so it lifted off.
The younger generation spoke out. They expressed themselves and the sad state of affairs on the rez, the tension of oppression is very high. I would not consider this a protest, the US military is just not wanted at the killing site in Wounded Knee. I will stand with the seventh generation on this issue. An elderly talked and told us he lost entire families here, and did not appreciate this tourist style invasion.
We can gather all the survivors from all the rezs, This is a time to set the protocol for any activity at Wounded K nee. I remember in 1992 Uncle Oliver and I threw the Seventh Calvary off the rez, they were going to give us truck loads of fertilizer if we would accept a apology, an apology for killing our grandfathers and grandmas."
video :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rmTSif15VA
YouTube Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rmTSif15VA
Lakotah Republic: Counting Coup at Wounded Knee
http://www.russellmeansfreedom.com/2010/counting-coup-lakota-citizens-stop-us-helicopters-from-landing-at-wounded-knee
Press statement:
To the Original Peoples of the Fourth World and all International Press Services:
By James (Magaska) Swan
At high noon today US Army helicopters of the US Seventh Cavalry air division attempted to land their Blackhawk aircraft upon Lakota Sacred Burial grounds in South Dakota. The presence of military aircraft from this unit is a sad and insulting reminder of the slaughter of more than 300 American Aboriginals on December 29,1890 when soldiers of the US 7th Cavalry gunned down more than 300 Aboriginal Minneconjou Lakota refugee children, women, infants and the elderly at what is now called Wounded Knee in South Dakota Indian Country. The military then left the bodies of their victims to decay unburied in the driving snow.
As of this writing, the US military was confronted by angry but peaceful and steadfast community resistance as the Aboriginal people of the area have so far, according to reports from Lakota people on the ground, managed to prevent the aircraft from touching Indigenous ground.
For all American Aboriginals of the Americas, this is a sacred area. This is the place where the promise of a people died while fleeing from a genocidal US military unit hell-bent on liquidating the continent of its Indigenous population. There has never been any official apology offered for this massacre and the military awards bestowed upon the genocidal aggressors involved in this conflict still stand, as does a physical monument in honour of the US Army killed during Custer’s “last stand” against a defiant and united Indigenous resistance to their own demise.
The history of the US Army 7th Cavalry is important to understanding the level of violence used against Indigenous peoples. It is important to remember that after the US Seventh Cavalry officially ended the "Indian Wars" at home, they were then dispatched to do battle against Indigenous Filipinos struggling to maintain their hard-won national independence from the colonialist Spanish. In other words, the US War Department sent this very same unit to do overseas what was done here to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. In this historical light, it is only logical for Indigenous peoples to assume that the Obama administration is attempting to make a political point out of this spectacle. Only, what sort of message are you sending by insulting and humiliating a people already suffering from five centuries of continuous pro-Europocentric, anti-Indigenous genocide?
This domestic military action is a deliberate insult and an obvious message of ongoing colonialism, state-sponsored racism and apathetic Indigenous genocide to all Indigenous peoples across the Fourth World; to the whole of the Lakota/Dakota Nation; and to the Indigenous residents of Pine Ridge and Wounded Knee. The symbolism of dispatching the Seventh Cavalry to Wounded Knee in an attempt to land weapons of mass destruction on Aboriginal sacred ground tells us how little this government, and this particular administration, respects the people of Indian Country and our significant historical perspective as survivors of the racist Euro-settler xenophobic purges waged against the Indian in the Americas.
To make matters worse, this action comes on the heels of newly-passed legislation in Arizona state that requires law officers to racially-profile anyone they believe “looks”, “sounds” or “dresses” like an illegal immigrant, a thinly veiled “race law” that directly effects both our Indigenous sisters and brothers native to Occupied Mexico as well as the Native American population of Arizona in the United States. Given that most Indigenous peoples of the Americas share the same general physiotype and more often than not, similar Spanish last names, the passage of this guideline will without a doubt lead to widespread abuses against that state’s brown-skinned population. The legal door now opened, Texas and other states led by neo-confederate constituencies are moving to pass their own anti-immigrant/anti-Indigenous directives that will broadly effect anyone and everyone who could be perceived by the colonial European majority as a “foreign invader”.
The Obama administration has shown America and the world that they are no different than any other previous US government in their view that the American Indian on both sides of the US border is nothing more than a prop or a tool to be displayed only when it is useful to promote the “contemporary” 21st century neo-colonialist capitalist agenda. The Obama administration, an office headed by a man of African descent, has shamed itself and all those who have supported his candidacy in arrogantly dismissing the memory of our people interred at Wounded Knee by rubbing the military might of the historically anti-Indigenous 7th Cavalry in our faces by forcibly entering Indian Country in an attempt to land their machines of war on top of the bodies of our ancestral dead.
Clearly, the culture war against the American Indian is not over. Welcome to the new American century.
Pass this on. We must get the word out. Let everyone know. Contact the your local media. Tell them the the local media in (Rapid City, South Dakota) hasn't even mentioned this in the news, so typical for Rapid City media, and if they did post it, it would not be the truth. I tried to contact the Rapid City Urinal....LOL. They wont return my calls or post any of the comments I have made in defence of our people.
James ( Magaska) Swan
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