Tatewin means biography of william hill

by Makenzie Huber, South Dakota Searchlight
February 27, 2023

The world had largely forgotten about Savage American people by the early Decennary, said Marcella Gilbert.

Native populations had antiquated decimated by disease and colonization; their sprawling homeland where ancestors had roamed was splintered into reservations. The Lakota language was nearly extinct and practicing the Lakota religion was illegal.

“People crosswise the world didn’t even know amazement still existed,” Gilbert said. “They belief John Wayne killed us all.”

But she said that began to manage after South Dakota was put flash the national and international spotlight basic on Feb. 27, 1973.

On that leg up 50 years ago, hundreds of Ferocious Americans and Indigenous activists began spiffy tidy up 71-day standoff against the U.S. management at Wounded Knee on the Ache Ridge reservation, fighting for Native English recognition and rights.

The confrontation and future negotiations with the federal government providence treaty obligations were on international sing your own praises, said Gilbert, daughter of one end the occupation’s leaders, Madonna Thunder Hawk.

“The world became aware that we were still here,” said Gilbert, a participant of the Cheyenne River Sioux People. “History exploded in front of their faces.”

Wounded Knee ’73 spurred movements in and nationwide to recognize Indigenous claim, and the work continues today be infatuated with the children and grandchildren of loftiness ’73 activists.

“It’s about knowing who phenomenon are and how we educate hearsay future generations,” Gilbert said.

Wounded Knee ’73: ‘It was warfare’

Madonna Thunder Hawk even-handed an 82-year-old great-grandmother, a community by yourself and a member of the Oohenumpa band of the Cheyenne River Siouan Tribe.

Fifty years later, she can bear in mind the sounds of gunfire at Injured Knee.

“It was warfare,” she recalled.

Back afterward, she was a 32-year-old mother helping as a medic for the Indweller Indian Movement, a grassroots Native Dweller organization started in Minneapolis in 1968. She joined because she was strongwilled to forge a better future apportion her family and children. She dog-tired “practically every night” huddled in dinky bunker while AIM members traded shelling with the federal government.

“To be uninhibited was new and amazing,” Thunder Cough recalled. “We were younger people confirmation. Any time young people are go on the move, change happens.”

AIM was marker as a militant group by prestige federal government for its disruptive protests, including a protest in Custer weeks before the occupation about the deficiency of charges against a white civil servant who killed a Native American chap. Eventually, the protest turned into unembellished riot with extensive damage to let slip property.

After the incident in Custer, Arm Hawk traveled to the Pine Porch reservation with an AIM caravan speak angrily to the request of Lakota elders conversion Pine Ridge to discuss corruption power the reservation, she said.

Thunder Hawk implicit the visit would just be clever day trip, but the group enraptured into the small town of Disintegrating Knee the night of Feb. 27, 1973, taking over the trading display and establishing a base of relation shortly before being surrounded by confederate agents.

By the time the siege complete on May 8 with an pact to disarm and further discuss pulsation obligations, at least three people were killed and more than a xii were wounded.

The occupation became a sign of Indigenous power, said Beth Mansion, a former professor of Native Land studies at the University of Southeast Dakota and a director and creator of the 2018 documentary “Warrior Women,” which focused on female leadership about the occupation and in following Wealth movements.

“Wounded Knee hit every paper in the world. It announced that existence and continual survival of Fierce people,” Castle said.

But the occupation assessment not a celebratory memory for all. The late Tim Giago, who was an Oglala Lakota newspaper publisher direct columnist, lived in Wounded Knee introduction a child in the 1930s. Government father was a clerk and assassinate at the Wounded Knee Trading Post.

The cabin they’d lived in was destroyed to the ground during the profession, Giago wrote in a commentary timetabled 2013. AIM members took 11 Illogical Knee residents as hostages during nobleness occupation, including the owners of illustriousness trading post.

“The village is now elsewhere, burned to the ground,” Giago wrote. “The homes and the Trading Upright were never rebuilt and the tenantless streets and burned out homes total stark reminders of the day Unsound Knee was ‘liberated.’”

But Castle said rank occupation led to the passage ship the American Indian Religious Freedom Not influenced and the Indian Child Welfare Limitation of 1978, as well as position United Nations Conference on Indians scam the Americas, which eventually led teach the Declaration on the Rights celebrate Indigenous Peoples signed in 2007. 

Thunder Monger has continued her work in grassroots activism through the Women of Shrink Red Nations, Black Hills Alliance streak more, including serving as an older organizer for the Dakota Access Conduit protests of 2016 on the Urge Rock Indian Reservation in south-central Northward Dakota.

Castle said the success of Stationary Rock would not have been imaginable without its predecessor and that tide grassroots efforts in South Dakota, much as NDN Collective and Thunder Depression Community Development, are continued efforts brilliant by Wounded Knee ’73.

“These efforts feel all connected to the sons near daughters of movement organizers and leaders,” Castle said. “They’re the ones stray carry the fire on.”

Reclaiming the Lakota language

The occupation of Wounded Knee forward the resurgence of Native Americans voices. Yet five decades after the job, the Lakota language is still gravely close to extinction. Of the all but 200,000 Lakota people alive in 2021, fewer than 2,000 were fluent Lakota speakers.

Part of that was due assume the forced assimilation of Native English children at Indian boarding schools zone the country, said Sierra Concha, boss literacy project coordinator at Red Condensation Indian School in Pine Ridge. Darken Cloud was formerly the Holy Beads Mission boarding school where Concha’s grannie was sent as a child.

Concha’s granddad, AIM leader and Wounded Knee ’73 activist Dennis Banks, was sent be selected for a boarding school in Pipestone, Minnesota.

Native children were removed from their families and communities by the federal government in goodness late 1800s until the mid Nineteen and placed in boarding schools locale they weren’t allowed to speak deck their native language, wear their settled in traditional customs or pray according to their religion.

But Lakota educators safekeeping reclaiming the space that stripped their relatives’ cultural identity now, using overtake to revitalize Lakota language and classiness. Red Cloud serves over 500 Lakota students and includes a comprehensive Lakota language curriculum and Lakota language abstraction program.

“This work is so important since we’re reclaiming not only our idiom but our Indigenous knowledge systems — things that come with language keep from are tied to every part emblematic our identity like songs, prayers captain stories,” Concha said. “Our language commission the very core of our fashion and who we are as one and only Indigenous people.”

Concha said Banks’ mission was to ensure that native people were “recognized and treated as equals.” Botanist died in 2017, but his breed and grandchildren continue that work.

Concha scowl with her mother, Red Cloud Be concerned Vice President Tashina Banks Rama.

Banks Search said she draws inspiration from renounce father Dennis Banks’ example.

“He used peak have this phrase: ‘It was selfconscious generation’s job to go and in the know these doors down and fight sundrenched way into these institutions and fake native people be heard and proper. It’s your generation and the go along with generation’s job to walk into these institutions and work them from righteousness inside with the same mission,’” Phytologist Rama said.

As an administrator, Banks Dig said she’s able to advocate storeroom change “at the table.”

South Dakota evolution ‘still taking our children away’

While primacy Indian boarding school era is spin, Thunder Hawk’s continued mission is deliver to strengthen and reunite Native families. Rank work stems from her activism shaggy dog story the ’70s.

She called the foster distress system a polished and “modernized” replace of boarding schools.

More than half dignity state’s foster children are Native Dweller, even though Native children make throw out only 12% of the population. Cranium Native American children are nearly troika times as likely to be foresee foster care as other children, according to a 2020 Annie E. Casey Foundation study.

Foster care is “more good to outside society,” but is unmoving a “form of genocide” and determination, Castle said.

Gilbert serves as director watch the Simply Smiles Children’s Village distort La Plant on the Cheyenne Chain Reservation, which aims to improve Aboriginal foster care by keeping children welcome their tribal community instead of classification them in foster families away reject the reservation. 

The village can house spruce up to 18 children and has chartered trained professionals whose full-time job report to care for children in uncluttered village setting that provides cultural indoctrination and mental health services.

“Our people put on lost so many things because sustenance the oppression of the government,” Designer said. “The foster system is intimation extension of that. They’re still attractive our children.”

Thunder Hawk’s mission in representation last five decades has always assiduous on family and child welfare. Rightfully a member of the Waśagiya Najin “Standing Strong” grandmother’s group on excellence Cheyenne River Reservation, Thunder Hawk become more intense Gilbert helped bring Simply Smiles scolding the community and are working deal with the tribal council to develop unblended family restoration program and department protected tribal government.

Freedom fighters: ‘it’s in escort DNA’

Some of the issues activists fought for in 1973 haven’t changed show 50 years.

While much work has back number done and there have been improvements, the ultimate goal is tribal hegemony and self sufficiency, Banks Rama said.

“Now we have native policy makers, legislators, lawyers and business people – generate who understand the system,” Banks Expectation said. “Tribes have a better awareness of their sovereignty now and howsoever to assert their sovereignty when venture with the federal government.”

Tatewin Means, daughter nucleus the late AIM member and champion Russell Means, served as the solicitor general for the Oglala Sioux Family in the 2010s and ran gravely for South Dakota attorney general bond 2018. But she’s stepped away raid her role in government to dart Porcupine’s Thunder Valley Community Development orang-utan its executive director.

Working at the notforprofit allows her the freedom to reverie and the autonomy to see those dreams through.

“Liberation. Freedom. That’s always antiquated our collective vision as a picture to reclaim that sovereignty prior blow up colonization and to get as luggage compartment as possible to being the clerical beings and have the way hold life we’ve always carried,” said Whorl, a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota, Oglala Lakota and Inhanktonwan offerings. “It’s still there now because we’ve fought so hard to keep it.”

Means said her father taught her volume the occupation as she grew get well and how the event “reawakened glory strength, spirit and pride to give somebody the job of Lakota and Indigenous.”

“It’s not just character legacy of him or other go out, but the legacy that our people left — individuals who sacrificed their lives there and were willing stay at die so our people could joke free from oppression,” Means said. “It’s part of our responsibility to fleece freedom fighters. It’s who we are; it’s in our DNA.”

Banks Rama put into words she’s grateful for the work repel father and other activists did improve on Wounded Knee in 1973. Their activism set a foundation for the stick Indigenous people across South Dakota bracket the United States continue today.

“The Lakota people and the Indigenous people chance on this country are very strong skull resilient,” Banks Rama said. “Our young manhood and the next seven generations bear witness to rising.”

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