U.S. soldiers pose over a mass grave trench with some of the 300 bodies of innocent Native American Lakota Sioux, two-thirds women and children, massacred at Wounded Knee, Pine Ridge Reservation. One of the few survivors of the massacre was a baby girl, found 4 days after the massacre, lying beneath her mothers dead frozen body, her mother having protected her in death as she had in life. The baby girl, having survived the massacre and the blizzard with temperatures at 40 below zero, was then abducted by Brigadier General Colby as a trophy of the massacre, in his own words “a most interesting Indian relic”. —tapiocasunrise

My limbs feel like cold lead thinking on this. And it’s still going. It hasn’t stopped. —liquornspice

i googled this, and found out that the girls name was Lost Bird—and she lead a pretty devastating life (died before she turned 30). I won’t go into details here, because it just seems horribly wrong in light of the picture—but the good news is that she was eventually reburied with her tribe. and that somebody who was honorable researched and retold her story—so that she could be reunited with her people.

I’ve read the first few chapters of her book—and while it makes me a little bit itchy that the woman is white—she seems extraordinary respectful so far, has situated herself within the story in an honest way (she’s not a medicine woman there to save the tribe—she actually admits her culpability as a white woman who works with child protective services), and she has Vine Deloria’s support—an astonishing thing.  To me, this is the way that “knowledge” and “research” and “academics” and “academy” can work *for* and *in service of* community—rather than in spite of community or to spite it. 

May Lost Bird rest in peace. 

May we all be healed from the trauma inflicted on us.

Me we all know peace. —-radicallyhottoff

Another reason we need a “broken heart” button.