While Americans agonize over the contents of the Iraq Study Group report and weigh the options of extricating U.S. soldiers from the middle of a civil war, the people of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota will gather on a lonely hill overlooking the demolished village of Wounded Knee -- destroyed during the occupation of the American Indian Movement in 1973 and never rebuilt -- to commemorate and grieve the massacre of their ancestors.
It was after a night so cold that the Lakota called it "The Moon of the Popping Trees," because as the winter winds whistled through the hills and gullies at Wounded Knee Creek on the morning of Dec. 29, 1890, one could hear the twigs snapping in the frigid air.
When a soldier of George Armstrong Custer's former troop, the 7th Cavalry, tried to wrest a hidden rifle from a deaf Lakota warrior after all of the other weapons had already been confiscated from Sitanka's (Big Foot) band of Lakota people, the deafening report of that single shot caused pandemonium among the soldiers and they opened up with their Hotchkiss machine guns upon the unarmed men, women and children.
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