Review: A SORROW SO DEEP
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 20, 2014
Too bad this book doesn't tell the whole story. Thank God for the internet.This book DOES give an excellent background of the ghost dance and a defeated people's grasp for anything that will bring back the days when food was plentiful and enemies weren't.The Sioux, all four branches (Lakota, Dakota, Ogalala and Hunkpapa) were and are a proud people. Unlike the Five Civilized Tribes who tried to work WITH the settlers, and wound up on a Trail of Tears, a march to a faraway reservation, the Plains Indians stood up for their rights. It scared D. C. so badly they instituted a policy of wiping out the buffalo (well, they tried) in an effort to kill of the Indians. You can read the Charles River Editors book about the Sioux to verify this.With the buffalo nearly gone, among other things, most of the Plains Indians did wind up on a rez. But a guy you need to read about had a vision: a vision about a future for the red man that gave his people the first hope they'd had in hundreds of years. This book explains it all.They held on tight with both hands.Just one problem: every time the story was told it got changed a little.In the end, Sitting Bull was assassinated (what else do you call it when two armed men come into a house and shoot and unarmed man?) and there was Wounded Knee.This book tells part of the truth of Wounded Knee. It doesn't tell how power mad soldiers played 'Jack the Ripper' with women's bodies and paraded through the neighboring town wearing, what's the plural of uterus, oh yeah, they wore uteri on their heads.They chased down unarmed women and children in their private shooting gallery.For this, twenty (count 'em, 20) medals of honor were awarded.It cheapens a medal of honor when awarded for such an activity.There are activists in the Sioux community who want those medals rescinded, even if the men have died. They say those aren't medals of honor, they are medals of shame: it's all there on the internet.It's too bad I had to tell you about the Jack the Ripper business because it's common knowledge.And the settlers called the Sioux savages.