Wounded Knee: U.S. Government and Military – Capitalist Hate Crime: Review

The people had been taught to despise themselves because they were left with barren land and dry rivers. But they were wrong. It was the white people who had nothing; it was the white people who were suffering as thieves do, never able to forget that their pride was wrapped in something stolen, something that had trickled the white people as completely as they had fooled the Indians, and now only a few people understood how the filthy deception worked; only a few people knew that the lie was destroying the white people faster than it was destroying Indian people. But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel.

-Leslie Silko, Ceremony

Over the next two hours, the soldiers hunted down and slaughtered all the Sioux they could find, riding them down and shooting them at point-blank range as they tried to escape. One woman was murdered after she had run three miles from the camp. Soldiers shot babies in their cradle-boards. The only good Indian was a dead Indian, many of the troops had been taught, and they had just turned about two hundred and fifty Sioux into good Indians.

-Heather Cox Richardson, Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre