The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

pain. I have tried to catch us not in the act of dying but, rather, in the radical act of living.

. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.

the success of the civil rights movement was vested in the degree to which activists voluntarily endured injustice and injury by marching in the street and by encouraging others to march into classrooms,

The protesters referred to themselves not as protesters but as water protectors. Theirs was a nonviolent protest

The Malheur militants were acquitted largely because their takeover occurred on federal land. The water protectors were arrested because they trespassed on private land (made private by historical theft of the Great Sioux Reservation).

He pointed out the irony that on the day the white militants who had occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon were acquitted in federal court, federal and state forces descended on unarmed “water protectors” at Standing Rock with pepper spray, armored vehicles, and rubber bullets.

They also, like so many Americans of all origins, wanted something more from their lives and their country than simply the chance to get rich.

Between 1973 and 1992 alone, audits show that the BIA stole or lost more than $2.4 billion of Indian money—from oil, gas, timber, and grazing leases. And that’s for just nineteen of the roughly 150 years that the BIA has been managing Indian money.

practice of sovereignty carries with it a kind of dignity—a way of relating to the self, to others, to the past, and to the future that is dimensionally distinct.