Читать книгу The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book - Gord Hill - Страница 6

be eagles” and vice versa, which also makes it possible for non-Indians to fully understand and act upon this truth, is difficult to imagine. Herein lies the key to genuine respect between people, and between peoples as well.

As is customary, I will proceed by telling a story—a couple of stories, actually—although the manner in which I recount them by no means adheres to the form in which such things are customarily done in traditional settings. The reasons for this go back to the nature of Philip’s advice to me all those years ago, and, in any case, the setting in which they’re being told is anything but traditional. That said, however, their purpose is the same: To clarify, sometimes in a seemingly oblique fashion, the broader matter(s) before us.

Yellow Thunder

Back in the early 1980s, I was a participant in Dakota aim’s (American Indian Movement) sustained occupation of Wincanyan Zi Tiospaye (the Yellow Thunder Community), an 880-acre parcel of land in the Black Hills, about a dozen miles outside of Rapid City, South Dakota. The occupation was seen at the time as a first step in physically reclaiming the Hills, or the He Sapa (or Paha Sapa), as they are known to the Lakota, which were seized in 1877 by the United States in direct violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. The stakes involved were exceedingly high.

For the Lakota, the Yellow Thunder occupation—named in memory of Raymond Yellow Thunder, a “Pine Ridge Sioux” (Oglala Lakota) man whose grisly torture/murder for the amusement of local whites in Gordon, Nebraska, galvanized regional Indian resistance in 1972—reflected a collective will to free themselves from such dehumanization and the subjugation to which they’d been forcibly reduced by the US during the late-nineteenth century.

To this end, the Lakota’s unabashedly expressed goal, as manifested through the actions of Dakota aim, were to recover, in its entirety, the He Sapa, sacred heartland of their traditional territory, thereby enforcing their

8