379 Comments

Thank you for this. I am shattered by the decimation of our native tribes currently being caused by COVID, with very little coverage. In fact, Oglala and Standing Rock Sioux tribes lost tribal leaders just last week with absolutely no recognition from our leadership or any statesmen. This is an absolute travesty. As a health care worker, the fact that global aid organizations like MSF and Partners in Health have to respond within our own country is mind boggling.

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“But it is not December 29 that haunts me. It is the night of December 28, the night before the killing.”

The horror of that night. The fear they must have known, surrounded as they were by angry, intoxicated, armed men who had hunted them and now held them captive.

Those men, women and children were helpless to do anything to protect themselves, and surely there were those among them who knew with unwelcome certainty that this would be their last night on earth.

The human truth of that night so insightfully rendered in your telling, Professor Richardson, is your power - that is what distinguishes you and that is why so many of us are here.

Thank you.

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The good thing about having 45 as president (I cannot say his name) and the pandemic is that I've learned so much that was never taught in school. I'm sorry that we don't teach history properly or in depth...we should. Thanks for being my teachers...you and your fellow Americans who post here.

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“It’s never too late to change the future”. That really hit me. This is such an incredible lesson. Thank you for this.

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Thank you for this. As usual you filled in a few blanks, close to 50 years ago I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, while I have forgotten much of the details over the years the story of what happened there has stayed with me ever since. It was a tragedy then and no less so today. BTW a Mountain Gun was a Gatling Gun, a hand cranked machine gun capable of over 100 rounds per minute. It’s obscene what they did to those people. I can still picture the photos they took after, celebrating their great victory. I believe that a number of Medals of Honor were awarded afterwards. Never has our greatest honor been awarded to less deserving recipients. I say this as a combat veteran.

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Thank you for the perspective. Also congrats on the NYTimes article; however the Ben Smith wrote a weird personal note at the end that he didn't read anything that wasn't on Twitter, which was exactly counter to the point of his article.

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America is the only "empire" in world history that can point to one precise moment when its historical upward trajectory reached its apex and its decline immediately began. That precise moment occurred on 9/11/2001 when the first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center. After that split-second explosion, the "Decline of the American Empire" officially had begun, with the only undetermined outcome being the length of time before the empire no longer existed as a viable world player (or existed at all). If managed brilliantly, the decline could be barely noticeable and last for centuries. If managed pathetically, the decline could be astonishingly rapid ... the equivalent of falling off a cliff. When Bush invaded Iraq, the graph went straight downhill. Then Obama was elected, and an upward trend began. Then Trump was elected, and the American Empire has been in free-fall ever since. It is certainly not impossible to reverse that trend (a useful phrase might be "flatten the curve"). But that happy outcome will never be obtainable so long as Republicans are determined to restore white supremacy as the guiding American principle. If the American empire is left to Republicans, its decline will be dazzlingly swift. In the brief 20 years since 9/11 happened, history has already provided two STARK examples of how quickly Republican governance "steepens the curve" of the nation's decline. So what needs to happen is obvious ... but achieving the obvious is far from obvious. God bless America ... it is going to need it.

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Years ago, they published an anniversary edition of Bury My Heart...

I bought the audible version and listened to the first half. I was so saddened I could not go on. Reading HCR’s letter in the early morning hours brings back the terrible feelings the book conjured.

I pray like all who read the newsletter that we have reached the limits of our inhumanity. That we can soften hearts and turn this time of great sorrow into a time of rededication to the dream of what America should be for all.

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Thank you for sharing this. My spouse has Lakota ancestry and we are in touch with many of his relatives. We share the dismay about the treatment of Native Americans and episodes like Wounded Knee. One of the relatives shares everyday the numbers from covid in South Dakota. It is a travesty indeed. One of his cousin's great grandmother ( I think that's the relationship) survived Wounded Knee. A couple bits of good news this week here in Oregon where Native Americans have regained control of important ancestral sites.

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This brings to mind the book“An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz In the section about the future the author states: “How then can US society come to terms with its past? How can it acknowledge responsibility? The late Native historian Jack Forbes always stressed that while living persons are not responsible for what their ancestors did, they are responsible for the society they live in, which is a product of that past.” (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014, p. 235)

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The United States of America is a country founded – at its core – on genocide and slavery. We will never heal as a nation until there is a national reckoning of this fact. We will never go forward in our evolution as a country until we face the truths of our true history . . .

Look at what Germany did after WWII. They faced the Holocaust honestly; they reckoned with it as a nation and emerged with a sense of redemption never to allow something like this to ever take place again.

And here we are at the end of 2020, with our government still lying to us about the JFK Assassination (and all the assassinations of the 1960s) and what actually took place on September 11, 2001.

"Historical truth matters," said former Princeton historian Martin Duberman,

also now a former Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at CCNY. “As a nation, we care little for it, much preferring simplistic distortions that sustain our national myths about ‘freedom,’ ‘opportunity,’ and ‘democracy.’ You can’t grow into adulthood when you’re fed pabulum all your life. And that’s why we remain a nation of adolescents, with a culture concerned far more with celebrityhood than with suffering.”

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As an American it saddens me that we still to this day dishonor or treaties with Native Americans for the purpose of profit. The building of pipelines is the most obvious, however, the more insidious failure to provide assistance to tribes on their lands and to disenfranchise them when it comes to voting saddens.

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A sad but necessary recounting of such a shameful event. Thank you. If only the true history of the country, including events like these, were included as a meaningful part of American history classes. If they were, perhaps more people would recognize the injustice that pervades our nation today is they understood its roots.

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This is a terrible story but one worth telling and retelling. Coupled with the New York Time's Bret Staples' piece on the Editorial page (1-28-20) about the Tulsa, Okla, massacre in 1921 of Black people, Congress might consider calling for a national day of mourning to remember and learn from these mass killings of Native Americans and African Americans by white people. Thank you for teaching your readers about one of them about which I am ashamed to say I knew very little.

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These stories are invaluable to bring history forward. Context is crucial about how we perceive and approach our present and future; hopefully with knowledge and compassion. It is natural that pieces of history become removed from our current lives but it is important that we and get jolted into remembering! Thank you Professor Richardson for reminding us!

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Thank you, Heather, for focusing on this anniversary. I bought your book on Wounded Knee a couple of weeks ago. Thank you! It is excellent and relevant to my family history. One thing that struck me was how many parallels 1890 and 2020 have. And, how often a catastrophe can start with a very simple, small miscommunication and misunderstanding as a trigger. But then, all the conditions that brought the players to that moment were long in the making. If I take the parallels a little further it would be something awful happening in Washington DC on the January 6th and the violence that may come from the dog whistles. In general, I keep thinking of a friend saying just wait until non-native Americans learn what it's like to live on a reservation. Minority rule is pushing us in that direction. I'm hopeful that we are learning a great deal from the experience of the past four years and the decades since 1968 or perhaps since 1890 that have taken us to this moment. May it make us determined for a better future.

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