Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee: The Sand Creek Massacre

The loss of Native American culture, languages, traditions, and entire tribes has taken place ever since Columbus landed in the Caribbean. During the 500 years that took place between Columbus’ expedition and now, numerous atrocities were committed against the Native Americans. In addition to this violence, surviving Native American tribes have had their culture, language, and traditions stripped away from them by forced assimilation. While Native Americans were never completely wiped out and there was never a systemic mass murdering of the Native American people, the results of centuries of killing and forced assimilation have resulted in a tremendous loss of culture that constitutes cultural genocide. When most people think of the word …show more content…
The Sand Creek Massacre occurred on November 29, 1864 when Colonel Chivington, a high ranking military official, and his men attacked a Cheyenne camp in the dead of night with no warning (Brown 92). The novel Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown contains this account of the massacre by: “The squaws offered no resistance. Every one I saw dead was scalped. I saw one squaw cut open with an unborn child, as I thought, lying by her side. Captain Soule afterwards told me that such was the fact. I saw the body of White Antelope with the privates cut off, and I heard a soldier say he was going to make a tobacco pouch out of them” (90). The brutality of the massacre demonstrates how little regard they had for the Native Americans. They butchered them like animals in the same way that the Nazis did the …show more content…
Document Project 15.6, titled “Support for Indian Extermination”, outlines Minnesota Congressman James Michael Cavanaugh’s disdain for the Native Americans and his belief that they should be exterminated. Back then his beliefs were more normalized, but today he would be recognized as genocidal. The Document project opens with the sentence, “I will say that I like an Indian dead better than alive. I have never in my life seen a good Indian (and I have seen thousands) except when I have seen a dead Indian.” (Hewitt and Lawson 485). He also referred to Native Americans as “red devils”, dehumanizing them in the same way that Chivington had (Hewitt and Lawson 485). In the end, he advises that a Bureau of Indian Affairs be created which “should be responsible for all matters connected with the management of the Indians” (Hewitt and Lawson 485). It is unclear whether he felt that the bureau would carry out his desire for the extermination of Indians, but in his own words, he “believe[d] in the policy that would exterminate the Indians” More than one person working in the United States government made it clear that they wanted the Native Americans exterminated in what we would recognize as genocide today, but many others seemed sympathetic to the Native Americans. Unfortunately, they also took part in the destruction of Native American