Pine Ridge Indian Reservation

still be expressed today. This expression in the form of mortuary practices can be seen in places like Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota, South Dakota. Pat Janis oversees the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s Burial Assistance Program. He is a spiritual leader in a community that faces more death, at a younger age, than the vast majority of American culture. He admits that “After we got on the reservation, a lot of that stuff started…

Nearly every day, most Americans spend a dollar bill from their pocket without giving much thought to what it stands for and who it represents. The dollar bill, while a symbol of our economy, is also stamped with the powerful words “E pluribus unum”, Latin for “Out of many, one. Some people believe this represents the states merging together to form a nation and others believe that it is a representation of a melting pot society, a group of people coming together to become one. This wishful…

Colonization, Decolonization, and Indigenous Spirituality in Leonard Peltier 's Prison Writings Within the American prison system, many individuals remain held for extended periods of time in solitary confinement. Despite arguments that solitary confinement has severe psychological and behavioral consequences for inmates, the experiences described by Leonard Peltier in Prison Writings tell a different story. Viewed from the historical lenses of colonization and decolonization, an important…

Arawak welcomed the strangers, then were stripped of their freedoms. They were raped, their bodies were mutilated, they were murdered, punished for their beliefs, sold like property, families were split up, and they were forced to live on small reservations, which are still actively binding Native American lives between inequality and disregarded freedoms as citizens in the United…

The noted Jamaican publisher, Marcus Garvey, once proclaimed that, "people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots." Garvey’s remark creates a myriad of parallels with my own experiences. As I considered the notion of "people and place," I concluded that, regardless of our heritage and ancestral home, it is the way in which we view other people that determines how we, ourselves, are viewed. In hindsight, having been placed up for adoption, I…

The growing popularity of the Ghost Dance movement among Native American tribes alarmed federal authorities, who viewed it as a potential threat to their control over Indigenous populations. In 1890, tensions reached a boiling point at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where the Lakota Sioux were actively participating in the Ghost Dance ritual. The U.S. government dispatched troops to suppress what they perceived as a rebellion, leading to the infamous Wounded Knee Massacre on…

part of America, in many Indian reservations. The main location was Pine Ridge, and the main battle was at Wounded Knee. The movie begins around the time when the Sioux were defeated at Little Bighorn. Then, the Americans continued to try and steal their land. Americans offered the Natives money for their land, but they refused to take it, because they believed some of it was sacred, and they did not want to give up. Americans were also trying to make the Sioux Indians into Americans, but…

Amiotte is a 17-year-old high school student at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She told The Huffington Post that about half of her female friends cannot afford feminine hygiene supplies causing them to miss school for up to a week at a time. The author of the article, Eleanor Goldberg, writes that “This can lead them to fall behind in class, contributing to the already abysmal graduation rates on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.” This is just one of the many stories of…

317-22) in this case the battle of Little Bighorn was just the start and over the last hundred years the escalation has increased and decreased. In fact in 1973 the established American Indian Movement (AIM) to rally support for their cause and "AIM occupied Wounded Knee Cemetery on Pine Ridge Reservation to alert the world about the vested economic interest the U.S. government held in the Hills and the extent to which that interest governed U.S. governmental policy and federal court cases…

At the time, the Native population was dwindling and they were restricted to reserves. As film was being invented, the U.S. 7th cavalry opened fire on the last free Native community at the Battle of Little Bighorn at Pine Ridge Indian Reservations in South Dakota (Diamond, "Reel Injun"). This incident influenced many people, especially filmmakers, to perpetuate the idea that Natives were a myth, as if they "didn 't exist" or they became "extinct". Clearly, as of today, this is not…