Thursday August 5, 2021 A Wait of 142 years

    In July of this year, the remains of nine Sicangu Oyate children of the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, were returned home to the Rosebud after 142 years, through largely the efforts of the Sicangu Oyate Youth Council. You have to wonder why it took so long when these were marked graves with historical documentation.

    I can’t help but think others had tried to get the children returned during that lengthy time period too those being the immediate and extended family of the children, reservation officials, sympathetic politicians, and assertive tribal representatives, but as in so many cases of Native rights prior to this, they were systemically deterred. 

    Ponder the 142-years before the Sicangu Oyate received the bodily remains of these young people who suffered and died of disease and malnutrition while ‘in the care’ of people thinking they were cleansing them of their ‘Indianness.’ These were children who were wrenched from everything they ever knew of family, home, and life, then shipped over a thousand miles away never to be seen until now, in pieces, wrapped in a buffalo robe bundle in a cedar box; grasp this happening in 2021.

    Earth from the grave was included in the box in case bone fragments had fallen loose into the ground. The remains were wrapped in ‘tatanka’ (buffalo) hides with the hair still on, the animals that once fed, clothed, and sheltered their ancestor’s ancestors; the animals that were literally slaughtered by the millions on orders of the United States to finally subjugate the Indigenous Nations of the Plains.

    Then to top that off, they stole their children away from them and sent them faraway from all that they had ever known, for generations to follow. A great many of those who survived to come home, came back as mere shadows of themselves in search of fulfillment of something they didn’t remember nor recognize.

    So as I read the stories of these nine children and looked at the photos of their contemporary relatives, five generations hardly removed from the terror and pain these children suffered; and I read about the others of the tribe who were there to honor the children home, some standing in the open graves to receive the bundles and place them in their final resting places, I couldn’t help but feel sorrowful about such ceremonial occurrences in Native communities not so very far away from here, stemming from lives torn away under the auspices of genocide of Indigenous people and their culture.

    But, as coined during a TEDx Talk in 2013 by a well-known Indigenous activist, I'm supposed to "Go cry over someone else's tragedy [because] we're alive and thriving ... We are modern. We are human. We are here."

 I well know that, as my Anishinaabeg relatives including my 11-year old grandson, have shown me all his life.

    And so in a similar vein, ends the Sicangu Oyate's ceremony,  when medicine man Richard Moves Camp says, in part, 

" ... Let’s prepare our children for a good future. Now it’s time for us to learn our ancestors’ teachings. We must learn to speak the language. We must learn about our culture."

https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/rosebud-ancestors-buried-in-emotional-ceremony