Eating Crow 5

At dawn on December 15, 1890, back at Standing Rock, Sitting Bull was shot in the heart and in the head by agency native police, in a raid to prevent him from supporting the Ghost Dance movement of magical bulletproof spirit shirts and returning buffalo. He died six hours later, and was buried at Fort Yates in a coffin made by a U.S. Army carpenter.
During the firing, the old show horse that Buffalo Bill had presented to him began to go through his tricks. At the crack of a gunshot, the mount had been trained to raise one hoof. For the faithful at Standing Rock that day, the horse sat upright, held a hoof aloft, and seemed to be performing the Dance of the Ghosts.

  ‘All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing. Pretty soon in
   next spring Great Spirit come. He bring back all game of every kind.
   The game be  thick everywhere. All dead Indians come back and live
   again. They all be strong just like young men, be young again. Old
   blind Indians see again and get young and have fine time. When Great
   Spirit comes this way, then all Indians go to mountains, high up away
   from whites. Whites can’t hurt Indians then. Then while Indians way
   up high, big flood comes like water and all white people die, get
   drowned. After that, water go away and then nobody but Indians
   everywhere and game all kinds thick. Then medicine man tell Indians
   to send word to all Indians to keep up dancing and the good time will
   come. Indians who don’t dance, who don’t believe in this word, will
   grow little, just about a foot high, and stay that way. Some of them will
   be turned into wood and be burned in fire.’
                                                                         Wovoka, the Paiute Messiah

In 1909, Red Cloud died at the age of 87 on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where he was buried. President Kennedy considered naming a ballistic missile submarine after him, but the Pentagon objected that it might be misinterpreted as pro-Communist.
After litigation spanning 40 years, the United States Supreme Court, in the 1980 decision United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, acknowledged that the US Government had taken the Black Hills without just compensation. The Lakota refused the money offered, and continue to insist on their right to their land. The profile of Crazy Horse is returning in stone. We did not give you our land; You stole it from us.
In 2010, a research team at the University of Copenhagen, announced their intention to sequence the genome of Sitting Bull, with the approval of his descendants, using a hair sample obtained during his lifetime. So far, no one has announced a similar plan to clone anything that might resemble George Armstrong Custer. Hokey Hey.



                        ‘In that desolate land and lone,
                        Where the Big Horn and Yellowstone
                        Roar down their mountain path,
                        By their fires the Sioux Chiefs
                        Muttered their woes and griefs
                        And the menace of their wrath.

                        ‘Revenge!’ cried Rain-in-the-Face,
                        ‘Revenue upon all the race
                         Of the White Chief with yellow hair!’
                         And the mountains dark and high
                         From their crags re-echoed the cry
                         Of his anger and despair.

                         In the meadow, spreading wide
                         By woodland and riverside
                         The Indian village stood;
                         All was silent as a dream,
                         Save the rushing a of the stream
                         And the blue-jay in the wood.

                         In his war paint and his beads,
                         Like a bison among the reeds,
                         In ambush the Sitting Bull
                         Lay with three thousand braves
                         Crouched in the clefts and caves,
                         Savage, unmerciful!

                         Into the fatal snare
                         The White Chief with yellow hair
                         And his three hundred men
                         Dashed headlong, sword in hand;
                         But of that gallant band
                         Not one returned again.

                          The sudden darkness of death
                          Overwhelmed them like the breath
                          And smoke of a furnace fire:
                          By the river's bank, and between
                          The rocks of the ravine,
                          They lay in their bloody attire.

                          But the foemen fled in the night,
                          And Rain-in-the-Face, in his flight
                          Uplifted high in air
                          As a ghastly trophy, bore
                          The brave heart, that beat no more,
                          Of the White Chief with yellow hair.

                          Whose was the right and the wrong?
                          Sing it, O funeral song,
                          With a voice that is full of tears,
                          And say that our broken faith
                          Wrought all this ruin and scathe,
                          In the Year of a Hundred Years.
                          Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Revenge of Rain-In-The-Face