This week’s Text, in observation of the fourth Friday of National Native American Heritage Month 2024, is this reading on Pine Ridge along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
The Pine Ridge Reservation entered my consciousness in 1973, when activists from the American Indian Movement (AIM) began the Wounded Knee Occupation. AIM had earlier, for almost two years between 1969 and 1971, occupied the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. I was dimly aware of that, but by 1973 I’d become much more aware, having read by then for the first time Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart and Wounded Knee. In 1975, members of the Menominee Nation seized the Alexian Brothers Novitiate in Gresham, Wisconsin; I lived in Madison at the time, and my high school friends and I followed these events with keen interest.
This reading pulls no punches about the role of the United States government in creating neglect and failure in the way it proceeded with establishing Native American reservations. The massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 took place at Pine Ridge. Enough said.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Mark's Text Terminal 