Where we're at this morning is, one of the oldest, graveyards established here after, the reservation was established in 1863. this one is significant to today's events in that, survivors of Whitestone Hill were buried here.

And also survivors of, the hangings from, the Minnesota War of 1862.

And so this has a lot of, spiritual significance to us, our relatives here.

A massacre took place.

It was bigger than Wounded Knee.

This is the same as Wounded Knee.

There's no difference.

There's no difference at all.

We start the horse ride from Crow Creek, and we do a relay system with our horses.

So the horses will, you know that you'll take out a group maybe of a 5 to 10, and you'll do a relay system where you bring out a couple horses and everybody else goes to the next checkpoint, maybe 5 to 10 miles ahead.

Those horses will ride.

We'll get our next horses ready.

So once we get towards, just outside of the white Stone Hill site, we get ready our horses because, not only the massacre site is important, but that site of Whitestone Hill is a site that's pretty ancient for us.

You know, it's over 6000 years that we can... We know that Dakota and Lakota people have been continually going there, you know, and they were going there to hunt buffalo to have ceremonies.

It's a spiritual site.

It's a sacred site.

It also happens, that there's a massacre, in there layered with it.

And that's that happens a lot with a lot of sacred sites.

You know, you look at, Bdote, or Fort Snelling, that's a sacred site.

Look at the Black Hills.

That's another sacred site.

A lot of these places where there is massacres.

It's connected to a spiritual place, because that's where you have a large group of people coming together to have ceremonies and get together.

This year is my fourth year.

When you make a commitment in any one of our ceremonies, Sundance or any other ceremony you need, it's four days.

Four nights.

Everything is... There's a law of four, Dopa.

Dopa.

They use to refer to it.

And all of the sacred energy teachings come from come from the cosmos, from the sacred energy.

What's sacred above is sacred below.

So, when we pray the color yellow represents the East.

As the understanding of new life birthing the sun, the morning sun coming over the horizon.

So we learn to pray during these times.

The first direction is to the West, the second to the North.

And they all represent, a nation.

And they have a color.

So we've been using red in the past to, to help the spiritual energy that, their lives were taken, in a very, murdering way of people that were, trying to enjoy life.

They came and massacred our relatives.

At Whitestone Hill.

The landmark itself, Whitestone Hill, being a ceremonial place for, for us.

The stone effigies that are, laid about, that our ancestors put there.

How on September 3rd, 1853, you know.

Sully, came in from the South and the Five Chiefs rode out under a flag of truce.

There's no accurate body count.

All we're hearing is 4 to 500 that got killed that day.

And the sad stories from elder, from Cannonball: A man with, 2 or 3 wagons full of bones was going East, and he returned later, 3 or 4 months later, and he sold fertilizer to the Standing Rock Tribe.

And that those bones became fertilizer for their first crop.

From further away, Sibley... General Sibley, General House.

And there's another, captain who was coming in and they, had some scouts who had gone further ahead and told him, you know, there's a lot, a lot of people over there, and there's some Santee's and Santee's referred to the Dakotas, who were primarily from Minnesota, which is the Bedowakontua, the Wahpekute, the Sisseton and Wahpeton.

So, those are the four bands of the, the East Santee or the Santee people of Minnesota.

And those are the ones that Sibley was coming after.

Sibley was in, basically he was hunting down all of the Dakotas that had tried to flee Minnesota, and he had entered into Dakota Territory.

This wasn't, you know, United States yet.

This was still sovereign Indian land of the Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation).

But he came in to the Dakota Territory and basically started confronting them.

And right away, one of the chiefs, Chief Big Head, he took a flour bag and, you know, he he emptied out the flour of it.

And, you know, he took that sack and put it on a, a stick or a little pole.

And he took that flag and wove it, you know, above his head, trying to tell Sibley that, you know, he didn't want war.

He didn't want, anything.

No hostilities, because the Hunktuwana, at that time, you know, they were there were peaceful with a lot of the different groups around, you know, compared to, you know, other, other groups in the northern Plains, they really tried to keep as much peace.

they tried to find resolutions first.

So he wove that flag and, and wanted to, you know, have some, some talking first.

So Sibley and some of the other military men got together on top of a little hill, at Whitestone Hill.

And they started talking and they talked for a couple hours, you know, trying to figure out what's the best way.

And Chief Big Head and some of the other Chiefs, you know, Little Soldier, Two Bears, they also tried to talk and figure out resolution.

And at the end of those, negotiations, basically, it was, agreed upon that all of the men of that camp would have to give themselves up so as Chief Big Head, you know, agreed to that he was going back to his camp, there was a shot fired from the soldier side because the Dakota at that time really didn't have a lot of guns.

They mainly just had their bows and arrows.

Because the previous summer, a lot of those weapons were confiscated.

After the uprising happened, the government was pretty worried that, you know, the the tribes would come up and, you know, try to help the Dakota in Minnesota.

So, a lot of those things were kind of confiscated.

Even horses were confiscated the year before.

So even the horse herds were a lot smaller.

What they typically would be for a camp that size.

So one of the soldiers shoots into the camp, you know, I'm sure they say it was an accidental fire, but Sibley was there for blood.

He wanted revenge.

He didn't want just to capture people.

And, you know, he wanted it, an actionable thing to happen.

So as soon as that shots fired, all the other soldiers are already ready, and they surround that camp.

You know, some people say it was a camp of about 5000 people, and they surround that camp in its entirety, and they just start shooting in.

Bullets are flying.

And so that shock and trauma, is passed on, to those who survived.

So, what we're doing when we found this out, I'm involved with prayer.

I've been involved with prayer since I was born to our families.

My father side, comes from medicine men and my mother's side, a lot of our Lakota people have that, their blood.

The WoLakota.

We were involved in the, the Sacred Horse Society, and we understand, the process of Wocekiya, and suffering for, for a cause, some people fast for as long as they can and pray for whomever or whatever for, good resolution.

When we understood that this massacre happened, our relatives never had a chance.

And a lot of them that, like, generations that come from that are still feeling the effects of that, that that horrible massacre.

So since then, a lot of our our people, Oceti Sakowin is feeling a lot of historical trauma.

And today it's creating and created what we we're still hanging on to historical trauma and and that was placed on us through a lot of practices of genocide.

The Whitestone Hill ride.

Is a ride that that commemorates a massacre that happened back then to the Hunkpati people, which is where I'm from.

one of the places where the Oceti, band together to fight against a common enemy.

The Lakota, Dakota, Nakota peoples were all present at that time.

And we were up there hunting buffalo, you know, preparing for winter.

And we also had, men, you know, doing their their annual, hanbleca which is, a ceremony, up, up on, Inyansan Paha which we know as white Stone Hill.

So we ride to, to remember them and, and to tell the truth of what happened there and and to to tell our side.

Because our side never gets told of what happened.

It's always a glorified, romanticized, you know, view of the Wasi'chus, view of that.

And, you know, those events.

We're doing this to bring attention to it and to make sure that the correct story is told.

They say, all the women were to the north up here September 3rd, 1863.

The women could still call their buffalo with their breath.

That's what I was told.

So they were collecting buffalo meat for the winter, and all the men were to the south, a couple of hundred tipis ring up there.

Whitestone Hill is a is, in terms of massacres in United States history, it's it's probably one of the most horrific because it's multiple layers of atrocities kind of layered on top of each other.

And some of the stories connected to that, you know, is when the the camp was being shot at all surrounded, the women kind of made a decision to start putting their babies and all the babies of that camp onto the back of dogs.

And if there was a horse or two, maybe they would put it onto the back of that horse.

And the the military, gave out an order to shoot down all those dogs.

But what happened was that those those soldiers weren't very good marksmen.

So when they were trying to aim for those dogs, they would shoot those babies as well.

And the Dakota people said that, you know, this is the the the military account of it.

But the Dakota people said, you know, those soldiers weren't bad marksmen.

You know, they were trained to shoot.

So they were purposely shooting those babies on their own accord and then passing it off as, 'oh, I missed'.

And they were aiming towards all of those things.

They would, you know, see something moving and you just shoot instantly.

Whether it was a child where there's a baby, a woman or, an elderly man, there wasn't warriors there.

So how could it?

For all of these years, they've called it the government has called it a battle site.

How can be a battle site when you're shooting babies and children and women and elderly?

That's a massacre.

And it's just one of the many massacres.

But this one is unique because all of the things that happened there, because they kept shooting until there was too much friendly fire, there was enough friendly fire for them to have to stop.

And it was kind of the sun was setting and it was starting to get dark out.

So they stopped shooting and they said, you know, through the night they could hear your wailing and dogs, howling.

And, you know, some of those dogs are injured too, and people are just crying out in pain, you know, because they were shot and maybe they weren't killed right away.

So from there, the next morning, those soldiers got up.

And one of the stories, you know, that the other stories that come from that is that some of the children who were, you know, crowded or, you know, huddled around their mothers or their families, you or maybe they were hiding under the one of the tipis.

They got them up and they gave them bayonets and then said, you know, 'who was ever not able to stand... You stab them.

Otherwise we'll kill you.'

So, you know, can you imagine what that meant for them to have to do something like that, or to make that type of decision to finish or to, you know, kill their own relatives, you know, in Dakota culture, there's above anything else.

You honor your relatives.

And that's something that those children, you know, who are forced to do that, they have to live with that for the rest of their lives.

My grandmother was one of those survivors.

Her name is, WyaNupa.

And she is a Kunsi, Kunsi WyaNupa, which is, great grandmother Two arrows was her name, and she was about five years old at that time of that massacre.

she said her earliest and earliest memories of childhood were holding on to the fringes of her mother's dress while she was riding on the back of a running horse, being shot at.

That's her first memory as a child.

They don't want to admit this happened.

They're always you always hear people say, 'get over it.'

You know, get over you.

You get over, what happened In Germany?

They don't talk about that, but we're supposed to get over it.

We're supposed to get over there.

And we still live with this.

We still live with these struggles every day.

Every day in our lives.

You know, you can go to reservations and you see it.

It's rampant.

You know, it's there yet.

And then and they're saying, why don't you guys just.

Behave yourself.

But they don't realize what we're what we're dealing with.

It's the same as a person that's been through, a war.

It's it's called historical trauma.

Intergenerational trauma, it's still there, just like PTSD.

Same thing.

I'm here because, my descendant is from the Whitestone Hill battle.

Chief Wolf Necklace was actually my great great great grandfather.

And so we came here.

This is our first year writing me and my boys.

And, I think it's really important for them to know their history.

You know, where they're come from, you know, understand, their people.

And to keep things like this going because, you know, until recently, this wasn't something I really knew about either.

Cultural education isn't really pushed in a lot of our systems.

You know, it's really, colonized education that we have.

Let's listen to these kids playing and and hear their laughter.

We are on a road to Whitestone Hill to to work on expanding this energy of healing our people, having those relatives who still remember what went on, the ancestors to share their pain, what they heard, what they felt, It's unresolved trauma.

Release that pain.

Let it go.

They took all the kettles from that camp, all the brass kettles, even, you know, if they had pottery, they took all those pots and then they started punching holes through them.

They started crushing them and stomping on them, shooting bullets through them.

And the idea was that if there were any survivors who had come back, some people were able to flee and head out into the prairies.

They thought, if anybody comes back, we want to make sure they starve, you know?

So they took all of those kettles and destroyed it.

They took all the tipi poles, all the tipis, all of their clothing and burned it, all the buffalo hides.

Then they took 500,000 pounds of buffalo meat, and they burned all of that buffalo meat.

And they said there was so much meat that was burned on top of the hill there was a river of grease that flowed down.

There was so much blood shed up there on that day that it created a river that flowed into the creeks.

The Wasi'chu say that they burnt all the buffalo meat and all the food we had stored.

And that's where that come from.

That was, blood flowing from our ancestors as they piled them up.

And it created a river of blood, you know, that's that's the stories we're told.

And this is the soldier's account of that.

But buffalo meat doesn't really have a lot of fat.

It's a really lean meat.

And the survivors from different communities, like, Cannonball or Spirit Lake or Montana or Crow Creek, they talked about that They seen soldiers stacking the bodies and burning those bodies.

So there wasn't a trace.

500,000 pounds of meat, you know, a buffalo can maybe produce about 1,000 pounds of meat itself.

So this is a big, big economic loss for the tribe, you know, or the tribes that were there between the Lakotas Dakotas, the Hunkpapas, you know, they they lost a lot of, you know, their clothing, their home, basically drove Dakota people to become impoverished, to be in poverty.

And this is a tactic that the United States government was using to make sure that they were pushed onto reservations where they could have complete control of, of of the Dakotas.

1863 was the beginning of the end.

September 3rd.

Last year we were there, and, I was at the the water at the pond.

They said, when this is going on, you know, that was pure red with blood from everything that was taking place.

You know, they destroyed everything they had, you know, everything.

They couldn't use anything.

They didn't want them to have anything.

So every year we used to go there and pray, you know, pray.

And then behind me is the monument on the hill.

They were starving in the winter, you know, those ones they took to the reservation... I mean, the, you know, the concentration camp was what you call it, prisoner of war.

Down in Crow Creek.

Those other ones started going there because they could they didn't have anything.

You think about tipi poles.

You think about, all that meat that they destroyed, everything they had.

And coming winter, they have to replace all that.

You know, you just don't replace it, tipi poles.

You have to.

If you have to get Buffalo, if you didn't have no weapons, nothing to to hunt with, the people were destitute.

They had to go there.

So all it was the start of the reservation system the reservation system was completely different.

You know, that was our loss of freedom, starvation of freedom.

I mean, you faced starvation or you faced starvation in freedom.

And that's what happened.

And then came the boarding schools.

Boarding school era came next.

All the things that came with it, everything it was, it was it was endless, When that happened up there that day, when we became under attack, most of the men were gone.

They were hunting or they were in ceremony.

And so the women, children and the elders were very vulnerable at that time.

And that's and that was one of the tactics of, of the U.S.

Army was to attack at those times.

They thought that, that was the way we would be beat, was to attack the home when the men were gone, destroyed, destroy the homes, destroy the food caches, destroy everything, kill the women, children and elders, and they, you know.

But little did they know that, everything of ours come from, Unci Makha, the Earth.

And so we were able to quickly obtain those things again and keep going.

It wasn't until years later when they finally figured out our Achilles Tendon, and that was the Horse Nation.

They figured out that that if if they can separate us from the horse nation, then we can be beat.

And sure enough, that's what they did.

They took our horses from us and put us back on foot.

And, that's how we ended up where we are today on this, Prisoner of War Camp 342.

This is what that was known as back in the 1860s, Known as Fort Thompson today or the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation.

But originally it was, Prisoner of War Camp 342.

But from there, it just gets it's like you're just adding one thing on top of the another saying, you know, who can make this worse for them?

So after they spent three days burning and destroying everything, hunting down people who were still in the prairie so they would run, you know, their horses out in each direction.

And if they seen a child or a person, you know, in the grass, maybe they were injured still, they would just come in, shoot them, try to find the next.

when they had all cleaned up that camp, then they took prisoners and they made them walk a couple hundred miles from North Dakota, all the way down to Crow Creek.

And when they were brought to Crow Creek, they were made prisoners.

And Crow Creek was not the place you would ever want to be.

You know, at that time there was some Dakota women, and children that were brought there from the concentration camp at Fort Snelling.

But then here comes another group, you know, and at that time, there's stories of, Crow Creek, of how bad it was.

You know, the soldiers were violating a lot of the women.

I've been on this ride for four years, from the start of it until four years later, until today, and throughout the four years it has grown, it has grown a lot of people.

those of us who know about treaties, you know, that's that's a legal document that we're going to be addressing and what we're doing today, we're unwinding the colonial, the colonial colonizing way of, Domination, the dominating energy and the greed for gold.

The greed for gold and that way of life.

And that's ongoing.

They don't know how to stop.

They want more.

They want the gold to pile higher and higher and higher.

They have no... there's no stop sign for them.

They want no matter how many billions of dollars they make, they still want more.

That's a learned behavior.

We don't practice that.

And we have our connection in survival.

How we respect, our connection to to life.

That's Who We Are.

The ride sparked a lot of interest to non-Native people as well as our own people.

A lot of people didn't know what happened at Whitestone.

And so through this ride, we educated through all the towns that we stopped in.

We had a lot of people stopping and asking us, what are you doing?

What what's going on?

I see a lot of horses, what's going on?

And that's our chance.

That's a chance to tell the dark history of America.

The things that the the history books in the schools don't tell.

That's what we tell when we come on these rides.

Usually things happen in fours in, in, native culture, like four seasons, four directions, four stages of life.

And it's a, it's a good number.

Four.

It's a powerful number in our, in our culture.

So when you make a commitment to like say for instance, to Sundance, it's usually four years.

Or if you make a commitment to do something... four years, The first year is to get in there with your energy.

Second year, you can start to make a little bit changes.

How can I improve?

Third year?

You make the changes, you know, you go with it.

And then the fourth year is when you give thanks.

So this is also a thank you ride.

"Wopida", thank you Ride, to everyone who was part of the four years.

And Wokakgesa understanding that sitting still and listening to someone explaining this whole process.

We've come to an age now where a lot of us don't have the patience to listen.

We we live in a fast lane today.

We want everything to happen now Within 20 seconds.

Because of that, there's a lot of teaching that should be held for survival.

So when that time comes, when you're out by yourself, you're going to be saying, I should have listened.

How how am I going to survive?

How am I going to, take a, take a four legged relative and cook it, prepare for me to eat?

I didn't listen, So when an elder speaks to a younger person, there's a "Wo" word in there too.

Called Wowahokunka Wowahokunka is Spiritual advice for survival.

So these are all good energies, good medicine that a lot of elders, they have that, young people need to listen because that's how you survive, how you take care of yourself, how you you you're going to have a long life.

Today it's going the opposite way.

Its history that's been suppressed along with the Minnesota uprising.

the Civil War was going on.

So the government didn't have a lot of money to, meet their obligations for their annuities and stuff.

And, you had a big influx of.

Immigrants coming in, and that was just a clash of cultures.

it just didn't work.

And it all came to a head when they were practically starved out in August of '62.

And, the leader, Little Crow, didn't want to.

Uprise against the whites because he knew that there was, you know, exercise in futility.

But he went along with it and that was suppressed and put down.

we've got two streets named in this little village, one named Sibley, the other named Ramsey that, are named after the Minnesota governor and General Sibley, that, basically made lots of money off the Native Americans over the years.

They were in charge of the whole operation.

And then you had a fool named, John Pope, who was the overall military commander that the Army didn't know what to do with after Antietam (relieved after the 2nd Battle of Bull Run in '62) And then so they shipped him out here and put him in charge of this, which was a mistake.

it seems to be suppressed all the time.

We come from blood, from people that.

Have understanding of the universe and everything that's in it.

To be able to make something so huge.

So it makes me proud to to be a Native American.

Everything we do that's going to help life, there's a little suffering to it.

We used to have a link of the grandpa.

A grandfather that used to take over the number one grounding here on Mother Earth comes from mom.

And that number one grounding or the anchor of life is love.

And she does that by welcoming the spirit into this world.

So the Wokakgesa, the suffering for our female is nine months.

Our ceremony, the longest male ceremony for Lakota, is 12, 12 days for Sundance.

And so she knows her hands are sacred.

So everything she does is nurturing energy.

Everything she's touching is good medicine.

The social ills we we gained that we learned because we didn't have those social ills.

We didn't have, things like, dysfunctional homes.

We didn't have those.

We had, societies that took care of things.

We didn't have the social ills like, addictions, alcoholism, you know, drug abuse, Everything that we have today... we didn't have poverty.

I mean, everybody was the same, you know, We took care of each other.

And depression and suicides, everything we have that today.

And you look at all the reservations.

They struggle with that.

Now, they... There's also other people, too.

The people in this country they they suffer, too.

And they suffer from shame.

Chief Big Head, survives and some of his family members survive Whitestone Hill; and he's made a prisoner and he's sent to, Davenport, Iowa, where he's kept there for a couple of years.

And then from there, he's brought back up to, to Crow Creek.

And along the way, Chief Big Head loses, I think, was like 4 or 6 grandchildren just between Whitestone Hill and then making it back to Crow Creek.

When he's released from prison in Crow Creek, the soldiers give him a nice plate of food.

And they say, here, you know, here's a nice place of food.

You're free to go.

Go wherever you want.

And they had, you know, he's tired.

He's... he's heart heartsick.

You know, and he gives that plate of food to his eldest sonápa (Beaver).

And pa takes that food.

He eats it.

And as he's eating it, Chief Big Head is saying, you know, we've lost a lot of our family.

We've lost our tiyospaye, our extended community.

Let's go find them.

Let's go bring them all back together.

And about an hour later, after eating that food, he starts to throw up, blood and blood clots.

And what had happened is that those soldiers at, Crow Creek, they poisoned that food because they were trying to kill Big Head.

And so from their Big Head, you know, vows to never be an American because what type of people could do atrocities like this over and over and then still try to kill him?

He said, you know, why would I ever want to be a Christian?

Why would ever I want to be an American?

Why would I want to be associated with a group of people that could do something atrocious like this, kill women and children, babies.

And now this.

So he took blood and he made a circle on that flag or that flour sack, and he still had that.

He held on to it because he wanted to show that he came in peace.

This is, you know, a peaceful camp.

They didn't attack or they didn't do anything negative.

These are our ancestors that survived those times of massacres and, sickness and, you know, and, war.

And so this is where they're laying now.

And, This is, the mouth of what's called Wolf Creek, which flows right into the Missouri River here.

And to honor those that died that day because there were many, many people that died that day.

We were scattered up there.

And many of us here at Crow Creek, are here because of survivors from the Whitestone Hill battle, you know, made it to here.

Our people first settled when they were brought here, the survivors of the Dakota 38, Minnesota War are over the horizon to our East over there.

And they're still there today.

When you have, like, the state of Minnesota set a bounty out, for our peoples scalps, and the hanging of our 38+2.

You know, if you're guilty of, of committing a crime would you hang around?

Would you hang around and say, 'hang me'?

A lot of the guilty ones and, they left.

The racist, way we were treated that we all look alike.

And then, the Christmas present that was given to the Christian people in Mankato, with the hanging on December 26th, 1862.

Are you happy to see people hang?

What kind of religion do you believe in?

Who's the murderer?

Who's the heathens?

Who's the savages?

Come to that balance and harmony.

And I remind our people.

Don't be angry anymore.

Don't be angry.

Try to find some balance and harmony in what happened to us.

Make make those who are guilty aware what they did to us.

We don't have, an alcohol problem or a drug problem.

We have a mental health problem.

And we we we need our ceremonies to help heal our people.

And basically, judgment was passed without any evidence.

So Chief Big Head basically goes off and, you know, he starts his community.

But they say that, Chief Big Head also goes and some of the survivors of, Whitestone Hill, they go and they, eventually end up at, Battle of Little Bighorn.

And they were able to, you know, make their stand there and kind of still stand in that, you know, that they're not Americans, that they would never want to be that there's something greater, A lot of us never learn these things.

None of us never learn these things until We're older and we're full of anger when we hear about it.

Soldiers that shot and killed, murdered.

You know, that's murder, man.

that ain't fighting when you ain't got no gun.

What's that?

That's, And if you fight back, it's.

It gets worse, you know?

But that's murder.

Just like Dakota 38, you know, that's the biggest mass hanging in U.S.

history, and nobody knows about it and we're trying to make it right.

That's why we do this.

To tell the truth.

To make sure that, we're heard.

It's proven that when we forget about our history, we tend to repeat it.

And so, we want to make sure we don't repeat those times, And it's so encouraging to see more and more of our youth step up and, make that journey, because when they go the distance and they finish this, it it does something to ones energy, ones spirit.

Uplifts us.

So they can carry on.

When we are in the star camp.

I love the fact that we, all bands, come together to do this ride.

I'm glad that the people of the towns come and.

And they want to help, you know, they they give to us to eat food we share, we break bread.

That's all the creator ever wanted us to be.

Was good human beings to one another.

So I believe that these rides are a must for the Native American people, because we've got to go back to our roots.

We've got to know what it is we need to do in order to save Unci Makah.

Our mother, grandmother, you know, you know, with we don't live like Native Americans anymore.

We don't we don't know how, you know, to get on that back of that horse and, and and to have that connection, that feeling that horse feels you when you get on it.

And they they know there's suffering.

It's a connection that we have with with the four legged.

It's a connection that Unci Makah has to us and we have to the creator that we need to get more in tune with.

The healing process that these animals carry.

In this culture, we don't.

The horse ain't ours, we don't own them.

We belong to the horse.

That's that's who we are.

They own us, so to speak.

We care for them.

We take care of them.

Are caretakers of the Sunka Wakan.

Until we journey on our they journey on.

There's too much hate in this world.

As the old man told me.

In my healing process, before we know where we're going, we have to remember where we come from and who we are.

We have to understand that we're the connection, of those that left... Us here and now, and those yet coming behind us.

To say this is a family.

This is.

We're a family here.

We're.

This is.

There's no other place in the world I'd rather be.

But here, right now, And I... I ride for my people.

I ride for the ones that can't ride.

I ride for our relatives.

The ones that are, having hardships on the reservations.

I ride for them, too.

And I'm proud to be here and I'm happy.

I'm happy that people are hearing us now.

There's so much out there that we're struggling with and we don't know about, We're in pain, you know, because of what happened, I think it was 30 years ago.

My wife and I came down to another one that they said they're having.

And it's the same troops, same guys that raided.

Kill Deer Mountain it's called.

And it's the same, same thing they did here at Whitestone That they did over there.

So that we went because they said they're going to cause that the same thing again, the portrayed as a battlefield.

And it wasn't.

My grandfather was a survivor of Wounded Knee.

What happened there at Wounded Knee?

There was no battle.

That was, total massacre of women and children.

And we need those medals to be Rescinded.

Because there was no battle.

The only men that did that were awarded medals for butchering women and children.

United States government, went in and tried to help heal those countries that they bombed and destroyed.

After the war.

They haven't done that to our people yet.

We have a Holocaust here, the Holocaust of the United States.

Is what happened to us.

We're still remembering the nightmare.

Of what we went through.

But we're going to keep coming until they're ready to hear it.

Mitakuye Oyasin So we wait for that day, you know?

But until then, if we can, we're going to right these wrongs and teach our kids, the real things and educate whoever it may be, you know, to help us understand who we are so we can help you understand who we are, too.

It's actually changed, changed from a, Civil War battlefield is what they called it, because they used Civil War soldiers to to a massacre site.

And that just happened this year.

Now what's up There is a memorial to the soldiers that died there, you know.

they were murderers and rapists and child molesters, you know.

But here we are memorializing them.

Hopefully they'll put a memorial for our grandmas and grandpas that died that day, the children that died that day.

And they'll think about us this time.

The accomplishment in this ride, A lot of people see accomplishment in a piece of paper of getting a degree and whatever their schooling is, whatever... They go to school for four years, they get a degree in that, a little paper saying they achieved those classes, completed those classes.

But this is a great achievement.

Accomplishment.

For four years we got the name changed from Whitestone Hill Battlefield... To Whitestone Hill Massacre site.

And to me, that's That's the accomplishment.

Itself And also that the world sees now.

The world can hear what we've been through, All the atrocities our people have been through and We're still here today.

We don't want to desiccate those graves.

So, you know, we don't do things like that.

We don't dig people up.

You know, the government's done that to our people for so long.

We would not do that to them, but we charge those... It's just, a way of kind of like getting back.

But a reenactment of that, It helps us with our, our bleeding hearts.

If that makes any sense?

Kind of, puts a little Band-Aid on it.

We've had to deal with it now let's heal.

Let's heal our communities.

Because from Whitestone Hill, you can trace a very clear line of where, a lot of hardships on contemporary reservations, you know, have taken place and happened.

What we do is we dress up our horses, we make them, we aakiya them.

And aakíya is kind of like you're painting them and it's it's something special for the horses and for the for the people who ride those horses.

Because it's a way to honor those horses, you know, they do all the hard work for us, you know.

And not only that, they help center us.

They help teach us, you know, when we're riding them, any trauma we have, a horse can help with that trauma as well.

So we paint those horses, we're going to do two things.

When we get up to Whitestone, we're going to visit with our relatives there.

You know, that, you know, who were massacred there.

But there's also relatives that go back hundreds and hundreds of years.

You know, how many people died just of natural causes at Whitestone Hill?

How many children were born there?

How many placentas were buried into that land?

So, you know, we have to come in there in a positive way.

And for our horses, you know, our belief is that the horses can see those spirits as we enter that.

So when we paint them, they know.

The spirits know that it's not, you know, soldiers horses.

So everybody gets their horses ready, make them look real nice, brush Out their hair, and whatever they feel like is is good for them.

Then it's a slow ride, kind of through a gravel road going up there, and we start off at a tree line and once we get into Whitestone right outside of the park entrance, those horses start to kind of pick up speed, and the horses are excited because they know what they're supposed to do.

A couple times now, we've had a Spirit Horse who goes ahead, and every year that Spirit Horse will charge the hill where the soldiers are buried.

And it's kind of an accumulation of all of this energy, all of the prayers, all of the the heartache, you know, that, you know, that takes place.

It's an emotional thing to talk about these things and to have to say to them and to explain it to people.

But when you see the horses come in and they're at a full sprint going up that hill and they surround the soldiers monument... People always wonder, why do you guys ride up that hill?

Are you honoring our soldiers?

No, we're not honoring those soldiers.

We're doing something that the people couldn't do.

We go up to count coup on those soldiers.

I mean, they're they're they're gone.

It's just it's just a reenactment thing.

We want to do something that they couldn't do.

They didn't have a chance.

They didn't have the weapons.

They had nothing.

They were surrounded.

They were.

They were shot at long distance.

There was no hand-to-hand combat there.

And people were, you know, they were slaughtered.

There was a man.

There was a man from Minnesota.

He was a translator.

When he went back, when, Sully bragged about what he did, you know, he said if I would have had a more light because it happened about half hour before dark.

If I had to have more light, I could have killed them all.

It was like.

It was like 4000 people there, and they were trapped, you know?

And that man told that told when he went back, he said it was a slaughter.

What he did was a slaughter.

We want to tell that story.

What happened... What happened there at Whitestone?

To us now, it's like counting coup.

It's striking that enemy.

Counting coup comes from this tradition of plains tribes that, you know, you could go off and kill an enemy, but that wasn't the most honorable thing, the most honorable thing, and the most brave thing you could do at that time is run up to an enemy to touch them and say, I could have killed you, and then run back.

And it's basically showing them, you know, we could do more, but we are choosing not to because there's an understanding that they have families.

So our modern day coup is doing that to the soldiers.

You know, we could tear down that whole sculpture.

We could tear down and break all of those headstones.

But at the same time, we're saying no, because that's not our shame to hold.

That monument, you know, that honors only the soldiers is not our shame.

If you want, you know, as American people, if they want to honor killers of babies, women and children, then they have a 15ft tall granite sculpture to to show that.

I'm proud to say that we did it.

We finally did it and.

These aren't Tears of sadness, but tears of happiness.

Tears of accomplishment.

When we charge that hill, that feeling is like a feeling of no other.

That that's like that graduation feeling.

People.

People feel when they walk Across that stage to get that piece of paper, But that's our... to charge that hill It brings a sense of pride, a sense of, we're doing, we're doing, we're back.

We're back on horse.

We're back with everything that they took from us on that day.

We're back and we're stronger, and we're here to tell this story.

We're here to bring awareness to what happened to our relatives up there.

And that makes me feel good.

And every year I'll be coming back to Keep riding for this, keep riding for our relatives That lost their lives at the hands of the US government.

We'll keep coming back.

it's a celebration to of, I say rewriting history.

I mean, it's not going to be known as that Civil War battlefield.

No more.

If it's known, it'll be known as a massacre site.

And for me, that's a that's a victory.

I mean, I mean, we can't bring people back, but we can write that history, make it right, and people will know and then other people, I mean, our own, our own people, like, they don't know about this.

A lot of people go visit Wounded Knee.

Nobody knows about Whitestone.

Whitestone Hill historically is one of the sites that's been very overlooked.

And my belief is that it's not it's not just because it's happened early or because it's remote, but I think it was by design that, you know, that it was overlooked, that, you know, Wounded Knee was a big atrocity as well.

But we can't forget that, you know, Whitestone Hill, there was many more killed, you know, on the low estimates.

I've heard people say 500, 600 people killed because it was a big camp, a camp of 5000 that was surrounded.

But if you look at the men who were in charge of these things, you know, you have, men like Sibley, who becomes governor General House, you know, who also becomes a politician.

All of these men that were in charge of, of this campaign to hunt down and kill Dakota people, they became men of prominence.

They became big landowners, became politicians who made a lot of money, and they made money off of the backs of Indian people.

It's really easy to have a one sided story like we've had for the last, you know, 150, 155, 160 years.

And I think now it's, you know, it's a collective effort of families and descendants and horse riders that, you know, are saying, why should we have to, you know, skirt around these histories and feel uncomfortable?

We've been telling our truths.

And that's where, you know, the power of a horse, the power of the Horse Nation.

It gives you that encouragement to say, you know, We can do this.

There's no reason.

There's nothing.

Lesser than of the Indian person or there's nothing lesser about us, you know, as indigenous people that should make us feel that way.

But, you know, through boarding school and all of these other things, a lot of these histories are suppressed.

They're pushed to the side.

And they're always going to do that.

They're always going to downplay it.

They don't want another massacre site, the United States.

But it's happened, you know.

We need to create the healing of our people and become a healthy nation again.

We have the ceremonies to heal our people.

That's not going to take psychotropic drugs to heal our people, or it's not going to take any, white people's treatment.

Because they don't understand who we are, they don't know who we are.

And they they call us savages and heathens.

When when we're not, we're very loving, nurturing, people.

We have our communication and connection to the invisible world.

I'm filled with the gratitude that these rides are happening.

And we're going back.

We're taking back our teachings.

It's just heartwarming to see that happen.

Wiconi Wicozani Good health, good blessings to everyone, to all the relatives on this ride.

I this time I, I want to sing a song, a verse in the song Unci is grandmother, and Thunkasila is Grandfather.

And, They taught us something sacred.

Remember that, some of the translations of this song that I want to share for this, for this, for the people, I love dearly all people.