Ministerial Meditations
By The Rev. Connie Yost
On this past 4th of July holiday, I was reflecting on the price our freedom has cost the peoples who were enslaved, made war upon, lied to and abused in the quest of our Independence and prosperity.
While Thomas Jefferson and others eloquently wrote that they would sooner "cease to exist before I yield to a connection on such terms as the British Parliament propose," indigenous peoples were increasingly lied to and manipulated as their ancestral lands were taken from them.
Black Elk was an Oglala Lakota of the Sioux nation, who lived through the battle of the Little Bighorn and the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, which pretty much marked the end of the US government's war on the western Indian Nations, as their colonization was now complete. He reflects: "I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream…the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead."