Sitting Bull . 1831 - December 15, 1890

This is the day, in 1890, that Sitting Bull died. He was fatally shot by two tribal police officers while being arrested in order to keep him from influencing an ensuing Native American movement that threatened the Great White Father (Benjamin Harrison at the time). He is probably most famous for his role in the defeat of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer in the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, but he was a prominant member of the Lakota (Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux) community for his entire life, recognized as an important shaman.

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Image from the Smithsonian

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Sitting Bull and his people attempted to come to Canada. They were allowed to at first -- Sitting Bull developed a trusting relationship with the NWMP's Major Walsh, but they were eventually starved out and returned to the US. It's one of many betrayals we Canadians perpetrated on the First People of this land.

http://www.histori.ca/minutes/minute.do?id=10174

There are Native Americans living in the most destitute poverty, on the most unproductive lands in our country. As late as the 1970s men used to go to the reservation to rape NA girls with impunity. A white person who killed a NA in the Dakotas could count on getting off without punishment. Yet, I hear these same people bragging that they have some minuscule amount of NA ancestry. Even the RC church placed the most intransigent pedophiles on reservations where they could rape generations without fear of punishment.

Read, or reread "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee". It makes you ashamed to be an American of European descent.

Hear me, people: We have now to deal with another race â small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.

--Chief Sitting Bull, speaking at the Powder River Conference in 1877