The Wakpala School Horse Club
Sitting Bull - Bigfoot Memorial Ride.

The Wakpala School Horse Club is participating in the annual Sitting Bull - Bigfoot Memorial Ride. This is the first time the newly founded horse club will be able to participate in this memorial ride. The ride began this past December 15th and will continue through December 29th. Riders brave the Dakota winter and cross the windswept prairie to honor the descendents of Sitting Bull and Bigfoot. The ride began on December 15th at Sitting Bull’s camp next to the Grand River. Sitting Bull and eleven others were killed by Indian Police during a botched attempted arrest of him on December 15, 1890. Indian Police were ordered by Major James McLaughlin, Superintendent of the Standing Rock Reservation, to arrest Sitting Bull because of his alleged involvement in the Ghost Dance movement.

Many from Sitting Bull’s band were fearful of more reprisals. They fled south and found refuge with Bigfoot’s band. Big Foot decided to take his followers away from the area and headed three hundred miles south to the Pine Ridge Reservation where he thought it would be safe. Soldiers patrolling for roving bands crossed paths with him and his people on December 28, 1890. Big Foot and his people set up camp near Wounded Knee Creek. Flying a white flag of truce he had no plans of resisting the troops who had surrounded his camp with several Hotchkiss guns that very night. On December 29, 1890 soldiers began confiscating the few weapons the Indians had. When a gun accidentally discharged, the soldiers opened fire and massacred 370 Lakota men, women and children. All of the bodies were buried in a mass gravesite.

There have been varying accounts of both events. But nonetheless the tragedies have been memorialized for the past eleven years by riders who start where this tragic tale began and where it ended. The ride is one of remembrance and atonement. It is not only to remember and honor the dead, but also to celebrate the living. This is why the Wakpala School Horse Club chose to participate in just such a ride. The horse club’s primary goal is to always ride with a purpose. Sitting Bull once said, “Let us put our minds together to see that what we can build for our children.” Wakpala Horse Club members consist of youth who are finding out more about who they are, where the came from, and ultimately where they are going.

Wakpala School Horse Club members participating in this journey are Ramey Hill, Kellyn Hill, Brandi Hill, Sebastian Rodriguez, Jubal Mellette, Ridge Cadotte, and Walter Jordan. They are supervised and guided by Manaja Unjinca Hill, Deb Talmadge, and Jack and Teresa Shillingstad. We would like to thank the Wakpala School and school board members, the Wakpala 21st Century Program, the community of Wakpala, and all of those who assist along the way.

The Sitting Bull - Chief Big Foot Memorial Ride
Mending The Sacred Hoop

© 1998 Sarah Penman
"The ride, whose participants have come to be known as Si Tanka Wokiksuye Kin (Big Foot Memorial Riders) has grown in size and duration each year. It covers 250 miles from Little Eagle, South Dakota on the Standing Rock Reservation, through the Badlands, and across the Pine Ridge Reservation to Wounded Knee. They are following the trail that Chief Big Foot's Band had fled along after the murder of Sitting Bull by Indian police on December 15, 1890. Just outside Wounded Knee 13 days later, the band met the 7th US Cavalry Division, were placed under arrest and escorted to Wounded Knee.

The ride draws riders worldwide and some of whom had ancestors who died in the massacre. In addition to being a mourning ritual, the ride was a reaffirmation of Lakota spiritual and cultural values and includes prayers for the soldiers fighting in Afghanistan".

Mending the Sacred Hoop © 1998 Sarah Penman is a photographic essay that celebrates the spiritual rides of the Lakota and Cree Nations, whose traditionalist leaders have been working to create community through a reaffirmation of spiritual and cultural beliefs and practices. The essay was first presented in a showing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1998.

The Sitting Bull - Chief Big Foot Memorial Ride Shedule - December, 2001

One hundred and eleven years ago, on December 29, 1890, in a ravine near Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, the U.S. Army, supported by American Indian mercenaries, slaughtered approximately 300 Lakota men, women and children -- 75 percent of Big Foot's Lakota community. Two-thirds of the massacred Lakotas were women and children. Only 31 of the 470 soldiers were killed, many by "friendly fire" of fellow soldiers.

A blizzard swept over the countryside the night of December 29, and when it cleared days later, the valley was strewn with frozen, contorted dead bodies. A burial party returned to the site on New Years Day, 1891. The bodies of the slain were pulled from beneath the heavy snow and thrown into a single burial pit. It was reported that four infants were found still alive, wrapped in their deceased mothers shawls.

Big Foot's Lakota followers had already surrendered when they were brought to Wounded Knee by the army. While the Lakota warriors were being disarmed, fighting broke out. Any real resistance on the part of the warriors was quickly over. But atrocities escalated as the U.S. troops turned their weapons -- including four rapid-fire Hotchkiss guns -- against clearly defeated warriors and innocent women, children and old men. Women and children trying to escape were pursued and slaughtered. An official U.S. report noted that "the bodies of the women and children were scattered along a distance of two miles from the scene of the encounter.

A Witness's Account of What Happened
More Lakota Accounts of the Massacre at Wounded Knee

Sitting Bull (1890's) & Great Grandson Ron McNeil (2001)

Sitting Bull, like Martin Luther King, was a man of vision. "The great hope and purpose of his life was to unify the tribes, and bands of the Dakotas, (Sioux) and hold the remaining lands of his people as a sacred inheritance for their children," wrote his friend Catherine Weldon. "This fact," she maintained, "made him unpopular with all who saw in his policy and influence obstruction to their selfish schemes, hence they demanded his removal." There was never an official investigation into Sitting Bull's murder, nor have the assassination charges been disproved. Reverend Murray believed that a day would come when Sitting Bull would be revered for the visionary man of peace that he was!

The following quotes were printed in "The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer," a weekly newspaper published in Aberdeen, South Dakota immediately after Sitting Bull's assasination by Indian Police Dec. 15, 1890.

"Sitting Bull, most renowned Sioux of modern history, is dead.

"He was an Indian with a white man's spirit of hatred and revenge for those who had wronged him and his. In his day he saw his son and his tribe gradually driven from their possessions: forced to give up their old hunting grounds and espouse the hard working and uncongenial avocations of the whites. And these, his conquerors, were marked in their dealings with his people by selfishness, falsehood and treachery. What wonder that his wild nature, untamed by years of subjection, should still revolt? What wonder that a fiery rage still burned within his breast and that he should seek every opportunity of obtaining vengeance upon his natural enemies.

"The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are. History would forget these latter despicable beings, and speak, in later ages of the glory of these grand Kings of forest and plain that Cooper loved to heroism.

"We cannot honestly regret their extermination, but we at least do justice to the manly characteristics possessed, according to their lights and education, by the early Redskins of America." The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer

Sitting Bull - In Memory

"If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man, he would have made me so in the first place".

"I was very sorry when I found out that your intentions were good and not what I supposed they were".

"If a man loses anything and goes back and looks carefully for it, he will find it".

"I am here by the will of the Great Spirit, and by his will I am chief".

"I know Great Spirit is looking down upon me from above, and will hear what I say".

"The earth has received the embrace of the sun and we shall see the results of that love".

"He put in your heart certain wishes and plans; in my heart, he put other different desires".

"In my early days, I was eager to learn and to do things, and therefore I learned quickly".

"What white woman, however lonely, was ever captive or insulted by me? Yet they say I am a bad Indian".

"What white man has ever seen me drunk? Who has ever come to me hungry and left me unfed? Who has seen me beat my wives or abuse my children? What law have I broken"?

"Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am Sioux? Because I was born where my father lived? Because I would die for my people and my country"?

"God made me an Indian".

"Each man is good in the sight of the Great Spirit".

"It is not necessary for eagles to be crows".

"Now that we are poor, we are free. No white man controls our footsteps. If we must die, we die defending our rights".

"What white man can say I never stole his land or a penny of his money? Yet they say that I am a thief".

"I want to tell you that if the Great Spirit had chosen anyone to be the chief of this country, it is myself".

"When I was a boy, the Sioux owned the world. The sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them"?

"You think I am a fool, but you are a greater fool than I am".

Sitting Bull

A salesman is driving toward home in northern Ontario when he sees an Indian thumbing for a ride on the side of the road. As the trip had been long and quiet, he stops the car and the Indian gets in. After a bit of small talk, the Indian notices a brown bag on the front seat.

" What's in the bag?", asks the Indian.

"It's a bottle of wine. I got it for my wife," says the salesman.

The Indian is silent for a moment then says, "Good trade"?

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