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.
– Black Elk
The Lakota Sioux holy man speaking about the Massacre of Wounded Knee. On December 29, 1890, 150-300 Lakota Sioux were killed by U.S. soldiers in the area of Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown.