The reason that it interested me was because in one of my history classes, a student in my class was Native American. She was a Navajo Indian, but she described how much the Massacre of Wounded Knee affected many Indians. I would always hear her joke about General Custer, who was the general for the 7th Cavalry unit. She also cried about the pain that her tribe went through in the Long Walk. But what convinced me to learn more about the Massacre of Wounded Knee was to understand why they were killed? It is something that no one knows only the survivors of this horrific event.
In a time when an end to free roaming in their lands took place, more than three hundred Sioux Indianans were killed. The deaths of the Sioux Indians were remembered as the Massacre of Wounded Knee. It was no battle, but a massacre. It should not have occurred, but it did, where more than two-thirds of the Sioux Indians killed were women and children. The massacre became a symbolic meaning to an end of old Indians ways, since the Sioux Indians were determined to refuse the new American ways of living. But what is important to know is what reason was behind the slaughtering of innocent Indians? .
According to Dee Alexander Brown, author of Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee, suggests that many of the early protests which took place in 1890 was due from early preaches of an Paiute shaman called Wovoka. Wovoka believed that a Messiah told him .
that the dead would join the living in peace and harmony away from the "whites," and continue to live in their old ways. The Ghost Dance was created as a result to go backwards in time, to escape the life they do not want to live, with buffalos to hunt, and free lands to roam in. Many different Indians, including the Sioux Indians, believed Wovoka, and began to preach his preaches (1).
As they began to practice this new ritual ghost dance, many white settlers were afraid, and the military were soon investigating the Sioux Indians.
