As we drove to Custer State Park 16+ years ago, I made the atypical honeymoon decision to read "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee." It was a great book, helping me understand our government's treatment of Native Americans during the civil war era.
It helped me learn that the guy Sibley, for whom a lot of things in my area are named, was a bad guy.
My bike ride yesterday, started behind the historic Sibley house, and followed a trail on the land formerly inhabited by the Dakota. As I was riding, I was thinking about the Thanksgiving images we are shown as kids of the pilgrims and Native Americans arm in arm, eating a huge turkey, and how I was riding across the river from the area that eventually was used as a concentration camp for the Dakota.
The most unsettling event of the government campaign to remove Native Americans from prime land, in my mind, although there are many to choose from, unfortunately, was the Sand Creek Massacre, which occurred 150 years ago tomorrow.
While I love Thanksgiving and what it can, and does, represent for many people, I appreciate learning that things might not have always been quite the way I initially learned they were. Something to mull over while eating a turkey sandwich...
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