THE REAL STORY OF THANKSGIVING. Massacre At Wounded Knee, 1890. Massacre At Wounded Knee, 1890 On the morning of December 29, 1890, the Sioux chief Big Foot and some 350 of his followers camped on the banks of Wounded Knee creek. Surrounding their camp was a force of U.S. troops charged with the responsibility of arresting Big Foot and disarming his warriors. The scene was tense. Trouble had been brewing for months. The once proud Sioux found their free-roaming life destroyed, the buffalo gone, themselves confined to reservations dependent on Indian Agents for their existence. In a desperate attempt to return to the days of their glory, many sought salvation in a new mysticism preached by a Paiute shaman called Wovoka. Emissaries from the Sioux in South Dakota traveled to Nevada to hear his words. When he heard of Sitting Bull's death, Big Foot led his people south to seek protection at the Pine Ridge Reservation. When the smoke cleared and the shooting stopped, approximately 300 Sioux were dead, Big Foot among them.
Illinois During the Civil War: Native American Relations. The United States’ Army, citizen vigilante groups, scalp-hunters and other proud-to-be-Americans hunted them down and massacred men, women, children and babies with Anglo-saxon efficiency and “endowment of mind” of which Thomas Jefferson was so proud. Thousands of women and children were lawfully abducted to be used as slaves, often subjected to repeated rape, or forced into prostitution and concubinage. West of the Mississippi, in the last half of the nineteenth century, it was a pandemonium of massacres. When the aboriginal peoples were not killed off outright like the Yahi and so many others, the straggling remnants of once great nations were sent off to reservations as efficiently as Jews being sent to nazi concentration camps.
Californian immigrants created “volunteer armies” that swooped down upon native villages, killing men, women, and children indescriminately. Captain Good was a sheriff in the region of Ishi’s sacred mountain Waganupa (Mount Lassen). Tongva 101. Chumash Modoc. The 'two-spirit' people of indigenous North Americans. We-Wa, a Zuni two-spirit, weaving Native Americans have often held intersex, androgynous people, feminine males and masculine females in high respect. The most common term to define such persons today is to refer to them as "two-spirit" people, but in the past feminine males were sometimes referred to as "berdache" by early French explorers in North America, who adapted a Persian word "bardaj", meaning an intimate male friend.
Because these androgynous males were commonly married to a masculine man, or had sex with men, and the masculine females had feminine women as wives, the term berdache had a clear homosexual connotation. Both the Spanish settlers in Latin America and the English colonists in North America condemned them as "sodomites". Rather than emphasising the homosexuality of these persons, however, many Native Americans focused on their spiritual gifts. Rather than the physical body, Native Americans emphasised a person's "spirit", or character, as being most important.