In the Moon of Falling Leaves, a treaty was made with Red Cloud that said our country would be ours as long as grass should grow and water flow. You can see that it is not the grass and the water that have forgotten. - Black Elk

have been reading Black Elk Speaks this morning....it is the most amazing, bitterly sad, beautiful book about the life of a holy man of the Oglala Sioux. 

this passage comes at the very end of the book, when he remembers wounded knee. tears fell from my eyes when i closed the last page.

..." i did not know then how much was ended there. 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."...