Wounded Knee Massacre

[Chuck]

Perhaps this post is more appropriate for West Victory Day, but December 29th is still many months away.

While reading about the final battle of the American Indian Wars, I discovered that tensions were partially to blame on a single indian named Wovoka. According to Wikipedia:

Wovoka claimed to have had a prophetic vision during the solar eclipse on January 1, 1889. Wovoka's vision entailed the resurrection of the Paiute dead and the removal of whites and their works from North America. Wovoka taught that in order to bring this vision to pass the Native Americans must live righteously and perform a traditional round dance, known as the Ghost dance, in a series of five-day gatherings.

While Wovoka instinctively followed nature's plan of segregation and war between the species, his method of executing that plan was inferior to the method of the White people they fought against. The two opposing sides had fundamentally the same vision: the removal of their enemies and populating the continent exclusively with their own people. Wovoka, however, relied on myth and superstition to reclaim North America for the indians. Whites believed that one should be proactive in seizing the land that already belonged to them. Wovoka's Ghost Dance fell to Manifest Destiny, and the Paiute indians have never recovered.

The moral of this story: Following superstition will result in ruin. Instead, take hold of the physical world that is already rightfully ours.