Film screening & discussion of Wounded Knee from American Experience documentary series

Film screening & discussion of "Wounded Knee" from the American Experience documentary series
"We Shall Remain" about Native peoples

On the night of February 27, 1973, fifty-four cars rolled, horns blaring, into a small hamlet on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Within hours, some 200 Oglala Lakota and American Indian Movement (AIM) activists had seized the few major buildings in town and police had cordoned off the area. The occupation of Wounded Knee had begun. Demanding redress for grievances-some going back more than 100 years-the protesters captured the world's attention for 71 gripping days.

Heavily armed federal troops tightened a cordon around the occupation trying to choke off food, supplies and other people joining them. The Indians bravely stood strong and gained the sympathy and support of people throughout the country. This act of resistance defied the government and its bloody history of massacres like the U.S. calvary slaughter of about 350 Lakota Indian men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in 1890.

From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock, North Dakota, the history of Native peoples in the U.S. has been one of genocide, theft of their land, and being forced off their land and onto reservations. Many children were stolen from their families and held in boarding schools where they were stripped of their language, culture and indoctrinated in Christianity. The history of the Native people has also been one of resistance to barbaric oppression from the earliest times to today.

As we write this, Standing Rock, North Dakota is a decisive concentration point in the battle against the oppression of Native people today which shapes the grounds that people are going to fight against the incoming fascist Trump regime.

Directed by Stanley Nelson whose work includes: Freedom Riders, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Freedom Summer, and The Murder of Emmett Till.