"Big Foot's band, fleeing for their lives, didn't know why they were being targeted and killed; they were heading for refuge with Red Cloud's band at Pine Ridge. Ostensibly, claimed the government, they sent their troops to stop us from performing the Ghost Dance, a purely religious rite. This was just a pretext, of course; they're very good to this day at finding pretexts to attack us. The real reason behind their attack was that they wanted to run their railroads from the stolen Black Hills back to Chicago and the East, right through what was left of our lands, which the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 had solemnly promised to us for "as long as the grass grows and the rivers run." When Big Foot's starving, freezing band saw the soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry, Custer's old unit, moving toward them through the deep snow, they figured the cavalry could only be there to help them, surely. Hadn't they been told that if they surrendered to the Indian Agency at Pine Ridge they would be cared for with food and medicine and shelter? I can physically feel this very moment the misery and suffering that more than three hundred men, women, and children endured as they made their way through South Dakota blizzards, below-zero temperatures, and impenetrable snowdrifts. I can imagine the terror and the fear rushing through them as the soldiers opened fire on them the following morning--the echoes and roar of the Gatling guns mixed with booming cannons and the rattling sabers and the screams of the women and children. As an Indian of Sioux blood I can hear those screams and feel the pain of those mothers, children and old men as they are torn to pieces by the bullets and the flashing blood-tipped sabers, striking them again and again and again as they lay there defenseless. I relive every one of their deaths. I die with each one of them again and again."