Wounded Knee
Chorus:
Wounded Knee, hear their plea,
Hear their cries, hear their sighs,
Hear their dreams,
The Ghost Dance
Was their chance to be free.
Narration:
When the gold rush in the 1870's,
Brought the white man in,
Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull,
Began to raid again.
Who knows if it was just or not,
In wild and lawless days,
Sitting Bull retird to the reservation
And for many years there stayed.
Chorus:
Then in the 1890's,
Wovoka, a piaute man,
Taught the Indians the Ghost Dance
To bring peace to their land.
The pony soldiers feared this rite,
And arrested Sitting Bull,
When he resisted and was killed,
The soldiers lost control.
His people fled and joined Big Foot,
The soldiers brought them back,
To a camp on Creek Wounded Knee,
And some rotten, filthy shacks.
In freezing winter, no means of heat,
Men, women and children crouched there,
Not even as warm as an animal,
Snug in a den or lair.
Chorus:
No one knows how it started,
Some say a Medicine Man,
Threw a handful of power in the air,
As a signal, the fight began.
Yet others say a soldier,
While the Indians were being disarmed,
With a rifle shot, an accident or not,
Was the one that set off the alarm.
I guess it doesn't matter,
For when the fight was done,
Two hundred sixty there had died,
Tell me who really won?
This was the deciding battle,
It was the last big fight
To occur on the nothern plains
Between, the Indian and the White.
Cile Beer
Chorus:
*
Dakota Land albumn written l975
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