FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Native people cheer and applaud numbers killed at the Sand Creek Massacre"
April 30, 2007 -- CENTENNIAL, CO -- Loud applause and cheers erupted during the Sand Creek Massacre Site Dedication Ceremony on April 28, 2007. They were for the 200 to 500 Cheyenne and Arapaho people massacred there on November 29, 1864. A Northern Cheyenne tribal speaker mention of the total massacred at Sand Creek, anywhere from 150 to 500 Cheyenne and Arapaho babies, children, persons with disabilities, elders and women, on November 29, 2007 outnumbered the thirty-two victims massacred at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia on April 16, 2007, ignited the eruption.
Subsequent to the Virgina Tech Massacre, Lakota Sioux tribe member, Joan Redfern, said in a "Gilroy Dispatch" article by Kat Teraji, "To say the Virginia shooting is the worst in all of U. S. history is to pour salt on old wounds-it means erasing and forgetting all of our ancestors who were killed in the past," Redfern said.
"The use of hyperbole and lack of historical perspective seems all too ubiquitous in much of the current mainstream media...My intention is not to downplay the horror of what has happened ...at Virginia Tech in any way. But we have a 500-year history of mass shootings on American soil, and let's not forget it."
To this writer, who was at the Sand Creek Massacre Dedication Ceremony, nausea nibbled at me as I heard the cheers and applause. Former Colorado governor Roy Romer, present Colorado governor Bill Ritter, Colorado Lt. Governor Barbara O'Brien, U. S. Rep Marilyn Musgrave, Kansas U. S. Senator Sam Brownback, Department of the Interior, National Park Service Director, Mary Bomar, former Colorado U. S. Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, and several others quietly observed this outpouring of emotion.
I wondered, "To where have we evolved as human beings and as Americans?"
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