I am Oglala Lakota
The true story of my grandfather’s abduction from Prisoner Of War Camp #334 — Pine Ridge Reservation
I am Oglala Lakota.
Before you go asking, no I am not full-blooded, nor do I count percentage, because only the Government agencies count the blood percentage. It is the method they have used to reduce the legal census number of our population: considering anyone rated (in their eyes) as less than three-quarters “Indian” a non-Indian.
But enough of that nonsense. This is the story my grandmother related to me of how her husband “found God.”
My grandfather was the child of Lakota refugees living on the Pine Ridge Reservation (a.k.a. United States Federal Prisoner Of War Camp #334) in the 1920's. When he was 6 years old, my grandfather was abducted by a group of men who invaded the reservation and kidnapped over 250 children at gunpoint from their parents.
These men who abducted the children bound their hands and tied their feet closely together, then loaded them into school buses. After nearly 300 miles of travel without food, water, or restroom breaks, the children were dragged — their bodies and clothing encrusted with body wastes — off the buses and lined up before a tall building with an arcane symbol atop its sharp, pointy roof.
The children were stripped nude, sprayed with water and de-licing powder, then strapped to a chair and — one-by-one — had their head of long, black and brown hair shaven bald.
Throughout the entire experience, the children were told to be silent, and felt the searing heat of a leather strap each time they spoke a word in Lakota instead of English.
Over the course of the next two years, my grandfather and his fellows were beaten, clothed in strange black cotton and wool suits, and received a haircut every week. They were taught English and odd mythologies that made no sense, but eventually turned to believe these myths through the torturous starvation and beatings they received when they uttered a single word of Lakota.
In this way, and over the entirety of the 1930's and 1940's, even up to the 1990's, millions of children were taken from their mother’s rams, beaten, brainwashed, and indoctrinated into submission. This took place every year on nearly every Reservation POW Camp in the United States.
The arcane symbol atop the steep roof was a Cross, and the men with guns — United States Cavalry troops — stood shoulder to shoulder with priests and nuns, all abducting Native children from their homes and beating them, starving them, and destroying their minds, their concepts of reality, and converting them to Catholicism, where they bowed down and prayed to statues and idols that they did not recognize, saying strange words to white faces that held no meaning to them.
This indoctrination, these crimes, were all just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
There were some children who were obstinate, and refused to convert. Those children were loaded onto a medical bus for experimentation. They were sold into medical laboratories for injections of deadly strains of virus, in hopes that they might survive and be harvested for antibodies, emptied and shelled out, then cremated to destroy the diseased remains.
To this day, there are still visits from priests and missionaries who come to the POW camps (reservations) to abduct traditional tribe members, convert them to the delusion of orthodox religion, and countless other unexplained disappearances occur in Canada and Mexico — children vanish from their beds in the middle of the night and are never seen again, their tribal families suffering the loss of the hope for their future, their children… while sudden cures for diseases appear out of nowhere and the profiteering pharmaceutical giants keep raking in the money.
Yet my grandfather survived, converted to Catholicism, switched in his adult life to Lutheranism, married a fanatical white Irish Catholic German woman and had 6 children. He lived a long life with many regrets, waking in cold sweats nightly from the memories of torture.
And that is just the story of my father’s father…
