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" To treat the lives lost on that cold South Dakota day in 1890 as merely symbolic is to disrespect those loves. It is also to disrespect the more than 200 Lakota who survived Wounded Knee and lived on to experience the pain of loss, yes, but much else as well. They survived to live and grow, to get married, and have babies. They survived to hold on to their Lakota ways, or convert to Christianity and let those ways recede. They survived to settle on the reservation and later, to move to cities. They survived to go to school, and to college, and to work. They survived to make mistakes and to recover from them. They survived to make history, to make meaning, to make life.
This book is about them; and it is about Indians of other communities and tribes around the country who survived their own holocausts and went on to make their own lives and histories and in so doing, to make and remake the story of the country itself. "
― David Treuer , The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present
