UI Press | Mario Gonzalez and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn | The Politics of Hallowed Ground: Wounded Knee and the Struggle for Indian Sovereignty

The Politics of Hallowed Ground

Wounded Knee and the Struggle for Indian Sovereignty

This book is the powerful story of the ongoing struggle of indigenous Americans in the twentieth century United States and of its shift in focus from traditional battlefield and massacre sites to federal courtrooms and the halls of Congress.

The Politics of Hallowed Ground includes excerpts from the diary kept by Mario Gonzalez, the attorney for the Sioux Nation in its struggle for recognition of the Wounded Knee Massacre site as a national monument. Gonzalez's personal record of the struggle is coupled with commentary by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a Native American writer who places the work in its historical context. Together, the two voices will draw the reader into far more than the continuing struggle of the Sioux people to achieve justice.

The book covers Sioux history from before the Wounded Knee tragedy to modern times, through the Sioux Nation's long and often rancorous dialogue with the U.S. government over control of South Dakota's Black Hills, traditional Sioux lands recognized by treaty in 1877 and never forfeited or sold. After reading a 13-year-old survivor's narrative of what happened at Wounded Knee and the list of the dead and wounded, readers will find it difficult not to share the Sioux perspective.

"Provocative and compelling with its raw incisive written commentary by a man who is trained as a lawyer but still views his world through tribal lenses." -- Leonard R. Bruguier, Director of the Institute of American Indian Studies, University of South Dakota

"By far the most moving, most compelling book I have read about the Sioux and their ongoing struggle to come to grips with history. Gonzalez and Cook-Lynn let us see the gut-wrenching realities that people who work to make a difference face." - Robert Allen Warrior, author of Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions

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