EXCERPT:
On August 26, 2011, 68-year-old Vernon Traversie was admitted to the Rapid City Regional Hospital in South Dakota for emergency double bypass surgery. After his operation, Traversie, who is blind, discovered that he had been brutally mutilated while under anesthesia. In addition to the surgical scars, his torso was covered in gashes, with the letters KKK carved into his stomach. Traversie is a Lakota Sioux who lives on the Cheyenne River Reservation.
“They’re squeezing us, just like they were before Wounded Knee,” said Guy Dull Knife Jr., who lives on Pine Ridge Reservation. Along with Cheyenne River, Pine Ridge is one of over a dozen territories scattered throughout the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Minnesota that were granted to the Lakota Nation by the U.S. government in a series of treaties, most of which were signed in the late 1800s. Pine Ridge, about a hundred miles south-east of Rapid City, is in the heart of America’s Great Plains—prairies, canyons, buttes, and dry riverbeds stretch impossibly far in any given direction, framed by the Black Hills on one side and the Badlands on the other. I speak to Guy regularly to get updates on his life and news of the reservation—a result of my visits over the last few years to film a documentary that I am producing.
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