Remembering the US soldiers who refused orders to murder Native Americans at Sand Creek

George Levi's images of the Sand Creek Massacre as ledger art are in this video produced by Colorado PBS.

As we ponder whether there will be any kind of just resolution in North Dakota with the Pipeline issue, and as we await any news about the 21 year old woman who was hit with a projectile and may have to have her arm amputated after being helicoptered to Minneapolis, I am honored to present this article sent to me by one of my best Native Artists, George Curtis Levi, Southern Cheyenne.

George has done so much ledger art, lecturing, and videotaping on this grim subject that Smithsonian's Native magazine gave him and his cousin a 14 page spread not long ago.

Here are two of his images:

One Colorado Morning, exhibited at the Clark County Historical Museum:

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This one depicts Captain Soule, who stands out as one of the few honorable men in those times:

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This is the massacre on November 29, 1864, that really makes Custer with his egregious genocide seem like an altar boy when compared to Colonel John Chivington of the Sand Creek, a Methodist minister who declared once that his religion was killing Indians.

Colorado's Governor Evans, after the outcry in his own legislature, had to step down, and we think something similar should occur with North Dakota's Governor Dalrymple, even if he is NOT prosecuted by the next administration's Department of Justice. Google George Curtis Levi and Sand Creek Massacre to read that moving story, and there is a whole chapter on it in that great historical classic, BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE.

In one of its better moments, even the New York Times managed to publish an opinion/editorial on Sand Creek a few years ago by Ned Blackhawk, a professor of history and American studies at Yale and the coordinator of the Yale Group for the Study of Native America, is the author of "Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West:

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Thank you so much for sending this to me, George Levi, just in time for people to think about over Thanksgiving.

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