Kevin Abourezk: Native youth listen to Wounded Knee judge

Thursday, January 12, 2012  

"As the old judge spoke, the 17-year-old girl's eyes watered.

Bianca White thought of her great-great-grandmother lying on that frozen ground, a victim of a massacre of more than 300 of her tribe's men, women and children. She remembered visiting the Wounded Knee Cemetery in South Dakota and seeing her grandmother's name etched on the gray stone marker.

On Wednesday, 121 years after her grandmother died at Wounded Knee, White sat in a federal courtroom listening to senior U.S. District Judge Warren K. Urbom talk about the massacre and about his role overseeing the trials of Native activists who took over Wounded Knee in 1973.

"It made me think a lot about my ancestors and what they went through," said White of the Santee Sioux Tribe.

Urbom spoke to students involved in the Native Sovereignty Youth Project, a yearlong leadership project organized by the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs with financial support from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services."

Get the Story:
Kevin Abourezk: 40 years after Wounded Knee, trial judge reflects (The Lincoln Journal Star 1/12)