Our Relatives’ Things
The other day, one of my granddaughters called and said, “Grandma, did you hear? They’re returning articles from a museum in Barre, Vermont, that belonged to our relatives that were massacred at Wounded Knee.”
“What?” I said. “What kind of things?”
She said, “Things they were wearing or had when they were murdered at Wounded Knee in 1890. There are even baby moccasins, and little kids’ moccasins in there. The soldiers took them off the bodies and they kept them in a museum all these years. Now they’re giving them back.”
As descendants of survivors of Wounded Knee, it is our relatives’ things that we are talking about so it hit home really hard.
What was in there that might have belonged to our relatives? Moccasins? A shirt? A shawl?
Then she asked, “What do you think should happen to these things?”