“We’ve used a passive approach to the telling of the brutality at Sand Creek for the purpose of showing the ignorance of utilizing killing as a means to solve problems. Violence always leaves an impact, but the graphicness of the murders, the rapes, the mutilations, even after people were dead, leaves a remarkable imprint on students, parents, and educators. They see an historic reality that motivates them to do more to circumvent violence in the present as a means to solve problems. And that includes fourth graders who viewed the film in an elementary school in Centennial, Colorado who shared their thoughts with me after the screening.”

-Donald L. Vasicek
Award-Winning Writer/Filmmaker/Consultant

“We Cannot Be Who We Are Not” “Always keep in mind that the main issue which has led to so many other issues is land. The earth has always been the Cheyenne/Arapaho’s power. As their lands dwindled because of European immigration, their power dwindled.  Today, most older, and many younger Native Americans are living without that power. Instead, they are living on reservations that yield little, ifany resources. This has reduced Native Americans
to a cross between their native heritage and the incursion of others into their space. Many know little about moving forward, because the past is where all of their power resides, and, it is gone.

Native Americans are born to roam the earth.  Many of their ancestors went where the buffalo went. The buffalo were the source of their existence. In the beginning, the Cheyenne and Arapaho people had 51 million acres of land. They were free. They lived with the elements and they prospered. Today, most conceive themselves as prisoners of a society that has little bearing to who they really are, what they inherited from their ancestors, not too unlike each one of us.  How can we be who we are not? The answer is, we cannot be who we are not, and until we discover who we are, then live that way, is when we experience the ultimate peace of who we are. It is my belief that most Native Americans are not who the society they live in forces
them to be, in order to survive.

So, if you surround yourself with this attitude, with this approach, with this theme, then, everything else you are being asked about which to understand, will fall into place.”

-Donald L. Vasicek

“Award-Winning Sand Creek Massacre Film Archived”

August 27, 2008 — CENTENNIAL, CO — Golden Drover Award winner for Best Native American Film in the Trail Dance Film Festival, “The Sand Creek Massacre”, has been archived in The Billie Jean Baguley Library in the Heard Museum in Phoenix.

Award-winning Writer/Filmmaker/Consultant, Donald L. Vasicek,
said, “By having the film archived in these prestigious institutions,
my goal of informing, educating and creating awareness for the
Cheyenne and Arapaho people via their oral histories in the film,
helps all American native people. The Cheyenne and Arapaho
people, vowed, after the Sand Creek Massacre, that they would live
on this earth forever. The film keeps their dream alive regardless
of the genocide that has stalked all American native people from
the inception of European people’s arrival on their lands to the present.
The film is a permanent recording of their ancestors and who they are as
a people.”

Vasicek continues his efforts to record the Cheyenne and Arapaho
history. He has placed, “Ghosts of Sand Creek”, a two-hour, six
episode series, into development. Vasicek said, “Ghosts of Sand
Creek” will dimensionalize the Cheyenne and Arapaho people’s
story. It will show the white man’s continuing invasion of their human
rights.

“I read recently where actor Brad Pitt raised $500,000 for
people in Darfur. He should now raise money for American native
people so that they can also eat. Walk down the main street
in Lame Deer, Montana, on the Northern Cheyenne’s reservation.
Cruise the Northern Arapaho Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.
American natives on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota
need groceries, socks, underwear, shirts, shoes, trousers, fuel to
keep warm, etc. And they have to go across the border into
Nebraska to buy liquor. You will experience, as I have, many times
over, the abject poverty American natives experience. This is
genocide at its finest in all centuries.”

Vasicek said, “America’s native people need America’s help. Be part
of ‘Ghosts of Sand Creek’.” Go to donvasicek.com for details.

Contact:

Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net

Thoughts from the Producer, Donald L. Vasicek

When I walk at Sand Creek today, I step carefully.

My size ten and a halves sink into the sand. Where there is grass or plants, Canadian thistle or tamarisk or sage or some other one of the numerous types of grass and plants at Sand Creek, it catches my clod hoppers, just before they sink into the sand.

Stepping beside the gnarled and stately cottonwood trees, roots feel hard under my Reeboks. The roots catch my feet, perhaps, like guardian angels, but yet, possibly parts of human remains. I know not where to take the next step, or how.

I fear that I will step on someone who died here, whose remains are permanent parts of the sand, the grass, and the trees. I wonder if I am walking in the buffalo wallow where this woman died. I step carefully because I feel the people who died here reaching out for me and I can’t see or hear them. I don’t know how to help them. I feel their presence, their fear, their terror, their disbelief, their helplessness to save their children, their husbands and wives, their disabled relatives, their parents and their grandparents.

Just like when I sat on a curb at Ground Zero in Manhattan two weeks after 9/11, I grieve for them. I grieve for myself. I grieve because I am alive and they died agonizing deaths. I grieve because I am helpless to give something to these victims to neutralize their agony, perhaps even, to reverse their deaths.

I turn and scan the horizon. It appears like it is overlooking the Sand Creek Massacre Site. Somehow, it makes me feel better, at the least, for the moment. Then, I have to move forward. I look down and wonder, where should I place my foot next?

~Donald L. Vasicek, Writer/Filmmaker, Olympus Films+, LLC

Witness Account

The Sand Creek Massacre Witness Account:

One Story of Horror At Sand Creek Duncan Kerr, the scout, found the body of One Eye lying near the camp.

“Some of the boys had scalped him, ” Kerr wrote, “but they either did not understand how to take a scalp, or their knives were very dull, for they had commenced to take the scalp off at the top of the head, and torn a strip down to the middle of the neck.”

A short distance beyond, he found One Eye’s wife sitting alone in a buffalo wallow: “I went up to her and laid my hand on her head. She looked up quietly, and recognizing me said; ‘How de do Dunk, me heap dry. Gib me some water.’

I asked in the Cheyenne language, if she was seriously hurt. She replied by throwing the blanket back and showing me aghastly wound in her side, through which the entrails were protruding. The wound must have been caused by a fragment of a shell.  I gave her a drink of water, and left my canteen. As I turned to leave, she took my hand to detain me, and begged me to shoot her with my gun….But I could not do it, for I had known her a long time; a lively, sprightly, mischievous, little thing, that fairly worshipped her Chief One Eye.

This is the squaw that One Eye brought into Ft. Lyon with him and was on our trip after the captives. When she saw I would not kill her she covered up her head and began singing her death song again….I had not gone very far, when I met a soldier.  I pointed her out to him, and told him I had just shot and wounded an Indian and had fired my last shot; that the Indian was badly wounded, and could not help himself, and I wanted him to creep up behind the Indian and shoot him in the back of the head. The fellow crept up close behind her and shot her dead….
-“Sand Creek: Tragedy and Symbol Pt. 1” G.L.Roberts, 1984

Sand Creek
Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado