If you can break free to see it, herewith are the links:

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8lgmcMtFFSP5DfcH5WwFKw?feature=guide

https://twitter.com/VirtualRecital.

https://www.facebook.com/VirtualRecitalSeries

If you are unable to make it today, the show will
be accessible at these same three links after the
show.

(Click on the Photo to See It)

Camp Weld Sign in Denver

As long as anyone even mentions the Sand Creek Massacre, they should involve the Cheyenne and Arapaho people, or they are showing disrespect towards the Cheyenne and Arapaho people. As long this kind of disrespect is exhibited, the Cheyenne and Arapaho people will not find peace and Caucasians will fail in communicating with them.

Respectfully Submitted,

Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
The Zen of Writing

http://www.donvasicek.comd

dvasicek@earthlink.net

There has been some interesting activity going on with respect
to my work with the Sand Creek Massacre. I placed a modified
version of my award-winning Sand Creek Massacre documentary
film on YouTube.com to see what kind of interest it would draw.
Due to its popularity, YouTube.com featured it recently on YouTube for
1 week.

I’ve also been working with a woman from the Boulder History
Museum who contacted me about a Boulder middle school
class that is making Sand Creek Massacre documentary
films for a class project. This occurred after I read in the Boulder
“Daily Camera” about the class and its project and contacted
her because she had mentioned that there were no
Cheyenne and Arapaho people alive to interview for their
films.

I encouraged her to make certain the kids interviewed
Cheyenne and Arapaho people for their films, after telling
her that there are plenty of Cheyenne and Arapaho people
who are alive and who could share their oral histories about
the Sand Creek Massacre with the kids. The Arapaho’s summer
camp was where Boulder is now. Chief Niwot or Chief Left Hand,
(a canyon northwest of Boulder is named after him),
an Arapaho chief, came out of his lodge at the onset of the
attack at Sand Creek to welcome the soldiers. They shot him. He
began singing his death song. They shot him again and again until
he died, I cautioned that to overlook this could insult the Cheyenne
and Arapaho people.

Ever since I began working on the Sand Creek
project in 2002, I have repeatedly noticed that while researching,
or as a friend of mine calls research these days, “googling”, that
Caucasian media, historians, educators, filmmakers, etc. ignore
telling their stories from the point-of-view of the Cheyenne and
Arapaho people. The Sand Creek Massacre is the Cheyenne
and Arapaho people’s story. They should be telling it.

Shonie De La Rosa, a Navajo filmmaker, and a good friend, and
I recorded on camera, over 50 tapes of Cheyenne and Arapaho
people giving us their oral histories. Southern Cheyenne Chief,
Laird (Whistling Eagle) Cometsevah, a man who passed on recently,
and a man I became to intimately know, a visionary, a chief’s
chief, emphasized this to me and he also emphasized that
Caucasian people could be more effective with Cheyenne and
Arapaho people if they showed respect towards Cheyenne and
Arapaho people and to the land.

I deeply miss him. We bonded through some pretty difficult
days of filming. His wife, Colleen, also passed on, was an
historian and genealogist, and also played an integral role in
helping me with the film, as well as many other Cheyenne
and Arapaho people. They could not stress respect of
people and the land enough to me. So, I want to carry on
their work in my small way. I contributed my film to
the kids so that they can use clips from it for their films.

Making their films will be of tremendous benefit to them as
they evolve in life. They are learning how vital respect is.
They are learning how different Cheyenne and Arapaho
cultures are in comparison to other cultures, particularly
their own. They are learning more and more about how
vital it is to understand that all of us are only parts of the
whole consciousness of humankind, not only certain chosen
people. So, this is something that is exciting and wonderful
as far as I’m concerned.

May is their deadline for the films to be made at which
time I will be the first in line to see their films at the school.

Naropa Institute students are also doing work with respect
to the Sand Creek Massacre. I have been recommended
to them by an educator and historian to help them out.

I have also been contacted by the Northwestern University
Native American and American Indigenous Alliance in
Evanston, Illinois, just outside of Chicago, to work
with them on a documentary film that will show Colorado
Territorial Governor John Evans’ role in the Sand Creek
Massacre. Governor Evans founded Northwestern
University, was a medical doctor, founded a cure for a
plague going on in the 1800′s, was a close friend to
Abraham Lincoln, and Lincoln, the developer he was,
appointed Evans Colorado Territorial Governor to help
Lincoln realize his goal of a transcontinental railroad,
amongst other things. It’s an interesting occurrence, while
Lincoln was working to free the slaves in the South, the
U. S. Department of the Interior, the military, Colonel
John Chivington, U. S. Indian Agent, Samuel Colley,
and Evans, amongst others, were massacring Indians
in the West. What kind of sense does that make? What
kind of logic is that?

Evans was known as the first 19th Century developer.
He disliked the Indians because of their attacks on people
coming across their lands in the Colorado Territory, as
many as 100,000 in 1859 during the Pikes Peak Gold
Rush, were frightening people from coming to the Colorado
Territory. Evans called Indians “pesky”, amongst
other things. The Alliance is investigating how much
money Evans earned from building railroads, on Indian
land, that he donated to Northwestern University. The
story goes on, so I’m meeting with the Alliance to see
how I can put this film together. It is exciting.

With respect to the Sand Creek Massacre, these times
are dynamic. When I put my first Sand Creek Massacre
modified short film on YouTube.com, it was the only
Sand Creek Massacre film on YouTube.com. Now, I
estimate there are 30 or 40, one most poignant was
done by a 14 year-old boy in 1976. Check it out. It is
powerfully done.

I am open to comments, questions, and suggestions
regarding the making of the documentary film with
the Alliance. Please don’t hesitate to contact me.

I would like to thank each one of you for sticking by me
through all of these years regarding the Sand Creek
Massacre. So, thank you very much!

Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
The Zen of Writing

http://www.donvasicek.com

dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103

Colorado Territorial Governor John Evans

Updated: 1:29 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 30, 2012 | Posted: 1:29 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 30, 2012
Massacre descendants seek justice 148 years later

By ERIC GORSKI
The Associated Press
ANADARKO, Okla. — They dance for the dead.
The foreman, the minister and the princess in the buckskin dress stomp and twirl and sing on a gymnasium floor protected by a tarp.
About 100 people watch from chairs arranged around a drum circle. All of them are family, in a way, bound to a terrible event 148 years ago on the banks of an ice-encrusted creek in Colorado.
The old lawyer is here, too, the former Oklahoma attorney general who smoked the truth pipe in a tepee as the Cheyenne arrow keeper looked on.
They gather every year — descendants of the Sand Creek Massacre and their unlikely allies — in a long search for justice that started with optimism, languished and now has a breath of new life.
At dawn on Nov. 29, 1864, Colorado soldiers attacked peaceful Indians camped on the banks of Sand Creek in what is now southeastern Colorado, slaughtering an estimated 163 — mainly women, children and the elderly — and desecrating their bodies.
The backlash was so severe, the U.S. government not only acknowledged wrongdoing but promised reparations of land and cash to survivors and relatives of victims.
That promise — spelled out in an 1865 treaty — remains unfulfilled, according to descendants and their attorneys.
Champions of the cause have died or moved on. And descendants who once stood as allies now view one another with scorn.
But on this early December day, in a town that calls itself the “Indian Capital of the Nation,” descendants receive a rare progress report.
The newly expanded legal team for the Sand Creek Massacre Descendants Trust has opened a dialogue with Department of Interior officials about the claim. At the least, the discussions could lay the groundwork for a federal lawsuit, the lawyers say.
And after decades of research and recruitment, about 15,000 descendants have been identified — a step that trust leaders believe is necessary.
Homer Flute, a former auto-parts- factory foreman who has headed the trust since 1990, sits on the gym’s wooden bleachers and considers the unlikely group of people in his company.
“Sand Creek is like a cobweb,” Flute says. “It links in all different directions, and you don’t know where it’s going. You find people you didn’t know existed, and they are kin to you somehow. The idea is you belong to these people and they belong to you.”
— Merciless killing, desecration
It is one of the darkest marks on Colorado’s history.
On a clear night in November 1864, 700 men under the command of Col. John Chivington set off from Fort Lyon on the Eastern Plains.
Tensions had been running high in the Colorado Territory, where white settlers and Indians were clashing over land.
That April, Arapahos had slaughtered a ranching family east of Denver, inflaming public opinion.
Yet there had been progress toward peace. The great peace chiefs — White Antelope and Black Kettle of the Cheyenne, and Left Hand of the Arapaho — were camped on Sand Creek under government assurances they would be safe.
Chivington, a fierce abolitionist and former Methodist minister, had a different view. He rallied his men against the “red scoundrels,” urging them to remember their own women and children.
The first shots were fired at daybreak, as the village of about 100 lodges, almost entirely Cheyenne with a few Arapaho, began to stir.
The village was largely empty of men, who were away hunting buffalo. The cavalrymen fired from sand bluffs and pounded targets with shells from mountain howitzers.
Soldiers paid no heed to the large American flag and smaller white flag beneath it tied to a lodgepole in the village.
Witnesses described Indians on their knees begging for mercy, children clubbed in the head and a woman’s belly sliced open. Indians hid in pits dug in the sandy creekbed.
Once the killing was over, the desecration began. White Antelope’s ears and genitals were cut off. One man claimed to have a cut out a woman’s heart and impaled it on a stick.
Body parts were taken as trophies and put on display in a Denver theater.
Initially, the incident was hailed as a heroic battle. But recriminations came quickly in congressional and military hearings the following year.
Soldiers wearing uniforms that should be “the emblem of justice and humanity” had executed a “foul and dastardly massacre,” a congressional committee found. Chivington suffered no consequences; by then, he was out of the military.
Sand Creek was a defining moment in relations between whites and Indians in the West.
“It’s never been forgotten,” said David Halaas, former chief historian of the Colorado Historical Society and an ally to the Cheyennes in the Sand Creek struggle. “It’s an open wound that still hasn’t healed.”
The 1865 Treaty of the Little Arkansas acknowledged “gross and wanton outrages perpetrated against certain bands” of Cheyenne and Arapaho. Article 6 promised land in locations to be determined and cash for victims.
— “We are going to succeed”
Robert Simpson remembers his grandmother coming to him when he was in high school and telling him to write down names of ancestors butchered at Sand Creek. One day, she said, he would need them.
Simpson joined the Army, fought in Vietnam and worked as a sheriff’s deputy. Later in life, he attended seminary and became a Methodist minister — just like Chivington, the villain of Sand Creek.
A soft-spoken bear of a man who apologizes when he gets emotional about Sand Creek, Simpson is pastor of J.J. Methvin Memorial United Methodist Church in Anadarko and a descendants trust leader.
“All this was by divine intervention,” Simpson said. “We were picked to do this for a reason, and we are going to succeed. It’s been a long journey for all of us, but we are still going forward.”
Other reparations efforts over the years have gone nowhere. Bills introduced in Congress in 1949, 1953, 1957 and 1965 failed.
In the 1960s, the federal Indian Claims Commission ruled that the Sand Creek claims were “individual in nature and must be brought by descendants.”
Tribal members thought identifying the descendants would fall to them. Activity stalled for several years.
Then, an anthropologist named John Moore got involved. Moore sought to solve a mystery central to any claim — identifying the tribal bands at Sand Creek and tracking their movements afterward.
He also began working with Laird Cometsevah, a Cheyenne chief, and his wife, Colleen, who were identifying descendants through records and oral histories. Moore and his graduate students dug through decades-old census records and other documents.
The going was tough. Cheyenne change their names and use nicknames. There were problems with translations.
By 1990, enough progress had been made to form a new pan-tribal descendants group. Laird Cometsevah recruited Flute, an Apache tribal member known for his organizational skills, to head it.
The group also hired a lawyer — Larry Derryberry, who served as Oklahoma attorney general in the 1970s.
In 1991, in a ceremony near the massacre site, Derryberry entered a tepee with trust leaders and the Cheyenne Sacred Arrow Keeper, the tribe’s highest religious office.
The lawyer smoked a pipe filled with tobacco and herbs. To the Cheyenne, “smoking on it” is a sacred vow.
Before the dying embers of a fire, smoke drifted up through the top of the tepee, sealing the deal. There would be a paper contract, too, laying out Derryberry’s contingency fee.
Derryberry said the goal of the descendants search always was to cast as wide a net as possible. If someone had one drop of blood traceable to Sand Creek, that was enough.
Shirley Wells discovered her ancestral ties to Sand Creek while researching her family tree in the 1990s.
She has taught the story to her 11-year-old daughter, Samantha, who is starting a four-year term as the descendants trust’s princess, traveling to powwows and other events as an ambassador.
“It is sad, but it makes me feel good my ancestors would be willing to sacrifice their lives for us,” she said. “I know they are in heaven and always watching down on us.”
— Reason for optimism
There was a new face at the latest descendants dance in Anadarko, a town that is equal parts white, black and Indian, and has a championship-caliber high school football team, the Gold River Casino on Highway 281 and a boarded-up bar with a “no weapons allowed” sign.
David Askman, a former federal litigator now in private practice in Denver, introduces himself. He explains how he first heard about Sand Creek growing up in Wyoming.
He mentions the two Indian boys he and his wife adopted from Oklahoma.
And he talks about the chance car ride to the Tulsa airport a few months ago in which a colleague happened to mention the Sand Creek Massacre reparations cause, which had stalled yet again.
Askman was drawn in, like so many others before him.
“They are viewed often as Indians with dollar signs in their eyes,” Askman said. “They are anything but that. They feel the pain of what happened and want recognition from the government.”
Askman said recent court rulings provide optimism after years of dashed hopes.
The landmark Cobell settlement of 2009 opened the door to other decades-old Indian claims. The lawsuit, brought by a Blackfeet woman over a century of mismanaged land-trust royalties, led to one of the largest settlements in U.S. history — $3.4 billion.
Trust leaders also see hope in the Interior Department, the federal agency that oversees government relations with Indian Country.
The department’s top lawyer, Hilary Tompkins, is of Navajo descent; Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is a Coloradan who knows Sand Creek.
An Interior spokesman declined to make officials available for interviews but said the department has opened an investigation in response to trust lawyers and will notify them when it is complete.
Stephen Pevar, senior staff counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union and author of “Rights of Indians and Tribes,” said courts largely have given Indians the benefit of the doubt on treaty claims.
One case bears remarkable similarity to Sand Creek. In 1980, the Supreme Court ordered the government to compensate the Sioux for seizing the Black Hills of South Dakota, which had been promised to the tribe in an 1868 treaty.
But the Sioux refuse to take the money, insisting on the land instead. More than $800 million is gathering interest in a government account.
“If the United States pledged its sacred word on reparations, those people have every right today to reparations,” Pevar said of Sand Creek. “We shouldn’t look at it as some ancient document that just acquired cobwebs. It is as sacred as the U.S. Constitution.”
Askman said the government likely will argue that the statute of limitations has lapsed. And the government has put forth another argument — that reparations have been paid.
Askman said an Interior Department official described finding a ledger from the 1960s that purports to show payments to individuals.
Trust officials are skeptical. And in any case, the matter of land promised in the treaty remains unsettled.
Askman said a claim could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, or “much less.”
If a lawsuit fails, trust lawyers say they plan to petition the Inter-American Court on Human Rights, an autonomous body charged with upholding rights and freedoms in the Americas.
Former U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado knows the Sand Creek political battles well. Part Cheyenne and a massacre descendant himself, he sponsored legislation that created the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, dedicated in 2007.
“There is something to be said about reparations,” Nighthorse Campbell said. “It would be a lot of tough negotiations. Politically, it’s simple. The country is broke. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip.”
Still another potential problem lies ahead. Some massacre descendants believe Homer Flute and his allies are frauds.
— Rifts form and persist
Divisions in the Sand Creek cause are nothing new. At one point in the 1960s, six groups announced plans to pursue reparations, all claiming to be the one true organization.
The trust was supposed to hold things together. But Flute and his former sponsor, Laird Cometsevah, turned against each other. The rift between trust leaders and Cheyenne traditionalists remains.
From his home in Watonga, Okla., Joe Big Medicine has focused not on reparations but on the grim task of burying the dead. Big Medicine has been using the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 to track down Sand Creek remains.
About nine sets — from a single scalp to a few bones and skulls — have been reclaimed from museums and private collections and buried at a cemetery near the massacre site.
Big Medicine said the dispute with Flute was over money. He said Flute wanted to register the trust as a nonprofit and pay himself and the board salaries, which tribal leaders opposed.
“It’s a good claim,” Big Medicine said. “It’s just the wrong people doing it. They are not looking out for the people, only themselves.”
There was another key divide. The Cometsevahs did not believe Arapahos were present at the massacre. The idea that Cheyennes were in a different class clashed with the trust’s egalitarian goals.
Colleen Cometsevah died in 2007, and Laird died the following year. One of their daughters inherited the genealogical work the couple had hoped would be the centerpiece of their own claim.
Steve Brady of the Montana-based Northern Cheyenne Sand Creek Massacre Site Committee said he has no knowledge of the trust’s latest efforts or any desire to join.
While Brady acknowledges that the treaty promises payments to descendants — not tribes — he argues that only federally recognized tribes can negotiate with the government.
“It’s going to be up to the tribes — not some nonprofit organization,” he said.
Flute dismisses the allegation that trust leaders sought to enrich themselves. He said officers spend their own money on everything from stamps to the annual dance.
Tax forms confirm that the trust has a pittance of a budget — it reported $1,923 in revenue in 2011 — and pays no salaries.
Flute thinks the traditionalists have their own financial motivation: to keep the descendant pool as small as possible to maximize payouts. Flute said all descendants are welcome to join the trust.
“If we unite, we are stronger,” Flute said. “If we fight, we are doing what the government wants us to do.”
— Perhaps the final battle
The search for Sand Creek descendants will end. To bring any lawsuit, the trust must set a cutoff date.
Derryberry said it will fall to the federal government or courts to establish who is a rightful descendant. The trust has identified only about 15,000 of an estimated 49,000.
If the trust prevails, individual descendants will decide how to spend their windfalls.
Flute would like to establish a source of permanent revenue to support generations to come. Others mention scholarships or preserving land in their ancestors’ memories.
The descendants feel they are getting closer after decades of stops and starts, of allies old and new, of divisions that won’t go away.
This is perhaps the final battle over Sand Creek.
What was once called a glorious battle is now etched into history as a massacre. The site of the tragedy is memorialized by the National Park Service. Remains of victims have been returned to the land once stained with their blood.
One day soon, Robert Simpson hopes to return to the banks of the dry creekbed where cottonwood trees and prickly pear cactus grow.
The Methodist pastor wants to stand among the “witness trees,” as the oldest ones are called, and talk to the dead.
“Our ancestors are still there,” he said. “When you go out there, it is very moving. You can hear them. After this is all over, I want to go out there and say, ‘You can rest now.’ ”
___
Information from: The Denver Post, http://www.denverpost.com

Thanks for putting together this important human memory. I tried to post the following on the Sandcreekmassacre site through WordPress but it didn’t recognize my WordPress account.

There is memory deep within our genes, our mysterious emotions, our fractured relations & everywhere we are or go. Unfortunately ‘exogenous’ (Latin ‘other-generated’) humans are driven to continually recreate tragedy in order to understand it. Those who don’t learn about their history, repeat it.

Celtic peoples of Europe, as ‘indigenous’ (L ‘self-generating’) peoples did here, lived in Longhouses, cultivated the biosphere, grew the Oak & other trees for their primary nourishment, held council in circle, upheld women’s circles, organized work in Production Societies, used a form of string-shell for accounting memory of village values & joined in confederacy.

When Mid-eastern nations, Mesopotamia, Semites, Greeks & Romans in sequence progressively had their own abundant 3-dimensional polyculture orchards destroyed for 2-D ‘agriculture’ (L ‘ager’ = ‘field’), each in turn became violently displaced by force & fell subject to the spread of disease. Each abused once indigenous nation became exogenous spreading biosphere destruction & genocide. Colonial institutions don’t talk about our own indigenous ancestors, so we are continually ignorant. Our indigenous village story tellers once held many thousands of years of family & national memory. As once abused we brought our suffering across the Atlantic, Pacific & Indian Oceans to impose it upon the people here.

When we rediscover & live the indigenous wisdom of all our ancestors, then we will rediscover welcome, love, life & abundance. www.indigenecommunity.info

Douglas Jack, coordonnateur, Jardins-LaSalle-Gardens Mutual Aid Committee, Maison de / Home of Dialogue, 9662 Jean-Milot, LaSalle-Montreal (Kahnawake-north), Quebec H8R 1X9, Canada 514-365-9594 eco-montreal@mcgill.ca douglasf.jack@gmail.com Skype: douglas.jack4

Cheyenne Holy Man Sweet Medicine's Home Bear Butte, SD

-Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
The Zen of Writing

http://www.sandcreekmassacre.net

http://www.donvasicek.com

dvasicek@earthlink.net

By John Walker

DUNCAN — With nearly 500 people attending in the first day and a half alone, the Trail Dance Film Festival is shaping up to be a success this year.

“We estimate that when we counted the sales between the heritage center and the Simmons Center, volunteers, sponsors and filmmakers, we’ve had nearly 500 people attend so far,” Duncan Convention and Visitors Center Director Jessika McDonnell said.

Many of the filmmakers are from out of state, some from New York, some from Los Angeles. All of them are here to network with others and promote their films.

One filmmaker, whose regular job is a reporter for ABC News in Los Angeles, came here for only the second time in his life and really enjoyed the atmosphere, he said.

“I came out to cover the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995,” Doug Lantz said. “I haven’t been back since, but the people are so welcoming and kind here.”

Lantz said as he was driving from Oklahoma City to Duncan this week, he had a good heart-warming conversation with the person at the toll booth for about 10 minutes.

“That was surprising,” he said. “People are really pleasant here.”

Many of the volunteers have also enjoyed themselves at the festival this weekend. As volunteers, they also get free passes to all of the shows over the three-day period.

“I’ve enjoyed it a lot so far,” volunteer Cecil Brewer said. “My wife and I watched a couple of shows Friday night and really liked the movie about the Sand Creek Massacre.”

According to the preview summary of the movie, “Sand Creek Massacre” portrays the horrific event from the Cheyenne and Arapahos’ perspective when more than 400 women, children and elderly were slaughtered by military troops in 1864.

“I had never heard about this event before,” Brewer said.

While he enjoyed watching the movie, Brewer said that there seemed to be no motive for the event, just cold-blooded murder.

“Sand Creek Massacre” is only one of approximately two dozen documentaries being shown over the course of this weekend-long event at the Simmons Center and Chisholm Trail Heritage Center.

In fact, one of the better-known producers of historical documentaries held a well-attended seminar on Saturday in the big auditorium.

“I started working for CBS News almost 30 years ago,” Bill Kurtis said. “In 1990, I sold my first documentary to A&E.;”

Since then, he has produced more than 300 different documentaries on a variety of topics. One of his favorite subjects is historical documentaries, but he soon realized that he walked a thin line between telling history in an interesting way and changing the historical facts.

“We wanted to make good entertainment, but still be accurate to what occurred,” Kurtis said.

Though makers of documentaries need to simplify certain elements of the story each time, they also try to be true and fair to the events portrayed, which Kurtis said he felt he was able to reach most of the time.

His crew also came up with a new way to film the re-enactments so as to give the viewer the feeling that it is a re-enactment and not Hollywood.

“We slowed the shutter speed down on the cameras to about 15 frames per second,” he said. This caused a blurred appearance that is unique to Kurtis’ documentaries.

“I fell in love with that method,” he said.

He also fell in love with recreating history and seeing it re-enacted before his eyes. Kurtis in many ways feels like a guide for his viewers. He tries to capture all sides of the story and present to an audience something that is both entertaining and educational at the same time, he said.

One of the reasons he feels so passionate about historical documentaries is his perceived lack of good historical education these days.

“We are in danger of losing history,” Kurtis said. “We don’t teach it very well in our schools anymore.”

When asked whether his team would ever run out of ideas for historical documentaries, Kurtis replied that one of the things he looks for is a story with a different element than previously known.

There are plenty of stories that meet his criteria when one peruses history, so he doesn’t think he is in danger of running out of ideas.

“History is being made all the time,” Kurtis said.