In 1864, 163 Cheyenne Indians, mostly women and children, were slaughtered by US cavalrymen at Sand Creek, Oklahoma.

It nearly wiped out the Cheyenne and the Arapaho, who were chief among the victims of the brutal slaughter.

It was one of the most depraved acts of barbarity ever committed by US soldiers.

The perpetrator was, one Colonel John Chivington who commanded the 1st Colorado Cavalry.

One year later a congressional enquiry condemned the massacre and ordered for generous financial reparation to be made to the Native Americans.

It was never paid.

In earlier times, there had been friction between local Native Americnans and miners, when the miners invaded their territory in the gold rush of 1858.

The local tribes attacked the prospector's wagon trains and settlements.

However, Black Kettle, chief of the South Cheyenne sued for peace and was granted a Stars and Stripes in recognition of his truce between his people and those of the US by President Abraham Lincoln.

He was granted land to establish a peaceful territory consisting of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians at Sand Creek, a dried out river bed.

On that fateful day of November 29th 1864, Colonel Chivington led 700 of his calvary in a suprise attack on the peacful village.

Ignoring the stars and stripes flag, signalling their status as peaceful Native Americans the calvary showed no mercy and within an hour 163 Native Americans had been butchered.

They were scalped, shot, had their genitals mutilated; children were clubbed to death to save bullets.

In one instance a pregnant woman was ripped open and her unborn child stamped upon and also scalped.

Chivington had thought to present the scalps as proof of his war record, to boost his chances of election to congress.

Those Arapaho and Cheyenne that remained alive were removed and resettled away from their traditional hunting grounds in places as far apart as Oklahoma, Wyoming and Montana.

Nearly 150 years later the pain of this brutal massacre still rings like a clear bell in the hearts of the the sons and daughters of the Cheyenne, the Arapaho.

Although they are no longer herded around, their language and culture is being subsumed in the tongue of Hollywood, of the dominant white culture that betrayed their ancestors and continue to betray their descendants.

The remains and broken bones, the scraped scalps of both the living and the unborn are still on display in museums to this day.

They still have not recieved any reparations from the US government.

A Jewish man, Jim Druck, recently bought 600 hectares land and donated it to the Cheyenne and the Arapaho in rememberance of the Sand Creek Massacre.

When Jim Druck talked to the Cheyenne and the Arapaho, who were his business partners, he learned of the massacre, he was reminded of Dachau, of the pogroms that his great-grandfather escaped in Kiev at the start of the last century.

His feeling was one of kindred spirits, of countless ancestors slaughtered by an oppressing force of power and greed with blind brutality to their human condition.

He saw that across tens of thousands of years of separation, that the Jews, the Cheyenne and the Arapaho were all one human, and that they had all suffered under the heel of inhuman oppression.

Congress has sanctioned the creation of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site.

It is the only national historic site dedicated solely to a massacre by the US against Native Americans.

yechydda,

Â