Honor the Grandmothers

Honor the Grandmothers Honor the Grandmothers takes a look at four Dakota and Lakota women who offer to share the stories of their lives to the reader. It is a heartfelt look into their hardships through racism, to their ongoing battle to pass along the rich history of their ancestors while fighting poverty on the reservation. The first grandmother we get the chance to hear from is Celane Not Help Him. I wondered how she got her name because I think that would be an entire story all by itself, but unfortunately I couldn’t find any research that would answer my question. Celane’s story was the most informative and vivid of all the tales in my opinion. The stories she recounted of the massacre at Wounded Knee really gave me a full understanding of what really happened there. There is a vast discrepancy in the version I learned in history class when I was a child versus what Celane described and what I now know to be fact. It was amazing to me that her grandfather, Dewey Beard was present at Wounded Knee and passed down the story from generation to generation in such detail. Her ancestry is sometimes hard to follow, as it is with all the women in the book, but from what I gathered one set of grandparents died among those killed during the massacre. Dewey Beard, one of her grandfathers, did survive and ended up raising Celane after her father died when she was fourteen months old. Celane’s retelling of Dewey Beard’s tale of the massacre at Wounded Knee is haunting because of the sheer inhumanity and brutality of it all. Dewey, his family, and approximately 300 other Indians were on a winter trek to Pine Ridge when they met up with the U.S. 7th Cavalry. The cavalry had orders to disarm the Indians but the Indians couldn’t understand the logic behind it. They needed those weapons to feed their families and to protect themselves. The soldiers lulled them into a false sense of security by offering them food and drink. They were starving so they obligingly took it.