Post by Dietmar on Jan 9, 2010 5:35:54 GMT -5
I found this interesting website about Meridas, a Mexican who travelled to Pine Ridge in the late 1920ies and early 1930ies.
home.comcast.net/~tomahawks1/
There are some excellent photographs of Lakota men and women, mostly unidentified, but some faces look familiar. Perhaps we can find out some of their names...
home.comcast.net/~tomahawks1/
home.comcast.net/~tomahawks1/
There are some excellent photographs of Lakota men and women, mostly unidentified, but some faces look familiar. Perhaps we can find out some of their names...
Meridas made numerous trips to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota 1928-29-30 and he was finally made an "honorary" chief by the Oglala Lakota tribe on August 6,1930 before some eight thousand Indians during an annual rodeo celebration. A motion picture based on the book "Massacre" by Robert Gessner is based loosely on this event and was made after Meridas passed away, it tells the story of an enterprising herbalist who visits the reservation and befriends the Indians. Robert Gessner was visiting various Indian reservations at the time keeping a personal log on all of the horrible conditions under which the American Indians had to live due to the Bureau of Indian Affairs cutbacks. (...)
In October of 1932 he brought thirty Indians from the Pine Ridge reservation on custom buses with many stops on the "Goodwill Tour" to spend a month or so at his three-hundred acre estate on Beacon Valley Road in Beacon Valley, Connecticut. Notable Indians such as Charles Turning Hawk, Stephen Standing Bear (who were both at the "Battle of Little Big Horn") Noah Bad Wound, Daniel Black Horn, Joseph High Eagle, Thomas American Horse,and Frank Goings to name a few. (...)
The photos below depict Meridas with his various employees and Indian friends, photographed in South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in Waterbury and in Beacon Valley, Naugatuck, Connecticut where Meridas owned a large parcel of land. It was there that the Indians set up their teepees in October of 1932 .
home.comcast.net/~tomahawks1/
