Who Are We Today?
- Jan 29
- 2 min read
163 years ago today, our Federal Govt, enabled by Cache Valley pioneers, lost it’s way.
The result?
The murder of well over 400 Shoshone women, children & men during a frigid Jan sunrise along the banks of an icy Boa Ogoi River.
Lest we forget, that’s what the Federal Govt. is capable of.
If you haven’t noticed, you’re in a moment that history will reflect on. Scrutinize. Learn from. And yes, judge upon.
It’s easy to look back on big cultural moments in our modern democracy & presume WHO we would have been in all the complex clashes of the times - Indigenous genocide, slavery, voting rights, gender equality, racial desegregation, & yes, even the interdependence of immigration.
Today, we commemorate the 163rd year since the Bear River Massacre downstream.
Had we lived then, who would we have been? How would we have spoken up? Who would we have held to account?
Would we have been the Cache Valley neighbors who sent requests to remove the “Indian” problem to SLC? Would we have supported the call of Utah leaders for Federal troops to “fix” those who looked & lived differently?
Ironically, would we have wondered if it was we who were the invading problem, not the Shoshone?
When they were murdered, on Jan 29th, would we have protested? Would we have sought justice? Or, as it happened, would we have simply remained quiet? In place of accountability did we force assimilation in the aftermath?
Today, there isn’t much we can do to correct the ancestral failures surrounding the Bear River Massacre.
But, we can ask similar questions about our own streets.
Are we comfortable with ICE racially profiling and rounding up our brown neighbors without warrants nor due process?
Do we support masked men in our streets wielding guns for which they have no training, enforcing laws around which they have no education, only to see them invade our communities & escalate our tensions.
When they shoot our mothers in the face, do we look away? When they tackle our brothers in the streets and fire not 1, 2, nor 3 bullets but 10 into their smothered back, do we stand taller or kneel lower?
WHO ARE WE TODAY, on this 163 anniversary of the BEAR RIVER MASSACRE?
