We started doing our National History Day topic on the American Indian Movement
because of Dylans grandfathers connection with them. After doing
some research on the topic we became interested in the events of Wounded Knee,
which the American Indian Movement had a big part in. Rather then have our topic
be the American Indian Movement and our focus on Wounded Knee we changed our
topic to Wounded Knee. We first researched our topic at Sonoma State University,
where we later returned to do more research. We also searched at our local libraries
and on-line. We also interviewed Dylans grandfather, Robert Livingston,
who was part of the Wounded Knee cleanup committee.
We had meetings through out the time we were working on History
Day. At these meetings we consolidated the information we had found since the
previous meeting. We also worked on our bibliography at these meetings, adding
whatever sources we had found to use.
In January we started work on our actual site. We used Macromedia
Dreamweaver to put the site together. It was constructed at both of our houses
over a period of a few weeks. We used our various resources to get media for
our pages. One example of this is the song Tom Toms of Wounded Knee,
on our first page, is from our interview with Robert Livingston.
Our topic relates to all three aspects of the theme: Revolution,
Reaction, and Reform in History. Wounded Knee 1890 marked the end of the Native
Americans resistance to the governments forced reform. The revolution
that took place in 1973 at Wounded Knee was the Native Americans reaction to
the U.S. governments hand in tribal affairs.