Today’s prompt asks:

If you could go back and witness any historical event, which one would you pick?

My answer is the Wounded Knee Massacre.

But I need to explain what I mean by that.

I would not choose Wounded Knee because I would want to watch something horrific happen.

I would choose it because I would want to bear witness.

On December 29, 1890, U.S. soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry killed Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota.

I know how history records what happened there.

But if I could go back, I would want something a history book cannot give me.

I would want to know the people.

Before they became a number.

Before their names were followed by the word massacre.

Before history turned human lives into something we summarize in paragraphs.

I would want to sit among them.

I would want to hear their voices.

I would want to see the children being children. I would want to notice the relationships between people—the small gestures of affection and familiarity that nobody could have known would someday matter to someone looking backward through more than a century of history.

And more than anything, I would want the opportunity to sit with Spotted Elk.

I don’t think I would arrive with a list of questions.

That surprised me when I first thought about it.

Surely, if I could sit across from someone who stood inside a moment of history that I have only been able to learn about generations later, I should have a thousand things to ask.

But I don’t think I would.

I think I would sit down.

And listen.

I wouldn’t presume that my questions were more important than whatever he might choose to say.

I would be honored simply to listen to whatever wisdom he wanted to share.

Maybe he would tell me something profound.

Maybe he wouldn’t.

Maybe he would speak about his people, his family, the land, fear, hope, responsibility, or something I could never predict from where I sit today.

Or maybe we would simply sit together.

I think I would be honored by that, too.

Because if I were given the impossible privilege of returning to that time, I wouldn’t want to go there believing I had come to collect something from him.

I would want to be present.

To listen.

To remember.

And there is another reason this particular place lives so heavily in me.

A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to go to Wounded Knee.

I stood in the cemetery.

I saw the old school and church.

And I looked across that vast stretch of land knowing what had happened there.

There is something difficult to explain about physically standing in a place you have previously known only through history.

The land is still there.

The sky is still above it.

Life has continued around it.

And yet you know.

You know what happened beneath that same sky.

You know people once stood where you are standing.

I remember looking across that land and trying to comprehend the enormity of what happened there.

Maybe that is part of why I chose Wounded Knee for this prompt.

I have already made the journey there through distance.

If I were given the impossible opportunity, I would make the journey in the other direction—

through time.

I have stood at Wounded Knee more than a century afterward and looked backward.

If I could go back, I wouldn’t want to see those people simply at the moment history took their lives.

I would want the privilege of knowing something about how they lived.

 

I would want to know them before history turned them into the dead.

And eventually, I know the moment would come that I would desperately wish I could stop.

That’s the unbearable part of this question.

If I could truly go back only as a witness, I would know what was coming.

I would know that families around me were about to be torn apart.

I would know that people whose voices I had just heard would soon become names, photographs, estimates, arguments, and passages in history books.

And I could do nothing.

I don’t know how anyone could stand there knowing that.

But I would not turn away.

I would witness.

Not because their suffering should be watched.

Because it should never be forgotten.

I would remember the people who existed before the world reduced them to the manner of their deaths.

Their voices.

Their faces.

Their relationships.

Their humanity.

Their lives.

And perhaps there is a responsibility that comes with witnessing.

If you have truly seen someone, you cannot return and speak of them only as a statistic.

If you have heard someone’s voice, you cannot pretend there was silence.

And if you have been entrusted with a story, you have a responsibility to carry it carefully.

A couple of years ago, I stood on that land and looked backward through history.

If I could return there through time, I would sit.

I would listen.

I would learn whatever Spotted Elk chose to teach me.

And when the terrible moment came, as much as every part of me would want to close my eyes—

I would keep them open.

Then I would come home carrying more than the story of a massacre.

I would carry the memory of voices.

Of families.

Of ordinary moments.

Of people.

Because I would not want to remember them only for what was done to them.

I would want to remember that they lived.

Maybe that’s what Wounded Knee taught me when I stood there all those years later.

Places remember.

People remember.

And sometimes bearing witness means refusing to look away.

But sometimes it means something more.

Sometimes it means listening closely enough that when you return, you can say:

I saw you.

I heard you.

You were here.

And I will remember.