About 8 years ago we were on what was, for me, the first trip to the Black Hills. Pretty pretty earrings everywhere we went-- made from genuwine "Black Hills Gold." Little miniature pinecones, leaves... I bought the earrings and searched in vain for the matching necklace I had neglected to buy when I first saw it. So pretty... I was newly in love and this was a place very dear to my new family... really wanted this necklace on many levels.

Till I learned how the whites had gotten those hills. I didn't know. Polite people are so gomorrahfied about this story that they mostly do not speak of it. I learned about it through an audio book, a recording we bought of Native American wisdom.... an oral history lesson delivered by the remnants of the massacred.

I was sick. I was the kind of sick I think a person would be if they found out the meal they had just downed with gusto had been human flesh. Get-it-away-from-me sick, and nowhere to run to get away from it.

So I stopped chocolate already. I finished the cocoa mix I had on hand as a way of underlining the memory of that ship and the outrage that filled me the day I learned of it.

I had used chocolate to adjust body chemistry, medicinally, many a time. The next time that need hits... I dunno how exactly, but I know the intensity of it will renew that commitment to justice just like the memory of Black Hills Gold still does today.

~Susan