Homeland of Sacajawea

What happened to the Agai Dika (Lemhi Shoshone) in the decades following Lewis & Clark? Gold was discovered on their lands in 1866. An 1868 treaty with the tribe wasn't ratified until 1875, and Chief Tendoy spent the next 30 years diplomatically negotiating to keep his people on their land. He maintained a policy of peace and nonviolence that won the support of settlers. After decades of his valiant efforts, the Agai Dika were forced off their land within months after his death in 1907. In a film produced for the bicentennial of Lewis & Clark at the Sacajawea Center, a tribal elder expressed his view that Chief Tendoy had been murdered.

It was told through the tribal members that when the people left the valley for Fort Hall Reservation some 200 miles distant (nr Idaho Falls), their cries became a wail, and the wail became a scream that reverberated throughout the valley. 

I pondered these words as I pedaled on, the thought of cries escalating to wails and screams penetrating my desensitized heart. I wonder how, as a child, I learned this history as a series of facts that never touched me emotionally, nor seemingly the hearts of my classmates or teachers either. Real people forced off their land by a dominating culture. That culture, convinced it was their Manifest Destiny to control all the land; convinced that since the tribes didn't use land in the same way, it was right put up fences, and turn the prairies into fields. Indeed, a clash of world view about the meaning and uses of land. One people group suffered the cost of another people's dream. 

I swallowed pretty hard when the final closing of the film, made by descendants of the survivors of a people group who were nearly wiped out, said this: 

Hopefully, not

The end

I heard humor, a desire to choose hope for the future, and a not forgetting the grief of the past as these printed words lingered on the screen. Perhaps I read more into it than I should. Whatever the case, this closing struck me deeply. 

One Agai Dika's words were this: people need to work together for good will. This is the way it should be. Hold on to what is good. 

How do I respond? Work together for good will. His words resonate with me. What is your response? How do we work together, tribal people and others, for good will? What does it look like, exactly?