![]() ![]() The cedar-studded foothills of the Wichita Mountains rose to the west. Students wearing jeans and boots, and Comanche elders in more traditional dress, mixed easily with faculty and administrators wearing suits, ties, and cowboy hats. Though their descendants still enjoy the economic benefits of their ruthlessness, apologies seem hollow without amends, and what amends can be made for the near destruction of a culture? The men guilty of planning and executing the ethnic cleansing of the Southern Plains are many generations gone. After half a century of sustained violence between the Comanche and encroaching Anglo-Texans, and the American triumphalism, rationalization, and indifference that followed and continue today, the two groups hoped to simply acknowledge what happened between their ancestors and ask each other for help in finding a way forward. ![]() ON AN OVERCAST SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON, 133 years after a way of life ended at Tule Canyon in the Texas Panhandle, a small delegation from Texas Tech University met with Comanche elders and representatives from Comanche Nation College at the Medicine Park Ceremonial Grounds near Lawton, Oklahoma. ![]()
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