Agreed on the connection thing, just to go back to my schooling my teacher had a great uncle or some such whos parents apparently lived at the Wounded Knee reservation though were lucky enough to have been away. That's only a couple degrees of separation and I could still witness the pain via my teacher since her uncle apparently talked about what he came back to quite a bit. That's just using a teacher as well, I have at least one ancestoral branch who were on the East Coast before even James Town so as you can imagine I can dig up quite a few stories that end with "and then our native allies were butchered".