#wounded knee

American Indian Movement (AIM) members during a stand off with federal agents, Occupation of Wounded Knee, 1973.

Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello Slams Hegseth Over Wounded Knee Medals

Morello: “What the f*ck is wrong with these people”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has decided that U.S. soldiers who received Medals of Honor for the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre will keep them, ending a review begun under the Biden administration. The massacre, in which Army forces killed hundreds of Lakota Sioux—many of them women and children—has long been condemned as one of the darkest chapters in U.S. history.

Tata'nka I'yota'nke (Sitting Bull)'s name and reputation are among the best known of Indigenous leaders in American history. He is often described as the 'chief' of the Lakota people, but he was, in fact, a spiritual leader, a medicine person of great stature for his integrity and courage. In 1890, one of the two main sites of the Ghost Dance in the Dakotas was on his land. He encouraged his people to take up the dance as a way to appeal to the Great Spirit to bring justice to the oppressed.

By December of that year, the American authorities were sufficiently afraid of the dance to plan the arrest of Sitting Bull. A number of 'indian police', backed up by a company of American troops, descended on Sitting Bull's home to make the arrest. As so often happens in volatile situations like this, things got out of control. Members of Sitting Bull's family protested. Some of the women ran forward to protect him. A shoving match began and then gunfire.

Sitting Bull was killed on December 15, 1890, at about fifty-six years of age. He died because of the Ghost Dance, which he understood to be a sacred liturgy of hope and reconciliation, but which his killers took to be a war dance by 'Indian Hostiles'. Ignoring the Constitution, the American government proclaimed the Ghost Dance religion to be outlawed. Without ever seeing or understanding it, they simply made it illegal. This level of paranoia on the part of the dominant culture led, a short time later, to the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation. So great was the Americans' fear that even a small band of starving people were seen as dangerous--so dangerous they had to be wiped out.

The massacre of unarmed dancers, the women and children left in the snow, had a chilling effect on all the nations that had taken up the dance. Among most of them there were ghost shirts or trances. The dances were the simple but dignified invocations of a people facing an apocalypse.

The level of brutality associated with Wounded Knee shocked the Indigenous nations and caused them to take the dance underground. To spare the lives of the innocent, Wovoka called on people to stop dancing in 1892. But the danced continued in secret for many years.

Milestone Monday: Wounded Knee Massacre

On December 29, 1890, soldiers of the United States Army killed up to 300 Lakota people at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, after a chaotic campaign to disarm the tribe. In his 2019 book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, David Treuer (Leech Lake Ojibwe) describes the tragedy:  

One of the most poignant stories to come out of Wounded Knee involves a Lakota child named Zintkala Nuni, or Lost Bird. Her mother had been among those shot as she attempted to run with her infant daughter down the frozen creek. It wasn’t until four days later that the child was discovered – frostbitten, starving, but alive—in her dead mother’s arms. She was passed among the occupying soldiers as a kind of living souvenir of the massacre until, a few weeks after the conflict, a general named Leonard Colby adopted her. Raised partly by his wife, she suffered horribly—she was sent from one isolated boarding school to another, was later impregnated (most likely by Colby), and still later was found working in Wild West shows and in vaudeville, before she died of influenza in 1920, in abject poverty.

Today, in remembrance, we’re highlighting Truer’s book, as well as two titles from the National Museum of the American Indian, part of the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. Native Universe: Voices of American Indians, by Gerald McMaster (Siksika Cree) and Clifford E. Trafzer, was published in 2004, in association with National Geographic. Spirit Capture: Photographs from the National Museum of the American Indian, edited by Tim Johnson (Mohawk), was published in 1998.

Truer characterizes his book (published by Riverhead in New York), as an attempt to illuminate “Indian Life as more than a legacy of loss and pain” and is written out of resistance and the “fierce conviction that our cultures are not dead and our civilizations have not been destroyed.”

-Read an article by Craig Howe on the recent announcement that the Medals of Honor for U.S. Soldiers at Wounded Knee would not be rescinded.

-See more Milestone Monday posts.

--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Assistant

Ghost Dances

Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian AffairsSeries: Records of ControversiesFile Unit: Correspondence Between Military Officers Regarding Wounded Knee Tragedy