The Occupation of Wounded Knee, Nineteen Seventy-Three

On February twenty-seventh, nineteen seventy-three, approximately two hundred members of the American Indian Movement and Oglala Lakota residents seized the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation and declared it liberated territory under the Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight. They chose the site deliberately: it was where the Seventh Cavalry had killed three hundred people eighty-three years before, and it had become a symbol that carried the full weight of that history.

The immediate cause was local as much as national. Pine Ridge tribal chairman Richard Wilson had created a private militia that opponents accused of intimidating and assaulting critics. The Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization had tried and failed to remove him through official channels. AIM leaders Russell Means and Dennis Banks became the most visible spokespeople, but the occupation was driven in significant part by Oglala women and elders who wanted their land, their treaty, and their self-governance recognized.

Federal marshals, FBI agents, and Bureau of Indian Affairs police surrounded the town. The standoff lasted seventy-one days. Two Lakota men, Frank Clearwater and Buddy Lamont, were killed during the occupation. Hundreds were arrested when it ended on May eighth. Charges against most participants were eventually dismissed. The occupation produced no immediate treaty renegotiation, but Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act within five years, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in nineteen ninety, legislation historians have connected, at least in part, to the pressure the occupation generated.

Wounded Knee is still there. The poverty on Pine Ridge has not ended. The occupation is still debated, still mourned, still cited as a turning point.