Wounded Knee, 1973: The Seventy-One Days

Russell Means and Dennis Banks chose Wounded Knee for a reason. On February twenty-seventh, nineteen seventy-three, members of the American Indian Movement seized the village of Wounded Knee on Pine Ridge Reservation and occupied it. They chose the site precisely because of what had happened there eighty-three years earlier. The choice was a statement that nothing had been resolved.

The occupation lasted seventy-one days. Federal marshals and FBI agents surrounded the perimeter. Two occupiers were killed: Frank Clearwater, shot on April seventeenth and died of his wounds on April twenty-fifth, and Buddy Lamont, killed on April twenty-sixth. Several hundred federal prosecutions followed the occupation's end on May eighth. Most charges were eventually dismissed or dropped on grounds of documented government misconduct.

The demands of the occupiers were specific: recognition of the Fort Laramie treaties, removal of the Pine Ridge tribal chairman Dick Wilson, whose administration was accused of corruption and of employing a paramilitary force to intimidate political opponents, and federal investigation of the conditions at Pine Ridge.

None of those demands were met in any substantial form.

What the occupation accomplished was visibility. Television cameras were there. The conditions at Pine Ridge were broadcast to audiences who had never heard of Shannon County. Life expectancy for men on the reservation was documented at approximately forty-seven years at the time, lower than any country in the Western Hemisphere. The cameras showed that.

The conditions that prompted the occupation in nineteen seventy-three had been created across more than a century of federal policy. That did not change.