Wounded Knee: The Massacre South of Here
South Dakota
About ninety miles southeast of Rapid City, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, there is a hill with a mass grave. On December twenty-ninth, eighteen ninety, the United States Seventh Cavalry surrounded a camp of Miniconjou Lakota people led by Chief Spotted Elk, also known as Big Foot, near Wounded Knee Creek. The following morning, in the process of disarming the camp, a shot was fired. Within minutes, soldiers with rifles and four Hotchkiss mountain guns opened fire on the camp. Between two hundred and three hundred Lakota people were killed, the majority women, children, and elderly men. About twenty-five soldiers also died, most from crossfire or by their own Hotchkiss guns. Twenty Medals of Honor were awarded to soldiers for their conduct that day. Efforts to rescind those medals have so far not succeeded in Congress.
The Ghost Dance movement had preceded the massacre. Wovoka, a Paiute holy man, had received a vision promising that a messiah would come, the buffalo would return, and the old world would be restored to the Indigenous people if they danced the Ghost Dance. The movement spread rapidly through the Plains nations in eighteen ninety and terrified white settlers and Indian agents, who saw a spiritual movement as a military threat. The Army moved onto the reservations. Sitting Bull was killed during his arrest on December fifteenth, eighteen ninety. Two weeks later, Wounded Knee happened.
Wounded Knee is often called the last major armed conflict of the Indian Wars. It is also the site of a second confrontation, eighty-three years later. In February nineteen seventy-three, members of the American Indian Movement occupied the Wounded Knee site for seventy-one days in a standoff with federal marshals, demanding recognition of Lakota treaty rights and an investigation of Pine Ridge tribal governance. The occupation ended with negotiated withdrawal. The underlying demands remain substantially unaddressed. The mass grave remains at Wounded Knee. The land remains federal.
