Wounded Knee: Two Moments That Shook America

Wounded Knee Creek is an unremarkable stream in the rolling pine country of southwestern South Dakota, but its name carries the weight of two of the most consequential confrontations in the history of relations between the United States and Native nations.

On December twenty-ninth, eighteen ninety, soldiers from the Seventh United States Cavalry surrounded a camp of Miniconjou Lakota near this creek, intending to disarm them. Most of the Miniconjou were traveling to the Pine Ridge Reservation under a flag of truce. The Ghost Dance religious movement had spread across the Plains that year, born from the vision of Paiute prophet Wovoka, blending Indigenous belief with Christian messianic hope in a ritual that promised the return of the buffalo, the restoration of Native lands, and the departure of the colonizers. The U.S. Army had panicked, fearing the movement as a prelude to revolt.

As soldiers attempted to take weapons from the camp, a shot was fired. What followed was a massacre. Soldiers opened fire with rifles and Hotchkiss mountain guns positioned on a surrounding ridge. When the firing stopped, more than two hundred fifty Lakota were dead, the majority of them women, children, and elders. At least twenty-five soldiers died, most from their own crossfire. The Army awarded twenty Medals of Honor to soldiers who participated. Many of those medals have never been rescinded.

Eighty-three years later, on February twenty-seventh, nineteen seventy-three, members of the American Indian Movement and Oglala Lakota activists occupied Wounded Knee, deliberately choosing this site to confront what they called the corruption of tribal leadership under Richard Wilson and the United States government's ongoing violations of treaty obligations. The occupation lasted seventy-one days. Federal agents surrounded the village. Frank Clearwater, who was Cherokee, and Lawrence Lamont, an Oglala Lakota, were killed by federal gunfire. The occupation ended on May eighth after White House officials promised an investigation. The charges against AIM leaders Russell Means and Dennis Banks were later dismissed due to government misconduct.

Wounded Knee today is a small community on the Pine Ridge Reservation. A mass grave memorial marks the site of the eighteen ninety massacre. The ground here holds both tremendous grief and an enduring insistence that the Oglala Lakota are still here, still fighting.