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wounded knee
Healing From the Horrors of Wounded Knee 133 Years Later
But how do we heal? That’s a question still worth asking.
Jan 21, 2024
On December 29, the Lakota held a ceremony at the Wounded Knee gravesite and read the names of those who were killed, and identified—aloud—women, children and entire families wiped out by the howitzers. There were many who were not named but remembered in the wind and in the moment.
It was somber. And, for the second year, clothing, moccasins and pipes that belonged to the murdered were there at Wounded Knee, returned from a museum in the east, where a ghoulish collection had rested for over a century. On that cold December morning, we prayed, listening to songs, as we looked upon the dresses, shirts of the Ghost Dancers and baby moccasins, all stripped from those slain at Wounded Knee. Now, all sat in open boxes covering the gravesite where their people had been buried. We mourned together.
It was l890 and the great leader Sitting Bull (Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake) was incarcerated at Fort Yates with his people. More than a decade had passed since the U.S. government illegally seized the Black Hills, forcing the people off sacred land. The buffalo had been decimated. Incarcerated at prisoner-of-war camps, the Lakota’s rations had been cut in half. The people were starving.
On December 15, Maj. James McLaughlin ordered the assassination of Sitting Bull by the Indian Police. Sitting Bull’s ally, the Minneconjou Lakota leader Spotted Elk (dubbed “Big Foot” by the cavalry for the size of his shoes), fled south to the Pine Ridge Agency along with about 350 Lakota, mostly women and children.
They traveled under the cover of night, in the depths of winter. They rode over 200 hundred miles through canyons, Badlands and brutal conditions. Chased by Col. Forsyth and the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry, they arrived at the village of Wounded Knee, where they sought safety and a chance to live. That chance was not given.
The next morning, Chief Spotted Elk (Uŋpȟáŋ Glešká) and his people, camped just north of Wounded Knee, were surrounded by the 7th Cavalry. Spotted Elk was among the first to fall. Thirty minutes later as many as 300 Lakota lay dead—adults, children and infants.
Forsyth commended his soldiers for their “gallant conduct… in an engagement with a band of Indians in desperate condition and crazed by religion.” The Army awarded 23 Medals of Honor to soldiers who participated in the massacre. U.S. Cpl. Paul Weinert was cited for “firing his howitzer at several Indians in the ravine.”
There’s no way to whitewash this story, although many have tried. This is simply history, and, despite decades of erasure, the story is here to stay. The people remember; they work to heal.
How do you heal? That’s a question still worth asking 133 years later. First, we must acknowledge what happened. Starting there, we grieve and begin to heal spiritually.
In the early 1980s, Alex White Plume’s uncle told him that because the Army had not allowed survivors and family members to perform grieving ceremonies at Wounded Knee, the spirits of the victims were unable to leave the “Land of the Breathing.” In 1986, White Plume, his brother Percy and 17 other Lakota, calling themselves the Si Tanka Wokiksuye Okolakiciye—the “Big Foot Remembrance Group”—embarked on the first annual Big Foot Memorial Ride from the Sitting Bull homestead in Standing Rock to Pine Ridge.
It was an emotional experience, a time to remember the past and reflect on the future. “As men, we cried,” said White Plume. “We used to try to be like the white man—don’t show any pain and just be tough. But after you go through that ride, it’s okay to cry. It heals your wounds.”
The White Plume family has continued this ride for almost 40 years. Each year new young riders come. Stories and prayers recited; men and women suffer in honor of their ancestors. We all come to heal.
During the ride this year, I stood next to Andrea Eastman, a Dakota woman friend from Sisseton reservation, as she looked over the medical notes of her ancestor, Dr. Charles Eastman. Eastman was among the first Native Americans to be certified as a European-style doctor. After graduating from the University of Boston medical school in 1890, he became a physician at Pine Ridge. Eastman saved all the survivors from Wounded Knee that he could. Only seven died in his care. Sickened by the carnage, he was forced out of his position because his medical notes countered Forsyth’s narrative.
Coming Home
At some point, collecting the heads, body parts and sacred items of Native people became a national pastime. Museums in the United States (and Europe) filled themselves with such curiosities; private collectors did the same. One of the largest collections of goods and clothing associated with persons killed at Wounded Knee came to be housed in the Woods Memorial Library Museum (now called the Founders Museum) in Barre, Massachusetts, a small town in western Massachusetts. Prior to their burial, the bodies had been stripped, and their items were donated to the town’s museum by Frank Root, a collector of such grisly remains.
In January 1993, more than a century after the day Root brought the collection to Barre, Nellie Two Bulls, Alex White Plume and Edgar Fire Thunder traveled from Pine Ridge to see the belongings. White Plume described his visit as “one of my saddest expeditions I had ever had.” He said, “We didn’t know what to expect but it was really sad. The reason was all the children’s clothing and the cegpognaka, the amulets for the umbilical cords. Everything had bullet holes in it, blood and Big Foot’s hair.” “The spirits still linger in the museum, I hear their voices and cries,” Nellie Two Bulls said. These Lakota wanted to bring their ancestors’ belongings home.
“These were trophies of war,” says Wendell W. Yellow Bull. His great-grandfather survived the massacre. It took 20 years for the museum to consider returning the clothes, the dolls and the hair.
Museums want to keep their hoards of looted goods, until forced to give them up, either by law or because they recognized it was the right thing to do. Shortly after White Plume’s visit to Barre, I spoke with Audrey Stevens, the Barre Museum curator, who gave me the whitewashed narrative of how the collection came to be.
Stevens told me that Root purchased the collection from its finders, two civilians in charge of putting the dead at Wounded Knee in a mass grave. “They had these wagons and mules which the bodies were on” says Stevens. “One of the mules stepped in a hole. They looked in and found all of these clothes. Big Foot’s Band had buried them there on the way to Wounded Knee.”
For a century, the Barre museum told people this story, that the Lakota had taken off their clothes before they went to Wounded Knee. The suggestion is absurd: What sort of people take off their clothes in the middle of winter?
Upon finding their ancestors’ clothing, considered cultural patrimony, the Lakota sought to bring them home. In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to address the widescale plunder of Native America by museums—the bodies, heads and other artifacts collected as booty of war by scientists and the military.
At the time, the Barre Museum said it was exempt from the law, because their collection received no federal funding. The Lakota, however, had allies. One was Mia Feroleto, editor and publisher of New Observations, who helped lead the movement to repatriate the museum’s more than 150 pieces of stolen artifacts. “You can be an inspiration to others or you can be the next generation of perpetrators,” Feroleto recalled telling the museum, Feroleto told the New York Times.Elizabeth Almen Martin, a museum board member, said it became clear that the collection held more significance to the Lakota people than it did to Barre residents. “We decided that anything they wanted to have, they can have,” Martin said.
And so it was that in 2022, the shirts, bullet hole-ridden children’s dresses and baby moccasins returned to Wounded Knee.
The complexity of historic trauma is compounded in the healing process. Native people are asked to bury their ancestors again, and again.
As I stood looking over the grave site with the baby moccasins, I cried. We all did. But in our grieving, something else begins. A new chapter, a time to heal from the brutality of history. The time for massacres is long over. The time for healing is now. That’s true, whether you live in North America, South America or Palestine.
As I witnessed those horse riders, I saw the coming of a new generation. They are the ones already here. It is time to wipe away the tears.
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50 Years On, Legacy of Wounded Knee Uprising Lives in Indigenous Resistance
"We're not the subjugated and disenfranchised people that we were," said one Ponca elder who took part in the 1973 revolt. "Wounded Knee was an important beginning of that."
Feb 27, 2023
As many Native Americans on Monday marked the 50th anniversary of the militant occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, participants in the 1973 uprising and other activists linked the deadly revolt to modern-day Indigenous resistance, from Standing Rock to the #LandBack movement.
On February 27, 1973 around 300 Oglala Lakota and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), seething from centuries of injustices ranging from genocide to leniency for whites who committed crimes against Indians, occupied the hamlet of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation for more than two months. The uprising occurred during a period of increased Native American militancy and the rise of AIM, which first drew international attention in 1969 with the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.
"The Native people of this land after Wounded Knee, they had like a surge of new pride in being Native people," Dwain Camp, an 85-year-old Ponca elder who took part in the 1973 revolt, told The Associated Press.
"Anything that goes on, anything we do, even today with the #LandBack issue, all of that is just a continuation."
Camp said the occupation drove previously "unimaginable" changes, including the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, the Indian Child Welfare Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.
"After we left Wounded Knee, it became paramount that protecting Mother Earth was our foremost issue," he explained. "Since that period of time, we've learned that we've got to teach our kids our true history."
Camp said the spirit of Wounded Knee lives on in Indigenous resistance today.
\u201cThe AIM occupation of 1973 endures in a new generation of Native activists at Standing Rock and other protests https://t.co/O0KZn7KF9J\u201d— ICT (@ICT) 1677451558
"We're not the subjugated and disenfranchised people that we were," he said. "Wounded Knee was an important beginning of that. And because we're a resilient people, it's something we take a lot of pride in."
Some of the participants in the 1973 uprising had been raised by grandparents who remembered or even survived the 1890 massacre of more than 200 Lakota Lakota men, women, and children by U.S. troops at Wounded Knee.
"That's how close we are to our history," Madonna Thunder Hawk, an 83-year-old elder in the Oohenumpa band of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe who was a frontline participant in the 1973 occupation, told Indian Country Today. "So anything that goes on, anything we do, even today with the #LandBack issue, all of that is just a continuation. It's nothing new."
\u201c\u201cWhat the American Indian Movement taught me was that everyone was in the movement,\u201d said Madonna Thunder Hawk, Wounded Knee veteran. On the 50th anniversary of Wounded Knee, she explained that AIM was about children, elders, and families.\u201d— Nick Estes (@Nick Estes) 1677360354
Nick Tilsen, an Oglala Lakota who played a prominent role in the 2016-17 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, North Dakota and who founded the NDN Collective, told Indian Country Today that "for me, it's important to acknowledge the generation before us—to acknowledge their risk."
"It's important for us to honor them," said Tilsen, whose parents met at the Wounded Knee occupation. "It's important for us to thank them."
Akim Reinhardt, an associate professor of history at Townson State University in Baltimore, told Indian Country Today that the AIM protests "helped establish a sense of the permanence of Red Power in much the way that Black Power had for African-Americans, a permanent legacy."
"It was the cultural legacy that racism isn't okay and people don't need to be quiet and accept it anymore," he added. "That it's okay to be proud of who you are."
\u201cLeading up to the 50 Year Anniversary of Wounded Knee hear a testimony from Lakota People's Law Project Community Organizer and (AIM) leader Madonna Thunder Hawk, and Russell Means, in this PBS video clip.\n\n#AmericanIndianMovement #WoundedKnee #MadonnaThunderHawk #RussellMeans\u201d— Lakota Law Project (@Lakota Law Project) 1677085745
Indian Country Today reports:
The occupation began on the night of Feb. 27, 1973, when a group of warriors led by Oklahoma AIM leader Carter Camp, Ponca, moved into the small town of Wounded Knee. They took over the trading post and established a base of operations along with AIM leaders Russell Means, Oglala Lakota; Dennis Banks, Ojibwe; and Clyde Bellecourt, White Earth Nation.
Within days, hundreds of activists had joined them for what became a 71-day standoff with the U.S. government and other law enforcement.
On March 16, U.S. Marshal Lloyd Grimm was shot and paralyzed from the waist down. Two Indians were subsequently killed during the government's heavy-handed response to the occupation, which included the deployment of armored vehicles and fighter jets. Frank Clearwater, a 47-year-old Cherokee from North Carolina, was shot in the head while resting in an occupied church on April 17 and died a week later. The day after Clearwater's death, Lawrence "Buddy" Lamont, a local Lakota and Vietnam War veteran, was shot through the heart by a sniper during a shootout. He was 31 years old.
\u201cBuddy Lamont\u2019s family marches to remember their slain relative. A federal sniper shot and killed Lamont on April 27, 1973, during a ceasefire. The bullet pierced his heart. Lamont was a Vietnam veteran, killed by the US government.\u201d— Nick Estes (@Nick Estes) 1677518996
Black activist Ray Robinson, who had been working with the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization, went missing during the standoff. In 2014, the FBI confirmed that Robinson died at Wounded Knee, but his body was never recovered.
AIM remains active today. Its members have participated in the fights against the Dakota Access, Keystone XL, and Line 3 pipelines, as well as in the effort to free Leonard Peltier, a former AIM leader who has been imprisoned for over 45 years after a dubious conviction for murdering two FBI agents during a separate 1975 shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
Kevin McKiernan, then a rookie reporter for NPR who was smuggled into Wounded Knee after the Nixon administration banned journalists from covering the standoff, said in an interview with NPR that the #LandBack movement—spearheaded in the U.S. by NDN Collective—is a leading example of the occupation's legacy.
\u201c#OtD 26 Feb 1860 the Wiyot massacre took place when white settlers murdered up to 250 Indigenous Wiyot people at Tuluwat, California, then expelled them from their land. But they and their descendants kept fighting and by 2019 got back most of their land https://t.co/YomPDwMR39\u201d— Working Class History (@Working Class History) 1677394817
"And I think that there is a collective or a movement like that on every reservation with every tribe," McKiernan said. "They're going to get back, to buy back, to get donated—just do it by inches."
"That's what's going on in every inch of Indian country today," he added.
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It's Been Two-Hundred Years, Not Twenty: Targeted Repression in the US Started Long Before 9/11
There is a terrible theme that runs throughout the story of the United States: when a group of people are seen as a threat, state power has been used to oppress them.
Sep 24, 2021
What comes after the anniversary of a tragedy? Earlier this month, many of us participated in memorials and retrospectives on the changes to American society in the two decades since the attacks of 9/11. We were among the many American Muslims who wrote about the impact of 9/11 on civil rights. As co-executive directors of Muslim Advocates, we were asked to document how the Patriot Act enabled mass surveillance and profiling of Muslims by local and national government, how a Bush-era immigrant registration program (NSEERS) effectively created a Muslim registry, and the many ways that the stereotype of Muslims as terrorists has fueled decades of anti-Muslim hate crimes and bullying. So what comes next?
Profiling, surveillance and over-prosecution of marginalized populations in this country are nothing new.
After 9/11, we were part of a group of Muslim lawyers who helped create a Muslim legal advocacy organization because we knew that things could get much worse for American Muslims. We knew and took seriously the way this country has discriminated against Black Muslims and other marginalized communities.
Simply put, profiling, surveillance and over-prosecution of marginalized populations in this country are nothing new. Trump's frenzy about an "invasion" of gangs across our southern border was not all that different from Democratic politicians' warnings about "super predators" during the passage of the 1994 crime bill. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were just two of many civil rights leaders under constant FBI surveillance, and the Black Panthers were targeted with the blunter, more violent end of that stick. Many in our families were alive when Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps upon zero evidence of wrongdoing. Anti-German sentiment led to bans against teaching the German language and COINTELPRO and the McCarthy hearings painted anyone with communist beliefs as an enemy of the state. Even further back in our history, the Chinese Exclusion Act explicitly banned an entire race from emigrating to this country, and Jim Crow laws did everything short of slavery to control non-whites. And of course, all of this took place on the land of the many Native peoples who were killed or forcibly removed from their homes over centuries of repeated falsehoods and betrayal by the United States government.
So, yes, it has been twenty years since 9/11. But it has also been 77 years since Korematsu, 100 years since the Tulsa massacre, 131 years since the massacre at Wounded Knee, 139 years since the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act and 199 years since the Denmark Vesey rebellion. In other words, we need to see the bigger picture. We believe something much more transformative is possible if we demand that post-9/11 reflections are connected to the rest of American history and that we learn from all of it.
There is a terrible theme that runs throughout the story of the United States: when a group of people are seen as a threat, state power has been used to oppress them. More specifically, political interests have built and solidified their power by ramping up fear--not just stoking a fire, but creating it. American communities are thus pitted against each other, and eventually there is public support for government overreach that is outrageously outsized to the supposed threat.
Monuments and memorials should help us learn about our history and grow from it. When we were asked to opine about all the ways American Muslims suffered in the aftermath of 9/11, we knew it wasn't enough. We want to also talk about what this means for today. What does this mean for oppression in all its forms right now? And then the really difficult question: are we complicit in any of it?
Abuse of power hurts not just the abused, but also the abuser. Everyone needs to heal from these past harms, so we all must ask these questions. We could start on anniversaries. What if every commemoration of every atrocity was a step on a path toward truth and reconciliation? Maybe, then, we could see our way out of this dangerous cycle, heal the fractures in our society, and finally write a new American story.
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