Wounded Knee Massacre

5 Key excerpts on "Wounded Knee Massacre"

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  Citizen Lane

  Defending Our Rights in the Courts, the Capitol, and the Streets

  • Mark Lane(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Lawrence Hill Books

    (Publisher)

  15

  Wounded Knee

  I t was winter when the “occupation” of Wounded Knee began in 1973. Indians had moved in substantial numbers to Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation. Russell Means, Gladys Bissonette, and Ellen Moves Camp, all leaders of the liberation movement, were longtime residents of the reservation and invited others in the American Indian Movement (AIM) and elsewhere to join them. They chose the site of the last Indian massacre, committed a century earlier, since they believed that the spirit of those who had died there would protect them. Their mission was to expose the terror that was visited upon them daily.

  The “siege” of Wounded Knee by US Marshals, the US Army, and the Guardians of Our Oglala Nation—a private police force organized by Richard Wilson universally known as the GOON Squad on the reservation—began hours after those who protested conditions on the reservation had arrived at the village for an open public meeting. The authorities set up roadblocks, cordoned off the town, and arrested those they could locate. The government sent fifty US Marshals to surround Wounded Knee. The government forces were equipped with automatic weapons, including .50-caliber machine guns, grenades, and grenade launchers, and were augmented by snipers, armored personnel carriers, and helicopters. The siege lasted for seventy-one days.

  Steve Hawkins called me one afternoon from the Chicago office of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. “Mark, we sent a few guys down to Wounded Knee, South Dakota, to see if we could donate some food to the Indians. They just disappeared. They are all veterans. They knew there would be a checkpoint and they were planning to stop there and ask for permission to leave the food there for the Indians. We haven’t heard from them and we wonder if they were arrested. Could you find them and bail them out?”

  A couple of veterans at the Covered Wagon drove me from Mountain Home to Boise. I told them I would be back in a day or two and then flew to Rapid City armed only with the names of the missing VVAW members. I located them in the local jail; their only crime had been to drive to the FBI and US Marshal roadblock with some canned food in their vehicle and ask the agents if they could deliver the food to the Indians. They were immediately dragged out of the car, handcuffed, and thrown into an FBI vehicle.

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  Nuclear Country

  The Origins of the Rural New Right

  • Catherine McNicol Stock(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  8 * * *

  The Occupation of Wounded Knee began on February 27, 1973, when more than two hundred Oglala Lakota and other members of AIM seized and occupied the hamlet of Wounded Knee, South Dakota.9 They stole provisions including guns and ammunition from a local store, captured—and later released—four white hostages, including store owners Clive and Agnes Gildersleeve, blocked local roads, and in time declared the Independent Oglala Nation.10 They sought redress for the many forms of violence—from forced removal, broken treaties, and stolen, allotted, and flooded land to sexual assault, kidnapping, and genocide—that Native people had experienced since settler invasion and colonization had begun. But they had another goal in mind. Because of the violence of forced assimilation in the twentieth century, Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and other leaders of AIM believed their entire way of life had been stolen, too. Means remembered, “We were about to be obliterated culturally. Our spiritual way of life—our entire way of life was about to be stamped out and this was a rebirth of our dignity and self-pride.”11 AIM leaders named medicine man Leonard Crow Dog to be their spiritual leader and built a sweat lodge for purification. Among their proudest moments inside the village was the birth of Mary Crow Dog’s son, Pedro Bissonette, the first “free” Indian child born in South Dakota in over one hundred years.12 And yet the Native men and women inside Wounded Knee also knew the risks they were taking. As Carter Camp recalled later, “We wanted to give our lives in such a way that would bring attention to what was happening in Indian Country and we were pretty sure that we were gonna have to give our lives.”13

  FIGURE 13. A tank rolls by a monument to Crazy Horse on the Pine Ridge Reservation, during the Occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. Getty Images.

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  Miracles and Massacres

  True and Untold Stories of the Making of America

  • Glenn Beck(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Threshold Editions

    (Publisher)

  6

  The Battle of Wounded Knee: Medals of Dishonor

  Grand River, South Dakota December 12, 1890 “Rescue me from these traitors!” Sitting Bull shouted.

  Lieutenant Bull Head was getting more concerned by the minute. What had started as a relatively simple mission to arrest this Indian chief for his involvement in a Sioux uprising was quickly getting out of hand.

  The lieutenant, in response to orders from General Nelson A. Miles, had entered the camp at first light with forty-two other Indian police. They’d hoped to arrest the old chief quickly and quietly, before his hundreds of followers could react.

  But that’s not at all what happened.

  The lieutenant had entered Sitting Bull’s cabin and found the chief and his sons asleep. Sitting Bull had been nude and it took a few minutes for him to dress. He had been willing to come quietly at first, but Crow Foot, one of his sons, started to berate his father for not resisting. When the small party stepped outside, the lieutenant saw that armed Sioux had gathered in front of the cabin. Sitting Bull, incited by his son, began to order his people to kill Lieutenant Bull Head. “This man is the leader!” he shouted. “Kill him and the others will flee!”

  The lieutenant saw that his fellow policemen were holding back the angry Sioux in a wide arc, but they were surrounded and had no way to get to their horses. Damn the Ghost Dancers , he thought. The Sioux danced for days on end in a ritual meant to reunite the living and the dead and eliminate evil, including the white man, from the world. Hundreds of these crazed believers had made camp around Sitting Bull’s cabin, and it now seemed that they were all coming to their leader’s defense.

  Bull Head hated these ignorant Ghost Dancers and what they were doing to the public’s perception of Indians. What they practiced, he believed, wasn’t a religion; it was wishful thinking. The buffalo weren’t coming back, and the white men weren’t going anywhere. The Sioux way of life had to change to fit the new reality.

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  They Met at Wounded Knee

  The Eastmans' Story

  • Gretchen Cassel Eick(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • University of Nevada Press

    (Publisher)

  9

  At the time of the Wounded Knee Massacre, Theodore Roosevelt was head of the US Civil Service Commission. He had spent time in the Dakotas, fleeing there after the deaths of both his wife and his mother on Valentine’s Day, 1884. He loved the Badlands and had written books about the West. Roosevelt became friends with Herbert Welsh, the founder of the Indian Rights Association. Later in the decade Welsh would propose that Roosevelt be named Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

  After the US Army fired on unarmed Lakota and Cheyenne on December 29, 1890, at the Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Teddy wrote to his friend Welsh that, “if all accounts are true there were . . . peaceable men, or women and children, killed under circumstances that ought to have called for the most rigid investigation.”10 Although he corresponded regularly with Welsh and several other Indian reformers, Roosevelt did not speak out publicly about what happened at Pine Ridge, even when eighteen Medals of Honor were distributed to soldiers in the US Army for their performance at Wounded Knee, or when the press and the military narrated the massacre as the fault of bloodthirsty Indians participating in a regionwide conspiracy. The press interpreted the slaughter of unarmed Indian civilians as a terrorist plot, a “more comprehensive plot than anything ever inspired by the prophet Tecumseh, or even Pontiac” to kill whites.11

  A year and a half after Wounded Knee, Roosevelt and Welsh traveled together to Pine Ridge and other Lakota/Dakota reservations. Visiting the South Dakota reservations provided them the opportunity to interview Lakota who were present during the massacre. Roosevelt spoke with Carlisle graduate Luther Standing Bear and with George Sword, the captain of the Indian police force at Pine Ridge. Welsh and Roosevelt also interviewed the Reverend William Hobart Hare, the Episcopal bishop of the Dakota diocese since 1873, the cleric with whom Elaine had traveled. Theodore Roosevelt met with Captain Hugh Leroy Brown, the former military man who had become the agent at Pine Ridge. Brown was trying to have Eastman removed as agency physician. Roosevelt chose not to interview Charles or Elaine.12

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  Political Trials

  Gordian Knots in the Law

  • Ron Christenson(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  34

  Dee Brown, the author of the most widely read recent book about Indians, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee , was the second defense witness. When the questioning by Kunstler turned to the 1868 Treaty, Hurd, predictably, was on his feet with objections. Judge Nichol ruled that questions about the opinions held concerning the treaty would be permitted. This allowed Kunstler to bring Brown through a series of questions in which the historian gave his judgment that when the Indians signed a treaty it “was a holy thing, [which] meant we will not break the treaty.” He mentioned that the federal government “violated almost all of the treaties and still is violating all of the treaties that today’s activities would impinge upon.” Hurd instantly moved to strike the portion “still is violating” and was sustained by Judge Nichol. Brown was allowed, however, to give examples of how Indians tried to bring the federal government’s attention to the facts of the violations: they wrote letters, which went unanswered; they went to Washington, but were ignored; and when they used other than normal channels, such as forcefully confining an agent to his own house, the military was brought in against them.

  When Kunstler started questions about massacres, Hurd raised objections that were sustained. On the ground that Brown was an expert, Judge Nichol did allow Kunstler to ask what effect massacres at Wounded Knee and Sand Creek had on Indians. Brown replied that there was a “path of destruction across the West, one massacre following another to forty or fifty years” endangering the very survival of the Indian peoples. When Kunstler inquired whether the fear of massacre persisted to that day, Brown responded that psychology was not his field, although he admitted that while talking about history with Indians the topic did come up. He had noticed a change of attitude: “When I began to meet Indians forty years ago, most did not want to be known as Indians. Today almost all Indians are proud to be Indians.”35

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