Manataka American Indian Council
300 reasons not to forget lessons of Wounded Knee
While Americans agonize over the contents of the Iraq Study Group report
and weigh the options of extricating U.S. soldiers from the middle of a civil
war, the people of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota will gather
on a lonely hill overlooking the demolished village of Wounded Knee -- destroyed
during the occupation of the American Indian Movement in 1973 and never rebuilt
-- to commemorate and grieve the massacre of their ancestors.
It was after a night so cold that the Lakota called it "The Moon of the Popping
Trees," because as the winter winds whistled through the hills and gullies at
Wounded Knee Creek on the morning of Dec. 29, 1890, one could hear the
twigs snapping in the frigid air.
When a soldier of George Armstrong Custer's former troop, the 7th Cavalry, tried
to wrest a hidden rifle from a deaf Lakota warrior after all of the other
weapons had already been confiscated from Sitanka's (Big Foot) band of Lakota
people, the deafening report of that single shot caused pandemonium among the
soldiers and they opened up with their Hotchkiss machine guns upon the unarmed
men, women and children.
Thus began an action the government called a "battle" and the Lakota people
called a "massacre." The Lakota people say that only 50 people of the original
350 followers of Sitanka survived that morning of slaughter.
One of the survivors, a Lakota woman, was treated by the Indian physician Dr.
Charles Eastman at a makeshift hospital in a church in the village of Pine
Ridge. Before she died of her wounds, she told about how she had concealed
herself in a clump of bushes. As she hid there she saw two terrified little
girls running past. She grabbed them and pulled
them into the bushes.
She put her hands over their mouths to keep them quiet, but a mounted soldier
spotted them. He fired a bullet into the head of one girl, then calmly reloaded
his rifle and fired into the head of the other girl. He then fired into the body
of the Lakota woman. She feigned death and, although badly wounded, lived long
enough to relate her terrible ordeal to Dr. Eastman. She said that as she lay
there pretending to be dead, the soldier leaned down from his horse, used his
rifle to lift up her dress in order to see her private parts, then snickered and
rode off.
As the shooting subsided, units of the 7th Cavalry rode off toward White Clay
Creek near Pine Ridge Village on a search-and-destroy mission. When they rode
onto the grounds of Holy Rosary Indian Mission, my grandmother Sophie, a student
at the mission school, and the other Lakota children, were forced by the Jesuit
priests to feed and water their horses.
My grandmother never forgot that terrible day, and she often talked about how
the soldiers were laughing and bragging about their great victory. She recalled
one soldier saying, "Remember the Little Big Horn."
The Massacre at Wounded Knee was called the last great battle between the United
States and the Indians. The true version of the events of that day were polished
and sanitized for the consumption of most Americans. Twenty-three soldiers of
the 7th Cavalry were awarded this nation's highest honor, the Medal of Honor,
for the murder of nearly 300
innocent and unarmed men, women and children.
Although 25 soldiers died that day, historians believe that most of them died of
friendly fire when they were caught in the crossfire of the machine guns. Many
Lakota have tried in vain to have those medals revoked.
Before they died, the Lakota warriors fought the soldiers with their bare hands
as they shouted to the women and children, "Inyanka po, inyanka po! (Run, run)."
The elderly men, unable to fight back, fell on their knees and sang their death
songs. The screams and the cries of the women and children hung in the air like
a heavy fog.
When I was a young boy I lived at Wounded Knee. By then the name of the village
had been changed to Brennan to honor a Bureau of Indian Affairs superintendent,
but all of the Lakota knew why the name was changed. Because although the
government tried various ways to conceal the truth, the Lakota people never
forgot; they always referred to the hallowed grounds as Wounded Knee, and they
continued to come to the mass grave to pray, even though it was roundly
discouraged by the government.
As a child I walked along the banks of Wounded Knee Creek and I often had an
uneasy feeling, it was as if I could hear the cries of little children. Whenever
I visited the trading post where my father worked I would listen to the elders
as they sat on the benches in front of the store and spoke in whispered voices
as they pointed at the hills and gullies. Never did I read about that horrible
day in the history books used at the mission school I attended.
Two ironies still haunt me. Six days after the bloody massacre the editor of the
Aberdeen (S.D.) Saturday Pioneer wrote in his editorial, "The Pioneer has before
declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the
Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect
our civilizations, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and
untamable creatures from the face of the earth."
The author of that editorial was L. Frank Baum, who later went on to write that
famous children's book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In calling for genocide
against my grandmother and the rest of the Lakota people, he placed the final
punctuation upon a day that will forever live in infamy amongst the Lakota.
And finally, as the dead and dying lay in the makeshift hospital in the
Episcopal Church in Pine Ridge Village, Dr. Eastman paused to read the sign
above the entrance that read, "Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men."
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Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, is the founder and first president of the
Native American Journalists Association.
najournalists@rushmore.com
Submitted by Andrea Cramlit, Indigenous News Network