Wounded Knee

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Brutal disputes between Native American parties and the U.S. military were widespread throughout several regions. One of the last military measures in opposition to Native Americans of the northern Plains took place on December 29, 1890. Government representatives outlawed a developing religion identified as the Ghost Dance on a South Dakota reservation that month. As part of the clampdown against the Ghost Dance, soldiers from the Seventh U.S. Cavalry Regiment arrested a band of Lakota who were traveling toward the Pine Ridge Reservation and confined them to a camp near Wounded Knee Creek.  The day after the arrest, the military tried to retrieve weapons from the imprisoned refugees. A gun was discharged, and soldiers opened fire. When the shooting halted, hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children were dead.  The massacre site became a place of commemoration for Native Americans, and decades later Wounded Knee would be a rallying cry in struggles for Native American rights (King, 2016).

Wounded Knee became not the final battle between civilization and savagery but a wholesale slaughter of innocent people led by a chief who had long sought peaceful coexistence with whites. The text therefore posed a direct challenge to the dominant memory of Wounded Knee. In retrospect, the government official quoted in the World in 1897 proved prophetic when he claimed, “the presence of a monument dedicated to Big Foot’s band [would] be a constant menace to the peace of the reservation.”67 In subsequent decades, the memorial served as the most tangible expression of Lakota protest against the Chief Big Foot Massacre and their challenge to the assumptions undergirding the broader narrative representing the final triumph of civilization over savagery (Grua, 2015).

The bloodbath at Wounded Knee, during which soldiers of the US Army 7th Cavalry Regiment aimlessly massacred hundreds of Sioux men, women, and children, demonstrated the conclusive end of Indian opposition to the infringements of white settlers. The massacre was the pinnacle of the U.S. Army's late 19th-century attempts to suppress the Plains Indians. It shattered any established opposition to reservation life and adaptation to white American civilization.

Grua, David W. 2015. “‘In Memory of the Chief Big Foot Massacre’: The Wounded Knee Survivors and the Politics of Memory.” Western Historical Quarterly 46 (1): 31–51. doi:10.2307/westhistquar.46.1.0031.

The article discusses efforts by survivors of the conflict when the U.S. Army massacres Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee.   Scholarly Journal.

King, Patti Jo. “The Truth About the Wounded Knee Massacre.” Indian Country Today. Indian Country Today, December 30, 2016. https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/the-truth-about-the-wounded-knee-massacre.

This gives a detailed summary of the events that surrounded the Wounded Knee Massacre.

Library of Congress. “Burial of the Dead at the Battle of Wounded Knee, S.D.” Library of Congress Prints and Photographs, January 1, 1891. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3a44690/. (picture)

U.S. Soldiers putting Indians in a common grave. Burial of the dead at the battle of Wounded Knee, S.D. Visually based source.