The Lakota will Never Forget Wounded Knee 1890

I wonder if Tom Brokaw knew what was happening on the nine Indian reservations in his home state of South Dakota in 1968. I seriously doubt it.

On December 29, 1968, as they have done for many years, the Lakota people were gathered around the mass grave at Wounded Knee to pray. And on December 29, 1990, they would gather to mourn the 100th anniversary of the massacre of their people.

To the non-Indians of South Dakota and the rest of America, December 29, 1990 was another day. But to the Lakota people, December 29 was a day they commemorated every year since 1890. It was a day when nearly 300 of their relatives were shot to death in cold blood by the enlisted men and officers of the 7th Cavalry. Ironically, 21 members of the 7th Cavalry were awarded Medals of Honor for this horrific slaughter of women and children.

White people ask why we Lakota still talk about Wounded Knee as if it was not ancient history. If something terrible happened to your grandmother -- that's right, your grandmother -- something so heinous that it became a part of American history, would you still consider that to be ancient history? I think not. A grandmother can never be ancient history or you wouldn't be able to ride over the river and through the woods to her house on holidays.

Consider this. On December 29, 1890, my grandmother, Sophie, was a 17-year-old student at the Holy Rosary Indian Mission, a Jesuit boarding school just a few miles from Wounded Knee. She was called out with the rest of the students to feed and water the horses of the soldiers of the 7th Cavalry that had just rode on to the mission grounds chasing down survivors that had escaped the slaughter. My grandmother recalled seeing blood on their uniforms and she overheard them bragging about the mighty victory they had just scored at Wounded Knee.

That's right, my grandmother, who is now deceased, remembered. Now does that make the Massacre at Wounded Knee ancient history to me? You bet that it does not. Many other Lakota still living today had grandmothers and grandfathers that were either killed or survived the massacre. No, it is not ancient history to the Lakota.

In early December of 1990, as the 100th anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee approached, I wrote the cover story for USA Today. I quoted an editorial that appeared in the Aberdeen (SD) Saturday Review on January 3, 1891, just five days after the massacre. The author wrote about those terrible "Redskins," his favorite word for Indians. He wrote, "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 civilization, follow it up by one or more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth."

That editorial calling for the genocide of the Lakota people was written by L. Frank Baum, the man who would later write, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." There have been many others before and since that called for genocide against a race of people. Adolph Hitler and Pol Pot come to mind. But then they never followed up their calls for genocide by writing a charming book for children. It appears to be unthinkable to most Americans that such a wonderful man as L. Frank Baum could be compared to other inhuman beasts that called for the extinction of a race of people.

In 2006, descendants of Baum asked the Lakota people to forgive Baum for the editorials he wrote calling for their annihilation. What do you think the Jewish people would say today if the descendants of Adolph Hitler approached them asking them to forgive Adolph for nearly exterminating all Jews? It's a tough question because the attempted extermination of the Jews was taken much more seriously than the extermination of the Lakota people. After all, according to the white man, we were just Indians and sub-humans at that and we didn't have the power of the press or of the free world to support our claims to life. In order for America to expand, the people of the Great Sioux Nation had to be expendable.

December 29, 2007 will mark the 117th anniversary of the slaughter of innocents at Wounded Knee. As is their custom, the Lakota people will gather at the mass grave where the bodies of men, women and children were dumped and they will pray and ask the United States government to apologize for this day of death. They will pray that the Medals of Honor handed out to the murderers be rescinded and they will pray for peace between the Lakota and the rest of America. There will be a ceremony called "Wiping Away the Tears," and this ceremony will conclude a day of mourning, a day when the Lakota reach out to the rest of America for peace and justice.

Americans may have forgotten Wounded Knee and pushed it to the back pages of history, a bad memory to some, but the Lakota people have not nor will they ever forget this terrible day until they at last see justice.

Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, was born, raised and educated on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

Comments

[kimages]

I would like to see an apology to the Indian just like the people of the Holocaust and the African American.

To those who would say people were "hurt on both sides" Please let me remind you that Wounded Knee was one of many acts of genocide, revenge and terrorism against the Indian people and it nearly wiped out an entire race.

To those who would dare to say its not the same as the Holocaust or Slavery, do your research on the genocidal acts that preceded Wounded Knee. Let your mind flow back in time and see the suffering and pain caused to Native American people across this country and then hold your sarcasm.

Respect the fact that in Virginia & the lower Eastern Seaboard alone 90 tribes were wiped out- gone forever- erased from history during the founding of this country. The reality is this is the way it was back then, this is how the government dealt with Native people for hundreds of years.

It hurts, its uncomfortable but it is the truth. Wounded Knee was one of many, many other instances before and after 1891.

Its time folks faced the facts of how this country was created, take responsibility for that and then apologize.

I think its a shame Native people have not received a formal apology for what happened. It does not matter if the apology is good enough. It must be done for the Indian just like it was for the African American and the victims of the Holocaust.

It was not so long ago my friend and it is not too late

[derik]

I myself am totally aware of Wounded Knee etc. I am not even Lakota or American Indian or for that matter native born American. I am just a plain natualized American. I did not make myself aware of it for any reason (such as "some" college learning) other than to understand nature. why? because it is nature. Either way, as nature's top of the pile we tend to be somewhat nasty towards each other. I hope we all evolve from all of this. Though, I think that could take a long time.

[Podcast]

TJ - Those who slaughtered the Cheyenne at Sand Creek could just as well have been Martians. All the Cheyenne saw were white men killing and maiming their people. How in the hell would they know or care that they were civilian militia. To the Cheyenne they were killers and they only saw their white faces. Does that make it alright that they murderers were militia instead of regular army?

[TJ1776]

The Sand Creek massacre was carried out by Colorado militiamen, not US troops. The Cheyennes and the Colorado settlers had been feuding for a decade before the attack.

Any rational study of Custer's actions on 25 June reveal no cowardice as claimed above. Custer was acting on a long known fact of Indian combat....When confronted, the Indians will scatter to avoid annihilation. Custer is guilty of acting without proper intelligence regarding the Indian encampment (the largest ever on the plains.) He also exceeded his orders, which had the 7th Cavalry containing the Indians until the arrival of the Terry/Gibbon column.

Here in the West, we get a little tired of the "noble savage" and "genocide" mumbo jumbo. Treaties were signed and broken on both sides. Do you think the Crow wanted the Sioux and Cheyenne on their land? The entire Bighorn region was and is Crow land and the encampment on the Little Bighorn violated treaties.

The children were innocents. And the US calvary ARE NOT the only guilty party in the murdering of innocents on the frontier.

TJ

[HeevenSteven]

in 1988 I read "Black Elk Speaks" for a religion 101 class. It is to this day one of the most memorable books I've ever read. Anyone who can get through it without crying is not human. I cannot recommend it enough.

[Podcast]

TJ - Many of the warriors and women at Little Big Horn were Cheyenne and saw the horrible mutilation of their friends and relatives at Sand Creek. The atrocities included cutting out the vaginas of Cheyenne women and hanging the grizzly objects on the saddlehorns of horses, of castrating the corpses of Cheyenne warriors and using the scrotums after they had been cured and treated as tobacco pouches. Cheyenne babies were thrown into the air and caught on the end of bayonnets. These Cheyenne and Arapahoe survivors were at the Little Big Horn and exacted their revenge. That doesn't make it right, but there was certainly motivation.

[whatsthatsound]

To even imagine that Mr. Baum could hold such benighted views, and at the same time write an insightful and heartwarming story for the children of his own race is amazing, but it mustn't be consigned to a period of even relatively recent history. Education, or rather the misuse of it, is still causing people to believe in the inferiority and expendability of others. In Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, he writes about an experiment in which children were told a story from within their culture of a siege and slaughter carried out by an army. The children were able to condone the action; such had been their cultural conditioning about its rightness. But when a similar group of children were told the same story, with the characters changed to appear unrelated to their culture (they were given names that were foreign to them), the children were much more likely to label the event an atrocity.
It seems that people can easily be programmed to believe that those of different skin colors and beliefs are "less than", and that no tears should be shed over their murders. At the same time, with proper education, we can learn the empathetic and humanitarian responses that would make us shudder at our ancestors' views. Indeed, we must "teach our children well".

[swift goat pet for truth]

Wounded Knee was just the last atrocity in a series of atrocities that stretched for many generations. Sand Creek. Trail of Tears. On and on.

Most Americans cannot name one.

Many who know the name Wounded Creek feel that the whites were justified, or the events exaggerated.

And most Americans think that the USA keeps its treaties.

[Spookcatcher]

I have researched about the Wounded Knee Massacre, including reading the documented recorded testimonies from Government Soldiers and Scouts, and of Indian survivors. I have to conclude on my own that many of the government accounts are "whitewashed". It is obvious to even a casual interested party that it a planned and executed tactical ground operation to murder those people.
In the ensuing wake of our History, with all of our intervensions and militerism, and with flag waving Manifest Destiny at the helm, it is also glaringly apperant that we have moved nowhere forward in our opinion of other Nations Peoples, or of their sovereignty. We still wholeheartedly as a majority, elect and support leaders of the same Elitist Supremeist Wordf View. I have no reservation of belief in my mind that if George Bush was President then, or the same conditions where here today, he would not hesitate to act in complete congruence of the massacre. if not even more arrogantly in the genocide of Native Americans.
It interesting that many/most Middle-Eastern Peoples and other indiginous peoples of the world are awakening to this reality about the U.S.A. and are seeking ways to align and protect or guard themselves from us. Some have also obviously radicallized against us.

[realitytrumpsbull]

Um, what kind of justice, exactly? I read
somewhere that there is a declaration of
secession or something...talk about sins of
the father, when are they finally going to
bury the hatchet, here? And no, not in someone
else's head...

[Grulg]

It was a pretty brutal thing, yes indeed. Odd timing-I just watched 'Hidalgo' which has the Wounded Knee massacre at the beginning. Dang.

Brokaw covering the Sixties would be like Pat Boone covering the Sixties. They were both there, but....

[hopeless277]

Uh, didn't Custer have guns? And wasn't he the instigator of the battle? This country sucks.

[TJ1776]

Consider this. On 25 June 1876, 265 members of the 7th Cavalry were killed and later mutilated, many beyond recognition. The survivors of Little Bighorn were at Wounded Knee. They remembered what the Sioux had done to their brave comrades.

The murder of innocents should never be condoned, but neither should the desecration of brave fighting men after their deaths, merely for "cultural differences."

The healing requires cooperation from both sides.


Garry Owen !


TJ