12-29-90 A hundred years ago today there was a horrible massacre (sometimes, cruelly, referred to as a “battle”) at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. I first heard of it at the age of ten or twelve; but the image of what happened that day has never left me. Here’s what happened: A band of Sioux led by Big Foot left its reservation and was being pursued by United States cavalry (including a rejuvenated Seventh Cavalry, which had been annihilated fourteen years earlier at the Battle of the Little Bighorn). The soldiers caught up with the Sioux in the frozen expanse of South Dakota; something was said; and before anyone knew what was happening shots were being fired (many by gatling guns). When it ended, more than 200 Indians were dead in the snow. The number may have been as high as 400. A blizzard then swept into the area, preventing a speedy burial. When soldiers returned a day or so later, they found contorted, frozen bodies. Big Foot himself, an elderly man, was in a half-sitting, half-lying position. All the bodies were thrown into a mass grave—as if, by removing them from sight, what happened that day would be erased from memory. That did not happen. To commemorate those who died on 29 December 1890, dozens of Sioux converged today on Wounded Knee, on horseback, despite subzero temperatures. I wish I could have been there with them to mourn the dead and to celebrate the Sioux way of life.
Addendum: Here is a story from The Progressive.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 