Sometime toward the end of the eighteen-eighties, a Paiute holy man named Wovoka had a vision that promised the rebirth and renewal of Indigenous nations on the North American continent. His prophecy called for the practice of the Ghost Dance, which would connect the living and the dead and reverse the tide of white conquest. The Ghost Dance began to spread among the Lakotas and other Western tribes. As it did, the United States Department of the Interior, which had implemented a reservation order prohibiting Indigenous ceremonies and dancing, requested that federal troops track down and arrest many of the movement’s leaders.
Among those who were said to have encouraged the movement was Tatanka Iyotake, or Sitting Bull, a Lakota leader whose renown had grown after the defeat of George Custer in the Battle of Little Bighorn. Late in 1890, Sitting Bull welcomed a band of Mnicoujou Lakota Ghost Dancers to the Standing Rock Agency. On December 15th, Indian police tried to arrest him, and, when he resisted, an officer shot and killed him. The Ghost Dancers, led by Unpan Gleska, fled, and, in the days after Christmas, the Army caught up with them, near Wounded Knee Creek, on what is now the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. On the morning of December 29th, during a negotiated surrender, soldiers in the U.S. Seventh Cavalry—Custer’s old regiment—opened fire on Unpan Gleska and his camp, killing some three hundred Lakotas, including many starving women and children.
In popular history, the massacre at Wounded Knee would come to stand for the end of the Plains wars—and of Indigenous resistance more broadly. “A people’s dream died there,” read the closing lines of “Black Elk Speaks,” an anthology of interviews with the Lakota religious leader Black Elk, edited in 1932 by the poet John Neihardt. “The sacred hoop was broken and scattered.” But this was authorial sleight of hand—a decision, by Neihardt, to close the curtain on a mournful, elegiac note. The U.S. Census Bureau had declared the Western frontier officially closed in 1890, and, at the time, the American Indian population was believed to have reached its lowest point in known history. But Black Elk also said, when reflecting on the enduring power of the Ghost Dance and what happened in 1890, “The tree that was to bloom just faded away, but the roots will stay alive, and we are here to make that tree bloom.”
Fifty years ago, Wounded Knee again became the setting for a confrontation between the U.S. government and a nascent movement of Indigenous resistance. Early in 1973, a local group called the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization (OSCRO) came together to protest the corruption of Dick Wilson, a despotic tribal president. Wilson had recruited a private police force, known as the “goon squad,” which collaborated with the F.B.I. to intimidate his political opposition. A year into his tenure, four impeachment petitions had been brought against Wilson by Oglala Sioux tribal members for circumventing normal council procedures and siphoning tribal funds for his own use. But Wilson oversaw his own impeachment hearings, and avoided a real airing of his misdeeds.
The members of OSCRO turned to the American Indian Movement for help. “We decided that we did need the American Indian Movement in here because our men were scared, they hung to the back,” Ellen Moves Camp, a community-health representative and Oglala leader who lost her job for opposing Wilson, said. AIM, which was founded in Minneapolis, in 1968, had grown from a community-patrol outfit into a national organization pressing for federal recognition of treaty rights and American Indian sovereignty. The movement had drawn national attention by staging occupations of several regional Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters, by confronting off-reservation vigilante violence against Native people, and by organizing the cross-country Trail of Broken Treaties, in 1972.
Wilson had banned all AIM activity, real or imagined, in Pine Ridge, going so far as to outlaw large public gatherings. OSCRO invited AIM anyway, and at a meeting on February 27, 1973, the AIM leaders Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and Clyde Bellecourt joined hundreds of others at a community hall on the reservation. There, they discussed staging a symbolic liberation of Wounded Knee, with the idea of reasserting the Lakotas’ traditional system of governance, based on the word of elders and the consensus of treaty councils rather than the rule of a single leader like Wilson. “And when we kept talking about it,” Moves Camp explained, “then the chiefs said, ‘Go ahead and do it, go to Wounded Knee.’ ” A fifty-four-car caravan carrying entire Native families and armed protesters drove past tribal headquarters, to a small village, situated in the hills where the 1890 massacre took place.
The meeting at the community hall had been closely monitored by both F.B.I. agents and Wilson’s paramilitaries; gunshots erupted as soon as the cars trickled into the village. By nightfall, F.B.I. agents and U.S. marshals had surrounded the area, setting up roadblocks and making arrests. The standoff that began that day had been hastily planned and spontaneously coördinated. It “was just a spark,” Madonna Thunder Hawk, a Lakota from the Cheyenne River Reservation who went to Wounded Knee that night with her ten-year-old son, Phillip, said. “From that we had flames.”
In the days that followed, a second massacre seemed imminent at Wounded Knee. The Justice and Defense Departments sent additional personnel, plus M16 assault rifles, hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, and a fleet of armored personnel carriers, or A.P.C.s. Many of the federal agents wanted to seize the village and rout the protesters by force. Still, the activists who were now trapped inside refused to leave. “Either negotiate with us for meaningful results, or you’re going to have to kill us, and here at Wounded Knee is where it’s going to have to happen,” Means said.
Word of the standoff spread to Indigenous communities across the continent, and Wounded Knee, known for nearly a century as the site of a mass killing, was transformed into a powerful symbol of strength and unification. Richard Whitman, a Yuchi-Muscogee artist and actor—known today for his role as Old Man Fixico on “Reservation Dogs”—can remember attending a meeting at the Southern California Indian Center in Los Angeles around this time. “That night,” he said, “three or four women stood up and said, ‘We’re going to drive to Wounded Knee.’ So I jumped in the backseat.” In the coming weeks, hundreds more would travel to Wounded Knee, bringing food and supplies and helping to erect bunkers. “That was when we realized that we weren’t alone,” Thunder Hawk said. “All of our people came from around the country.”
On March 11th, the protesters declared themselves part of the Independent Oglala Nation, citing the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which acknowledged the Lakota nation as a sovereign entity separate from the United States. Inside the village, traditional ceremonies once banned by the U.S. government were observed. “Ghost Dance at Dawn,” read an announcement taped to the wall of the Wounded Knee trading post.
Federal forces did all they could to draw the protesters out. The phone lines were cut, and utilities were periodically shut off. When rations inside the village ran out, food and medicine had to be delivered by airdrop, or obtained by backpackers who knew the countryside and could slip around checkpoints in the dark. There were nightly exchanges of gunfire; the sky lit up with tracer rounds and flares that caught fire on the dry prairie grass and blackened the earth. Several ceasefires were brokered, but each one failed, as the government refused to recognize the authority of grassroots Oglala leadership.
In late April, a federal sniper shot and killed an Oglala veteran of the Vietnam War named Buddy Lamont. Within a week, elders called for a peaceful end to the occupation, seventy-one days after it started. Whitman was among the last to leave the village, on May 8th. U.S. marshals escorted him and three others, including a Comanche from Oklahoma named Arvin Wells, out of Wounded Knee. As they did so, the flag of the Independent Oglala Nation came down. “They did a gun salute, like they do when they take a hill, and asked us to stand at attention when they started raising the American flag,” Whitman recalled. “But Arvin says, ‘No, we’re not defeated.’ ”
This past February, Whitman and a handful of other survivors from the protest gathered on Pine Ridge for a weekend of events commemorating the occupation on its fiftieth anniversary. There were film screenings, a powwow, dance competitions, and an oral-history exhibit honoring the women of what has become known as the siege of Wounded Knee, 1973. “It was always a land struggle,” Thunder Hawk, now eighty-two, said. “That’s who we are. We’re the land.”
The events culminated with the Liberation Day march, which is held annually on February 27th, an officially proclaimed holiday of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. It was really four separate marches, as members of AIM chapters from all over the U.S. and residents of Pine Ridge set out from points north, south, east, and west to converge at Wounded Knee. There, in front of the cemetery where many of the Lakotas slain in the 1890 massacre are interred, speakers paid tribute to leaders who have died—including Banks, Bellecourt, and Means—and reflected on how the organizing of the Red Power era, in the sixties and seventies, informs today’s landback movement, which also advocates for the recognition of treaty rights and for reducing the high rate of incarceration and recidivism among Native youth.
Means’s brother Bill—who, like Lamont and many other men inside Wounded Knee, had combat experience in Vietnam—described leaving the village during the occupation for a speaking tour of college campuses and the difficulty he had, later, getting back inside. Hoping to pass through the fields undetected, he was spotted by government agents after a trip flare went off. “It kind of gave away our position,” he said. “So we started running, and we found a little creek and dove in. There was some tumbleweeds and brush there, so we put it on top of us. Pretty soon an A.P.C. come rolling up, and I couldn’t help but remember Vietnam. I said, ‘At least this time I’m on the right side.’ ”
For many, the end of the standoff did not mean the end of their activism but, rather, the beginning of something greater. Lavetta Yeahquo, a citizen of the Kiowa Nation who, at the age of nineteen, served as a medic during the occupation, described Wounded Knee as “a great experience of teaching . . . I didn’t know my tribal ways. . . . I went home and I went around the elders that we had and I sat down with them and started asking them questions.” ♦
