Wounded Knee Massacre

Wounded Knee Massacre, (December 29, 1890), the slaughter of approximately 150–300 Lakota individuals by United States Army troops in the area of Wounded Knee Creek in southwestern South Dakota. The massacre was the climax of the U.S. Army’s late 19th-century efforts to repress the Plains peoples. It broke any organized resistance to reservation life and assimilation to Euro-American culture, although Native American activists renewed public attention to the massacre during a 1973 occupation of the site.

Context

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For much of the United States’ period of westward expansion, settlers’ attempts to claim plots of land were met with fierce and sometimes violent resistance from Indigenous peoples. This resistance intensified in the latter half of the 19th century as the U.S. federal government repeatedly signed and violated treaties with various Plains leaders. Most prominent among these were the Oceti Sakowin (Sioux), of which the Lakota are a subgroup. The Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868 established the 60-million-acre Great Sioux Reservation and created agencies to represent the federal government among each tribe. If the Lakota stayed on the reservation and refrained from attacking settlers, they would be provided with food rations, education, and other state-funded benefits. However, U.S. interest in natural resources on the reservation resulted in a series of conflicts that saw the Great Sioux Reservation shrink from 60 million acres to 21.7 million acres by 1877. The General Allotment Act of 1887 further reduced the acreage to a mere 12.7 million, barely 20 percent of the original allotment. The unbroken tract of land now consisted of six separate reservations centered on existing federal agencies.

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Reservation life was an abrupt and difficult adjustment for the Lakota who acquiesced to the U.S. government. Federal agents encouraged them to raise livestock and grow crops, a lifestyle that was unsuited to the semiarid environment of the northern Great Plains and largely foreign to a nomadic people who hunted game. The Lakota were required to adopt Western dress, learn English, observe Christian principles, and abandon traditional religion. This process of forced assimilation hacked away at Lakota culture and identity, and the government rations program in particular made reservation life impractical to escape. Without access to their large swaths of hunting grounds, the Lakota were forced to rely on government-issued rations for survival. In 1889 the U.S. Congress slashed the annual Lakota rations budget. When combined with the harsh winter and drought of 1889–90, the tribe was pushed to the brink of starvation.

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Such was the state of the Lakota when the Ghost Dance religious movement swept across the Plains in 1890. The Ghost Dance was not a new movement: the first iteration took hold around 1870 among the Northern Paiute in Nevada, but it faded out after a few years. It experienced a revival in 1889 under the leadership of a Paiute prophet named Wovoka, whose father, Tavibo, had been a prominent devotee of the first Ghost Dance and taught his son about the religion. Wovoka was also raised among white ranchers who exposed him to Christianity. During a total solar eclipse on January 1, 1889, Wovoka fell unconscious and experienced a dream that he believed was prophetic. According to his millenarian interpretation, God told him that Native Americans needed to remain peaceful and regularly perform a ritual circle dance. If they followed these instructions, then in 1891 God would return the earth to its natural state prior to the arrival of European colonists. He would bury the white settlers under 30 feet (9 meters) of soil and would raise Indigenous ancestors from the dead. This was an enticing promise for many of the Plains peoples, but Wovoka’s prophetic message struck an especially strong chord among the destitute Lakota. They modified the Ghost Dance to address the intense violence they had endured at the hands of settlers and the U.S. Army, incorporating white "ghost shirts" painted with various symbols that they believed would protect them from bullets. Not all Lakota took up the Ghost Dance, but it grew in popularity on the reservations throughout much of 1889 and 1890.

In August 1890 Daniel F. Royer became head of the Pine Ridge Agency; he arrived at his post in October. Many of the Oglala Lakota on his reservation had become passionate Dancers, and he was both displeased with and fearful of their religion. Whereas some federal agents and officials were more tolerant of the practice, Royer was convinced that the Ghost Dancers were militant and threatened to destroy the U.S. government’s decades-long effort to “civilize” the Lakota. When the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) requested a list of Native American “troublemakers” to be slated for relocation, Royer placed influential Dancers at the top of his list and demanded that the military address the matter.

In November the U.S. Army arrived on Lakota reservations with the goal of stopping the rise of the Ghost Dance. One source indicates that it was the largest deployment of federal troops since the end of the Civil War in 1865. Near the Standing Rock Agency lived Sitting Bull, a powerful Hunkpapa Lakota chief and spiritual leader who had led the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne to victory in 1876 against the U.S. Army at the Little Bighorn. Many of his 250 followers were Dancers, and, though he personally was not a practitioner, he refused to let the federal government repress them any further. Major James McLaughlin, the reservation’s agent, resolved to arrest Sitting Bull for his role in permitting the spread of the religion. Major General Nelson A. Miles commanded U.S. Army forces on the Lakota lands and hoped to take a peaceful approach to removing the Hunkpapa leader from the reservation. McLaughlin chose to undermine that plan, instead dispatching 43 tribal policemen to Sitting Bull’s cabin on December 15. Sitting Bull was compliant, but his followers would not relinquish him without protest. A vicious struggle ensued, and roughly nine Hunkpapa were killed; among the dead was Sitting Bull.

The death of Sitting Bull struck fear into the hearts of those Lakota who had been opposed to reservation life. Some, numbering in the thousands, gathered in the Stronghold region of the South Dakota Badlands in preparation for a U.S. attack. Others rushed to Pine Ridge, where the Oglala chief Red Cloud was attempting to negotiate the preservation of Lakota traditions without bloodshed. Miniconjou Lakota chief Sitanka, known to Euro-Americans as Big Foot, hoped to join those at Pine Ridge and help find a peaceful resolution to this tense matter. Although he was not a Ghost Dancer, many of his people were, and he had been placed on the BIA’s list of hostiles. As he was leading some 350 Miniconjou southwest from the Cheyenne River reservation to Pine Ridge reservation, the U.S. Army grew fearful of his intentions. Miles ordered a detachment of the 7th Cavalry to intercept Big Foot, confiscate all weapons in his band, and escort them to a military prison at Fort Omaha, Nebraska.

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Massacre

On December 28, 1890, the 7th Cavalry, commanded by Colonel James W. Forsyth, reached the Miniconjou camp near Wounded Knee Creek, located roughly 20 miles northeast of the Pine Ridge Agency. The late General George Armstrong Custer had led the 7th Cavalry to its demise at the Little Bighorn less than 15 years earlier. Big Foot saw Forsyth’s scouts and informed them that he would surrender without resistance. On December 29 Forsyth convened with the Miniconjou to begin the process of weapons confiscation. He herded them into a nearby clearing, had their men form a council circle, and surrounded the circle with his cavalry. He also positioned four Hotchkiss guns on a hilltop bordering the clearing.

Forsyth was clear in his terms: the Miniconjou must surrender all their weapons. Big Foot was hesitant, but he surrendered a few guns as a token of peace. Forsyth was not satisfied and ordered a complete search of the people and their camp, where his men discovered a host of hidden weapons. The increasingly intrusive search angered some of the Miniconjou. A man named Sits Straight began to dance the Ghost Dance and attempted to rouse the other members of the band, claiming that bullets would not touch them if they donned their sacred ghost shirts. The soldiers grew tense as Sits Straight’s dance reached a frenzy. When a deaf Miniconjou named Black Coyote refused to give up his gun, the weapon accidentally went off, and the fraught situation turned violent as the 7th Cavalry opened fire. Because many of the Miniconjou had already given up their weapons, they were left defenseless. Scores of Miniconjou were shot and killed in the first few moments, among them Big Foot. Some women and children attempted to flee the scene and sought protection in a nearby ravine, but the Hotchkiss guns fired on their position at a rate of 50 2-pound (0.9-kg) shells per minute. The Miniconjou who were able to make it a little farther were cut down by the mounted soldiers. The 7th Cavalry did not discriminate.

Casualties and aftermath

Immediately following the massacre, Forsyth ordered the transportation of 51 wounded Miniconjou to the Pine Ridge Agency. Hundreds of Lakota who lived there fled the area in horror; some even ambushed the 7th Cavalry in retaliation, prompting Miles to dispatch more troops to the area to quell further resistance. On January 2, 1891, a band of Lakota went to the site of the massacre and rescued a few survivors from the snow. The following day the U.S. Army unceremoniously buried 146 Miniconjou in a mass grave where the Hotchkiss guns had been placed, a location today known as Cemetery Hill. Many of the corpses were naked. Modern scholars estimate that between 250 and 300 Miniconjou were killed in total, almost half of whom were women and children. At least 25 U.S. soldiers also died, many likely fallen to friendly fire.

The BIA attempted to portray the destruction at Wounded Knee as a battle, but later investigations and eyewitness accounts clearly established the event as a massacre. There was no significant armed resistance, because of the weapons confiscation, and the U.S. Army combatants significantly outnumbered the Miniconjou present. It is plausible that the 7th Cavalry committed this atrocity to avenge their humiliation at the Little Bighorn. Miles was appalled at their actions, stripped Forsyth of his command, and conducted an investigation of the events. However, Forsyth was deemed innocent and restored to his former post. Furthermore, 20 U.S. cavalrymen received a Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest honor conferred upon a member of the U.S. armed forces. In June 2019 several members of the U.S. House of Representatives introduced the Remove the Stain Act, a bill that would rescind those awards. The measure was cosponsored by Rep. Deb Haaland, one of the first Native American women to serve in Congress.

The Wounded Knee Massacre marked the last major armed conflict between the United States and the Plains tribes. The Ghost Dance religion sputtered out, with Wovoka himself begging his people to follow “the only trail now open—the white man’s road.” In February 1973, however, some 200 American Indian Movement activists occupied the hamlet at Wounded Knee to alert the public to persistent civil rights violations on the Pine Ridge Reservation. They declared it the “Independent Oglala Sioux Nation” and refused to leave until the U.S. federal government ousted the presiding tribal chairman, promised to honor all treaties with Native Americans, and corrected the treatment of Indigenous peoples throughout the country. Federal troops besieged the area for 71 days, reaching a half-hearted settlement only after two deaths and several exchanges of gunfire. Despite the hundreds of arrests that followed, the activists achieved their goal of drawing attention to the United States’ repeated infringement upon Native American rights and sovereignty.