Wounded Knee: Genocide

Wounded Knee is back in the headlines. The Secretary of Defense is leading what can only be called a malicious and intentional campaign of whitewashing. Innocent men, women, and children were murdered at Wounded Knee, in cold blood, by the U.S. military. It was part of a willful genocide and ethnic cleansing by the US.

To even suggest a Medal of Honor is appropriate for the men who perpetrated this crime is not only blatantly racist and inflammatory, but an insult to the reality of truth and an attack on history itself.

It is also a dog whistle to the military, telling them he will excuse any atrocity they commit.

In a sane world, his resignation would be immediately demanded by all sides.

But we live here.

So we should remember what he's excusing, what he's implicitly saying he will excuse.

Ghost Dance

The Ghost Dance movement was spreading across Native communities in 1890. For the Lakota, it was a sacred prayer: that the buffalo would return, that Native ways of life could be restored, that the dead might walk again, and that white domination would end. For the U.S. government, this was intolerable. They branded it rebellion. They sent in troops.

Chief Sitting Bull had already been killed that month, part of an escalating campaign of intimidation and violence. On December 28, 1890, Chief Big Foot (also known as Spotted Elk) and his band of nearly 350 Lakota, many of them women and children, were intercepted by Colonel James W. Forsyth and the 7th Cavalry near Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. Forsyth commanded about 500 soldiers. The Lakota were starving, freezing, and under guard. They were not free allies in negotiations; they were effectively prisoners, encircled and disarmed.

The Massacre

It was early, the ground frozen hard under the snow, the creek bottom winds cutting through thin canvas tents. Families were only just stirring, children wrapped in blankets, the sick and the old coughing in the cold air. Soldiers moved in at dawn, surrounding the camp and demanding that weapons be turned over. Most had little left to surrender. They were underfed, freezing, and terrified.

One Lakota man, Black Coyote, was deaf and did not understand the order to give up his rifle. Soldiers tried to wrestle it from him, and in the struggle the weapon discharged. The U.S. claimed this began a fight with armed warriors. In truth, it was the excuse the 7th Cavalry wanted. The Hotchkiss guns were already positioned on the hills above, aimed directly into the camp. The massacre was not an accident; it was prepared.

The 7th Cavalry fired two-pound explosive shells, designed to tear through soldiers in open battle, into tipis full of families. The noise was deafening. Each blast obliterated people, ripping through canvas and flesh alike.

What followed was not a battle. It was a slaughter.

Some 250 to 300 Lakota were killed. More than half were women and children. Chief Big Foot was found dead, his body frozen where he fell. Survivors fled across the prairie, chased and shot down by soldiers. Mothers holding babies were gunned down where they stood. Infants were killed in their mothers’ arms. Women trying to surrender were shot alongside the men. Soldiers did not stop at bullets. Survivors testified that they used sabers and bayonets on the wounded, cutting down people who had already fallen.

Those who survived told of bodies heaped in the gulch, left for days in a blizzard, picked at by animals before soldiers dug a mass grave. A photograph still survives: soldiers standing over a trench stuffed with frozen Lakota corpses, women and children among them. It is one of the most damning images in American history, proof that this was not a battle but a crime against humanity.

Some 50 survivors, many children, were taken away. At least 20 were sent to boarding schools, torn from their families and culture in yet another act of violence.

It was, unequivocally, a crime. A genocide.

The Aftermath

The Army called it a victory. The United States government, under President Benjamin Harrison’s administration, issued at least 20 Medals of Honor to soldiers who took part in the massacre. That grotesque decision has never been undone. The medals remain.

Colonel Forsyth faced an Army inquiry but was cleared of wrongdoing and went on with his career. White newspapers celebrated the carnage, portraying it as a battle. Native voices were ignored or erased.

Black Elk, the Oglala holy man, later wrote: "I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there."

The Story We Carry

This was not a misunderstanding or a tragic accident. It was the full weight of the United States government brought to bear against a people it intended to destroy. Wounded Knee was genocide, part of a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out against Native Americans.

The descendants of those killed still live with the trauma. The government still honors the killers. Each year, Lakota families and their allies gather at the site to remember, to mourn, and to resist forgetting. They continue to demand that the Medals of Honor be revoked.

And now, in 2025, the Secretary of Defense is standing at a podium and saying those medals are deserved. He is telling today’s soldiers that no matter what they do, no matter how many innocents they kill, the state will honor them for it.

This is what he is excusing. This is what he is promising. And it’s on us to remember the truth, and call it what it was: a massacre, a crime, and a stain on this country.

Sources

• Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks (as told to John G. Neihardt), 1932.
• Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 1970.
• Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee, 2004.
• U.S. Army records and Medal of Honor rolls, 1891.
• Contemporary press accounts, including the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, December 1890–January 1891.
• Congressional Record, hearings on Indian Affairs, 1891.