The Wounded Knee Massacre, also known as the Battle of Wounded Knee, was an 1890 armed conflict between Native Americans and the United States Army. It was part of the U.S. Army’s Pine Ridge Campaign. Between 250 and 300 Lakota people were killed, and 51 were wounded (four men and 47 women and children, some of whom died later). Twenty-five U.S. soldiers were killed and 39 were wounded (six of the wounded later died). Nineteen soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor specifically for Wounded Knee, and 31 overall for the campaign.
The event occurred on December 29, 1890 near Wounded Knee Creek (Lakota: Čhaŋkpé Ópi Wakpála) on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, following a failed attempt to disarm the Lakota people at the camp. The previous day, a detachment of the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment commanded by Major Samuel M. Whitside approached Spotted Elk's band of Miniconjou Lakota and 38 Hunkpapa Lakota near Porcupine Butte and escorted them westward to Wounded Knee Creek, where they made camp. The remainder of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, led by Colonel James W. Forsyth, arrived and surrounded the encampment. The regiment was supported by a battery of four Hotchkiss mountain guns. The Army was catering to the anxiety of settlers who called the conflict the Messiah War and were worried the ceremonial Ghost Dance signified a potentially dangerous Sioux resurgence. Historian Jeffrey Ostler wrote in 2004: "Wounded Knee was not made up of a series of discrete unconnected events. Instead, from the disarming to the burial of the dead, it consisted of a series of acts held together by an underlying logic of racist domination."
On the morning of December 29, U.S. Cavalry troops went into the camp to disarm the Lakota. One version of events maintains that during the process of disarming the Lakota, a deaf tribesman named Black Coyote was reluctant to give up his rifle, claiming he had paid a lot for it. Black Coyote's rifle went off at that point, and at the same moment, another Lakota man threw some dust into the air, and approximately five young Lakota men with concealed weapons threw aside their blankets and fired their rifles at the American military. After this initial exchange, the firing became indiscriminate, and the soldiers began firing on the Lakota. The Lakota warriors fought back, but many had already been disarmed.
In 2001, the National Congress of American Indians passed two resolutions condemning the military awards and called on the federal government to rescind them. The Wounded Knee Battlefield, the site of the massacre, was designated a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1965. In 1990, both houses of the U.S. Congress passed a resolution on the historical centennial formally expressing "deep regret" for the massacre.
Prelude
In the years leading up to the conflict, the U.S. Government continued to seize Lakota lands. The once-large bison herds of the Great Plains, a staple of the Plains Indians, had been hunted to near-extinction. Treaty promisesHall, Kermit L (ed.), The Oxford Guide to the Supreme Court of the United States, Oxford Press, 1992; section: "Native Americans," p. 580 to protect reservation lands from encroachment by settlers and gold miners were not implemented as agreed. As a result, there was unrest on the reservations. During this time, news spread among the reservations of a Paiute prophet named Wovoka, founder of the Ghost Dance religion. He had a vision that the Christian Messiah, Jesus Christ, had returned to Earth in the form of a Native American. The Ghost Dance, however, was not a Christian faith; it may have adopted the Sun Dance as part of its rituals, and had at its roots the deeper principles of Lakota faith, and the symbols of the old faith.DeMallie, R. J. (1982). The Lakota Ghost Dance: An Ethnohistorical Account. Pacific Historical Review, 51(4), pg.399 Its purpose was understood to revitalise pre-colonial life and restore it, instead of simply abolishing it. By 1890, nearly one-third of the Lakota had become part of the new religion.
According to Wovoka, the white invaders would disappear from Native lands, the ancestors would lead them to good hunting grounds, the buffalo herds and all the other animals would return in abundance, and the ghosts of their ancestors would return to Earth. They would then live in peace. All this would be brought about by the performance of the slow and solemn Ghost Dance, performed as a shuffle in silence to a single drumbeat. Lakota ambassadors to Wovoka, Kicking Bear and Short Bull, taught the Lakota that while performing the Ghost Dance, they would wear special Ghost Dance shirts, as had been seen by Black Elk in a vision. Kicking Bear misunderstood the meaning of the shirts, and said that the shirts had the power to repel bullets. Some tribes, including the Sioux, believed that a great earthquake and flood would occur which would drown all the whites. The Ghost Dance was understood as a new ritual formed by a new prophet, but was not understood as a clean break with traditional faith, and instead was meant to revitalise it.
The Ghost Dance movement (also called Wanagi wacipi)DeMallie, R. J. (1982). The Lakota Ghost Dance: An Ethnohistorical Account. Pacific Historical Review, 51(4). Pg.385 was a result of the slow but systematic and continuous destruction of the Native Americans' way of life. Tribal land was being seized at alarming rates. The entire livelihood of the plains tribes revolved around the bison, and without the resources the animal offered, their cultures rapidly lost stability and security. This forced them to rely on the United States government to provide rations and goods, or else face starvation. The way of life of these independent people was rapidly fading. The Ghost Dance brought hope: the white man would soon disappear; the buffalo herds would return; people would be reunited with loved ones who had since died; the old way of living before the white man would return. This was not just a religious movement but a response to the gradual cultural destruction. However, the religion was not adopted purely due to the deteriorating humanitarian situation on the reservations. The Ghost Dance faith found a place within the framework of Lakota religion (which is largely non-doctrinal) as all those who met with Wovoka took away their own interpretations of the Ghost Dance, allowing it to be integrated into the development of Lakota faith.DeMallie, R. J. (1982). The Lakota Ghost Dance: An Ethnohistorical Account. Pacific Historical Review, 51(4), pg.387
U.S. settlers were alarmed by the sight of the many Great Basin and Plains tribes performing the Ghost Dance, worried that it might be a prelude to armed attack. Among them was the U.S. Indian agent at the Standing Rock Agency where Chief Sitting Bull lived. This agent, D.F. Royer, asked for troops to come to the reservation, while General Nelson Miles stated that 'the most serious Indian war in history was at hand.' Alongside settler hatred of the Lakota, missionaries in the area sought the repression of the Ghost Dance movement, as they considered it a type of heathenism that was necessary to repress in order to 'modernise' the indigenous population.DeMallie, R. J. (1982). The Lakota Ghost Dance: An Ethnohistorical Account. Pacific Historical Review, 51(4), pg.396-397 U.S. officials decided to take some of the chiefs into custody in order to quell what they called the "Messiah craze". The military first hoped to have Buffalo Bill—a friend of Sitting Bull—aid in the plan, to reduce the chance of violence. Standing Rock agent James McLaughlin sent the Indian police to arrest Sitting Bull. President Harrison authorised an invasion of the reservation by nearly 1/3rd of the entire U.S. army, and in doing so aimed to win support for the Republicans in the state of South Dakota.
On December 15, 1890, 40 Native American policemen arrived at Sitting Bull's house to arrest him. When Sitting Bull refused to comply, the police used force on him. The Lakota in the village were enraged. Catch-the-Bear, a Lakota, shouldered his rifle and shot Lt. Bullhead, who reacted by firing his revolver into the chest of Sitting Bull. Another police officer, Red Tomahawk, shot Sitting Bull in the head, and he dropped to the ground. He died between 12 and 1 p.m. After Sitting Bull's death, 200 members of his Hunkpapa band, fearful of reprisals, fled Standing Rock to join Chief Spotted Elk (later known as "Big Foot") and his Miniconjou band at the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation.
Spotted Elk and his band, along with 38 Hunkpapa, left the Cheyenne River Reservation on December 23 to journey to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to seek shelter with Red Cloud.Viola, Herman J. Trail to Wounded Knee: The Last Stand of the Plains Indians 1860–1890. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2003.
Former Pine Ridge Indian agent Valentine T. McGillycuddy was asked his opinion of the "hostilities" surrounding the Ghost Dance movement, by General Leonard Wright Colby, commander of the Nebraska National Guard (portion of letter dated January 15, 1891):Annual report, Part 2 By Smithsonian Institution. Bureau of American Ethnology, John Wesley Powell, Matthew Williams, pp. 831–833 (1896) As for the 'Ghost Dance' too much attention has been paid to it. It was only the symptom or surface indication of a deep-rooted, long-existing difficulty; as well treat the eruption of smallpox as the disease and ignore the constitutional disease.
As regards disarming the Sioux, however desirable it may appear, I consider it neither advisable, nor practicable. I fear it will result as the theoretical enforcement of prohibition in Kansas, Iowa and Dakota; you will succeed in disarming and keeping disarmed the friendly Indians because you can, and you will not succeed with the mob element because you cannot.
If I were again to be an Indian agent, and had my choice, I would take charge of 10,000 armed Sioux in preference to a like number of disarmed ones; and furthermore agree to handle that number, or the whole Sioux nation, without a white soldier. Respectfully, etc., V.T. McGillycuddy.
P.S. I neglected to state that up to date there has been neither a Sioux outbreak or war. No citizen in Nebraska or Dakota has been killed, molested or can show the scratch of a pin, and no property has been destroyed off the reservation.The ghost-dance religion and the Sioux outbreak of 1890, by James Mooney, p. 833 General Miles's telegramGeneral Miles sent this telegram from Rapid City to General John Schofield in Washington, D.C., on December 19, 1890:
"The difficult Indian problem cannot be solved permanently at this end of the line. It requires the fulfillment of Congress of the treaty obligations that the Indians were entreated and coerced into signing. They signed away a valuable portion of their reservation, and it is now occupied by white people, for which they have received nothing."
"They understood that ample provision would be made for their support; instead, their supplies have been reduced, and much of the time they have been living on half and two-thirds rations. Their crops, as well as the crops of the white people, for two years have been almost total failures."
"The dissatisfaction is wide spread, especially among the Sioux, while the Cheyennes have been on the verge of starvation, and were forced to commit depredations to sustain life. These facts are beyond question, and the evidence is positive and sustained by thousands of witnesses."
Fight and ensuing massacre