On This Day in History: December 29

The massacre at Wounded Knee

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Fuck you if you think it was a battle. Wounded Knee was a mass murder of nearly 300 Lakota people, including many women and children. That didn’t stop the U.S. government from awarding 20 soldiers the Medal of Honor for their participation in the massacre, however.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: December 29, 1890--

In previous years the government had seized Lakota lands in what is now South Dakota, and the bison on which they relied had been hunted to near extinction. The government had promised to protect reservations from gold hunters and settlers, but of course the fuckers reneged on that, because they’d proven they were fine with genocide of America’s Native populations again and again.

Despair led to the embracing of the “Ghost Dance” religion on the reservation, which told of how their ancestors would return and bring back the time of abundance, and the white invaders would disappear. Of course, encroaching settlers saw the Ghost Dance performed and because of their ethnocentrism they freaked right the fuck out and figured the Lakota were going to murder them all. In mid-December 1890, U.S. officials reacted by attempting to arrest Chief Sitting Bull and killed him in the process.

Ghost Dance practitioners were deemed “hostiles.” Fearing for their lives, members of the Miniconjou band of Lakota Sioux fled the reservation toward the Badlands to escape. The Seventh Cavalry pursued them, and on December 29, 1890, surrounded the Lakota at Wounded Knee Creek and demanded they relinquish all their firearms. One Lakota, Black Coyote, was deaf and spoke no English. When ordered to give up his rifle he didn’t understand, and was resistant when someone tried to take his rifle that he’d paid a great deal of money for and needed to feed his family. A struggle ensued and the rifle discharged into the air. This initiated the mass murder on the now-disarmed Lakota by the U.S. Army, using not just their rifles, but cannons with exploding shells.

Some of the Lakota were able to retrieve confiscated weapons and return fire. Twenty-five U.S. soldiers were killed, but much of that was from friendly fire from their own rifle crossfire and cannons. Most of the Lakota fled and were hunted down and murdered. Bodies of women and children were found as far as three miles from the camp, having been stalked and killed by the soldiers as they ran away in terror. The bodies of the slain were buried in a mass grave at the site of the massacre.

Despite all this, the site of the mass murder is officially referred to as the Wounded Knee Battlefield. And here I thought a battlefield was a place where armies fought each other, not where soldiers murdered unarmed men, women, and children.

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