We're Not Going to Get Over Wounded Knee

PBS, Wounded Knee "We Shall Remain"

Lakota people have heard countless times, "It was a long time ago. Get over it."

How does one dismiss genocide? Do we accept it as a means of extermination in the name of political repression? You ask us to erase the lives of the men, women, and children slaughtered at Wounded Knee? No. We won’t. We won't dismiss, accept, or erase. We won't get over it. Just as we wouldn't expect families traumatized by genocide in Africa, Armenia, Bosnia, Cambodia, China, Germany, Iraq, North Korea, Romania, Syria, and Vietnam, to get over it. We must remember it because history repeats itself. Dictators rise, colonialism flourishes, imperialism triumphs, genocide continues.

The 500-year genocide of Native Americans is the most overlooked and understated in world history. Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, believes the reduction of the North American Indian population went from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900, and represents a "vast genocide . . . the most sustained on record." And yet, a multitude of people refuse to acknowledge it today.

Genocide of indigenous people began with the arrival of Columbus, and while tactics may have changed, they have never ceased. Europeans arrived on a continent flush with wildlife, saturated with crisp clear running waters, grounded with fertile unblemished land, and they wanted it.

"Columbus and his successors were not coming to an empty wilderness, but into a world which, in some places, was as densely populated as Europe, and where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations between men, women, children and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps in any other places in the world.” Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States.

In 1784, a British man traveling in the newborn United States recorded, “White Americans have the most rancorous antipathy to the whole race of Indians; and nothing is more common than to hear them talk of extirpating them totally from the face of the earth, men, women, and children.” In 1867, General William Tecumseh Sherman (ironically named after the great Shawnee Chief Tecumseh) said, "We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux [Lakotas] even to their extermination: men, women and children." The US Cavalry carried through with the threat.

Wounded Knee is looked upon as the brutal end of the free-roaming Lakota. Red Cloud brought in his Bad Face band of thousands to Fort Laramie in the spring of 1869, uttering the simple words, “We want to eat.” Crazy Horse surrendered in May 1877 for the same reason; to halt the inevitable starvation of his loyal band. Sitting Bull, murdered in Standing Rock Reservation on December 15, 1890. Big Foot, executed two weeks later at Wounded Knee while the white flag of surrender blew in the winter wind in front of his tipi. Leaders gone, people traumatized, the struggle to find a new way of life began.



Lakota Medicine Man


On December 29, 1890, four Hotchkiss guns ripped apart tipis at the encampment of Big Foot. Fleeing Lakota were mowed down by rifle fire; the Cavalry pursuing the terrified men, women, and children for two miles until all were eliminated. Mothers and babies were killed with one shot; a bullet penetrated the back of the mother, going through her body to enter the child she carried in her arms.



The Bloody Aftermath

Stained with blood, limbs missing, frozen stiff, their mangled bodies were thrown into a mass grave.



Black Elk was 27 years old. He recounted the terror of this day in Black Elk Speaks. “We heard that Big Foot was coming down from the Badlands with nearly four hundred people. Some of these from Sitting Bull’s band. There were about a hundred warriors and the rest women and children and old men. They were all starving and freezing, and Big Foot was so sick they had to bring him along in a pony drag. They had all run away to hide in the Badlands, and they were coming in now because they were starving and freezing. They crossed Smoky Earth River, they followed up Medicine Root Creek to its head. Soldiers were over there looking for them. The soldiers had everything and were not freezing and starving. Near Porcupine Butte the soldiers came up to the Big Foots, and they surrendered and went along with the soldiers to Wounded Knee Creek where the Brenan store is now. It was the next morning, December 29, 1890, that something terrible happened.

In the morning, I went after my horses and I heard shooting off toward the east, and I knew from the sound it must be wagon guns (cannon) going off. The sounds went right through my body, and I felt something terrible would happen…I painted my face red, and in my hair I put one eagle feather for the One Above. It did not take me long to get ready, for I could still hear shooting over there…We stopped on the ridge…There was much shooting down yonder, and there were many cries, and we could see cavalrymen riding along the gulch and shooting into it, where the women and children were huddled under a clay bank…

By now many other Lakota, who had heard the shooting, were coming up from Pine Ridge…We followed down along the dry gulch, and what we saw was terrible. Dead and wounded women and children and babies were scattered all along there where they had been trying to run away. Sometimes they were in heaps because they had huddled together…Bunches of them had been killed and torn to pieces where the wagon guns hit them…When I saw this I wished that I had died too.”

No. We will not get over it.

Prayers to the people of Aleppo. You are in my heart.