Tim Giago: 'Battle' of Wounded Knee was a massacre of the Lakota
The government tried to conceal the truth of the 1890 slaughter. My
people never forgot.
Tim Giago (Nanwica Kciji)
http://www.startribune.com/562/story/903315.html
While Americans agonize over the contents of the Iraq Study Group and
weigh the options of extricating its soldiers from the middle of a
civil
war, the people of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota will
gather on a lonely hill overlooking the demolished village of Wounded
Knee (Wounded Knee was destroyed during the occupation of the American
Indian Movement in 1973 and was never rebuilt) to commemorate and
grieve
the massacre of their ancestors.
It was after a night so cold that the Lakota called it "The Moon of the
Popping Trees," because as the winter winds whistled through the hills
and gullies at Wounded Knee Creek on that morning of Dec. 29, 1890, one
could hear the twigs snapping in the frigid air.
When a soldier of George Armstrong Custer's former troop, the Seventh
Cavalry, tried to wrest a hidden rifle from a Lakota warrior after all
of the other weapons already had been confiscated from Sitanka's (Big
Foot) band of Lakota people, the deafening report of that single shot
caused pandemonium among the soldiers, and they opened up with their
machine guns upon the unarmed men, women and children.
Thus began an action the government called a "battle" and the Lakota
people called a "massacre." The Lakota people say that only 50 people
of
the original 350 followers of Sitanka survived that morning of
slaughter.
One of the survivors, a Lakota woman, was treated by the Indian
physician Dr. Charles Eastman at a makeshift hospital set up in a
church
in the village of Pine Ridge.
Before she died of her wounds she told about how she had concealed
herself in a clump of bushes. As she hid there she saw two terrified
little girls running past. She grabbed them and pulled them into the
bushes. She put her hands over their mouths to keep them quiet but a
mounted soldier spotted them.
He fired a bullet into the head of one girl and then calmly reloaded
his
rifle and fired into the head of the other girl. He then fired into the
body of the Lakota woman. She feigned death and, although badly
wounded,
lived long enough to relate her terrible ordeal to Eastman.
She said that as she lay there pretending to be dead, the soldier
leaned
down from his horse, used his rifle to lift up her dress in order to
see
her private parts, and then he snickered and rode off.
As the shooting subsided, units of the Seventh Cavalry rode off toward
White Clay Creek near Pine Ridge Village on a search-and-destroy
mission. When they rode onto the grounds of Holy Rosary Indian Mission,
my grandmother Sophie, a student at the mission school, and the other
Lakota children were forced by the Jesuit priests to feed and water
their horses.
My grandmother never forgot that terrible day, and she often talked
about how the soldiers were laughing and bragging about their great
victory. She recalled one soldier saying, "Remember the Little Big
Horn."
The Massacre at Wounded Knee was called the last great battle between
the United States and the Indians. The true version of the events of
that day were polished and sanitized for the consumption of most
Americans.
Twenty-three soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry were awarded this nation's
highest honor, the Medal of Honor, for the murder of nearly 300
innocent
and unarmed men, women and children. Although 25 soldiers died that
day,
historians believe that most of them died of friendly fire when they
were caught in the crossfire of the machine guns. Many Lakota have
tried
in vain to have those medals revoked without success.
Before they died, the Lakota warriors fought the soldiers with their
bare hands as they shouted to the women and children, "Inyanka po,
inyanka po!" ("Run, run!") The elderly men, unable to fight back, fell
on their knees and sang their death songs. The screams and the cries of
the women and children hung in the air like a heavy fog.
When I was a young boy I lived at Wounded Knee. By then the name of the
village had been changed to Brennan, ostensibly to honor a Bureau of
Indian Affairs superintendent, but all of the Lakota knew why the name
really was changed. Because, although the government tried various ways
to conceal the truth, the Lakota people never forgot. They always
referred to the hallowed grounds as Wounded Knee, and they continued to
come to the mass grave to pray, even though it was roundly discouraged
by the government.
As a child I walked along the banks of Wounded Knee Creek and I often
had an uneasy feeling: It was as if I could hear the cries of little
children. Whenever I visited the trading post where my father worked, I
would listen to the elders as they sat on the benches in front of the
store and spoke in whispered voices as they pointed at the hills and
gullies. Never did I read about that horrible day in the history books
used at the mission school I attended.
Two ironies still haunt me. Six days after the bloody massacre the
editor of the Aberdeen (S.D.) Saturday Pioneer wrote in his editorial,
"The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the
total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries,
we had better, in order to protect our civilizations, follow it up by
one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the
face of the earth."
The author of that editorial was L. Frank Baum, who later went on to
write the children's book "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." In calling for
genocide against my grandmother and the rest of the Lakota people, he
placed the final punctuation upon a day that will forever live in
infamy
among the Lakota.
As the dead and dying lay in the makeshift hospital at the Episcopal
church in Pine Ridge Village, Dr. Eastman paused to read a sign above
the entrance. It said, "Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men."
Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, is the founder and first president of the
Native American Journalists Association. His articles are distributed
by
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
