The Wounded Knee Massacre

By 1890 the Lakota had lost the Black Hills, their bison-based economy had collapsed, and they lived on shrinking reservations under government agents. A Paiute prophet, Wovoka, taught that if Native people lived justly and performed the Ghost Dance, their ancestors would return, the whites would vanish, and the buffalo would again roam the Plains. Members of many nations, including the Lakota, adopted the Ghost Dance.

White settlers and federal officials feared the Ghost Dance meant an armed uprising, and troops were sent to the Lakota reservations. On December 15, 1890, Lakota police trying to arrest Sitting Bull at Standing Rock killed him. Fearing more violence, Spotted Elk led his band toward the Pine Ridge Agency to seek refuge. The 7th Cavalry intercepted them and escorted them to Wounded Knee Creek.

On the morning of December 29, cavalrymen entered the camp to disarm the band. Tensions flared and a shot was fired — it is unclear by whom. The soldiers then fired their heavy weaponry indiscriminately into the camp. When the shooting stopped, between 150 and 300 Lakota were dead, nearly half of them women and children by one estimate. About two dozen soldiers were killed, by concealed Lakota weapons or by friendly fire.

The dead were buried in a mass grave. The killings ended the Ghost Dance as a mass movement and effectively ended armed Native resistance on the Plains.

Wounded Knee became a symbol of the destruction of Native nations by the United States. In 1973, activists of the American Indian Movement occupied the town of Wounded Knee for 71 days, drawing on the site’s meaning to protest treaty violations and conditions on the reservation.