After 280 or more years of consistent conflict between white settlers of the ever-expanding United States and the indigenous peoples who first populated North America, the fate of those indigenous peoples was symbolically sealed in a massacre on the northern great plains. On December 29, 1890, soldiers of the U.S. Cavalry massacred at least 250 Oglala Lakota (often called Sioux) people, including women and children, and wounded dozens of others. With this massacre, the U.S. government symbolically destroyed the final remaining indigenous resistance to U.S. expansion and control over the North American continent.
Throughout the 19th century, settlers of the United States, many of them recent immigrants, had moved westward in hopes of owning land, becoming independent farmers, and making a living for themselves and their families. Driven by a combination of economic opportunity and racist sentiments, these settlers moved westward despite the existence of indigenous inhabitants. During and after the Civil War, the U.S. government intensified this movement by creating incentives for both business and people to move westward in ever larger numbers. With the Homestead Act of 1862, numerous land grants given to railroad companies between the 1850s and 1870s, and the Dawes Act of 1887, the federal government gave material, economic rewards to those companies and individuals who moved westward, while at the same time removing the indigenous population from regions most desired by settlers and business interests. As the white population of the plains grew, towns and cities sprouted and grew, modes of transportation expanded, commerce and production intensified, and pressures grew to expand and grow even further.
This consistent westward expansion and development of white society and the new economic system it brought – capitalism – meant continual conflict with the indigenous peoples who already inhabited those lands. Even as many Native Americans were coerced onto reservations, those lands often again immediately came under pressure from more settlers and more business interests eager to control more access to natural resources. The Sioux, for example, had been assigned in 1868 to a reservation of 60 million acres, in one contiguous space. But after a series of conflicts that acreage had shrunken to 21 millions acres in 1877, and then in 1887 was shrunken again to only 12 million acres, and then broken up into 6 separate areas. A people who had once roamed a vast territory were slowly being forcefully squeezed into a smaller and smaller territory. They were forced into dependence for food on the federal government, which began to supply rations to the reservations to make up for the destruction of their previous economy.
Their ability to survive under such losses was continually being reduced. The huge herds of bison that had once roamed the plains had been intentionally and systematically destroyed by private profit seekers and federal government policy. Farming, which had only supplemented the hunting of bison, was also becoming less and less possible as the best agricultural lands were being taken by the colonizers. In 1889 the entire northern plains experienced a drought, reducing already insufficient crop yields. In that same year, the federal government slashed food assistance to the reservations, pushing tens of thousands to the brink of starvation.
In this context, many indigenous peoples turned to a mystical-Christian millenarianism in the hopes that, if called upon properly, supernatural forces would bring an end to white dominance and usher in a new world in which the meek would inherit the earth. In this world, their lands and their bison would be returned and they would be able to resume their old ways of life. To call this world-changing event into being, according to its prophets, Native Americans would have to turn to pacifism, end their outright resistance to the white settlers, and regularly perform a special dance that came to be known as the Ghost Dance. In the fall of 1890, this dance and its adherents spread and grew in the Sioux regions of the northern plains. As the weeks and months passed, the dance took on more warrior-like qualities, including the belief that special garments might even protect dancers from bullets. The dance was becoming a symbol of cultural resistance and potentially even insurgency.
In response, federal officials issued orders prohibiting the dance. Under threat of punishment, most stopped, but a small group of a few hundred persisted, and fled from the reservations, hoping to find safety in the Dakota Badlands. They were intercepted by cavalry troops and taken as prisoners to camp at the tiny hamlet of Wounded Knee in what is today South Dakota. Since many of the Sioux men were armed, the next day the decision was made by the cavalry to disarm them. As this occurred, one man refused to be disarmed and fired his rifle into a group of soldiers. The soldiers then opened fire in a volley of shooting, which killed dozens before the fighting became close quarters and sometimes hand to hand combat. The more heavily armed, better trained, and more numerous U.S. troops killed the majority of the indigenous in perhaps one hour of firing. 25 soldiers were also killed, along with 39 wounded.
Soon after the shooting ended, and before an accounting of the dead or a cleanup could occur, a heavy snow began to fall, and the bodies were left in the snow to freeze as they were, in their positions of pain and death. Three days later, when a contingent of Sioux from the nearby Pine Ridge reservation arrived, along with 30 local whites contracted to bury the bodies, they found a grim scene. In the words of Robert Utley, a historian of the conflicts between Native Americans and the U.S. state:
Strips of shredded canvas and piles of splintered lodgepoles littered the campsite, together with wrecked wagons and twisted pots, kettles, and domestic utensils. Here and there the skeletons of a tepee rose starkly from the wreckage, bits of charred canvas clinging to the poles. Snow-covered mounds cluttered the ground from one end of the camp to the other; beneath them lay the shattered bodies of the victims of the battle. Other mounds dotted the floor and sides of a deep ravine along the edge of the campsite; and beyond…the mounds lay thick and numerous…Each mound hid a human form, torn by shrapnel and carbine bullets, caked with blood, frozen hard in the contortions of violent death. They were of all ages and both sexes. The storm of shot and shell had spared none.
Amazingly, a few, including children, were still alive despite being shot and buried in snow.
Although nobody knew it at that moment, this massacre was to be the last violent confrontation between indigenous peoples and white settlers and the government that protected them. Although most Native American peoples had already experienced their own version of the Wounded Knee Massacre – in broken treaties, theft of land, in resettlement on reservations, in lost battles, in forced migrations, or in previous massacres – this 1890 massacre signaled the completion of a process of violent domination by the U.S. state over indigenous peoples. The rapacious spread of that capitalist state left no space for people who structured their societies differently and who lived by different values. The deaths of these 250 or more Oglala Lakota people is a testament to the violence that capitalist states would carry out against those who offer an alternative to a world driven by exploitation of human beings in pursuit of profit.
Eighty-one years later the massacre would inspire future indigenous activists to form the American Indian Movement, or A.I.M., and occupy the site at Wounded Knee and issue demands to address the needs of Native Americans of the 1970s.
Today we remember the Wounded Knee Massacre for the tragic human suffering it caused and the death of the culture that it destroyed. We also remember it for what it came to symbolize: the end of a process of conquest and genocide that extended the dominance of the United States from one side of the North American continent to the other.
