Gestures Matter

April 23, 2021

I’m reluctant to be too quick to judge combat soldiers or police officers, because those are dangerous jobs and I don’t know how I’d behave in such stressful or precarious situations. But I do believe that American soldiers should not be awarded the nation’s highest military commendation for slaughtering women and children.

Yet that is what happened after the massacre of Lakota Sioux men, women, and children in 1890. Twenty soldiers of the U.S. Cavalry were granted the Medal of Honor for killing between 250 and 300 unarmed Lakota people at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

But now there is a movement to get Congress to rescind those medals.

When I read about that political effort in today’s New York Times, my first reaction was negative: why are these activists focusing their attention upon a symbolic act when there are more serious and pressing social problems such as poverty and Covid on the nearby Lakota reservation? Yes, the mass murder at Wounded Knee Creek and the honoring of its perpetrators was a historical injustice, but that was long ago and there are more urgent challenges that need to be addressed today.

Then I remembered my visit to Wounded Knee 20 years ago.

It was an extra warm afternoon in late July, 2001 when I walked from the hilltop cemetery down to the meadow next to the creek. I was alone, wading through dry, knee-high summer grasses, with grasshoppers leaping away at my approach. The killing field was quiet, an occasional sunflower swaying in the hot summer breeze. My four companions would not come with me to the massacre site, preferring to wait near the cars for my return. They had explored the burial ground with me, but were vague about their reasons for declining to walk the short distance to the creek.

Two of my four fellow travelers were a Lakota couple, and the woman told me that the Lakota see the carnage as a sad event that happened generations ago, and that they don’t dwell upon it. Wounded Knee Creek is in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and Pine Ridge is reputedly the poorest place in the U.S., with very high rates of unemployment and alcoholism. Yet when I suggested that the tribe create jobs by making the battlefield a tourist attraction, like Gettysburg or the Little Bighorn site of Custer’s Last Stand, she said that her people did not want to make money off of their dead. Her husband added that the Lakota are often unable to overcome the petty jealousies and factionalism that plague their tribe, and that a visitor center (trading post?) which once stood near the historic site was burned down by Indian radicals in 1973.

The couple did not object to my wandering around the site of the bloodbath, but neither did they wish to join me.

It was a cold December day shortly after Christmas in 1890 when tense Seventh Cavalry troops disarmed captive Lakota warriors. A shot rang out, and the tension turned into panic and chaos as the soldiers opened fire on the surrounded Indian camp. Exploding shells and bullets killed warriors and cavalrymen, women and children. Some soldiers went berserk, pursuing and murdering mothers and children who were cowering in the creekbed. When the shooting stopped, wounded troopers and Lakota alike were taken up the hill to a little church where clergy labored to save their lives.

Up to 300 Lakota were buried in a mass grave in the cemetery. There was no burial mound or marker showing the exact location of the bodies, though there was an old monument to the Lakota dead, along with more recent Lakota graves marked by crosses. In the meadow, site of the former Lakota campsite, there were no reminders of the fighting. No signs, no interpretive displays, no maps, no monuments. A rusty car had been pushed down the side of the creek bank. Discarded clothing was scattered nearby. Two trailers were on the edge of the flat. Wounded Knee Creek was peaceful, its waters sheltered by thick growths of leafy trees and bushes. Hard to imagine the barren winter ravine filled with blood, shrapnel, and corpses.

According to the Times, “In 1990 the descendants of Native Americans killed and injured during the Wounded Knee massacre received an apology from Congress after lawmakers approved a resolution expressing ‘deep regret’ for the Army’s actions…Representative Dusty Johnson, a South Dakota Republican, said ‘This was a sin of our nation, and the United States Congress has issued a formal apology; that doesn’t make the massacre go away, but it’s those kinds of efforts toward reconciliation that I think can help mend hearts and minds and give it the opportunity to move forward.'”

The Times quoted Marcella Lebeau, a 101 year old World War II nurse veteran and citizen of the Two Kettle Band of the Cheyenne River Sioux, who said, “I believe on our reservation, we have a pervasive sadness that exists here because of what happened at Wounded Knee, the massacre, and it has never been resolved and there has never been closure.”

I don’t condemn the nervous soldiers who panicked and started shooting indiscriminately. Maybe I would have done the same thing in that situation, although I can say with confidence that I would not have hunted down and butchered the fleeing women and children. But soldiers are warriors, and warriors sometimes go crazy in the heat of a fight. Even so, there’s no excuse for the murderous behavior of the Seventh Cavalry, and every reason to revoke the awards that those troops received.

We owe it to our fellow Americans, our Lakota brothers and sisters, to help them heal the sorrow they have felt since before and after 1890, by honoring their request to retract the misguided decorations granted to the killers of their ancestors. It may be just a symbolic gesture, but if it helps the Lakota people to heal, let’s do it.