Wounded Knee occupation

The Event Native Americans activists stage an occupation to protest broken treaties and the purported corruption of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)

Date February 28-May 7, 1973

Place Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Wounded Knee, South Dakota

The tiny hamlet of Wounded Knee, the site at which more than two hundred Sioux and others were massacred in 1890, became a symbolic site again as members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupied the site during 1973. They quickly were confronted by armored troops and police.

The seventy-one-day occupation of Wounded Knee began on February 28, 1973. On March 11, 1973, AIM members declared their independence as the Oglala Sioux Nation, defining its boundaries according to the Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed in 1868. At one point, federal officials considered an armed attack on the camp, but the plan ultimately was discarded. Dennis Banks and Russell Means, AIM’s best-known leaders, stated that they would hold out until the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee had reviewed all broken treaties and the corruption of the BIA had been exposed to the world. After much gunfire and negotiation, AIM’s occupation of Wounded Knee ended on May 7, 1973.

Providing food for a community of several hundred people under siege was a continual problem. Some food was smuggled through police lines, but fresh meat was acquired on the hoof. Writing in his memoir, Ojibwe Warrior (2004), Banks noted that occupants of Wounded Knee rustled cattle from local ranches. Most of the AIM leaders were urban people, however, who had to learn quickly how to process meat straight from the animal.

Pine Ridge tribal police supported tribal chairman Richard Wilson, an Oglala Lakota, against the occupiers of Wounded Knee. From the early 1970’s until his defeat for the chairman’s office by Al Trimble in 1976, Wilson outfitted a tribal police force that was often called the Goon Squad. This police force, which understood “goon” to mean “Guardians of the Oglala Nation,” was financed with money from the federal government. The local context of the occupation included an effort to confront publicly Wilson’s policies, which often favored non-Native American ranchers, farmers, and corporations.

Political Context

The struggle between AIM and Wilson also was taking place within the realm of tribal politics. Wilson had a formidable array of supporters on the reservation, many of whom criticized AIM for being urban-based and insensitive to reservation residents’ needs.

When Wilson sought reelection in 1974, Means challenged him. In the primary, Wilson trailed Means, 667 votes to 511. Wilson won the final election over Means by fewer than two hundred votes in balloting, which the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights later found to be permeated with fraud.

The Commission on Civil Rights recommended a new election, which was not held; Wilson answered his detractors by increasing assaults on his opponents, examples of which were described in a chronology of more than sixty murders between 1973 and 1976 kept by the Wounded Knee Legal Defense-Offense Committee. One of the Goons’ favorite weapons was the automobile; officially, automobile deaths could be reported as traffic accidents. Between 1973 and 1976, Pine Ridge experienced a higher per-capita murder rate than any U.S. urban area.

Aftermath

Following the occupation of Wounded Knee, Banks and Means were charged with three counts of assault on federal officers, one charge each of conspiracy and one each of larceny. The men, facing five charges each, could have been sentenced to as many as eighty-five years in prison. For several months in 1974, a year after the occupation of Wounded Knee, the defense and prosecution presented their cases in a St. Paul, Minnesota, federal court.

On September 16, Judge Fred J. Nichol dismissed all the charges. The judge said that Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents had lied repeatedly during the trial while under oath and had often furnished defense attorneys with altered documents. Judge Nichol said that R. D. Hurd, the federal prosecutor, had deliberately deceived the court. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation,” said Judge Nichol, “has stooped to a new low.” To the chagrin of the judge and jurors, however, the Justice Department responded by presenting Hurd with an award for “superior performance” during the trial.

Impact

The occupation of Wounded Knee by Native American activists had a profound impact on non-Indians, as news of the conflict spread worldwide through the media. The occupation had a major effect on American culture: A book by Dee Brown about the history of oppression at Wounded Knee, titled Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), also became an international best-seller. At the 1973 Academy Awards, held as Wounded Knee was being occupied, Marlon Brando refused to accept his Academy Award in order to protest the treatment of American Indians.

Unrest continued at Pine Ridge for several years after the 1973 occupation. More than sixty people, many of them AIM members, were murdered in factional violence between 1973 and 1976. In June, 1975, two FBI agents and one Native American man died in a shootout at the Jumping Bull Ranch, west of Wounded Knee, for which Leonard Peltier later was convicted on what his defenders contend was falsified evidence. By the early twenty-first century, Peltier continued to serve a life sentence.

Bibliography

Banks, Dennis, and Richard Erdoes. Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. A lively, personal account of the Wounded Knee occupation by one of its leaders.

Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall. Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret War Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Boston: South End Press, 1990. Detail on the FBI’s attempts during the 1970’s to destroy AIM during and after the occupation of Wounded Knee.

Johansen, Bruce E., and Roberto F. Maestas. Wasi’chu: The Continuing Indian Wars. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979. Context describing the situation at Pine Ridge before and after the Wounded Knee Occupation.

Josephy, Alvin, Jr. Red Power: The American Indians Fight for Freedom. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971. Provides context on the social movement that gave birth to the occupation at Wounded Knee.

Matthiessen, Peter. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. New York: Viking, 1991. An account of the many political murders at Pine Ridge after the Wounded Knee occupation.