The genesis of the massacre began with a dance.
During the throes of a continuing drought on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1890, the Lakota people living there were also contending with severely reduced rations from the U.S. government as it tried to pressure Indigenous residents into yielding valuable reservation land. These punitive restrictions caused widespread hunger and starvation, which turned many Lakota tribal members toward Wovoka, a Paiute prophet who “promised the disappearance of the white man and a return of native lands and buffalo if certain rites and dances were performed,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
The central ritual of this hybrid Christian-Indigenous religious movement was the so-called “Ghost Dance,” which struck non-Indigenous settlers in the area, then the U.S. government, with paranoid terror (“ghost shirts” sanctified in the dances supposedly could stop bullets).
U.S. soldiers were then dispatched to deal with the situation, just 14 years after Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and more than 200 of his 7th Cavalry troopers were ignominiously annihilated by a combined force of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors at Montana’s Little Bighorn River valley. Among Army units sent to Pine Ridge in 1890 was the 7th Cavalry.
Ominously, Lakota holy man Sitting Bull, one of the leaders at the Little Bighorn fight, had been killed two weeks before, as tribal police on the Standing Rock Reservation, northeast of Pine Ridge, tried to arrest him after the Ghost Dance rituals were subdued, further enflaming tensions. This prompted some of Sitting Bull’s followers to join a group led by Miniconjou Lakota leader Sitanka, also known as Big Foot, who fled the Cheyenne River agency with a plan to join other leaders at Pine Ridge. Big Foot and his followers encountered 7th Cavalry troops on Dec. 28, 1890, and spent the night uneventfully at a campsite near Wounded Knee Creek.
Early the next morning, everything went south, as U.S. soldiers encircled the encampment and attempted to disarm the group. A shot rang out as soldiers wrestled with a warrior who refused to give up his weapon, followed immediately by a continuous, deadly volley of gunfire from soldiers. In the end, 200 to 300 Lakota men, women and children lay dead — some corpses were found a mile or two from the site — and another 100 were injured. As many as 40 soldiers also reportedly died in the mayhem.
The frozen Lakota dead (a frigid snowstorm had rolled in the next day), including Big Foot, were dumped unceremoniously into a mass grave several days later.
In 2025, the immediate issue is the insistence of Pete Hegseth, secretary of the newly minted U.S. Department of War, that U.S. history records this terrible tragedy as a “battle” and not what it objectively was, a massacre of many unarmed people, including women and children. To that end, Hegseth will not revoke Medals of Honor — it’s America’s highest military honor today but in 1890 was a less revered military decoration — that were granted to approximately 20 soldiers after the incident (the precise number is in debate, because records for some of the medals are incomplete or unclear). Members of Congress including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, have made repeated attempts to revoke the medals legislatively, which South Dakota’s congressional delegation has not supported.
“We cannot be a country that celebrates and rewards horrifying acts of violence,” Warren said recently. “With this announcement, Secretary Hegseth is valorizing people who committed a massacre.”
Deb Haaland, a candidate for governor in New Mexico and the first Native American to serve as Interior Department secretary, under President Joe Biden, said that Hegseth’s rhetoric about the medals represented “cruelty, not justice.”
In 2024, under Biden, then Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin convened a panel to review the actions of each soldier at Wounded Knee, and reconsider the medals’ validity. But a report by the panel was never released and Austin did not make a final decision. Hegseth termed this “careless inaction,” and stressed that the medals were deserved.
This year, South Dakota’s U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson sponsored a bill — the Wounded Knee Massacre Memorial and Sacred Site Act — to preserve a section of land where the massacre took place. It passed the House and is awaiting action in the Senate, where South Dakota’s Mike Rounds and John Thune are sponsoring an identical bill.
In a press release issued by Johnson’s House office, he stated: “In 2023, I visited the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre. I met with descendants of the survivors, and I saw the bloodstained floorboards of St. John’s Church where the wounded were treated. It was a tragic day in America’s history. My bill acknowledges our mistake and ensures this land will be sacred for generations to come.”
Soldiers significantly outnumbered Native Americans that fateful day at Wounded Knee. The troops also fired four cannons from a hilltop at such a distance that, according to a 1980 journal article by Larry D. Roberts of South Dakota State University, neither the age nor gender of those targeted could be clearly distinguished.
Not much of a “battle.”