Genocide: Healing From the Horrors of Wounded Knee 133 Years Later

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/wounded-knee-of-1890

Healing From the Horrors of Wounded Knee 133 Years Later

But how do we heal? That’s a question still worth asking.

WINONA LADUKE
Jan 21, 2024

On December 29, the Lakota held a ceremony at the Wounded Knee gravesite and read the names of those who were killed, and identified—aloud—women, children and entire families wiped out by the howitzers. There were many who were not named but remembered in the wind and in the moment.

It was somber. And, for the second year, clothing, moccasins and pipes that belonged to the murdered were there at Wounded Knee, returned from a museum in the east, where a ghoulish collection had rested for over a century. On that cold December morning, we prayed, listening to songs, as we looked upon the dresses, shirts of the Ghost Dancers and baby moccasins, all stripped from those slain at Wounded Knee. Now, all sat in open boxes covering the gravesite where their people had been buried. We mourned together.

It was l890 and the great leader Sitting Bull (Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake) was incarcerated at Fort Yates with his people. More than a decade had passed since the U.S. government illegally seized the Black Hills, forcing the people off sacred land. The buffalo had been decimated. Incarcerated at prisoner-of-war camps, the Lakota’s rations had been cut in half. The people were starving.

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In the early 1980s, Alex White Plume’s uncle told him that because the Army had not allowed survivors and family members to perform grieving ceremonies at Wounded Knee, the spirits of the victims were unable to leave the “Land of the Breathing.” In 1986, White Plume, his brother Percy and 17 other Lakota, calling themselves the Si Tanka Wokiksuye Okolakiciye—the “Big Foot Remembrance Group”—embarked on the first annual Big Foot Memorial Ride from the Sitting Bull homestead in Standing Rock to Pine Ridge.

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