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PHOTOGRAPH BY ADOLPH F. MUHR, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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Convinced the movement posed a threat to whites, the U.S. Army banned Ghost Dance ceremonies on all reservations. When Lakota Chief Sitting Bull, known for taking down Lt. Col. George Custer and his army at the Battle of Little Bighorn, was confronted and refused to be silenced, he was killed along with hundreds of men, women, and children.
"The U.S. Army recovered its own dead but left the Lakota victims to freeze during the three-day blizzard that followed. Before flinging the frozen bodies into a mass grave, many soldiers stripped the Lakota naked, saving their ghost shirts as souvenirs,” Blakemore writes.
American newspapers portrayed the massacre as a necessary battle; white settlers celebrated it as a victory over a warlike people. Native Americans interpreted the massacre as a sign that the U.S. government would stop at nothing to eradicate them. “I did not know then how much was ended,” wrote Black Elk, a Lakota medicine man who survived the massacre. “The nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.”
It would be the last large skirmish in a century of armed conflict between Native Americans and American troops. Wounded Knee became a rallying cry for activists (pictured at top in 1973) who point out how centuries of land theft, broken treaties, and forced assimilation affected Native Americans. In 1990, Congress formally apologized for the slaughter.
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