["Were not the subjugated and disenfranchised people that we
were," said one Ponca elder who took part in the 1973 revolt. "Wounded
Knee was an important beginning of that."]
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50 YEARS ON, LEGACY OF WOUNDED KNEE UPRISING LIVES IN INDIGENOUS
RESISTANCE  
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Brett Wilkins
February 27, 2023
Common Dreams
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_ "We're not the subjugated and disenfranchised people that we were,"
said one Ponca elder who took part in the 1973 revolt. "Wounded Knee
was an important beginning of that." _

Oscar Bear Runner, a member of the American Indian Movement and an
Oglala Lakota artist, stands guard with a rifle during the Wounded
Knee Occupation on March 2, 1973 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
in South Dakota., Bettman Archive/Getty Images

 

As many Native Americans on Monday marked the 50th anniversary of the
militant occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, participants in the
1973 uprising and other activists linked the deadly revolt to
modern-day Indigenous resistance, from Standing Rock to the #LandBack
movement.

On February 27, 1973 around 300 Oglala Lakota and members of the
American Indian Movement (AIM), seething from centuries of injustices
ranging from genocide to leniency for whites who committed crimes
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occupied the hamlet of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation for
more than two months. The uprising occurred during a period of
increased Native American militancy and the rise of AIM, which first
drew international attention in 1969 with the 19-month occupation
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of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.

"The Native people of this land after Wounded Knee, they had like a
surge of new pride in being Native people," Dwain Camp, an 85-year-old
Ponca elder who took part in the 1973 revolt, told
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The Associated Press_.

"Anything that goes on, anything we do, even today with the #LandBack
issue, all of that is just a continuation."

Camp said the occupation drove previously "unimaginable" changes,
including the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act,
the Indian Child Welfare Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom
Act, and the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.

"After we left Wounded Knee, it became paramount that protecting
Mother Earth was our foremost issue," he explained. "Since that period
of time, we've learned that we've got to teach our kids our true
history."

Camp said the spirit of Wounded Knee lives on in Indigenous resistance
today.

"We're not the subjugated and disenfranchised people that we were," he
said. "Wounded Knee was an important beginning of that. And because
we're a resilient people, it's something we take a lot of pride in."

Some of the participants in the 1973 uprising had been raised by
grandparents who remembered or even survived the 1890 massacre of more
than 200 Lakota
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Lakota
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men, women, and children by U.S. troops at Wounded Knee.

"That's how close we are to our history," Madonna Thunder Hawk, an
83-year-old elder in the Oohenumpa band of the Cheyenne River Sioux
Tribe who was a frontline participant in the 1973 occupation, told
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Country Today_. "So anything that goes on, anything we do, even today
with the #LandBack issue, all of that is just a continuation. It's
nothing new."

Nick Tilsen, an Oglala Lakota who played a prominent role in the
2016-17 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock,
North Dakota and who founded the NDN Collective, told
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Country Today_ that "for me, it's important to acknowledge the
generation before us—to acknowledge their risk."

"It's important for us to honor them," said Tilsen, whose parents met
at the Wounded Knee occupation. "It's important for us to thank them."

Akim Reinhardt, an associate professor of history at Townson State
University in Baltimore, told _Indian Country Today_ that the AIM
protests "helped establish a sense of the permanence of Red Power in
much the way that Black Power had for African-Americans, a permanent
legacy."

"It was the cultural legacy that racism isn't okay and people don't
need to be quiet and accept it anymore," he added. "That it's okay to
be proud of who you are."

_Indian Country Today_reports
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The occupation began on the night of Feb. 27, 1973, when a group of
warriors led by Oklahoma AIM leader Carter Camp, Ponca, moved into the
small town of Wounded Knee. They took over the trading post and
established a base of operations along with AIM leaders Russell Means,
Oglala Lakota; Dennis Banks, Ojibwe; and Clyde Bellecourt, White Earth
Nation.

Within days, hundreds of activists had joined them for what became a
71-day standoff with the U.S. government and other law enforcement.

On March 16, U.S. Marshal Lloyd Grimm was shot and paralyzed from the
waist down. Two Indians were subsequently killed during the
government's heavy-handed response to the occupation, which included
the deployment of armored vehicles and fighter jets. Frank Clearwater,
a 47-year-old Cherokee from North Carolina, was shot in the head while
resting in an occupied church on April 17 and died a week later. The
day after Clearwater's death, Lawrence "Buddy" Lamont, a local Lakota
and Vietnam War veteran, was shot through the heart by a sniper during
a shootout. He was 31 years old.

Black activist Ray Robinson, who had been working with the Oglala
Sioux Civil Rights Organization, went missing during the standoff. In
2014, the FBI confirmed
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that Robinson died at Wounded Knee, but his body was never recovered.

AIM remains active today. Its members have participated in the fights
against the Dakota Access, Keystone XL, and Line 3 pipelines, as well
as in the effort to free Leonard Peltier, a former AIM leader who has
been imprisoned for over 45 years after a dubious conviction for
murdering two FBI agents
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a separate 1975 shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Kevin McKiernan, then a rookie reporter for _NPR_ who was smuggled
into Wounded Knee after the Nixon administration banned journalists
from covering the standoff, said
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in an interview with _NPR_ that the #LandBack movement—spearheaded
in the U.S. by NDN Collective—is a leading example of the
occupation's legacy.

"And I think that there is a collective or a movement like that on
every reservation with every tribe," McKiernan said. "They're going to
get back, to buy back, to get donated—just do it by inches."

"That's what's going on in every inch of Indian country today," he
added.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel
free to republish and share widely.
==
Brett Wilkins [[link removed]]
Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
 

* American Indian Movement; Wounded Knee; Standing Rock; Leonard
Peletier; Indian Country;
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