- In 1973, hundreds of Native American activists occupied the town of Wounded Knee to demand the US government fulfill its treaties with tribes.
- The siege galvanized the movement for Indigenous rights across the country.
Fifty years ago, around 200 Native American activists seized the town of Wounded Knee in South Dakota. Their demands: the removal of a tribal president whom they accused of corruption, and for the US government to fulfill treaties with Native Americans.
The occupation on February 27, 1973, led by members of the grassroots organization American Indian Movement, lasted 71 days in what the US Marshals called the "longest civil disorder" in history.
The Wounded Knee protest also galvanized the movement for Indigenous rights across the country, drawing public attention to the government's history of injustice against Native Americans and their sovereignty. Sacheen Littlefeather cited the occupation in her controversial Oscars speech, and, decades later, many saw echoes in the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests at Standing Rock in April 2016.
"I didn't come up here to die. I came up here to live with this water," Vonda Long, from the Cheyenne River tribe in South Dakota, told Minnesota Public Radio at a Standing Rock protest in 2016. "I'm a Wounded Knee descendant, I done survived and I want my people to continue to survive."
A history of injustice
The movement for Native American rights was driven by a long history of injustice, including poverty and police brutality.
In 1968, the American Indian Movement was founded to stop police harassment of Indians in the Minneapolis area. It emerged in the wake of the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, which was an effort by the US government to hasten the assimilation of Native Americans by encouraging them to leave Indian reservations for urban areas. Critics condemned the policy, which resulted in poverty, joblessness, and homelessness for relocated Native Americans.
"People were in the gutter and they wanted to get up," journalist Kevin McKiernan, who covered the occupation for NPR, recalled AIM co-founder Dennis Banks saying.
The organization became known for its highly visible demonstrations and publicity campaigns. It picked the Pine Ridge Reservation village in Wounded Knee — one of the poorest areas in the US at the time — for its historical symbolism: It was the site of a 1890 massacre, when federal troops killed anywhere from 150 to 300 Lakota men, women, and children.
Throughout 1890, the US government had grown concerned about the increasing influence of the Ghost Dance spiritual movement, which taught that Native Americans had been defeated and confined to reservations because they had angered the gods by abandoning their traditional customs. On December 29, 1890, the US Army surrounded a band of Ghost Dancers near Wounded Knee Creek and demanded they surrender their weapons. The ensuing fight led to the killing of hundreds of Native Americans.
The legacy of Wounded Knee
When the American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee decades later in 1973, federal authorities descended upon the town. They exchanged gunfire, killing two Native men and wounding and arresting many others, and began negotiations with the protestors. The activists ultimately surrendered on May 8 after officials promised to investigate their complaints.
But Congress didn't take any major steps to remedy the broken treaties, although the Supreme Court did rule in 1980 that it owed the Sioux money for taking its land a century earlier. (The tribe has not accepted compensation, which was valued at $2 billion dollars as of 2022, because accepting payment meant the Lakota people would forfeit all claims to the territory in question, the Black Hills.)
The Wounded Knee occupation did usher in some gains for the Native American community, including legislation that protects their children from arbitrary removal from their homes; guarantees their rights to religion; and provides funding for the repatriation of Native American cultural items.
Many of these protections have been jeopardized in recent years, most recently with the proposed construction of the North Dakota pipeline. But Native Americans have continued to oppose these efforts, just as they have for centuries.
"Every time there's a project of this magnitude, so the nation can benefit, there's a cost," Dave Archambault, the then-chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux, told the Los Angeles Times in 2016. "That cost is borne by tribal nations."