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In the days that followed, a second massacre seemed imminent at Wounded Knee. The Justice and Defense Departments sent additional personnel, plus M16 assault rifles, hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, and a fleet of armored personnel carriers, or A.P.C.s. Many of the federal agents wanted to seize the village and rout the protesters by force. Still, the activists who were now trapped inside refused to leave. “Either negotiate with us for meaningful results, or you’re going to have to kill us, and here at Wounded Knee is where it’s going to have to happen,” Means said.
Word of the standoff spread to Indigenous communities across the continent, and Wounded Knee, known for nearly a century as the site of a mass killing, was transformed into a powerful symbol of strength and unification. Richard Whitman, a Yuchi-Muscogee artist and actor—known today for his role as Old Man Fixico on “Reservation Dogs”—can remember attending a meeting at the Southern California Indian Center in Los Angeles around this time. “That night,” he said, “three or four women stood up and said, ‘We’re going to drive to Wounded Knee.’ So I jumped in the backseat.” In the coming weeks, hundreds more would travel to Wounded Knee, bringing food and supplies and helping to erect bunkers. “That was when we realized that we weren’t alone,” Thunder Hawk said. “All of our people came from around the country.”
On March 11th, the protesters declared themselves part of the Independent Oglala Nation, citing the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which acknowledged the Lakota nation as a sovereign entity separate from the United States. Inside the village, traditional ceremonies once banned by the U.S. government were observed. “Ghost Dance at Dawn,” read an announcement taped to the wall of the Wounded Knee trading post.
Federal forces did all they could to draw the protesters out. The phone lines were cut, and utilities were periodically shut off. When rations inside the village ran out, food and medicine had to be delivered by airdrop, or obtained by backpackers who knew the countryside and could slip around checkpoints in the dark. There were nightly exchanges of gunfire; the sky lit up with tracer rounds and flares that caught fire on the dry prairie grass and blackened the earth. Several ceasefires were brokered, but each one failed, as the government refused to recognize the authority of grassroots Oglala leadership.
In late April, a federal sniper shot and killed an Oglala veteran of the Vietnam War named Buddy Lamont. Within a week, elders called for a peaceful end to the occupation, seventy-one days after it started. Whitman was among the last to leave the village, on May 8th. U.S. marshals escorted him and three others, including a Comanche from Oklahoma named Arvin Wells, out of Wounded Knee. As they did so, the flag of the Independent Oglala Nation came down. “They did a gun salute, like they do when they take a hill, and asked us to stand at attention when they started raising the American flag,” Whitman recalled. “But Arvin says, ‘No, we’re not defeated.’ ”
This past February, Whitman and a handful of other survivors from the protest gathered on Pine Ridge for a weekend of events commemorating the occupation on its fiftieth anniversary. There were film screenings, a powwow, dance competitions, and an oral-history exhibit honoring the women of what has become known as the siege of Wounded Knee, 1973. “It was always a land struggle,” Thunder Hawk, now eighty-two, said. “That’s who we are. We’re the land.”
The events culminated with the Liberation Day march, which is held annually on February 27th, an officially proclaimed holiday of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. It was really four separate marches, as members of AIM chapters from all over the U.S. and residents of Pine Ridge set out from points north, south, east, and west to converge at Wounded Knee. There, in front of the cemetery where many of the Lakotas slain in the 1890 massacre are interred, speakers paid tribute to leaders who have died—including Banks, Bellecourt, and Means—and reflected on how the organizing of the Red Power era, in the sixties and seventies, informs today’s landback movement, which also advocates for the recognition of treaty rights and for reducing the high rate of incarceration and recidivism among Native youth.
Means’s brother Bill—who, like Lamont and many other men inside Wounded Knee, had combat experience in Vietnam—described leaving the village during the occupation for a speaking tour of college campuses and the difficulty he had, later, getting back inside. Hoping to pass through the fields undetected, he was spotted by government agents after a trip flare went off. “It kind of gave away our position,” he said. “So we started running, and we found a little creek and dove in. There was some tumbleweeds and brush there, so we put it on top of us. Pretty soon an A.P.C. come rolling up, and I couldn’t help but remember Vietnam. I said, ‘At least this time I’m on the right side.’ ”
For many, the end of the standoff did not mean the end of their activism but, rather, the beginning of something greater. Lavetta Yeahquo, a citizen of the Kiowa Nation who, at the age of nineteen, served as a medic during the occupation, described Wounded Knee as “a great experience of teaching . . . I didn’t know my tribal ways. . . . I went home and I went around the elders that we had and I sat down with them and started asking them questions.” ♦
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