Sacred Ground: Wounded Knee

Spotted Elk in Death, photo credit:  [PBS Archives]

The historian Frederick Jackson Turner noted in his essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Report of the American Historical Association (1893): 199-227.1

"In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: "Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports." This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development."

However, the year 1890 not only marks the disappearance of the American frontier, insofar as unsettled areas had been so broken up that there was not any longer evidence of a frontier line, but of the last significant American Indian massacre at Wounded Knee and the subjugation of proud peoples.

Here's an eyewitness account via Wikipedia;

"Black Elk (1863–1950); medicine man, Oglala Lakota:  ""I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream ... the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.""  (Source: Black Elk Speaks, c. 1932)

Via [NYTimes]  

"WOUNDED KNEE, S.D. — Ever since American soldiers massacred men, women and children here more than a century ago in the last major bloodshed of the American Indian wars, this haunted patch of rolling hills and ponderosa pines has embodied the combustible relationship between Indians and the United States government."

"It was here that a group of Indian activists aired their grievances against the government with a forceful takeover in 1973 that resulted in protests, a bloody standoff with federal agents and deep divisions among the Indian people."

"And now the massacre site, which passed into non-Indian hands generations ago, is up for sale, once again dragging Wounded Knee to the center of the Indian people’s bitter struggle against perceived injustice — as well as sowing rifts within the tribe over whether it would be proper, should the tribe get the land, to develop it in a way that brings some money to the destitute region."

Does paying homage to righteous memory have a high price? Apparently.

And since murdered children are recently in the news, here's another link to the events of the massacre with many photos and eyewitness accounts.

The Wound Knee museum's website is here.