On December 29, 1890, in one of the final chapters of America’s long Indian wars, the U.S. Cavalry kills 146 Sioux at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.
Throughout 1890, the U.S. government worried about the increasing influence at Pine Ridge 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. Many Sioux believed that if they practiced the Ghost Dance and rejected the ways of the white man, the gods would create the world anew and destroy all non-believers, including non-Indians.
On December 15, 1890, reservation police tried to arrest Sitting Bull, the famous Sioux leader, who they mistakenly believed was a Ghost Dancer, at the Standing Rock reservation and killed him in the process.
On December 29, the U.S. Army’s 7th cavalry surrounded a band of Ghost Dancers under the Sioux Chief Big Foot near Wounded Knee Creek and demanded they surrender their weapons. As that was happening, a fight broke out between an Indian and a U.S. soldier and a shot was fired, although it’s unclear from which side. A brutal massacre followed, in which it’s estimated almost 150 Native Americans were killed (some historians put this number at twice as high), nearly half of them women and children. The cavalry lost 25 men.
AFTER CHRISTMAS DEALS
The conflict at Wounded Knee was originally referred to as a battle, but in reality it was a tragic and avoidable massacre. Surrounded by heavily armed troops, it’s unlikely that Big Foot’s band would have intentionally started a fight. Some historians speculate that the soldiers of the 7th Cavalry were deliberately taking revenge for the regiment’s defeat at the Little Bighorn in 1876. Whatever the motives, the massacre ended the Ghost Dance movement and was the last major confrontation in America’s deadly war against the Plains Indians.
Conflict came to Wounded Knee again in February 1973 when it was the site of a 71-day occupation by the activist group AIM (American Indian Movement) and its supporters, who were protesting the U.S. government’s mistreatment of Native Americans. During the standoff, two Native Americans were killed, one federal marshal was seriously wounded and numerous people were arrested.
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And then they came for the Weavers, then Branch Davidians, and now . . .
. . . and I didn’t say anything:
By ‘they’ you mean the braindead police and military who will do whatever the hell they’re told to do for a paycheck!
“You’ll dance HOW we tell you, WHEN we tell you and not anything else. Understand?” – Uncle Sam
They were deceived into believing a messiah would come save them if only they worshiped correctly.
Really?
Story sounds familiar..but…
I had no idea the Indians had been as duped as the colonizers with religion.
The Indians were decimated long before Wounded Knee. The vast majority were murdered by the Federal Governments germ warfare program of spreading disease among the Tribes by giving them blankets and clothing contaminated with deadly disease. It was the beginning of Government “plausible deniability”.
Our real history is one of criminal terrorism on a scale few can admit…..
How did the purported distributors of smallpox-tainted blankets to Indians keep from becoming infected, themselves?
Just asking for my friend, Glocko the Perennially Obtuse, who’s unavailable at the moment, as he’s polishing his rose-tinted lenses.
.
Toxic metals contaminated blankets along with a subsistence diet of bleached fluor, oil, and distilled liquor, along with very little hygiene and sanitation will do people in very quickly.
Throw in a bunch of rich kids playing soldier, hopped up on drugs and alcohol looking for “revenge” for “Indian atrocities” they previously read about in dimestore novels…and you have the makings of a deliberately sanctioned murder of a prostrate, sick and dying group of Indians.
Seeing as your 4th grade education did not include biology, you probably never learned that smallpox survivors were immune to the disease….
Malnutrition and heavy metals exposure symptoms [blankets treated with mercury, lead, arsenic] are exactly the same as “smallpox” symptoms.
Horse-pucky dude…..
The Medal of Honor was tarnished forever by the 20 Medals “awarded,” to the 7th Cav’s murderers.
Ask the Sioux how giving up their firearms worked out.