South Dakota: Pine Ridge Reservation – Wounded Knee

🪶 Wounded Knee – America’s Uncomfortable Truth

Living in the United States has given us the rather wonderful opportunity to peel back the layers of this country’s history — and there are rather a lot of layers, some of them deeply uncomfortable. America, like every nation that’s ever existed, has had its brilliant moments and its catastrophically awful ones. We’ve been doing our best to understand both, which is more than can be said for quite a few people who were actually born here.

It was during a road trip through South Dakota — a state that most Americans seem to regard as something you drive through on the way to somewhere more interesting — that we decided to visit one of the most sobering places in the entire country: Wounded Knee.

Before we set off, I did what any self-respecting history enthusiast does before visiting somewhere significant — I read the book. In this case, it was Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, first published in 1970, and still one of the most important and difficult reads you’ll ever sit down with. Brown spent years pulling together the historical record of what happened between the Native American tribes and the United States government during the period from roughly 1860 to 1890. It is not a cheerful book. You won’t find it nestled between a beach read and a cosy crime novel. It is, to put it plainly, a chronicle of broken promises, land theft, and systematic destruction of entire peoples and their way of life. I’d recommend it to anyone, though perhaps not immediately before bedtime.

Wounded Knee itself sits within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, home of the Oglala Lakota Sioux — one of the seven bands of the Teton Sioux, themselves part of the broader Lakota Nation. The reservation was established in 1889 following the Fort Laramie Treaties, which, like most agreements the US government made with Native tribes during this period, turned out to be roughly as reliable as a chocolate teapot.

The events at Wounded Knee took place on the 29th of December, 1890. The Lakota Ghost Dance movement had been growing throughout that year — a spiritual practice that had spread rapidly among Plains tribes, born of a vision by a Paiute holy man named Wovoka, who prophesied that the dancing would bring about a new world in which Native peoples would be reunited with their ancestors and the settlers would disappear. The US government, never particularly relaxed about anything the Native tribes did, viewed the Ghost Dance with considerable alarm.

Sitting Bull, the great Hunkpapa Sioux chief, had been allowing the Ghost Dance on the Standing Rock Reservation. On the 15th of December 1890, he was arrested by Indian police and killed in the ensuing struggle — a moment that sent shockwaves through the remaining Sioux communities. Chief Big Foot, leader of a band of Miniconjou Lakota, began moving his people south towards Pine Ridge, hoping to find safety with Red Cloud. They were intercepted by the US 7th Cavalry Regiment near Wounded Knee Creek.

On the morning of the 29th, the soldiers began disarming the Lakota. What happened next remains disputed to this day, but what isn’t disputed is the outcome: a shot was fired — from which side, nobody agrees — and within minutes the soldiers opened up with four Hotchkiss mountain guns that had been positioned on the surrounding hills. When it was over, approximately 146 Lakota men, women and children lay dead in the snow. Some historians put the figure considerably higher. Around 25 soldiers also died, many likely killed by their own crossfire in the chaos. Chief Big Foot himself was found frozen in the snow, having died of pneumonia during the march.

The US Army awarded 20 Medals of Honor to soldiers involved in the engagement — awards that many people, including members of Congress, have since argued should be rescinded. That debate continues to this day.

Many historians and the Sioux Nation itself view Wounded Knee not as a battle but as a massacre — the deliberate killing of largely unarmed civilians. It also marked the effective end of armed resistance by the Plains tribes against the United States military. The frontier was closed. The wars were over. And the consequences of all of it were still very much on display when we drove through the reservation more than 130 years later.

The first thing we encountered upon entering the Oglala Sioux reservation was, predictably, a casino. This seems to be the universal welcome mat of Native American reservations across the country — the gaming industry being one of the few legal mechanisms by which tribes have been able to generate any kind of income since the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988. It is, when you think about it, a rather bleak irony: centuries of dispossession partially addressed by the right to take money off people at slot machines.

As we drove deeper into the reservation towards the town of Pine Ridge, the signs of poverty became impossible to ignore and impossible to look away from. The housing stock consisted largely of modular homes — the kind of prefabricated units that are meant to be temporary and have instead become permanent — in various states of deterioration. Rubbish was strewn about in quantities that suggested either a bin collection service that had given up entirely, or a community so ground down by circumstances that civic pride had become an unaffordable luxury. Wrecked and abandoned cars sat beside the road. The whole place had the atmosphere of somewhere that the rest of the country had very deliberately decided not to think about.

Pine Ridge is, by most measurable standards, one of the poorest communities in the United States. Life expectancy on the reservation has historically been lower than in many developing countries. Unemployment has at times exceeded 80 percent. The land, which was assigned to the Sioux after the more productive territories were taken, is not particularly suited to farming. There is very little in the way of industry or employment. It is the kind of place where hopelessness is not a personality trait but a rational response to circumstances, and we felt the weight of that as we drove through.

We pulled into a petrol station — sorry, gas station, I keep forgetting — and while I was filling up, Karen got talking to two young women who were standing nearby with babies in pushchairs. When she got back into the car, she told me they had asked her for money and she had given them some. We don’t generally give money to people in these situations — our usual logic being that food is more useful and less likely to fund habits that make a difficult life worse. But Karen had given them money, and I wasn’t going to argue with that, and frankly I don’t think either of us were in much of a position to be making judgements about anything that morning.

We wanted our children to see this. That might sound like the sort of thing terrible parents say, but we genuinely believe it’s important. Not as some sort of misery tourism, but because the world is considerably larger and more complicated than the comfortable bubble most of us inhabit, and young people who don’t understand that grow up into adults who vote accordingly.

We drove on towards Wounded Knee itself, which proved considerably harder to find than you might expect, given that it’s one of the most historically significant sites in the American West. After a fair amount of searching and several wrong turns — the kind that make you wonder if the sat-nav has simply given up — we eventually found it.

What greeted us was not exactly what we had come to expect from American historical sites. Across the country, we have visited National Parks with visitor centres that would not look out of place at an international airport — gleaming, beautifully designed, packed with interactive displays and helpful rangers in pressed uniforms. At Wounded Knee, there was a rather tired-looking sign beside the road, and across from it a building that served as a combination visitor centre and gift shop and was, on the day we visited, firmly closed.

The historical marker itself was simple. Weathered. Straightforward in its language about what had happened here in December 1890. We stood and read it, and the silence around it did most of the work.

There is something to be said, I suppose, for the simplicity of it. No gleaming interpretive centre. No sanitised retelling. Just a worn placard at the side of a road in South Dakota, marking the spot where 146 people died and an era ended. In its own accidental way, it said something quite powerful — that this place has been left much as everything else here has been left, which is to say not particularly well looked after and not particularly high on anybody’s list of priorities.

That felt, on reflection, like exactly the right monument for Wounded Knee. And we found we couldn’t stop thinking about it long after we’d driven away.