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- By Levi Rickert
Opinion.Today marks the 135th anniversary of the Massacre of Wounded Knee, which occurred during the wintry week between Christmas and New Year’s in 1890.
Nine days before the massacre that left hundreds of Sioux men, women and children dead, an obscure weekly newspaper in South Dakota published an editorial following the death of Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull. In the opinion piece, L. Frank Baum, publisher of the Saturday Pioneer, wrote:
“The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled.”
Early on the morning of Dec. 29, 1890, at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, Sioux people who had been captured the previous afternoon by members of the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment were surrendering their weapons. A shot was fired. The cavalry then opened fire on unarmed Sioux elders, women and children. While an exact account will never be known, historians believe between 250 and 300 Sioux were killed that day.
Snow fell heavily that December week. The Sioux ancestors who were killed were left on the frozen plains of the reservation until a burial party arrived days later to place them in a mass grave.
After the killings, Baum again took to his newspaper’s editorial page. This time, he wrote:
“The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.”
Ten years later, Baum published a children’s book titled The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was later adapted into one of the most famous films of all time. As a child, my siblings and I would make popcorn and watch the movie during its annual television broadcasts. As an adult, after learning of Baum’s virulent racism and calls for the extermination of Native people, I stopped watching it. Baum’s family later apologized for his racist editorials.
Baum did not single-handedly cause the genocide of Native Americans, but his words contributed to it. His editorials helped normalize violence and extermination as acceptable policy. History matters. If you know your history, you know your place in this world.
Unfortunately, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth doesn’t appear to understand history.
On September 25, 2025, Hegseth announced that he would not rescind the Medals of Honor awarded to approximately 20 members of the U.S. 7th Cavalry for their actions at the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre. He wasn’t preserving history. He was protecting a lie.
That lie — that what happened at Wounded Knee was a battle deserving of the nation’s highest military recognition — has been told for over 130 years. But Native Americans know the truth. It wasn’t a battle. It was a massacre of women, children and elders. And it remains one of the most painful, unresolved wounds in American history.
The soldiers of the 7th Cavalry were not heroes that day.
In defending his decision, Hegseth has framed the debate around what he calls “woke” politics and vowed to put an end to what he called “historical revisionism.” But this is not revisionism. This is accountability. This is truth.
In 1990, on the 100th anniversary of the massacre, Congress passed a resolution expressing “deep regret” to the descendants of those killed at Wounded Knee. Tribal leaders, historians and descendants of survivors have spent decades calling for the revocation of the medals — not as an erasure of history, but as a correction of it.
The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) released a statement following Hegseth’s announcement that said “such despicable violence should not have been lauded in the first place.”
“Honoring those involved in the Wounded Knee Massacre with the United States’ highest military award is incompatible with the values the Medal of Honor is meant to represent,” NCAI Executive Director Larry Wright Jr. said. “Celebrating war crimes is not patriotic. This decision undermines truth-telling, reconciliation, and the healing that Indian Country and the United States still need.”
Earlier this month, Congress passed the Wounded Knee Massacre Memorial and Sacred Site Act that was signed into law that protects 40 acres of the Wounded Knee massacre site.
The law places the land in restricted-fee status, meaning it cannot be sold, taxed, gifted or leased without approval from Congress and the Oglala Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes, which jointly purchased the land three years ago.
Ironically, U.S. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who sponsored the Senate version of the legislation, has never supported the Remove the Stain Act, legislation that calls for revoking the medals given to the 7th Calvary members who massacred innocent Sioux people 135 years ago, Even though the Removed the Stain Act has been introduced in the Senate numerous times, it has never made ii to the Senate floor for a vote. Sen. Rounds needs to support this legislation.
As we have learned many times in recent years — from boarding school acknowledgments to MMIP awareness campaigns — remembering a tragedy is not the same as reckoning with it.
Thayék gde nwéndëmen - We are all related.
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