Lakota from reservations throughout South Dakota gathered on the Wounded Knee Cemetery on the Pine Ridge Reservation to commemorate ancestors massacred by the U.S. Cavalry in 1890.
On high of 2-foot snowdrifts on the cemetery on December 29, 2022, lay a group of cardboard containers containing artifacts and gadgets of clothes believed to have been ripped from the victims’ our bodies. After years of negotiations, the gadgets have been returned to the Lakota by a small museum in Barre, Massachusetts.
Museum information present solely {that a} touring shoe salesman from Barre acquired the gadgets on a visit West in 1891 and donated them to the Barre Museum a number of years later.
Now on the chilly December day, religious leaders Richard Moves Camp, an Oglala Lakota from Pine Ridge, and Ivan Looking Horse, a Miniconjou from the Cheyenne River Reservation, led the gathering in prayer and a ritual feeding of the spirits.
Later, dozens of Lakota gathered within the heat of a close-by faculty the place they shared household histories of the bloodbath, seen images of the returned artifacts, and honored the useless.
VOA spent weeks digging by means of historic information and newspaper accounts to search out out extra.
Background
In the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868, the U.S. authorities put aside 233,000 sq. kilometers west of the Missouri River for the “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation” of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota tribes, collectively referred to as the Sioux.
When Lieutenant General George Custer and his seventh Cavalry confirmed there was gold within the Black Hills of that space, prospectors rushed in. By 1875, the Bureau of Indian Affairs ordered the tribes to maneuver. When they resisted, the U.S. authorities despatched in troops, setting off armed battle that will see Custer defeated.
By 1889, the assorted bands of Lakota have been consigned to separate reservations, with their outdated methods of life forbidden and the buffalo, which had sustained them for 1000’s of years, gone.
Subsisting on insufficient authorities rations of beef, they appeared for a miracle.
The ghost dance
In 1890, the Lakota heard a couple of Paiute man in Nevada who had a imaginative and prescient whereas reducing wooden for his white employer. He fell and died, and God lifted him to heaven. There, he noticed white and Native folks, made younger once more, “dancing, gambling, playing ball and having all kinds of sports.”
That imaginative and prescient sparked the Ghost Dance, primarily based on beliefs that if males have been good, labored exhausting, didn’t struggle and danced for 5 nights in succession, God would deliver the useless again to life and restore to the (*132*) their former methods of life. White males would vanish, however particulars weren’t clear.
To study extra, the Lakota despatched Miniconjou chief Kicking Bear and a Sicangu Lakota from The Rosebud Agency named Short Bull to Nevada.
“They didn’t all speak English,” stated Ernie LaPointe, the closest dwelling direct descendant of Chief Sitting Bull. “So, they had to speak with hand signals.”
The message that the duo introduced again from Nevada misplaced one thing within the translation.
“They told the Indians that they had been up near Salt Lake, Utah, to visit the new Messiah,” U.S. agent at Pine Ridge Daniel Royer telegrammed Washington, “and they were told by him … that a new Earth would be formed and would pass over this one, burying the whites beneath.”
“It was Kicking Bear and Short Bull who conjured up this story that if Indians wore these ghost shirts, that a white man’s bullets would never hurt them,” stated LaPointe. He believes the lads received the thought from Mormon colonists in Nevada, who wore white “temple garments” to guard them towards temptation and religious evil.
Within weeks, a whole bunch gathered to bop. Some Indian brokers and navy officers seen it as a innocent diversion; others believed the tribes have been gearing up for riot.
Royer once more telegrammed Washington: “Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy. … We need protection, and we need it now.”
The White House answered by sending in a number of thousand troops.
Tipping level
Indian agent James McLaughlin believed Hunkpapa Lakota chief Sitting Bull was “the high priest” and chief instigator of the “Messiah craze.” He visited Sitting Bull at his cabin close to the Grand River and requested him to cease the “absurd craze.” Sitting Bull refused.
“My great grandfather knew that his ghost dance was not a Lakota sacred ceremony. But he had to give his hope to his people, so he allowed them to do this,” LaPointe stated.
Sitting Bull determined to violate a journey ban and go to Pine Ridge to talk to Chief Red Cloud about easing tensions.
McLaughlin despatched tribal police to arrest Sitting Bull on December 16. In the melee that ensued, Sitting Bull was shot useless.
A bloodbath
Sitting Bull’s half-brother Hupah Gleska, extra generally referred to as Si Tanka (“Big Foot”), chief of the Miniconjou Lakota, was on the time camped on the Cheyenne River Agency, 160 kilometers to the north.
“He thought the government was going to come after him,” stated Michael He Crow, an Oglala Lakota and descendant of Big Foot. “He felt that he was going to be the next one to die because he had a lot of influence among the people there.”
Big Foot and several other hundred followers set out for Pine Ridge, however the Army intercepted them and compelled them to camp on the tiny village of Wounded Knee.
On December 29, the Army ordered the Lakota to disarm.
“The men and women were separated,” stated He Crow. “Most of the men were sitting in a council circle and were the first ones killed. And the ones running were mostly women.”
What occurred to spark the bloodbath that adopted? Some say it was when the medication man, Yellow Bird, grabbed a handful of filth from the bottom and threw it up into the air.
“He was praying and crying,” a Hohwoju Lakota survivor named Alice Ghost Horse/Kills the Enemy/War Bonnet would later inform her son. “He was saying to the eagles that he wanted to die instead of his people. … He picked up some dirt from the fireplace and threw it in the air and said this is the way he wanted to go back … to dust.”
Others inform a special story.
“When they were taking the guns away from them, there was a man that was deaf,” He Crow stated. “They were trying to tell him to put his gun in the middle of the pile, but he held on to the gun and told them, ‘This is the only thing I have to keep food on the table and stay alive. And you’re taking this away from me?’”
The gun went off as officers tried to wrestle it away, stated He Crow. And that’s when the Army started firing revolving cannons and rifles.
“It was chaos,” Violet Catches, a Hohwoju Lakota from the Cheyenne River Reservation, stated. Her grandfather Leon Holy, then round 12, was considered one of 5 youngsters who survived the bloodbath.
As many as 300 Lakota males, ladies and youngsters died that day; some who have been tracked so far as 3 kilometers from the positioning. Official accounts say the bloodbath took 20 minutes, however Ghost Horse/Kills the Enemy/War Bonnet stated the capturing didn’t cease till after sundown.
They can be buried in a mass pit a number of days later, however not earlier than they have been picked clear of their weapons and belongings, together with the ghost shirts on their backs.
NOTE: Part 2 of this story will study the “relics craze” that adopted the bloodbath and present how dozens of things related to Wounded Knee ended up in Massachusetts.
