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THE LIE WE KEEP TELLING ABOUT WOUNDED KNEE
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Levi Rickert
December 29, 2025
Native News Online
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_ Today (12/29) marks the 135th anniversary of the Massacre of
Wounded Knee, which occurred during the wintry week between Christmas
and New Year’s in 1890. _
The open grave at Wounded Knee in 1890, Photo/File
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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* Wounded Knee; Sioux People; L. Frank Baum; The Wounded Knee
Massacre Memorial and Sacred Site Act
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