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The Wounded Knee massacre took place December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The massacre was precipitated when the Seventh Cavalry of the U.S. Army tried to disarm a group of about 500 Lakota Sioux under the leadership of Chief Big Foot. During the contentious process of disarming, a shot was fired. After this, the army began a merciless slaughter. Within hours, the Seventh Cavalry killed between 270 and 300 of Big Foot's people. Of these, 170 to 200 were women and children. The army killed a few men who were fighting back, but the large majority of Lakotas were destroyed while trying to flee or hide. In a few instances, soldiers shot Lakotas at point blank range, three or more miles from the place the firing began.

The chain of events that led to Wounded Knee began six weeks earlier, when the United States government decided to use massive military force to suppress the Ghost Dance on Lakota reservations. The Ghost Dance originated in the teachings of Paiute prophet Wovoka, living on the Walker River Indian Reservation in Nevada. In 1889, Wovoka began to forecast the coming of a new world in which non-Indians would be destroyed or removed, game restored, and tribal ancestors returned to life. Portions of several tribes in the western United States adopted Wovoka's teachings, including several Lakota communities.

Although many scholars have argued that the Lakotas fundamentally altered Wovoka's originally "peaceful" teaching into one of hostility toward European Americans, thus justifying military action, recent scholarship has called this view into question. It is doubtful that the Lakotas changed Wovoka's teachings. Rather, the government's decision to suppress the Ghost Dance among the Lakotas, but not among other tribes, resulted from long-standing American perceptions of the Lakota Sioux as particularly treacherous, as well as army officers' perceptions that the situation on the Lakota reservations afforded an opportunity to demonstrate the continued importance of the army's mission in the West.

The army's invasion of Lakota country, the single largest military operation since the Civil War, was designed to overawe the Lakota ghost dancers into giving up the dance. At first, this strategy had some success. In late November and early December several groups of ghost dancers surrendered. On December 15, however, military officials began to lose control of the situation when reservation Indian police killed Sitting Bull at his home on the Standing Rock Reservation. Fearing for their lives, most of Sitting Bull's people fled south, with some joining Big Foot's village on the Cheyenne River. Army officers responded to these events by adopting a punitive attitude toward Big Foot and the ghost dancers among his people. Big Foot was characterized as "defiant and hostile" and the army positioned troops near his village to secure his arrest.

For their part, Big Foot and the other leaders of his community were deeply fearful of the army's intentions. Having received an invitation from Lakota leaders at Pine Ridge to help with their ongoing diplomatic efforts to secure a peaceful conclusion to the army's invasion of their country, Big Foot decided on December 24 to leave Cheyenne River and travel through the rough country of the Badlands to Pine Ridge. Big Foot's evasion of military surveillance increased army officers' frustration. More than ever they desired to punish Big Foot and his people. Hence, officers in charge of the campaign issued orders to all units to try to find Big Foot, and should they succeed, to disarm him, adding: "If he fights, destroy him." On December 28, the Seventh Cavalry intercepted Big Foot and his people about twenty-five miles from Pine Ridge and escorted them to nearby Wounded Knee Creek. The next morning the Seventh Cavalry began to carry out its orders.

Much of the analysis of Wounded Knee has focused on who fired the first shot. One theory is that army officers planned in advance to open fire, perhaps to avenge the Seventh Cavalry's defeat under George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn fourteen years before. Another theory is that the first shot was fired when a single Indian refused to give up his gun and it discharged accidentally when soldiers tried to take it from him. A third theory, advanced by the army after the massacre, is that a few Lakotas, acting in concert, opened fire.

Wounded Knee qualifies as an instance of genocide most obviously under the first of these theories, as it holds that the destruction of Big Foot's people was intentional. In all likelihood, however, army officers probably did not plan the massacre and instead intended to use the threat of force to secure a bloodless disarmament of Big Foot's people. Nonetheless, even under the second (very likely) theory or the third (very doubtful) theory, the events after the first shot reveal widespread genocidal impulses. Although army officers testified before a court of inquiry that they and their men took great pains to prevent the killing of women and children, their testimony collapses under the weight of the sheer number of casualties and the circumstances of their deaths.

Regardless of who fired the first shot, the killing fields of Wounded Knee must be placed within a long tradition of racist Indian-hating in American culture, reflected in widely held axioms like "nits breed lice" and "the only good Indian is a dead Indian," and manifested in numerous instances in which the army, volunteers, and civilians engaged in acts of indiscriminate slaughter with the intent to kill as many Indians as possible. Neither the army's campaign to suppress the Lakota Ghost Dance nor nineteenth-century U.S. Indian policy explicitly called for the extermination of all Indians. Yet, both were premised on the view that Indian opposition to U.S. authority was illegitimate and deserving of punishment, and that it was therefore legitimate to use the threat of extermination to secure policy objectives. In many instances, as at Wounded Knee, the threat of genocide became reality.

SEE ALSO Indigenous Peoples; Massacres; Native Americans; Racism

Jeffrey Ostler