![]() Wilson had recruited a private police force, known as the “goon squad,” which collaborated with the F.B.I. ![]() Early in 1973, a local group called the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization ( OSCRO) came together to protest the corruption of Dick Wilson, a despotic tribal president. government and a nascent movement of Indigenous resistance. But Black Elk also said, when reflecting on the enduring power of the Ghost Dance and what happened in 1890, “The tree that was to bloom just faded away, but the roots will stay alive, and we are here to make that tree bloom.”įifty years ago, Wounded Knee again became the setting for a confrontation between the U.S. Census Bureau had declared the Western frontier officially closed in 1890, and, at the time, the American Indian population was believed to have reached its lowest point in known history. “The sacred hoop was broken and scattered.” But this was authorial sleight of hand-a decision, by Neihardt, to close the curtain on a mournful, elegiac note. ![]() “A people’s dream died there,” read the closing lines of “ Black Elk Speaks,” an anthology of interviews with the Lakota religious leader Black Elk, edited in 1932 by the poet John Neihardt. In popular history, the massacre at Wounded Knee would come to stand for the end of the Plains wars-and of Indigenous resistance more broadly. Seventh Cavalry-Custer’s old regiment-opened fire on Unpan Gleska and his camp, killing some three hundred Lakotas, including many starving women and children. On the morning of December 29th, during a negotiated surrender, soldiers in the U.S. The Ghost Dancers, led by Unpan Gleska, fled, and, in the days after Christmas, the Army caught up with them, near Wounded Knee Creek, on what is now the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. On December 15th, Indian police tried to arrest him, and, when he resisted, an officer shot and killed him. Late in 1890, Sitting Bull welcomed a band of Mnicoujou Lakota Ghost Dancers to the Standing Rock Agency. ![]() As it did, the United States Department of the Interior, which had implemented a reservation order prohibiting Indigenous ceremonies and dancing, requested that federal troops track down and arrest many of the movement’s leaders.Īmong those who were said to have encouraged the movement was Tatanka Iyotake, or Sitting Bull, a Lakota leader whose renown had grown after the defeat of George Custer in the Battle of Little Bighorn. The Ghost Dance began to spread among the Lakotas and other Western tribes. His prophecy called for the practice of the Ghost Dance, which would connect the living and the dead and reverse the tide of white conquest. Sometime toward the end of the eighteen-eighties, a Paiute holy man named Wovoka had a vision that promised the rebirth and renewal of Indigenous nations on the North American continent. ![]()
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