WOUNDED KNEE '73 50TH ANNIVERSARY
From The AIM Archives
The 50th Anniversary of Wounded Knee 1973
February 27, 2023 | Native Children's Survival
“I was born on the reservation in 1973, on a trail of tears exiled in the land of the free, in the spirit of Crazy Horse and our people buried at Wounded Knee.”
In an era where crime show dramas have become an American obsession, a true crime story continues to unfold...
Once upon a crime, back in 1879, during the so-called "American Indian Wars," Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the flagship Indian boarding school in the United States from 1879 through 1918, was founded. The school took over the historic Carlisle Barracks of the U.S. War Department, which was transferred to the Department of Interior. Ironically, the school's founder, U.S. Colonel RH Pratt, failed to discern that his ill-conceived motto, "Kill the Indian and Save the Man," would give rise to a resilient Indigenous movement for generations to come.
Racist notions of white supremacy were popular rallying cries back then and still are today. American history credits United States General Philip Sheridan, responding to Comanche Chief Tosawi, for coining, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." General Sheridan's sentiment was the warmongering slogan for armies of European invaders and colonists. By the 1800s, the United States and Canadian governments and American and Canadian settlers continued the drive to destroy, in whole or in part, Indigenous Peoples in North America. As their so-called "American Indian Wars" failed and Colonial genocide became a slow-moving destructive process, U.S. Colonel Pratt's "Kill the Indian and Save the Man" became U.S. and Canadian policy for cultural genocide.
Wrathful from losing their infamous Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer and defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn in June 1876, on December 29, 1890, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation near Wounded Knee creek became the United States killing fields. Under a white flag of truce, the U.S. 7th Calvary massacred more than 300 unarmed Lakota women, children, and men and buried their frozen bodies in a mass unmarked grave. While American his-story sees Wounded Knee as the climax to repress Native Nations, nearly a century later, their cowardly massacre would prove otherwise.
"Kill the Indian and Save the Man" paved the way for the United States and Canadian governments to abduct Native children by the hundreds of thousands and raise them as Americans and Canadians. Native children were terrorized, tortured, and abused in boarding and residential schools administered by religious groups of foreign governments. Many perished. Christian saviors or Angels of death? The unmarked graves of Native children found today bear insight into the intergenerational trauma survivors and their families endure.
One such boy, captured by the United States Government when he was just five, survived. The Ojibwe knew him as Nowa Cumig, "In The Center Of The Universe." The United States government knew him as Dennis Banks, on the FBI's most wanted list. Severed from his family and culture and forbidden to speak his language, he repeatedly escaped from the U.S. federal government's church-operated boarding schools, only to be recaptured and sent back. Despite their attempts to "Kill the Indian and Save the Man," in 1968, Dennis Banks co-founded the American Indian Movement, a movement the United States and Canadian governments could not eradicate.
On February 27, 1973, led by members of the Oglala Lakota Nation and the American Indian Movement, Native Peoples and allies from the four directions of Turtle Island came together at Wounded Knee to make a stand against injustice and tribal corruption at the hands of the U.S. government. This time, in place of Hotchkiss Cannons and the 7th Calvery, U.S. Marshals, the FBI, and Soldiers with armored personnel carriers on the ground, fighter jets overhead, and snipers in the shadows surrounded the village near Wounded Knee creek. In a poetic twist of fate, the Ojibwa boy sentenced to be "civilized" and "assimilated" into Euro-American culture became an Ojibwa Warrior in a movement that continues to expose the cruelly brutal genocidal practices and oppressive policies of Colonialism.
Following the Indigenous youth-led stand against environmental genocide at Standing Rock, which started in the Spring of 2016 and, like Wounded Knee '73, amassed world awareness and support, Nowa Cumig, born on April 12, 1937, began his journey to the spirit world on October 29, 2017. His body, shrouded in a buffalo robe, cedar, sage, and sweetgrass, filled the air as he walked on in the language, songs, and ceremonies he fought a lifetime to protect.
February 27, 2023, marks the 50th Anniversary of Wounded Knee and the 71-day stand that ignited Indigenous resistance from Wounded Knee to Washington D.C. and Hollywood to the United Nations. Reconstructing foreign and domestic relations, Wounded Knee changed everything.
“While The Great American Experiment continues to play out today and invasion and war persist, we remember Wounded Knee 1890/1973. In peace and prayer, we walk in the footsteps of our ancestors. Knowing we belong, the movement for the rights of Indigenous Peoples, Mother Earth, and all our relations is alive and still strong.”
In the Spirit of Nowa Cumig, join us in resisting the forces that threaten Indigenous Peoples, Mother Earth, and All Our Relations.