Finding my heart at Wounded Knee
It’s pouring with rain as we sit in our vehicles across the road from the Wounded Knee memorial on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
It’s the site of the mass grave of around 300 Lakota men, women and children, who were killed on December 29, 1890 by the US 7
th
Cavalry Regiment.
Our guide, Warren (Gus) Yellowhair, climbs into the seat next to me and closes the door to stop the rain filling the car. It’s unseasonably cold – in one day the temperature has dropped from 26 to 4 degrees.
I’m parked next to a big red sign which tells the history of the site but Yellowhair says there’s mixed feelings in the reservation as to how to properly commemorate this history.
If it was good weather today you would have people here selling you arts and crafts, he says.
“Some would like to see this kept as a sacred site,” he says, such as that of the small but significant mountain, Bear Butte further north near Sturgis, where prayer cloths can be found tied to trees and Native Americans come regularly to pray.
Warren (Gus) Yellowhair
I hear that on that cold December morning the Sioux chief, Big Foot, and around 350 of his followers were camped at Wounded Knee creek. The proud people had been decimated, forced to live on reservations with cultural and religious practices forbidden and their precious buffalo almost wiped out.
Many had been drawn to a new cult, known as the Ghost Dance, preached by a Paiute shaman called Wovoka, who prophesised that the dead and the living would soon live once more in the old way – with no more white people. They were told to perform the Ghost Dance and wear brightly-coloured shirts with images of eagles and buffaloes, which would protect them from the army’s bullets.
These wild dances had spread fear through the white community, even making headlines in the eastern states. On December 15, another Native American chief, Sitting Bull, was killed while being arrested, and Big Foot led his people south to seek protection on the Pine Ridge reservation.
According to eyewitnesses, the massacre began when a shot was fired, and chaos broke out, with men, women and children running for their lives. Twenty-five soldiers also died that day.
Photographers “embedded” with the army later took photos of the bodies of Big Foot and others frozen in the snow, and other photos were doctored and sold for extravagant prices. Scattered fighting continued for several days afterwards, but this was the end of the Ghost Dance movement and the Indian wars.
The memorial at Wounded Knee.
Photo:
Chad Coppess
South Dakota Department of Tourism
That morning at the Pine Ridge Chamber of Commerce, I had met Tribal Historic Preservation Officer / Director Mike CatchesEnemy, who gave me an impromptu history lesson at my request: on June 25 and 26, 1876 the 7
th
Cavalry led by Lt Col George A Custer had been defeated in Montana at the famous Battle of the Little Big Horn – also known as the Battle of the Greasy Grass, or Custer’s Last Stand. What happened at Wounded Knee some 14 years later in 1890 could only be revenge by those same soldiers of that unit, he says.
He told me that in his cultural resource management archaeology thesis he initially compared the trauma his people suffered after Wounded Knee as a premeditated crime scene similar to that of 9/11. His graduate advisor advised him to leave out the comment that these military acts were considered terrorist killings, that the general public would not be so readily acceptant of that correlation.
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, home of the Oglala Lakota Nation (Oglala Sioux Tribe), covers around 29,000 square km, bordering the Nebraska state line to the south and Badlands National Park to the north and was originally part of the Great Sioux Reservation established by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, but which was later ignored when the US government opened millions of acres of the Black Hills to homesteaders and private interests.
I had driven in from the Badlands side, having done the loop from Sturgis in the west via Wall and its tourist trap, the Wall Drug Store, where a group of concerned citizens run the Wounded Knee Museum.
I travelled south through the tiny town of Interior and onto rolling pine-covered hills and ridges, dotted with farms and settlements.
Unlike Australian Aboriginal reserves I did not need a permit. Every few kilometres you come across trailers surrounded by piles of old cars and farm machinery.
This is pickup country.
After the small town of Kyle I found my motel, the Lakota Prairie Ranch, where dinner was a delicious fried chicken and dessert of mixed fruits pie.
Yellowhair takes us to the Woksape Tipi Library at the Oglala Lakota College, where archivist Tawa Ducheneaux tells us about how they are collecting and archiving Lakota historic resources, including a “few thousand boxes” of artefacts of the tribe’s records and that of the college, which was started in the early 1970s.
Ducheneaux’s name shows her French heritage – French fur traders were the first non-Native Americans to come through this country.
“We have a long history of our cultural history leaving the Badlands,” she says.
The college itself has about 1500 students. Each of the reservation’s nine districts has a centre and there’s also a satellite college and library at Rapid City.
Now nearly 60 per cent of the nurses on the reservation are graduates of the college and 70 per cent of the teachers are locals.
Wanda Reddy, direct mail clerk, tells me when we visit the Historical Centre, after playing us
an audio tape and a video telling the story of Wounded Knee, that she studied Business at the college.
What if there hadn’t been that opportunity, I ask.
“I would have worked in a grocery store,” she says shyly.
Wanda Reddy
Tourists are welcome at the centre, particularly when there’s artists in residence in late June to early September. Graduation pow wows are also open to the public.
Driving off, Yellowhair tells me to tune my car radio to KILI (90.1FM) to catch what’s happening on the “rez” – staffed by college journalism graduates, who also work at the local cable TV station.
He tells me private ceremonies are still held where people are given Lakota names.
He was named Tasunka Najin by his uncle which means His Horse is Standing. At your puberty ceremony your name will be changed, only the first in several changes during the course of one’s life.
“Having a Lakota name means when I pass on my ancestors will know me,” he says.
At the small town of Pine Ridge, we find the cosy café, Higher Ground Coffee House, owned by Belva Matthews and chef husband Leon, who bases the unusually exotic food on recipes his mother gave him.
Leon, who writes a blog for the Lakota Country Times – one of two Native American newspapers covering the area - proudly poses for a photo against the red stone walls of the café in his matching Russell Means T-shirt.
Means, who died in 2012, was one of the leaders in 1973 of around 200 Oglala Lakota and followers of the American Indian Movement, who held a 72-day stand-off against corruption and racism at the Wounded Knee site.
An actor, his films include The Last of the Mohicans, and the Disney cartoon, Pocahontas, where he spoke the part of Pocahontas’s father.
Belva Matthews, her sister and fellow chef
Leon
Matthews
Our last stop is the Red Cloud Indian School, where Community Relations associate and former student Rilda Means shows us around what was started by the Oglala chief, Red Cloud, and Jesuits of the Holy Rosary Mission in 1888.
On a reservation which has a high number of social problems, the school is remarkable in that 98 per cent of the senior year graduate and their names can be found carved into the bricks in the old building, Drexell Hall.
Kids travel “1000 miles a day in 18 buses” to come to a school where Lakota culture and basketball is “a big deal”.
“Every day we teach them you have a chance,” says Means, whose father was an alcoholic but mother was a teacher here, and who went on to graduate from the Black Hills State University with a Master in Lakota Leadership and Management.
The school has a renowned Heritage Centre, museum and gift shop, displaying Native American art, including beadwork and porcupine quillwork.
Rilda Means
We leave the reservation via a quick look at the Lakota-run Prairie Wind Casino, which like the rest of the reservation, is “dry” but where you can still sip “pop or coffee” while you gamble.
Speeding north-west into the misty shapes of the Badlands along the Red Shirt road, I wish I had more time at Pine Ridge, a place I’d wanted to visit since reading the classic history by Dee Brown:
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
.
A shorter travel story was published in this week's The Saturday Paper:
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