Wounded Knee -- v

 

Aftermath

That afternoon, when the shooting ended, Army personnel loaded 39 of their wounded into wagons, along with their dead, 25. Fifty-one wounded Sioux were located, 47 of them women and children, some of whom—like six of the cavalry survivors—would soon succumb to their injuries. The Sioux dead were left on the field and in the ravines, but exactly how many had been killed will never be known. Native people consider 300 a fairly just estimate.

That night, a blizzard came in on the wind and laid a gossamer veil over the carnage—some say mercifully; some think the hand of white man’s God was simply covering their sin. Wounded Knee was the final military action in the Plains Indians Wars, the horrid, bloody conclusion of a cultural and religious confrontation that, from my vantage point, a white man at Wounded Knee, looks even today like something obscenely inevitable. Millions of white people—my own Dutch immigrant ancestors among them—went west for cheap land they assumed the Sioux didn’t value. After all, where were the improvements, the tree lines, the fences, the buildings, the cut sod? Millions of white people—my own ancestors among them—thought our holy book to a pagan people was a generous gift for the millions of acres those people had once roamed in freedom. My own family included, we wanted to own what they wanted to honor.

But the Lakota people lost far more than those buried on the hill where we’re standing. They lost what the cavalry and the government called “the battle”; they lost the war; they lost their way of life. “And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard,” Black Elk says. “A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”

There’s more. You must have noticed because you can’t have missed what’s right in front of us—what’s been there the whole time we’ve been watching what happened. Be careful as you walk around on that promontory because a crumbling block foundation, scattered with crumpled beer cans and trash, marks the outline of what was once a Catholic church, right there where those Hotchkiss guns rained death on the council circle. It’s crumbling, as things do that are not preserved.

The church that once stood here was destroyed in the 1973 Wounded Knee conflict, when, once more, violence occurred not far from where we’re standing. Men and women who held radically different views of Native dignity squared off against each other in this very valley. That dispute brought in U. S. Marshalls and turned deadly, when armed wasicu, here, once again, dug in like the cavalry. For many, those government marshalls were here to defend tribal leaders some thought violent, despotic men who’d long ago sold their souls for fools’ gold.

It isn’t pretty—this crumbling shell. There’s nothing to suggest that what once stood above ground here represented—even offered—the Prince of Peace.

In Coventry, England, you can walk within the skull-like remains of a cathedral destroyed by Nazi bombs during World War II, a remarkable memento of Brit suffering during relentless air strikes. Coventry Cathedral is what much of Europe looked like after Hitler. That foundation is immense, its walls rise and fall jaggedly. But its perimeters are festooned with plaques and flowers and all kinds of memorials neatly commemorating suffering and heroism.

No walls still stand on the foundation half-buried in the crest of the hill where we’re standing. No memorials—just graffiti—decorate what’s there. No one keeps the place up, so what’s left deteriorates in the abusive hands of changing prairie seasons. You can walk into that foundation, if you dare. The empty shell of the church that once looked over the field where hundreds died is nothing at all like the monument at Coventry.

And yet it is. It’s just not sanitized. But then, nothing is at Wounded Knee. Today, there is very little to mark the spot, beyond the sign on the road and the old monument behind us. There is a circular visitors’ center down the hill to the east, the pit toilets stand just outside. The center itself is black, and it’s likely you’ve parked beside it before you walked up the hill to the burial monument. In the summer, the place is open. You can wander into its dark confines, where various displays will tell part of the story. But most of the year you’ll find a padlock on the door, which means you’re on your own at Wounded Knee.

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continued and finished on Monday. . .