saddlebag dispatches
THE MASS GRAVE OF THE LAKOTA MASSACRED AT WOUNDED KNEE IN 1890 AND AS IT LOOKS TODAY. THE MONUMENT MARKS THE GRAVE OF CHIEF BIGFOOT.
thought on February 28, 1973. The government was more thoughtful. Indians were more peaceful. There was no ghost dance and no planned extinction of the buffalo, no forced movement of Native Americans across the country. But there it was. AIM founders Russel Means and Dennis Banks organized a caravan of several hundred people. They drove and marched into Wounded Knee and took over the community as a symbolic gesture of protest. They issued a public statement demanding a government hearing on treaty rights, an investigation of the BIA and of Tribal Council president Richard “Dick” Wilson. The list of demands was endorsed by the eight leading chiefs and medicine men of the Oglala Band. It wasn’t a ghost dance, but government agencies saw it as a threat. There were plenty of grievances on the reservation but this burst of activism was triggered by the murder of a young Lakota man, Wesley Bad Heart Bull, by a
white man who had stabbed him to death. The assailant was being charged with involuntary manslaughter and had been released without bail. Some of the demonstrators brought weapons—the Sioux were warriors after all—but they didn’t bring supplies. They were expecting the occupation to last a few days at the most, but much to their surprise, the next morning Wounded Knee was surrounded by U.S. marshals, FBI agents, BIA police, and a private militia controlled by Tribal Council President Richard Wilson. There was no turning back once things had escalated that far. THE OCCUPATION OF ALCATRAZ A lot of things were going on in the 60s and 70s in America that had ramped the government’s level of concern. The 1968 Democratic Convention was still fresh in the minds of government law enforcement
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