On this day — February 27, 1973 — the land at Wounded Knee stirred again.
Not because our people forgot 1890.
But because memory does not stay buried.
When around 200 Oglala Lakota relatives, alongside the American Indian Movement, entered Wounded Knee, it was not an act of spectacle. It was an act of return. They went to a place where ancestors had fallen under U.S. gunfire in 1890 — a place where bodies were left in the snow — and they said:
The protest was about corruption within tribal governance, yes. But deeper than that, it was about the United States continuing to violate the treaties it signed — agreements made nation to nation, promises written in ink but rooted in sacred word.
And when the federal response came — FBI, marshals, National Guard — it came heavy. Machine guns. Tracer rounds. Seventy-one days of siege.
I do not romanticize firefights. People were wounded. People died. Fear was real. But there was also something else there — something Len Foster later described as beautiful. Not because it was easy. But because people stood up together without shame.
For generations before 1973, our people were told to cut our hair.
To burn our medicine bundles.
To stop speaking our languages.
To become something else in order to survive.
Wounded Knee in 1973 was not just about protest.
It was about dignity returning to the body.
The occupation did not achieve every stated political goal. But it shifted something in the consciousness of this continent. It forced the country to look — even if briefly — at treaties it preferred to forget. It strengthened AIM. It ignited solidarity across Native Nations.
But here is what I sit with:
Every decision made there — every risk taken — echoes forward.
Our ancestors in 1890 were shot in the snow.
In 1973, their grandchildren stood in that same snow and said, “We are still here.”
And whether one agrees with every tactic or not, the deeper current was this:
Wounded Knee 1973 opened hearts because it exposed the wound.
And sometimes healing begins when the wound is no longer hidden.
The story did not end there.
Because resistance, like ceremony, moves across generations.
And the fire lit in those seventy-one days still warms — and challenges — us now.
