Milestone Monday: Wounded Knee Massacre
On December 29, 1890, soldiers of the United States Army killed up to 300 Lakota people at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, after a chaotic campaign to disarm the tribe. In his 2019 book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, David Treuer (Leech Lake Ojibwe) describes the tragedy:
One of the most poignant stories to come out of Wounded Knee involves a Lakota child named Zintkala Nuni, or Lost Bird. Her mother had been among those shot as she attempted to run with her infant daughter down the frozen creek. It wasn’t until four days later that the child was discovered – frostbitten, starving, but alive—in her dead mother’s arms. She was passed among the occupying soldiers as a kind of living souvenir of the massacre until, a few weeks after the conflict, a general named Leonard Colby adopted her. Raised partly by his wife, she suffered horribly—she was sent from one isolated boarding school to another, was later impregnated (most likely by Colby), and still later was found working in Wild West shows and in vaudeville, before she died of influenza in 1920, in abject poverty.
Today, in remembrance, we’re highlighting Truer’s book, as well as two titles from the National Museum of the American Indian, part of the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. Native Universe: Voices of American Indians, by Gerald McMaster (Siksika Cree) and Clifford E. Trafzer, was published in 2004, in association with National Geographic. Spirit Capture: Photographs from the National Museum of the American Indian, edited by Tim Johnson (Mohawk), was published in 1998.
Truer characterizes his book (published by Riverhead in New York), as an attempt to illuminate “Indian Life as more than a legacy of loss and pain” and is written out of resistance and the “fierce conviction that our cultures are not dead and our civilizations have not been destroyed.”
-Read an article by Craig Howe on the recent announcement that the Medals of Honor for U.S. Soldiers at Wounded Knee would not be rescinded.
-See more Milestone Monday posts.
--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Assistant
