Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory

Wounded Knee, S.Dak., emerged as a symbol of Native American resistance to white American dominance in the early 1970s, via Native scholar Dee Brown’s history, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and Lakota activists who occupied the site demanding greater sovereignty over tribal affairs. But as historian Grua emphasizes, the 1973 occupation “relied heavily on the endeavors of an earlier group of activists”: the survivors of the band of the Lakota Sioux leader Big Foot, who strove to obtain justice for kinsmen killed at Wounded Knee by U.S. cavalry in 1890. Following anthropologist Maurice Halbwachs’s conception of memory as a social construction, Grua stresses how Lakota memory of the massacre differed greatly from that of white Americans, encouraging Lakota survivors to dedicate their lives to gaining compensation for their people’s suffering. By tracing the patterns of recollection and interpretation of past events that informed respective responses to the Wounded Knee massacre, Grua lucidly reveals that “the Indian Wars had not ended in 1890; rather, the venue of struggle had changed from the battle field to the landscape of memory.” Grua encourages readers to reflect on the ways historical knowledge is constructed and why it can be so difficult for opponents to agree on the facts underlying a particular conflict. (Jan.)