So, I’m supposed to be working on my Thematic Threads Spreadsheet this morning, which is an amazing writer’s tool that turns out to be quite arduous. Then, against Karl’s wishes, I turned on the news. Big mistake.
I try not to be too political on my Blog because we get enough of that on TV and social media, but when Pete Hegseth announced today that the twenty men who had been awarded the Medal of Honor for their participation in the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre would keep their medals, I was destroyed. For those of you unfamiliar with the history of Wounded Knee, those medals had been awarded to cover up the incompetence of political appointees that led to the deaths of at least 230 peaceful Lakotas, mostly women and children, as well as about twenty-five soldiers who were caught in their own crossfire. Heather Cox Richardson wrote an excellent essay today on this disgraceful chapter in American history, when robber barons desecrated an entire race of dignified people in the name of money and power. Some things never change…
Hegseth honoring those men as “brave soldiers” was a bridge too far for me, coming from a Fox couch commentator. The Wounded Knee Massacre was one of the most heartwrenching episodes in American history. In the early 1980s, I lived about a mile from the massacre site with one of the AIM (American Indian Movement) members who had occupied Wounded Knee in 1973 to protest corruption in tribal leadership and highlight the U.S. government’s failure to honor Native treaties. That occupation, like the massacre at Wounded Knee, has been “reframed” and vilified to conform to the government’s narrative. Most will never know the other side of that story, especially if our history books continue to be rewritten and sanitized.
The pain and loss of Wounded Knee are palpable for the Lakota people, as raw as the day it happened. Most interesting as an observer while living there was that the Lakota were not, for the most part, radicalized militants, like some of the folks headlining the news today. To this day, they do their best to honor the old ways, like Inípi, Pow Wows, and Sundances, even though their practice of the Ghost Dance back in 1890 was one of the excuses for staging the massacre in the first place.
I am blessed to have been welcomed into that culture as a wasichu to experience everything from daily tasks, like making fry bread, to participating in spiritual and healing ceremonies that few white people have encountered. At the time I lived there, I had been a writer in Hollywood, which made many of the spiritual leaders nervous. I promised them I would not exploit my experiences there when/if I left. Sadly, I did leave under very dramatic circumstances, but to this day, I have not written about them other than to allude to some of my experiences in general terms. Ah Ho
Judy Richter 