Last fight of the Indians: Massacre at Wounded Knee (Feature)

By Chris Melzer Dec 28, 2010, 4:12 GMT

New York - For four centuries, Native Americans resisted the advance of European Americans, but then it was all over: the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 marked the end of the Indian Wars, and the end of the era of the indigenous peoples of the prairies.

A snow storm saved the last Indians who managed to escape. The bodies of their fellow Lakota tribespeople lay on the freezing white expanse of what is now South Dakota - at least 150, possibly several hundred - shot, beaten, frozen to death.

This was one of the last major fights of the once-proud native people, one that would mark another spirit-breaking milestone in a history of brutal repression that some have called genocide.

When Christopher Columbus came upon the people he called Indians in 1492, their lives had little to do with those of the red-skinned people of Wild West stories of later centuries. But the horses brought in by the Spanish allowed the indigenous peoples to dominate the prairies and hunt buffalo.

Successive waves of millions of immigrants pushed into Indian country through the 19th century in a land grab backed by the US government.

The Sioux had managed one last victory at Little Bighorn in 1876, but illness and liquor, war and tribal conflicts forced the once invincible warriers, one after the other, into barren reservations.

And yet in 1890 the spirit of resistance lit up again, spurred by the Ghost Dance religious movement that promised a spirital and physical resurgence of their people. Behind it, US authorities saw a rebellion.

The authorities wanted to arrest the legendary Sitting Bull for his support of the movement, and the attempted arrest turned into a wild shootout. Over a score of people were killed. Sitting Bull's body was found in the dust with a bullet in the head.

US authorities got uneasy and ordered that all Native Americans be disarmed. On December 29, 1890, they set up a camp for them on Wounded Knee, and asked for their weapons. One man refused to hand over his new, expensive Winchester, so the story goes. To this day, it is not exactly known why the first shot was fired, or by whom.

The soldiers immediately reacted, and they targetted the camp with their repetition guns and four rapid fire guns set up around the site. Chief Spotted Elk, who was mortally ill at the time, was shot in the head. And 150-300 other Native Americans - the exact number is unknown - died with him, men, women and children.

Some 25 soldiers were also killed, most of them presumably from friendly fire.

Over the following years alcohol, poverty and lack of attention further eroded the life of the tribes. The film industry followed up with its portrayal of Indians as wild murderers in Hollywood westerns, dealing the final cultural blow to their stature.

The cultural image however started to change after the Second World War. Navajo Indians had served as code talkers, using their native tongue to confound enemy listening posts, and stories about their work afterwards gave them patriotic status. The emerging multiculturalism and civil rights movement of the 1960s raised awareness, as did the 1970 bestseller Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown.

Films like Little Big Man (1970), with Dustin Hoffman, started to correct the popular history, and there was increasingly broader public interest in the culture of the indigenous communities.

In 1973, activists of the American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee. The 27 militants took hostages and demanded the removal of a tribal leader they regarded as corrupt. They surrendered three- and-a-half months later, but only after drawing the eyes of the world to the general plight of Native Americans.

Marlon Brando turned down the Academy Award for best actor for his performance in The Godfather (1972) to protest the way Hollywood portrayed Native Americans. Ironically, one of the leaders of the occupation, Russell Means, himself later became an actor playing Native American characters.

In the early 1980s, the grave of the youngest survivor of the Wounded Knee Massacre was discovered by Lakota researchers. Zintkala Nuni - or Lost Bird - was only a few weeks old when the massacre happened. She survived sheltered from the bitter cold by her mother's dead body, and was picked up by a general who raised her as a white girl - a poignant fate that symbolized so much of the loss of indigenous Americans.

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