Wounded Knee Massacre

name was Booker DeWitt, and in 1890 he was a young soldier in the United States Seventh Cavalry, riding through South Dakota in the bitter cold of late December toward a creek the Lakota people called Kankpe Opi Wakpala.

wounded knee what happened there on december twenty ninth eighteen ninety has been described many ways by many people with many investments in the description what it was at the level of simple physical fact was the massacre of between 250 and 300 Lakota Sioux men, women,

and children by the United States military, including many of the same soldiers who had, at other moments in their careers, been called heroes.

The 7th Cavalry opened fire on a group that was already in the process of surrendering.

A permanent thing.

A thing that exists in the world and cannot be recalled.

He came home from Wounded Knee and carried it with him.

He became a Pinkerton detective, a man paid to use the skills the army had given him in the service of industrial interests.

So I said, okay, that works.

And then I wrote the Wounded Knee book.

And the Wounded Knee book never mentions anything about the present.

It is about the Wounded Knee Massacre and how politics took us to the Wounded Knee Massacre.

And almost every single review said, whoa, that looks a lot like Abu Ghraib and George W. Bush.

And I'm like, really, does it? I had no idea.

Richard Aquila writes that The Great Train Robbery became the first blockbuster film of the 20th century.

To put things in perspective, the Wounded Knee Massacre took place only 13 years before Barnes' iconic gunshot.

Whatever fascination Easterners harbored for cowboys and Indians, it was not because their images were frozen in time.

Indeed, many parts of the United States still resembled the Wild West.

And the reason I say that is because Baum, of course, wrote The Wizard of Oz stories.

And I believe right after the Battle of Wounded Knee, he actually called for the genocide of Native Americans there.

So this now I have motive here.

I believe I believe that they put a curse on Baum and his family, Native American skinwalker or something like that.

And Booker's like, I remember this place.

I was here 20 years ago after the Battle of Wounded Knee.

I was going to get baptized.

And we see as it happens, the pastor offers to baptize us.

But Booker fights him off and runs away.

And he's like, I couldn't because no amount of water was going to wash away the blood.

the trauma he had of the Battle of Wounded Knee.

And Elizabeth says, it's okay, just continue.

The Lakota tribe was located on Pine Ridge Reservation.

And there was a number of these camped by a creek called Wounded Knee.

And the Indian agents and the troops stationed outside of the reservation became increasingly nervous about this ghost dance talk and the ghost dance shirts and all these kinds of things.

And so in February of 1890, the 7th Cavalry marched out to Wounded Knee to confront this camp of Indians.

Believing in the power of the ghost dance and the power of the ghost dance shirts, there was what can be termed only as a massacre.

More than 300 Lakota were killed that day, primarily women and children, because the ghost dance did not bring back the buffalo and the ghost dance shirts were not bulletproof.

And it was an awful American tragedy.

It really was.

I'm just thinking this now.

Wounded knee.

Shoots up his knee.

And then

there something there? Are you kidding

me?

So the wounded knee thing,

I just thought of now, but the scalped thing was very intentional.

It's been on the news a lot over the years, and almost never for anything good.

Wounded Knee is here, the 1891 and the 1973 one both.

The poverty numbers that get printed about this place are some of the worst in the country.

The distances are long, and the winters are hard, and the jobs are few.

It was what you talked about at night when you were sitting in somebody's car in the parking lot of the gas station with nothing to do.

He said most of the kids he knew treated it like a game, a dare.

Who's going to drive out to Wounded Knee at midnight and look for him? He said he and his cousin had done exactly that twice in March and seen nothing but the road.

The night he's talking about was in late April.