Sunday marks date of 'cold-blooded massacre,' but military review is still unresolved
www.usatoday.com
134 years ago, hundreds of Lakota were massacred at South Dakota's Wounded Knee Creek. The U.S. is reviewing medals awarded to soldiers who took part.

The date marks the slaughter of hundreds of Lakota, including women and children, in the snow at Wounded Knee Creek by the 7th Cavalry on Dec. 29, 1890.

“I have never heard of a more brutal, cold-blooded massacre than that at Wounded Knee,” Maj. Gen. Nelson Miles, who took over the 7th Cavalry after the noncombatant deaths came to light, wrote in a private letter.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon announced it would review 20 Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers who took part in the massacre as the military continues efforts to acknowledge the role that racism may have played in its past and that not all of its awardees meet modern standards of heroism.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin directed a five-member panel to present recommendations by Oct. 15, but those recommendations have yet to be announced.

As the last decade of the 19th century began, the Indigenous Lakota Sioux people of the Great Plains had been put in government reservations, according to History.com. Their culture and hunting livelihoods were destroyed as white settlers seized their lands and pursued fortunes of gold in the Black Hills of what had become South Dakota.

As noted by History.com, the year 1890 would only compound their despair, bringing prolonged drought and outbreaks of measles, influenza and whooping cough. As their world crumbled around them, many found hope in a dance ritual that adherents believed would ultimately spark an upheaval in which their enemies would be ousted and their once-free existence restored.

White settlers, however, viewed the growing Ghost Dance practice as a harbinger of insurrection. President Benjamin Harrison dispatched the 7th Cavalry to the area, where growing tensions would culminate in the slaughter of hundreds of Lakota at Wounded Knee Creek on Dec. 29, 1890.

Full article

  • eldavi@lemmy.ml
    ·
    3 days ago

    it looks like we're going to keep doing this every few decades when you take into account that the vietnamese, burmese, standing rock & gazans all experiencing the same exact treatment right now and all of it is a the hands of the same american empire who SWEARS TO GOD that they will never do this again every time they do again.

    the people i descend from are almost completely subsumed by their greater western hegemony so i gave them a pass when they self-defeatingly aligned with their western majority; but my explorations in exploring my cultural inheritance has taught me that even the people of the best preserved cultures happily support genocidal regimes like my government and twist themselves into the same positions of capitalist cannon fodder that are/have oppressed them and others.

    so i can't help but think that this is the ultimate end goal of the isrealis & americans: to genocide the gazans into numbers small enough so that they'll never again have the collective strength to push back on the boot that's stomping on their collective necks; just like the people at wounded knee and the indigenous populations of the americans today are unable to do.

    just like the peoples before the westerners showed; the gazans had a self sustaining life and economy whose destruction we're witnessing in real time on tiktok and other social media and with the aim of ensuring that the few remaining, poor, hungry & broke gazans are just as controllable through their dependency on governmental purse strings as any reservations & ejidos in the americas are today.

    and to "compensate" they might add another sentence about this genocide after the trails of tears paragraph in western history books to convince future generations that we weren't the bad guys; it will work if they do and that will be the context that our future generations live within.