The occupation of Wounded Knee, 1973

27 February 2027

On 27 February 1973, about 200 Oglala Lakota and members of the American Indian Movement took over the village of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The occupation lasted 71 days, until 8 May 1973, and it began after a dispute over tribal leadership on the reservation. The U.S. Marshals Service calls it the longest civil disorder in its history.

The site was chosen for its name. Wounded Knee was where soldiers of the 7th Cavalry had killed Lakota men, women and children in 1890, and the occupiers said they had come to draw attention to broken treaties. They demanded the removal of the Pine Ridge tribal chairman, Richard Wilson, and the honoring of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. An agreement on 5 May promised a meeting on the treaty.

Federal officers surrounded the village. The Marshals Service, the FBI and other agencies cordoned off the area, and shots were exchanged for weeks. Two Native men were killed. On the government side, a deputy U.S. marshal, Lloyd Grimm, was seriously wounded, and so was an FBI agent. The occupiers used the village church as their headquarters, and the government’s negotiators talked with them while the shooting continued.

The siege ended without a treaty. The last occupiers left on 8 May 1973, and no agreement was reached on the treaty question. The occupation followed the Alcatraz takeover of 1969 and became the best-known action of the Red Power movement; treaty rights and the condition of reservation communities stayed on the national agenda after it.

Wounded Knee is remembered twice a year. The massacre site of 1890 and the village occupied in 1973 are on the same ground on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and the cemetery there holds the graves of the Lakota killed in 1890. Fifty years later, in February 2023, descendants and organizers returned to the same ground to mark the anniversary of the takeover.

Sources

• U.S. Marshals Service, “Incident at Wounded Knee”
• National Museum of the American Indian, “Wounded Knee Occupation” (record)
• NPR, “Wounded Knee occupation 50th anniversary”, 27 February 2023
• National Park Service, “Occupation of Wounded Knee, 1973”
• Timeanddate.com, “Holidays and Observances in the United States in 2027”

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