Occupation of Wounded Knee

When and how the decision was made to stop and take over the village of Wounded Knee is unclear, but the residents who were taken hostage testified about the circumstances. Agnes Gildersleeve, a seventy-year-old Chippewa who grew up in Minnesota and married a white trader, had operated the trading post in Wounded Knee with her husband since 1934.

Mrs. Gildersleeve watched from her front window as the street lights and gasoline pump lights were shot out by those arriving with the caravan and as guns, groceries, and other articles were carried out of the trading post across the road from her home. She turned out the lights, got down on the floor, crawled into the bedroom, and phoned the BIA, the FBI, the U.S. marshals, and the fire departments of nearby Gordon and Rushville, Nebraska. Two hours had passed but no help had arrived when someone with a gun came to the door and announced: “Regard yourselves as hostages and political prisoners.”⁸

Father Paul Manhart saw the caravan arrive. Manhart, priest at Sacred Heart Catholic Church on the hill near the trading post, had been on the Pine Ridge Reservation since 1952. Five young men drove up to the church and one approached Fr. Manhart, who was outside the church. “I greeted him, and he said nothing,” Fr. Manhart related. “Almost at that very moment the front door of the church was opened…[by] a young man who stood rather tall carrying a large shotgun.” After they all went into the church, Russell Means arrived.

During the day following the takeover, some 100 federal agents surrounded Wounded Knee, closing it off. Gunfire was exchanged. The siege was on. Discussions between AIM and the government began when South Dakota senators George McGovern and James Abourezk arrived and received a list of demands, among which were that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigate the election of Oglala Sioux officials and consider the details of some 371 broken treaties. Federal officials replied that they would negotiate only their terms of surrender. Negotiations, nevertheless, did begin. AIM demanded that the Tribal Council and Richard Wilson be suspended and new tribal elections be held. The Interior Department responded that such a suspension would threaten the basic political structure established by the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934. That was the exact consequence the AIM leaders desired. Russell Means proclaimed secession of Wounded Knee from the United States and announced that any foreign official representing a foreign power, especially the United States, would be regarded as a war agent.¹¹

Members of the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council and Richard Wilson attacked the ministers from the National Council of Churches, who had come as mediators, for their “aiding and abetting the criminals in Wounded Knee.”¹² Throughout the occupation and siege of Wounded Knee, Wilson was vituperative: working to prevent food from entering, criticizing governmental inaction, and calling upon the Justice Department to end negotiations so that Wounded Knee could be taken by force.

The confrontation broke into fierce fighting several times, especially at the end of March and in mid-April. Frank Clearwater, an Apache who had come to join the militants, was shot April 17 and died a week later. His burial became a major issue when the Tribal Council refused permission for him, because he was non-Sioux, to be buried on the reservation. The heated dispute was resolved when Leonard Crow Dog, a Sioux medicine man, offered to have Clearwater buried in his family plot.¹³ Louis Lamont, a Sioux from the Pine Ridge Reservation, was shot and killed in an April 27 exchange of gunfire. U.S. Marshal Lloyd Grimm was wounded seriously enough to remain paralyzed from the waist down. FBI agent Curtis Fitzgerald was shot but less seriously wounded, and we do not know how many Indians were wounded in the gunfights.