Wounded Knee 1973
Seventy-one days at the same place name, eighty-three years on
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The American Indian Movement was an Indigenous organisation founded in Minneapolis in 1968, originally to counter police violence against Native people in cities. The occupation brought Indigenous rights back into American public life as nothing had since the nineteenth century, following the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969. It also set off a period of serious violence on Pine Ridge. Politically the decade produced the Indian Self-Determination Act of 1975, giving tribal governments real administrative authority, and the religious freedom act of 1978 — Indigenous ceremonies had until then lacked full legal protection.
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Activists from the American Indian Movement and Lakota from Pine Ridge occupied the village of Wounded Knee, where the massacre of 1890 had taken place. They held out for seventy days against federal forces, demanding that old treaties be honoured.
Sources
- Smith & Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (1996)
- Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (1975)
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