Wounded Knee 1973

On February 27, 1973, approximately 200 members of the American Indian Movement occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota — the site of the 1890 massacre of Lakota Sioux — and declared it liberated territory. They held it for 71 days against an encircling perimeter of FBI agents and federal marshals, demanding a Senate review of all treaties the United States had signed with Native nations and a federal investigation into the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The choice of Wounded Knee as the site was not incidental; AIM wanted the memory of 1890 in every news dispatch filed from the standoff.

The occupation grew from years of accumulated grievance over conditions on the Pine Ridge Reservation — some of the worst poverty in the United States, unemployment above 50 percent, inadequate housing and healthcare — and from anger at the tribal government of Richard Wilson, whom AIM accused of running a corrupt administration backed by the BIA and enforced by a private paramilitary. Local Oglala Sioux elders had invited AIM onto the reservation, and their request was as central to the confrontation as AIM's initiative. The standoff ended in May after two AIM members were killed and a federal marshal was paralyzed by gunfire.

The 1973 occupation produced two federal criminal trials — of AIM leaders Russell Means and Dennis Banks — that collapsed in 1974 when a judge dismissed charges after finding prosecutorial misconduct and a fabricated government witness. The confrontation drew international media attention and revived public awareness of reservation conditions, though the underlying economic and political conditions changed little in the years that followed. On Pine Ridge itself, the situation worsened: more than 60 AIM members and supporters were killed or died under suspicious circumstances in the two years after the occupation ended.