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Showing posts from July, 2019

Removing the Stain of Wounded Knee

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This story first appeared on Rural America In These Times in 2019. For more on topics like this, please see my book, American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle... . B odies frozen in the snow, a baby with five bullet wounds, small children shot at such close range their clothes and bodies were singed with gunpowder. Lieutenant General Nelson Miles was shocked by what he found at Wounded Knee. He arrived from his headquarters in Rapid City, S.D., several days after the carnage, which occurred December 29, 1890. A battle-hardened Civil War veteran, he was appalled by what he called in a letter to his wife, “the most abominable criminal military blunder and a horrible massacre of women and children.” Over Miles’s objections, 20 Congressional Medals of Honor were soon awarded to the U.S. Army soldiers involved. When more medals were suggested later in 1891, Miles called them “an insult to the memory of the dead.”  Reps Cook, Haaland and Heck, standing l to r, with Marcella LeBea