Copyright © 2001 NLThomas
All Rights Reserved

The Lakota elders call this time of the year "The Moon of the Popping Trees." Before planes, trains and automobiles stole the winter nights of the stillness their parents and grandparents spoke of, the elders said it got so cold one could hear the twigs in the trees popping in the frigid air. At times it almost sounded like the report of a distant rifle.

In the early morning hours of Dec. 29, 1890, the Hotchkiss guns situated on each end of the valley overlooking the Sioux encampment at Wounded Knee barked into action as they spewed bullets pointblank into the unarmed Lakota men, women and children.

Fighting back with their bare hands, the unarmed Lakota warriors shouted to the women and children, "Inyanka po! Inyanka po!" (run! run!).

Elderly men, unable to fight back, stood defiantly singing their death songs before falling to the hail of bullets. The exact number of Lakota killed by the 500 soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry, George Armstrong Custer's old troop, may never be known because many women and children made it out of the valley and died of their wounds later.

Twenty-three soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry were awarded Medals of Honor for this action against unarmed men, women and children. Even a musician named John E. Clancy received a Medal of Honor for supposed bravery at Wounded Knee.

Have the Lakota (Sioux) forgotten this day of tragedy and sorrow?

Since 1986, the Lakota have commemorated this massacre by riding the same trail taken by Big Foot and his band in 1890. Oftentimes in below-zero weather they ride their horses on this trail and camp out along the way until they reach their final destination at Wounded Knee Creek.

Three Lakota men, Birgil Kills Straight, Alex White Plume and Jim Garrett, started this tradition by forming a group they called Si Tanka Wokiksuye Okolakiciye -- Big Foot Memorial Riders. They are on this trail even as I sit at my computer writing about it.

Every year, at the conclusion of the ride, a ceremony is held at the mass gravesite where the frozen bodies of those men, women and children murdered that day were unceremoniously dumped. Arvol Looking Horse, keeper of the Sacred Pipe of the Lakota, prays for peace and justice for the descendants of the massacre and he prays that America apologize to the Lakota for the murderous acts of that day and that the Medals of Honor issued for this atrocity be revoked.

To the Lakota people, Wounded Knee was not that long ago.

After the assault on the unarmed Indians, units of the Seventh Cavalry set out across the Pine Ridge Reservation looking for survivors. A troop rode on to the playgrounds at Holy Rosary Mission Boarding School, four miles north of Pine Ridge Village and about 15 miles from Wounded Knee.

Prodded by the Jesuit priests, the frightened children were forced to water and feed the horses of the soldiers. My grandmother, Sophie (Good Shell Woman) Abeita was one of those students. She was a teen-ager at the time.

She never forgot that day. She recalled watching the soldiers as they laughed about their great victory at Wounded Knee as they wiped the blood from their uniforms and saddles.

Five days after the massacre, an editorial in the Aberdeen (S.D.) Saturday Pioneer appeared to speak the minds of the many white settlers of that day. It reads, "The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth."

Ten years later, the author of that editorial would write a children's book that would bring him everlasting fame worldwide. His name was L. Frank Baum and he wrote "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." Few people know he had called for genocide against the Lakota people.

It is one of the ironies of this tragic event that the makeshift hospital set up to assist those who were wounded was in the Episcopal Church in the village of Pine Ridge.

Above the door through which the wounded were carried was a sign that read, "Peace on Earth, Goodwill to men."

Tim Giago, publisher and editor of the weekly newspaper the, Lakota Journal, P.O. Box 3080, Rapid City, S.D. 57709, can be reached by e-mail.