O'maka Tokatakiya/Wašigla “Big Foot” Riders and Wounded Knee
Lililililililililililili!
December 29th in American history, something else you never learned about that had a major impact on the country as a whole—the last great “battle” of the “Indian Wars.”
Every year on December 15th, Indigenous people gather at Sitting Bull Camp near Bullhead, South Dakota for a journey to Wounded Knee.
They ride horseback nearly three hundred miles from the 15th-29th to the site of the Wounded Knee massacre—near Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.
They ride through Christmas and regardless of the weather to honor their ancestors.
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Wounded Knee is where more than 300 mostly elders, women and children were killed on December 29, 1890 by the 7th Cavalry of the United States Army.
It was recorded there were five hunting rifles total found with the Natives’ remains, but that figure is unverified officially.
Some reports say no guns were found while others list 20 “weapons” found among the Natives belongings after the “battle.”
The ride taken in honor of these ancestors is called the O’maka/Oomaka Tokatakiya (Future Generations) Ride.
The majority of the riders come from three Lakota Očeti Sakowin reservations: Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, and Pine Ridge—my Ata (Father) was born and attended boarding school at Pine Ridge.
Many of the riders are young people giving up their school vacations and Christmas celebrations for the ride.
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The Future Generations Ride is an offshoot of the Big Foot Memorial Ride that ran from 1986 to 1990.
1890 is only 133 years ago. Memories were still fresh for our Elders when we were growing up.
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The original ride started on the 22nd of December and traced the route taken by Wašigla (Big Foot)—leader of the Mniconjou Lakota from the Cheyenne River reservation—and his people, as they were chased by the 7th Calvary, from their camp near Bridger to where they were surrounded and slaughtered with rifles, handguns, bayonets and four Hotchkiss mountain guns near Wounded Knee Creek.
Left in the cold, it's unclear how many were dead due to the attack or froze to death as they lay wounded.
When the bodies were finally gathered days later, many had to be pried from the ground.
They were uncounted and piled in mass graves so the exact number killed is unknown, but estimates are between 300 and 450.
The Army stopped counting at 200.
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Due to potential backlash, the US Army sought to cover up what happened.
More Medals of Honor—20 total—were awarded to soldiers who participated in the Wounded Knee massacre than any other singular conflict in United States history.
Labeled the Medals of Dishonor, several bills have been put before Congress to rescind these ill-gotten and badly motivated silence buyers.
The motivation?
After the 1864 massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek in Colorado, Captain Silas Stillman Soule—a fellow Maineiac born in Bath, Maine—was adamant people know of the atrocities that really happened.
He was jailed, intimidated, threatened and even shot at, but Soule—and his company of soldiers—refused to fire at unarmed Natives at Sand Creek. Then he made his voice heard through reports that reached from Colorado to Washington to the floor of the U.S. Senate about the savage slaughter that occurred.
Walking home with his new bride on April 23, 1865, Silas Soule was ambushed, shot in the head and killed by an assassin who had participated in the Sand Creek Massacre. Soule was just 26 years old.
Soule’s whistleblowing had another byproduct.
When the U.S. Army slaughtered hundreds of Lakota women, children and elders at Wounded Knee, the government handed out a record number of Medals of Honor to buy the participants silence about the atrocities they committed.
But massacres like Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, whistleblowers like Soule and press coverage pushed the federal government to abolish the "Indian extermination policies" in favor of "assimilation."
While the assimilation policies were cultural genocide, at least they weren't providing bounties to settlers for “ Redskin” scalps and actively, openly slaughtering Indigenous people any more.
I’ve known this history for 50 years. I read Dee Brown’s book “ Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee “ back in the early 1970’s.
My parents read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee aloud to us five kids as we drove across the country from TN to CA to visit our grandparents. I mostly remember my parents crying and crying reading the stories of the massacre and him peeing off Mount Rushmore and how Teddy Roosevelt defaced that sacred rock face with those heinous dead presidents. And how he called money frog skins. Thank you for sharing this. It’s so heartbreaking 💔