Wounded Knee anniversary renews push to revoke US Medals of Honor

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Each year, the Sitanka Wokiksuye, or Chief Big Foot Memorial Ride, remembers the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre with a 14-day journey on horseback from the Cheyenne River Reservation to the site of that violence on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation.

By the late 1880s, the Native American Lakota tribe was confined to reservations, their traditional ways of life forbidden, and the buffalo, critical to their survival, were decimated. Left to survive on inadequate U.S. government rations, the Lakota and many other tribes found hope in the Ghost Dance, a messianic movement that promised a return to their former way of life.

The U.S. Army interpreted the dance as a call to arms and sent the 7th Cavalry to suppress the dancing and arrest Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull, who the U.S. government believed was orchestrating rebellion.

Sitting Bull was shot dead, and his half-brother, Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitanka, dubbed Big Foot, led his followers to consult with the Oglala leadership on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

The Army intercepted them and forced them to camp at Wounded Knee village; the next day, while confiscating weapons, a shot rang out, triggering the Army to open fire. By the end of the day, Big Foot and about 300 Lakota, including unarmed women, and children, lay dead. The event was celebrated as a victory for the U.S. Army, and the government awarded Medals of Honor to 20 cavalry soldiers for their actions.

This year, the Big Foot riders and their supporters hoped that President Joe Biden might revoke those medals.

Oliver “O.J.” Semans has spent years lobbying U.S. administrations to “take back honor wrongly bestowed.” The Sicangu Lakota voting rights advocate from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota lost many ancestors in that violence and said, “If Biden’s going to do anything, the best day would be December 29th” as that is the anniversary of the massacre.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced the Remove the Stain Act in 2019, calling on the Army to revoke those Medals of Honor. Despite some bipartisan support and backing from Native leaders and advocacy groups, the bill did not advance.

Administrative action

This July, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a review of medals of honor given for what he called the “engagement” at Wounded Knee to assess whether awardees violated the laws and military ethics of the era.

"It's never too late to do what's right," said an unnamed senior defense official quoted in the Pentagon press release that announced the decision. "And that's what is intended by the review that the secretary directed, which is to ensure that we go back and review each of these medals in a rigorous and individualized manner to understand the actions of the individual in the context of the overall engagement."

Austin directed a review panel of five members – three from the Department of Defense and two from the Interior Department -- to gather all relevant historical records and assess the actions of those soldiers based not on today’s standards but by those at the time.

"This is not a retrospective review," said another unnamed DoD official in the same Pentagon press release. "We're applying the standards at the time. And that's critical because we want to make sure that as these are reviewed and as a recommendation is made to the secretary and then to the president that we have applied the standards appropriately, while ensuring that we look at the context.”

The U.S. Army’s 1863 General Orders No. 100, also known as the “Lieber Code,” banned using excessive force, killing noncombatants, attacking during a ceasefire, and looting.

The Army held two sets of hearings on the matter in early 1891, interviewing officers and witnesses that included newspaper reporters, a surgeon and a Catholic priest.

“The Army was on the cusp of being a modern professional force, and so they at least made an effort to investigate allegations of crimes at Wounded Knee,” said Dwight S. Mears, author of “The Medal of Honor: The Evolution of America's Highest Military Decoration.”

In the end, the Army excused the cavalry’s actions as accidental and unintentional, and the U.S. Secretary of War recommended commendations.

“There was no political will to prosecute anybody, but they did collect a lot of evidence,” Mears said, “and if you sift through that with a critical eye, you can find a whole bunch of places where officers misrepresented themselves, which is a crime under oath.”

Three months after the massacre, the first Medal of Honor for Wounded Knee was awarded to an officer who, according to the medal citation “killed a hostile Indian at close quarters, and although entitled to retirement from service, remained to the close of the campaign.”

An award without guidelines

The U.S. Medal of Honor was created in 1863 to recognize acts of bravery, gallantry, and other distinguished actions in battle.

"But the Army didn't publish any standards for awarding it until 1889, so the commanding general of the Army just gave the medal out however he saw fit,” Mears explains.

In 1916, Congress directed the Army to review more than 2,600 medals and determine whether any had been issued “for any cause other than distinguished conduct by an officer or enlisted man in action involving actual conflict with an enemy.”

After an eight-month review, the Army struck more than 900 medals from the record. All of the Wounded Knee medals remained in place.

This year’s Wounded Knee review panel was given until October 15 to present its findings. By mid-November, Cheyenne River Sioux President Ryman LeBeau reported that the panel had voted three-to-two in favor of maintaining all medals awarded.

Semans believes that review was flawed from the start.

“Military historians weren’t used, and it was done over such a short period of time that evidence really couldn’t be put together,” he said.

Senator Warren and South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds asked the Interior and Defense departments to extend the review’s deadline to give stakeholders — including tribes, survivor descendants and historians a chance to weigh in.

"The devil is in the details,” Mears said. “If you don't know what actually happened at Wounded Knee, you might assume that every member of the 7th Cavalry, you know, just stood up and executed Lakota. And that is not what the record supports.”

To date, neither the Pentagon nor the White House has made any statement about the review panel’s findings.

“We have no additional updates to share at this time,” a Defense Department official told VOA.

https://www.voanews.com/a/wounded-knee- ... 08513.html