8 House hearings, and some eight decades after the original action, did Wounded Knee re-surface in public consciousness.
In the 1960s, many long-established attitudes toward American life and American history were being called into account, and among the subjects of this revisionist thinking were Indians and the Indian Wars. In 1970, author Dee Brown published an account of the Indian Wars that took as its title a line from a Stephen Vincent Benet poem, "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee." Three years later, another armed confrontation took place at the Pine Ridge reservation--this time in the context of 1960s- and 1970s-era political and cultural militancy, in which American Indians participated along with other minority groups. In the wake of the violent confrontation of 1973, further attention was called to the violence that had taken place there 83 years earlier. In the words of writer Rex Alan Smith, "during the 1973 occupation of the Indian community of Wounded Knee by other Indians, many people asked me what happened at Wounded Knee 'the first time.' They knew it was something bad, but they weren't quite sure what it was."
Nearly a quarter-century later still, Wounded Knee has become a familiar byword in American popular culture. It has become the counterpoint, in a sense, to Custer's disaster at Little Big Horn, as a shorthand expression for the Indians' side of the story about the Indian Wars. Yet, while the name of Wounded Knee is now well known, what happened there "the first time" still remains largely an unknown story. More people are likely to identify the name with Russel Means of the modern American Indian Movement and the 1973 confrontation than with any participant in the original events. Everyone has heard of General Custer and Sitting Bull, the antagonists at Little Big Horn, but how many people know that Sitting Bull himself figured in what happened at Wounded Knee? (In fact, he was killed in th...