"Remember Wounded Knee": AIM's Use of Metonymy in 21st Century Protest

'Remember Wounded Knee': AIM's Use of Metonymy in 21st Century Protest" examines the American Indian Movement's call to remember the 1890 Big Foot massacre as a rhetorical move that produces a complex, multilayered palimpsest, as various incarnations of the words Wounded Knee function to define the course of protest for the American Indian Movement. Homi Bhabha's theory of metonymy playing an important role in "the social articulation of difference from the minority perspective" is especially useful for exploring how chance and contingency work in understanding American Indian history. Using as its primary source a collection of AIM's early 1970 documents, which are now available on the World Wide Web, along with the contemporary articulation of the American Indian Movement's purpose, this article traces the meaning of Wounded Knee as a pan-tribal generation of American Indian people attempt to recover an indigenous past while putting that past to work, defining the future.