Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory by David W. Grua (review)

WOUNDED KNEE LOOMS LARGE in American history. It's remembered as a tragedy, a turning point, an ending. On December 29, 1890, along the banks of Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, the Seventh Cavalry—in revenge for the death of Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer, many would later say—killed more than two hundred Lakota Ghost Dancers, the last remnants of Indigenous resistance to American Manifest Destiny. The Indian wars were over. Civilization triumphed over savagery. And out of the Indian's last gasp, modernity emerged. Or so the story goes.

But as David Grua painstakingly documents in Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory, historical remembrances of the event have been hotly contested from the beginning. For the U.S. Army, the "battle"—as they insisted on calling it—was justified and heroic. Reporters and Colonel James W. Forsyth, the commander in charge, blamed the event on "fanatical" Ghost Dancers. In articles, official reports, and even throughout an initial investigation spearheaded by a skeptical Major General Nelson A. Miles, U.S. Army soldiers closed rank to exonerate Forsyth and the Seventh Cavalry. Portraying the Indian wars as a "race war" and the Lakota as "hostile" and "'treacherous savages,' who had killed their own women and children," the official record cast Wounded Knee as "the final victory in the four-hundred-year struggle between civilization and savagery for the continent" (80).

The official record, however, did not go unchallenged. As Grua shows, Lakota survivors pursued historical justice, following Lakota cultural practices of conflict resolution, by seeking compensation from the government. In 1896 they filed claims for compensation from the government for property loss during what they called, in opposition to the official record, "a massacre." They also constructed counter-memorials. In one of the most interesting sections of the book, Joseph Horn Cloud—who as a teenager lost his parents at Wounded Knee—and other survivors erected an obelisk "In Memory of the Chief Big Foot Massacre." Placing their monument at the Wounded Knee mass grave in 1903, the memorial included a list of those murdered by the Seventh Calvary with the Lakota inscription "Cankpi Opi Eltona Wicakte Picun He Cajepi Kin—'These are the Names of those Killed at Wounded Knee'" (101). The government ignored the claims, and the memorial.

But in 1904, Horn Cloud and others renewed their pursuit of justice by filing again for compensation. This time, the government investigated. And what followed were several decades of hearings and investigations by the Indian Office and even Congress. These hearings, and the historical documentations they produced, slowly shifted the language around the event from "battle" to "massacre," until finally South Dakota Congressman Francis Case introduced a bill in the 1930s intended to "liquidate the liability" of the United States for Wounded Knee by offering the survivors and their descendants some form of compensation. Although the bill ultimately failed and was abandoned in the wake of World War II, it was nonetheless, according to Grua, a "historical achievement" that represented a foundation for future political activism in the name of the tragedy of Wounded Knee (174).

Grua's work comes amid a decadelong explosion of scholarship on the historical legacies of nineteenth-century U.S.–Indian violence. And as such, it should be read in the context of similar studies such as the work of Lisa Blee, Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Michael Elliott, Karl Jacoby, and Ari Kelman to name a few. Like these scholars, Grua exposes the layered ways in which political and economic power, memorial culture, and official and unofficial archives fundamentally structure our access to and understanding of the past, especially the violent past.

But unlike these other works, Grua's book only tangentially and very lightly engages with the politics of the past in the present. His study effectively ends in 1940. And although the publication of Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in 1970 and the American Indian...