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Wounded Knee

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TV-PG
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2:54

The tragic, yet true tale of Sitting Bull, the leader of the Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux tribe who led his people's resistance against the United States, sung by musician and artist Jeffrey Lewis.

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On February 27, 1973, 200 American Indian Movement (AIM) leaders and supporters occupied the South Dakota reservation town of Wounded Knee, site of the infamous massacre of 300 Sioux by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry in 1890. Reporters on the scene relay information about the takeover.

Siege of Wounded Knee

On this day in 1890, in the final chapter of America's long Indian wars, the U.S. Cavalry kills 146 Sioux at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Throughout 1890, the U.S. government worried about the increasing influence at Pine Ridge of the Ghost Dance spiritual movement, which taught that Indians had been defeated and confined to reservations because they had angered the gods by abandoning their traditional customs. Many Sioux believed that if they practiced the Ghost Dance and rejected the ways of the white man, the gods would create the world anew and destroy all non-believers, including non-Indians. On December 15, 1890, reservation police tried to arrest Sitting Bull, the famous Sioux chief, who they mistakenly believed was a Ghost Dancer, and killed him in the process, increasing the tensions at Pine Ridge. On December 29, the U.S. Army's 7th cavalry surrounded a band of Ghost Dancers under the Sioux Chief Big Foot near Wounded Knee Creek and demanded they surrender their weapons. As that was happening, a fight broke out between an Indian and a U.S. soldier and a shot was fired, although it's unclear from which side. A brutal massacre followed, in which it's estimated almost 150 Indians were killed (some historians put this number at twice as high), nearly half of them women and children. The cavalry lost 25 men.

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