The Wounded Knee Massacre - December 29, 1890

On a frozen December morning in 1890, U.S. Army soldiers of the 7th Cavalry surrounded a band of Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. What followed was the massacre of approximately 300 people, primarily women and children, many unarmed, some killed while fleeing, others hunted down miles from the camp. Twenty soldiers received Congressional Medals of Honor; those medals have never been rescinded. In this episode, we explore the decades of broken treaties and systematic dispossession that preceded Wounded Knee, the Ghost Dance spiritual movement that authorities saw as threatening, Sitting Bull's death two weeks earlier, and the tragic events of December 29th. We examine how the army framed it as a battle for decades, the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation by the American Indian Movement, and why this history connects directly to Standing Rock, ongoing treaty disputes, and persistent inequities facing Native communities today. Through George Santayana's wisdom about remembering the past, we discover that false memories don't prevent repetition; they enable it. Only honest remembering and acknowledging genocide and broken promises allow us to break destructive patterns. A challenging but essential episode about America's treatment of indigenous peoples and the importance of remembering honestly rather than comfortably.