In popular history, the massacre at Wounded Knee has come to stand for the end of the Plains wars—and of Indigenous resistance more broadly. But for many, it was just the beginning.
leaders Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and Clyde Bellecourt joined hundreds of others at a community hall on the reservation. There, they discussed staging a symbolic liberation of Wounded Knee, with the idea of reasserting the Lakotas’ traditional system of governance, based on the word of elders and the consensus of treaty councils rather than the rule of a single leader like Wilson.
In the days that followed, a second massacre seemed imminent at Wounded Knee. The Justice and Defense Departments sent additional personnel, plus M16 assault rifles, hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, and a fleet of armored personnel carriers, or A.P.C.s. Many of the federal agents wanted to seize the village and rout the protesters by force. Still, the activists who were now trapped inside refused to leave.
Federal forces did all they could to draw the protesters out. The phone lines were cut, and utilities were periodically shut off. When rations inside the village ran out, food and medicine had to be delivered by airdrop, or obtained by backpackers who knew the countryside and could slip around checkpoints in the dark. There were nightly exchanges of gunfire; the sky lit up with tracer rounds and flares that caught fire on the dry prairie grass and blackened the earth.
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