To Sioux, Wounded Knee Seems ‘Like Only Yesterday’ : Indians: Anger and despair over incident that finally broke a proud people remain real after 100 years.

WOUNDED KNEE, S.D. —  It is peaceful here, in the charnel quiet of a new day. Snow blankets the hills, now as then. The sun is shining.

Listen: from the valley to the west, faintly, the lowing of cattle, the barking of dogs. Even closer: the echo of what happened here.

Beside Chankpe Opi Wakpala--a creek called Wounded Knee--more than 200 people died 100 years ago, many of them women and children. The sacred Ghost Dance did not save them.

Whether what happened was a battle or massacre will perhaps be debated forever. What no one disputes is this: At Wounded Knee, on Dec. 29, 1890, the red man’s last resistance to what was called the “march of civilization” was trampled once and for all. The Indian wars were over.

And a proud people called Sioux by the whites but who call themselves Lakota, a people who had dominated the northern plains and considered themselves the superiors of any white man, were finally subjugated.

Sick with pneumonia and spitting up blood, Big Foot, the chief of the Minneconjou band of the Lakotas, had gone peacefully with soldiers to the U.S. cavalry camp, flying the white flag of truce. Now he lay on the ground as troopers rounded up weapons. His band was surrounded. Fast-firing Hotchkiss guns had been set up on the hills, aimed into the Indian camp. A commotion broke out. A shot was fired . . . .

Echoing through 100 winters, that shot and the sorrow, anger and despair that attended it remain as real for the Lakota people today as the Black Hills, on whose pine-cloaked, sacred slopes they believe their line began.

“It’s only yesterday,” said Charles White Elk, a Pine Ridge Reservation tribal council member and a descendant of American Horse, a Lakota chief. “In talking to the elders, when they relate these stories, its like only yesterday that it happened.”

“The general public may think of it as ancient history,” said Vic Runnells, an artist from Aberdeen, S. D., who grew up on the reservation. “They say: ‘Why are you still talking about this?’ But it’s still a very close part of our history. My uncle was in Wounded Knee, and I knew him in my lifetime.”

When seen from Cemetery Hill, where the Hotchkiss guns were fired, overlooking the gulch where much of the killing occurred and where the bodies later were dumped into a common grave, the scene today looks much as it must have looked then.

The road now, of course, is paved. And the shack on the hillside with the outhouse and windmill beside it was not erected then, nor the other nearby buildings, nor the telephone poles with wires like silken threads shining in the sun.

But much about these undulating hills, only a few miles south of the stark stone cathedrals and lunar canyons of the Badlands, remains unchanged.

Much of life on the reservation, too, is the same. “It’s like a concentration camp, we call it,” said Silven Little Hawk, who works in the tribal council offices.

Half of South Dakota’s 60,000 Indians live on five reservations--depressing, economically barren enclaves of high unemployment and rampant alcoholism. And they contend with the conflicts--between mixed breeds and full-bloods, between progressives who want to accommodate the white man and traditionals who emphasize the old ways of life--that plagued the reservations from the beginning.

In the mid-1970s, these tensions surfaced in a bloody civil war after the American Indian Movement for a time occupied buildings at Wounded Knee. For two years after the brief occupation, the forces of AIM and the tribal council police force fought each other. More than 60 people were killed.

“We did a lot of fighting,” said Pat Janis, a teacher at the Wounded Knee District School who was involved in the battles as a teen-ager. “There was a lot of injustice . . . . A lot of good things came of it, but a lot of bad things came of it, too.”

“It split families,” White Elk said. “And it’s still going on. The contemporary against the traditional--that’s still going on. It’s not so violent as it was back then, but it’s still there.”

In the days of Custer and the westward expansion, the challenge to the Lakotas was to preserve their land and their way of life. Today, many fight to preserve their culture in the face of more than a century of what White Elk calls government- and church-led attempts at cultural genocide.

Until the 1960s, a primary goal of reservation schools was to stamp out all traces of Indian-ness, Lakota critics say. At Jesuit-run boarding schools, students were forbidden to speak Lakota, under threat of spanking. “There was a time when the spiritual leaders were persecuted for practicing their religion,” said White Elk, who believes that the many ills of Lakota society, including alcoholism, are the result of white domination.

“This is the last stronghold for us,” he said, “to try to keep our land and our language and our culture . . . . I read somewhere where it said that, when a language dies, a culture dies. I’m a strong believer in this.”

Today, said Little Hawk, a former teacher of Lakota studies, the children of half-breeds who never spoke the language are learning the customs.

He said he tells his 13-year-old daughter that “the culture is the only thing we have to keep us going.” Still, he says of efforts to teach children to speak Lakota and to “be Indian”: “You’re fighting a fight you’ll never win. White society will overpower the culture no matter what you do.”

One hundred years after the last of the Indian wars, tensions between whites and Indians, who make up 4% of the state population, still remain high.

It was considered a politically daring act in February when South Dakota Gov. George S. Mickelson proclaimed 1990 the Year of Reconciliation, an effort to promote understanding between Indians and other South Dakotans. He smoked a peace pipe with tribal leaders.

On Saturday Mickelson will be among speakers at a ceremony at the site of the massacre.

To mark the anniversary of the event that closed a chapter of American history and, according to U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs historian Michael Lawson, symbolized the end of the “golden age of the Sioux people,” the Lakota are holding more than two weeks of commemorative activities. They include symposiums at the state cultural heritage centers of both North and South Dakota and a symbolic ride tracing Big Foot’s final 250-mile journey that ended here.

Last October, the U.S. Congress for the first time issued a statement of “deep regret” over the incident at Wounded Knee.

Survivors, and now their descendants, have for 100 years demanded an apology and restitution. More recently, they have sought designation of the neglected Wounded Knee site as a national park, erection of a monument and the return of the Black Hills, which the government took away in 1876 after the discovery of gold, eight years after giving ownership to the Lakota. For them, “regret” is not enough.

White Elk, like others here, sees parallels between current events in the Persian Gulf and the U.S. takeover of Indian land. “The United States, they’re talking about human rights violations in Kuwait,” White Elk scoffed. “Look at what they did to the Indians. It’s the same damn thing . . . . If the United States is so concerned about the human rights and the occupation of land, have them clean up their own back yard first.”

Eighteen congressional medals of honor were bestowed on soldiers for their actions at Wounded Knee, although Gen. Nelson Miles, commander of the region, twice court-martialed the colonel who commanded the troops.

Miles accused Col. James W. Forsyth of permitting “the cruel and unjustified massacre of Indian men and innocent women and children” and of deploying troops so carelessly that they suffered casualties from their own cross-fire.

Forsyth, removed from command six days after Wounded Knee, eventually was reinstated, after a court of inquiry found that most of the deaths of women and children were caused by the confusion of battle and concluded that only in isolated incidents were noncombatants deliberately killed.

Nevertheless, Miles remained an ardent supporter of restitution to the Indians.

Sally Roesch Wagner, a research associate from UC Davis who is writing a book on Wounded Knee, said she is convinced that there was a military cover-up of what happened and also of the circumstances of Sitting Bull’s death two weeks earlier.

“One hundred years after it happened, one hundred years after Gen. Miles said there must be restitution made to the survivors, there’s no apology nor restitution,” she said. “And when I take my son to Wounded Knee, there is absolutely no place for him to learn the history of what happened there.”

It was the death of Sitting Bull, the great war leader, on Dec. 15, 1890, that sent Big Foot on the arduous journey that ended at Wounded Knee.

By now, the Lakotas already were a conquered people. Anyone could see that the end was near. Cities were sprouting in the Black Hills, the sacred Paha-Sapa where medicine men and warriors long had gone--and still go--to seek visions. The nomadic tribes had been corralled on arid, ever-shrinking reservations, disgraced warriors with rakes in their hands. They were dependent on U.S. rations for survival, and, in the winter of 1890, the rations were shrinking.

Ever more desperate, the Lakota turned to a new messianic religion, the Ghost Dance, and prayed for deliverance.

The dance would bring renewal, they believed. Dead ancestors and the buffalo would return to the earth, and the white man would be taken away. White reservation agents, alarmed by the Ghost Dance and the possibility of violent revolt, requested military help to quash it. The dancers wore medicine shirts that they believed would protect them from the white man’s bullets.

With fears fanned by a sensationalistic press and a huge buildup in military troops, tensions mounted.

It was in this atmosphere that Indian policemen were dispatched to arrest Sitting Bull, a strong opponent of government policy. “You must not let him escape under any circumstances,” their orders read. When a violent mob tried to stop them, gunfire erupted. A policeman named Red Tomahawk shot Sitting Bull in the back of the head.

This all happened 100 years ago, but the events are so near, said Carole Barrett, an instructor in Indian studies at the University of Mary in BismarckD., that even today the descendants of Sitting Bull and the descendants of the Indian policemen who killed him bear grudges.

“It was a colossal tragedy for the Sioux people,” she said.

The families symbolically laid their differences to rest just this month, in a “wiping of the tears” ceremony on Dec. 15 that marked the end of 100 years of mourning for the Lakota chieftain’s death and the bloodshed that ensued.

After hearing of Sitting Bull’s death, Big Foot, whom the authorities also wanted to arrest, sought refuge at the Pine Ridge, S. D., reservation. He and his band were intercepted en route.

As soldiers searched tepees for weapons at the camp at Wounded Knee, Yellow Bird, a medicine man, started to chant. Another medicine man sang a ghost song. Lakota witnesses said later that the first shot was fired when soldiers tried to disarm a brave described by some as deaf, by others as a troublemaker.

Some have charged that the band was massacred by soldiers who sought revenge for the bloody defeat of Custer’s 7th Calvary at the Little Big Horn 14 years earlier. Whatever the motive, when the firing ended, 25 soldiers were dead. The number of Lakota men, women and children who died either on the field, in a nearby ravine or later from injuries was been put at 170 to 300.

Years later, Lakota medicine man Black Elk would say: “When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream . . . .”