Voices from Wounded Knee
Voices from Wounded Knee is an oral and photographic documentation of the historic 1973 confrontation on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The book has long been out of print, but it can be read in digital form at the Internet Archive, here.
The story of the book
In 1890, U.S. forces massacred some 300 Oglala Sioux people, mostly unarmed women and children, at a place called Wounded Knee on what would become the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. In February, 1973, Oglala activists and supporters from other tribes occupied that same spot. They were protesting the dismal conditions on the impoverished reservation, and demanding that the United States honor a treaty signed between the two nations in 1868. The government's response was a military encirclement and siege that lasted 71 days.
At the time I was working on a weekly newspaper in Chicago. Like other people from the alternative media, I went to South Dakota to cover the story. Given the danger of the situation, most of us threw our lots together in an ad hoc collective. When the confrontation finally ended, we realized that we were in possession of a priceless record—photos, sound recordings, notes and recollections—of a pivotal event in the history of Indigenous Americans. Four of us took this material to Akwesasne, the Mohawk reserve at the New York/Quebec border, where there was a publishing operation, and put together what became Voices from Wounded Knee.
Pictured: Me, in Rapid City, SD, a few days after the Wounded Knee confrontation ended.
