The Killing Fields of Wounded Knee

Abstract

On December 29, 1890, as many as 300 Sioux were killed or mortally wounded by U.S. soldiers at Wounded Knee creek. After winter blizzard spread white blanket over the bloody mud, Dr. Charles Eastman, fullblooded Santee Sioux physician, attempted to rescue possible survivors on New Year's Day. Beneath mound of snow, he uncovered little girl about four years of age lying next to corpse. Her name was Zintkala Nuni, or Lost Bird. She was wrapped in shawl and wore buckskin cap, which bore traditional beadwork crafted into the design of an American flag. Despite mild frostbite, she was still alive. Brigadier General Leonard W. Colby, commander of the Nebraska militia, eventually adopted the orphan and gave her the name Marguerite.1 More than one hundred years later, historians continue to ask: what happened at Wounded Knee? Jeffrey Ostler, professor of history and department head at the University of Oregon, turns his gaze toward the killing fields to find answers. He seeks to revise the classic narrative of Robert M. Utley's The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (1963), which called it a regrettable, tragic accident of war ... for which neither side as whole may be properly condemned.2 Dissatisfied with existing scholarship, Ostler revisits rich cache of documents in the National Archives as well as an impressive number of secondary sources. He untangles contested process negotiated through century of empire building. Instead of the last Indian war, he sees America's legacies of conquest. Ostler argues that America's commitment to an expansionist ideology of manifest destiny ultimately led to Wounded Knee. His story arc resembles Dee Brown's best-selling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), although his approach to the subject is more analytical.3 He engages in the kind of analysis typical of New Western historians such as Patricia Nelson Limerick, who once called the frontier the f-word.4 Likewise, he prefers the c-word, conquest,