Looking At (m or f?) (Sans Arc IA)

Apparently murdered at Wounded Knee at the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation on Dec. 29, 1890 (name not verified on list of victims yet), around the age of 53 yrs old. Gender also not determined yet.

As many as 400 members of The Seven Fires (“Lakota”, a matrilineal tribe) were massacred at the Lakota Pine Ridge Agency (Reservation) on Dec. 29, 1890, in an event now known as Wounded Knee, marking the last official US Army atrocity/conflict of the American Indian War.

Events leading up to the massacre:

The Red Cloud War: a conflict fought w/ allied bands of Northern Cheyenne, Lakota and Arapaho against the US Army.

Ft. Laramie Treaty of 1868 was established to end the 2 year Red Cloud War over land/buffalo hunting rights.

The Agreement of 1876 was established in response to the US order, forcing the Lakota to abandon the Powder River hunting grounds. Gold was discovered in the Black Hills, and greedy miners broke the treaty in 1868. The US Govt annexed the Black Hills (causing a further land reduction of the Great Sioux Reservation).

The Agreement of 1889 further divided the Lakota tribal lands into 6 separate reservations, cutting a corridor through the Great Sioux Reservation, resulting in furthered reduction of land (negotiated by the appropriately named “Crook” Commission).

Lakota divisions resulted: Oglala, Brulé, Minneconjou (leader ‘Big Foot’), Hunkpapa (Sitting Bull), Mdewakanton (Santee), Yankton(ais),

The ‘Ghost Dance’ (or ‘Spirit Dance’), ideas surrounding a coming Messiah, and US media accounts of ‘exaggerated /inflammatory sensationalism’ (later known as ‘yellow journalism’) all figured in the misconstruing of facts, increasing tensions which eventually provoked the conflict.

Witness accounts state that a young deaf man named Black Coyote (possibly Sitting Bull’s deaf-mute son) refused to give up his rifle and unintentionally fired, potentially starting the conflict.

Big Foot, who had pneumonia and was dying, was shot immediately and apparently scalped. Men, women and children were shot and killed as they fled, even up to three miles away! (search web for info on ‘Lost Bird’ and other infant survivors).

• *********************************************************************************** Other points of interest:

http://www.woundedkneemuseum.org/main_menu.html

See Wovoka (a Northern Paiute from Nevada): Wovoka’s Ghost Dance (a name coined by writers), actually called “Spirit Dance” or “Lakota Dance” by native tribes/”The Great Vision”. To many onlookers (including many immigrant German farmers), this dance signaled an uprising.