Wounded Knee

An overview of the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 and how it affected the relationships between Native and European Americans until the present day.

In the 1990s, the South Dakota community of Wounded Knee remains a tiny village of less than 100 persons, but its name commands a most symbolic and also sinister connotation in the history or relations between the United States and its aboriginal peoples. In this paper’s discussion of the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, it is emphasized how what might seem an obscure event in the history of interaction between European-Americans and the American Indians was to become a powerful symbolic event of significance to the present day. The very mention of Wounded Knee brings to mind numerous issues of great emotive and political meanings.