Protecting a Lie: Pete Hegseth’s Massacre at Wounded Knee

In 1971, when Alvin Josephy wrote about the “Custer Myth” for Life Magazine, he included a photo of the mass burial at Wounded Knee in 1890, committed by the next generation of Custer’s 7th Cavalry. In a recent issue of Native News Online, Levi Rickert wrote about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s decision to NOT rescind the Medals of Honor awarded to 20 members of that cavalry unit for their actions in the 1890 massacre.

Indians had lobbied long and hard for a truth telling of the event and rescinding the medals of honor. They’d made progress. In 1990, on the 100th anniversary of the massacre, Congress passed a resolution expressing “deep regret” to the descendants of those killed at Wounded Knee. And there was hope that those Medals of Honor would go away.

With the Secretary of Defense’s decision, Rickert writes that Hegseth was not erasing woke politics and preserving real history, as he claimed, but “protecting a lie.”

“That lie — that what happened at Wounded Knee was a battle deserving of the nation’s highest military recognition — has been told for over 130 years. But Native Americans know the truth. It wasn’t a battle. It was a massacre. And it remains one of the most painful, unresolved wounds in American history.

“The soldiers of the 7th Cavalry were not heroes that day. They killed as many as 300 Lakota people — most of them unarmed women, children, and elders. They shot into tipis, chased survivors into ravines, and left bodies frozen in the snow. For this, the Medals of Honor were awarded. That is not courage. That is horror.”

So much good history has been discovered and revealed since Alvin Josephy wrote the real story of Custer’s debacle for Life in 1971. But, as confederate monuments find their ways back into “private parks,” and women and people of color are removed from the top ranks in the military, and the war on woke continues across the country, it is good to remember that true history will ultimately get told.

Our emboldened Native historians and journalists will not let Hegseth off the hook on this one. As my friend Bobbie Conner, Nez Perce-Cayuse director of the Cultural Institute on the Umatilla Reservation, says: it is hard to “unsee” things. It is up to all of us to make sure things stay “seen” as they really were and are.