Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced in a video post last week that soldiers who participated in the 1890 massacre of more than 250 women, men, and children at Wounded Knee will keep Medals of Honor that many have said should be rescinded.
The Massacre at Wounded Knee
On December 29, 1890, some 500 troops of the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment surrounded a group of Lakota people who were camped at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
The Lakota had been forced to march to Pine Ridge from the Standing Rock Indian Reservation after U.S. Indian Agency Police killed Lakota Chief Sitting Bull, who led his people during years of resistance to U.S. government policies that forcibly relocated Indigenous people from their homes to reservations.
The troops entered the camp to disarm the Lakota. During a brief scuffle between a soldier and a Lakota man who refused to surrender his weapon, the rifle fired, alarming the rest of the troops. The soldiers began firing on the Lakota, many of whom tried to flee the assault. The attack left more than 250 Lakota dead; over half of those killed were women, children, and elderly tribal members, and most of the dead were unarmed.
Despite the extreme cruelty and the killing of so many innocent people, Medals of Honor were given to 19 soldiers for their actions and conduct.
“We Will Never Forget What They Did”
For generations, Native American groups, including the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and the National Congress of American Indians, advocates, state lawmakers from South Dakota, and members of Congress have called for the awards to be rescinded.
A century after the massacre, Congress apologized to the descendants of the people killed at Wounded Knee, but did not revoke the awards, AP reported.
In 2019, then-Rep. Deb Haaland (D-New Mexico) co-sponsored the Remove the Stain Act to rescind the awards. “This bill is particularly significant because it’s a marker that shows that our country is finally on its way to acknowledging and recognizing the atrocities committed against our Native communities,” Haaland said at a press conference, where South Dakota tribal members showed photos of their ancestors who survived Wounded Knee.
“While 1890 may seem like a long time ago, it’s actually only been a few generations since the bloodiest military attack on Indigenous people in the United States,” the Lakota People’s Law Project wrote.
Cheyenne River tribal member Manny Iron Hawk, whose grandmother survived Wounded Knee, said that rescinding the awards would help everyone to heal. “There was no honor in these murders and the Lakota, we live with these traumas to this day,” he told the Argus Leader.
“Picture in your mind, your grandma grabbing you by your hand when you were 12 and running away into a ravine trying to survive,” Iron Hawk said. “My mother usually tells about this story and she gets sad and she cries. All of us children, she transferred that sadness and story to us.”
Despite bipartisan support, the bill did not make it to a vote in the House.
But in the 2022 defense bill, Congress recommended that the medals be reviewed, and in 2024, then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a special panel of experts to review the medals to “ensure no awardees were recognized for conduct inconsistent with the nation’s highest military honor.”
The panel was directed to review each individual award to assess whether the soldier’s conduct “demonstrated any disqualifying actions” under the standards at the time.
Austin ordered the panel to provide a written report of its findings. The report has not been released publicly.
But Hegseth said in his video post that the review panel concluded in October 2024 “that these brave soldiers should, in fact, rightfully keep their medals from actions in 1890.”
AP reports that the Defense Secretary’s office could not say if the report that Hegseth referred to in his video would be made public.
“We’re making it clear that (the soldiers) deserve those medals,” Hegseth said, before adding that “their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate.”
“We salute their memory,” he said in closing. “We honor their service, and we will never forget what they did.”