By Mordecai Specktor
Revising the Wounded Knee Massacre
On Sept. 27, the New York Times reported that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth will not revoke Medals of Honor for soldiers who took part in the 1890 massacre of Chief Big Foot’s band at Wounded Knee.
“More than 300 Lakota Sioux men, women and children were killed by U.S. Army soldiers on Dec. 29, 1890, in one of the deadliest attacks on Native Americans by the United States military,” according to the Times. “The Lakota people had gathered to resist government control in an area of South Dakota that is now part of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.”
Some 20 soldiers with the U.S. Seventh Cavalry received Medals of Honor, as per a report in The Guardian (UK).
(In early September, Trump authorized the Defense Department to use the secondary title of “Department of War,” an historical name of the department. Trump’s executive order on the this matter declares: “The Secretary of Defense is authorized the use of this additional secondary title — the Secretary of War — and may be recognized by that title in official correspondence, public communications, ceremonial contexts, and non-statutory documents within the executive branch.” The website for the largest department in the federal government is now titled “U.S. Department of War” [war.gov]. In 1949, the combined military command of the army and other forces was renamed the Defense Department; however, Trump in his great discernment preferred the old appellation — “war” has a certain ring to it.)
The Secretary of War — or Defense or whatever — is Pete Hegseth, 45, who grew up in Forest Lake, Minnesota. Hegseth was in the news earlier this year when he leaked plans for a military attack on the Houthis in Yemen over the Signal messaging app to an email list that included top government officials and Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic magazine. Goldberg thought that he was the subject of a prank but later confirmed that the information revealed in the group chat, March 11-15, was real.
Goldberg later wrote an article about the “Signalgate” scandal titled “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.” There were calls from members of Congress to fire Hegseth in the aftermath of the egregious security breach.
Fast forward to September, when Hegseth expressed his admiration for the soldiers who massacred the Lakota at Wounded Knee Creek.
The Guardian newspaper reported: “‘We’re making it clear that [the soldiers at Wounded Knee] deserve those medals,’ Hegseth said, announcing the move in a video on social media on [Sept. 25]. Calling the men ‘brave soldiers,’ he said a review panel had concluded in a report that the medals were justly awarded. ‘This decision is now final, and their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate.’”
Hegseth, a Christian nationalist whose body is tatooed with Crusader symbols, is part of the Trump 2.0 regime’s program of revising U.S. history to fit the MAGA ideology. Trump and his ilk are trying round the edges of presentations — by the Smithsonian museums, at federal monuments, schools, etc. — of history related to chattel slavery, depredations against Native nations and other tragic elements of U.S. policies. The Trumpites are promoting “patriotic education,” the glorification of U.S. imperialism, which began with the subjugation of the domestic Indian nations and then moved on to colonial adventures around the world.
Readers of The Circle likely will judge Hegseth as morally depraved, vis-à-vis his valorizing of the U.S. soldiers involved in the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre. That’s my view, too.
Robert Redford walks on
Maybe I’ve told this story before: When I visited Leonard Peltier at Marion federal prison in 1980, I was accompanied by the late photographer Dick Bancroft. We drove up to an intercom on the driveway to the prison complex. We identified ourselves to a guard in a distant watchtower, let him know that we were there to interview Peltier. He had a question: “Is there a Mr. Redford with you?”
No, just me and Dick. The famous actor and director had visited Peltier in Marion several weeks prior to our interview.
Robert Redford, a champion of Leonard Peltier’s long fight for justice and a supporter of aspiring Indian filmmakers, died at his home in Utah on Sept. 19. He was 89.
“Redford’s contributions to Indian Country were significant and enduring,” according to a remembrance on Native News Online. The article noted that Redford was an executive producer of Incident at Oglala, the 1992 documentary about the Peltier case.
In a telephone interview with Native New Online, Peltier, whose prison sentence was commuted by Pres. Joe Biden in January, said, “Robert served as the narrator [of the documentary] and he helped finance the making of it. It was done in a decent way and I was happy at the time. … and it helped my cause.”
