Where is wounded knee

In particular, they sought the removal of tribal chairman Dick Wilson , whom many Oglala living on the reservation thought corrupt. Oglala Lakota interviewed by PBS for a documentary said Wilson seemed to favor mixed-race, assimilated Lakota like himself -- and especially his own family members -- over reservation residents with more traditional lifestyles.

Efforts to remove Wilson by impeaching him had failed, and so Oglala Lakota tribal leaders turned to AIM for help in removing him by force.

Their answer was to occupy Wounded Knee. Federal marshals and National Guard traded heavy fire daily with the native activists. To break the siege, they cut off electricity and water to the town, and attempted to prevent food and ammunition from being passed to the occupiers.

Bill Zimmerman, a sympathetic activist and pilot from Boston, agreed to carry out a 2,pound food drop on the 50th day of the siege. When the occupiers ran out of the buildings where they had been sheltering to grab the supplies, agents opened fire on them. The first member of the occupation to die, a Cherokee, was shot by a bullet that flew through the wall of a church.

To many observers, the standoff resembled the Wounded Knee Massacre of itself -- when a U. Some of the protesters also had a more current conflict in mind. As one former member of AIM told PBS, "They were shooting machine gun fire at us, tracers coming at us at nighttime just like a war zone. We had some Vietnam vets with us, and they said, 'Man, this is just like Vietnam.

When PBS interviewed federal officials later, they said that the first death in the conflict inspired them to work harder to bring it to a close. While members of AIM fought to keep the occupation going, the Oglala overruled them, and, from that point, negotiations between federal officials and the protesters began in earnest.

The militants officially surrendered on May 8, and a number of members of AIM managed to escape the town before being arrested. Tensions between the two groups Miles, commander of the U. Army troops in South Dakota. Miles asked Cody to proceed immediately to Standing Rock, a reservation in Dakota Territory, where a Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland.

Siege of Wounded Knee. Wounded Knee. The Last of the Sioux. American-Indian Wars From the moment English colonists arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in , they shared an uneasy relationship with the Native Americans or Indians who had thrived on the land for thousands of years.

American Indian Wars: Timeline For more than years, as Europeans sought to control newly settled American land, wars raged between Native Americans and the frontiersmen who encroached on their territory, resources and trade.

Native American History Timeline Long before Christopher Columbus stepped foot on what would come to be known as the Americas, the expansive territory was inhabited by Native Americans. Sitting Bull Sitting Bull c. Their leader, Big Foot, was also engaged in the Ghost Dance, and though not considered a major threat, he was under close observation by the military. In an attempt to quiet the Miniconjous, the military asked a local squatter named John Dunn to persuade them to acquiesce to the military's wishes that they stay in their own village on the reservation.

Dunn's tactics are inexplicable: he is reported to have told the Miniconjous that the military planned to take their men prisoner and deport them to an island in the Atlantic Ocean. He apparently advised them to take sanctuary on Pine Ridge Reservation. On December 23, the Miniconjous left their village in the dead of night and fled south toward the Badlands.

Big Foot soon contracted pneumonia, which slowed the escape. Nonetheless, the tribe managed to avoid the military pursuit for five days. On the morning of December 29, Col. James W. Forsyth convened a council with the Miniconjous. He demanded that they surrender all their firearms and told them that they would be relocated to a new camp. The order to a new camp was interpreted by the Miniconjous as exile, probably to Indian Territory, a prospect that they found intolerable. While these discussions proceeded in the Lakota camp, a number of Indians began singing Ghost Dance songs, with some rising to throw handfuls of dirt in the air.

The troops who surrounded them perceived the singing and dirt throwing as signals to attack, and at this tense moment the fuse was lit. A man named Black Coyote sometimes called Black Fox refused to surrender his rifle to a soldier.

The two began wrestling over the gun, and in the struggle it discharged. Immediately the nervous troops began firing, while the Miniconjous retrieved their weapons and returned fire. The military's rifle fire was complemented with cannon rounds from Hotchkiss guns, whose accuracy and exploding shells were formidable.

The outnumbered and outgunned Lakotas fled, and for several hours intermittent gunfire continued, with the military in pursuit. Bodies were found as far away as three miles from the camp. Firing ceased, and by midafternoon the troops had gathered up their dead and wounded, as well as Lakota wounded, and returned to Pine Ridge Agency.

The fear of a reprisal attack kept troops and civilians entrenched at the agency until January 3, , when a military-escorted civilian burial party proceeded to the site of the massacre.

There they buried Lakotas in a single mass grave.