Remembering Wounded Knee: A Family and a Tribe Look Back

As hawks swoop lazily in the vast sky and a raw wind whips across the barren hills, Leonard Little Finger makes his way to the sacred ground. Then, slowly, he kneels before the mass grave.

He murmurs a prayer in his native tongue, then sprinkles an offering of food to the spirits of the Lakota Nation that once ruled this land. The silence is powerful. There is no echo of the shots and screams that twice filled this air.

More than 100 years ago, Little Finger’s great-great-grandfather, Chief Big Foot, and 300 followers were massacred under the withering fire of the U.S. cavalry in a day that forever marked Wounded Knee in history and blood.

Then, 25 years ago, a tribal uprising here became a 71-day standoff against the federal government. The name Wounded Knee became a symbol of Indian pride and resolve that had lasted despite decades of neglect.

As the tribe marks the 25th anniversary of the 1973 uprising that for two months focused the nation’s attention on the desolate Pine Ridge reservation, it also will mark one more milestone in the life of Leonard Little Finger. His family’s story is the story of Wounded Knee, and he is the keeper of that flame.

“We are survivors,” said the soft-spoken 58-year-old descendant of Lakota warriors. “Ours is a story of pride and survival.”

His is a legacy drenched in the agony of the Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee and animated with the spirit of a people at one with the sun and stars. Five generations of his family have left him a heritage of both laughter and sorrow.

“There’s still a grief that I have when I go to Wounded Knee,” Little Finger said. “I have this sickness that mankind can do that to one another.”

For all but eight years, Little Finger has called this reservation home. “Life is hard here,” he said simply. It is an understatement. Pine Ridge is one of the poorest patches in America.

Shannon County has a median income of $11,000, almost $20,000 less than the national median. Diabetes, alcohol and traffic accidents all kill here. Indian men die at an average age of 56.5, younger than any other place in the nation.

Even the overcrowded Loneman Elementary School on the reservation, where Little Finger is painstakingly nurturing a Lakota cultural research center, was condemned as unsafe by the government in 1990.

But Little Finger sees beyond poverty to the richness of his heritage.

“To know who we are, we have to know where we came from,” he said.

He teaches Lakota history at Oglala Lakota College. And last spring he began collecting oral histories from Indians who, like him, can trace their bloodlines back to an era when their ancestors shared this earth with the buffalo.

Their reminiscences will undoubtedly include more recent memories, too, of the events that began the frosty night of Feb. 27, 1973.

Members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), angry and newly radicalized by Vietnam-era ferment, seized the hamlet of Wounded Knee in protest against reservation conditions and the federally backed tribal government.

FBI agents, U.S. marshals and tribal police set up roadblocks. The siege began. The shooting started. When the standoff was over, two occupiers were dead and a federal marshal was paralyzed.

The blockade turned the spotlight not only on the modern-day militancy but on past injustices.

“They didn’t win anything, but they did bring it to the attention of people,” said Dee Brown, author of “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.”

“Nobody knew about Wounded Knee until then,” he said. “They brought it into the forefront of the American consciousness. You never found it in history books.”

For Little Finger, it also was a watershed. He watched from Aberdeen, S.D., where he was working as an administrator for the Indian Health Service, a job he held for 26 years, almost always on the reservation.

“Wounded Knee showed me how important family was,” he said. The drama unfolding there made him feel like a stranger among white Americans. “I felt like I did not belong in that society. These people at Wounded Knee were very articulate. They were not afraid of being Lakota. They were willing to give their lives.”

He came home two years later. He began digging deeper into the past.

One day in the late ‘70s, he visited an Indian art museum exhibit in Santa Fe, N.M., that featured photos of the 1890 massacre. He found himself staring at a gruesome picture of his ancestor, Chief Big Foot, lying dead in the snow.

He had seen it before. This time it was different.

“I cried,” he says.

Today, in his house, he keeps a photo of Big Foot in his early days, along with a portrait of his grandfather, John Little Finger, who was just 14 when he saw his family gunned down in the slaughter.

John, shot in the right calf, survived by hiding in a ravine. He then holed up in a cave for three months.

He grew into a bear of a man, 6-foot-5 and nearly 300 pounds, working as a featured performer in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. In his dying days, he taught his young grandson a lesson he remembers a half-century later.

“He could not go to the spirit world carrying any hatreds, any type of hard feelings,” Little Finger said. “He had to make forgiveness. . . . The world needs to take a lesson from that.”

It’s a message Little Finger carries with him in his travels to Paris and Geneva, talking about his tribe. And he hopes to pass that wisdom on to his five children and his baby grandchild, Leland, the eighth generation to grow up here.

Little Finger already has taken his sons and daughters to the hilltop, the site of two historic moments in Lakota history.

Today, much of the hamlet that was seized in ’73 is gone. So is the trading post. And the church, though its charred foundation remains. A new church has been built.

In the cemetery, a gray marble obelisk commemorates the massacre. One of Little Finger’s grandfathers raised money to build it. Sixteen of his ancestors died that day; four of their names are etched in the monument.

A few feet away is a tombstone where one of the two Indians killed in 1973 is buried. Little Finger played with him as a child. The headstone is carved with the words: “2,000 and 500 came to Wounded Knee in ’73. One Still Remains.”

Little Finger remains too. This is his homeland.

“Having understood the world around me, I don’t particularly care for that world,” he said. “I feel more comfortable here. I feel like I belong.”