No other atrocity against Native Americans remains so potent and poignant as the massacre at WOUNDED KNEE . On December 29, 1890, the US Army delivered a coup de grâce to the vestiges of Plains Indian resistance, killing several hundred unarmed Sioux men, women and children. Most were Ghost Dancers , followers of a messianic cult who believed that by trance-inducing dancing and singing they could recover their lost way of life. The massacre was triggered by a misunderstanding during a tribal round-up. A deaf Indian, asked to surrender his rifle along with his peers, instead held it above his head, shouting that he'd paid a lot for it. An officer grabbed at the gun, it went off, and the troops started shooting.

A commemorative stone monument, surrounded by a chain-link fence, marks the victims' collective gravesite, off Hwy-27 toward the bottom of Pine Ridge Reservation. Somehow it has an intangible feeling of grief and anger, the mass murder here having left an indelible scar on all First Americans. Eighty-three years later, members of the radical American Indian Movement (AIM) grabbed headlines by occupying Wounded Knee in a dispute over the federal imposition of a tribal government; they were eventually dispersed by armed FBI agents and a paramilitary unit. More peaceably, since the mid-1980s the Sitanka Wokiksuye movement has organized an annual pilgrimage to the site, arriving in harsh winter weather by horse and travois, to symbolically release the spirits of their dead ancestors. The tribe has so far refused federal funds to turn the site into a glossy national monument, wanting instead to leave it uncommercialized; a concrete block nearby offers a few souvenirs and local knowledge.

Wounded Knee

• Wounded Knee

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