Wounded Knee Massacre Site Up for Sale-Give It Back to the Oglala!

Workers Vanguard No. 1023	3 May 2013

Give It Back to the Oglala!

Wounded Knee Massacre Site Up for Sale

There is no more potent symbol of the genocide, wholesale land theft and dispossession meted out to the Native American peoples than Wounded Knee. It was the site of the last battle of the so-called Indian Wars—the 1890 massacre of some 300 men, women and children by the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry. This was the same Seventh Cavalry once headed by one George Armstrong Custer, which was routed in the battle of Little Big Horn by the Lakota and their allies four years earlier. That may well have accounted for just how bloodthirsty the Army’s slaughter at Wounded Knee was. It was due to that legacy that this was also the site of the 1973 American Indian Movement (AIM) occupation and subsequent stand-off with federal agents armed to the teeth.

For the next three years, the Oglala Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation was subjected to a reign of terror by hundreds of FBI and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) agents, supplemented by trained and armed thugs. Some 69 tribal members were victims of unsolved murders. Mass arrests were carried out and militants like Leonard Peltier were framed up and imprisoned (see accompanying article).

Adding insult to grave injury, the Wounded Knee site is now up for sale by a private owner for $3.9 million. The Oglala reportedly have a May 1 deadline to come up with the money or the site may be sold to one of the investment groups that have made offers. To say that the Oglala Sioux are cash-strapped is a cruel understatement. Having had their land stolen through broken treaties as well as by legislation sanctioning massive land grabs and sales to non-Native settlers as part of allotment schemes, those who survive at Pine Ridge live in conditions of absolute hopeless poverty. From 1980 to 2000, the counties that make up Pine Ridge comprised the poorest in the country. The 2000 census found them the third poorest, only because things got worse on two other South Dakota reservations. As of 2007, the unemployment rate was a staggering 80-90 percent, per capita income was $4,000, and teens committed suicide at four times the national rate. Infant mortality is three times the national rate, and life expectancy is the lowest in the United States and second-lowest in the Western Hemisphere, after Haiti.

The U.S. government stole the lands around Wounded Knee. They should be given back to the Oglala to do with as they see fit! There is no way to undo the destruction of the aboriginal tribes by the racist rulers who founded their republic on the backs of black chattel slaves and whose westward march was guided by the spirit of General Sheridan’s infamous remark: “There are no good Indians but dead Indians.” Only the destruction of capitalism through proletarian revolution and the inauguration of the era of socialist development can ensure the all-sided, voluntary integration of American Indians into society on the basis of the fullest equality and meet the special needs created by a history of injustice and oppression.

Last year, the Departments of Justice and the Interior (which oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs) announced a $1 billion settlement over nearly 56 million acres of Indian land held “in trust” by Washington but in fact exploited by timber, farming, mining and other commercial interests with little benefit to the tribes. Attorney General Eric Holder proclaimed that the settlement “fairly and honorably resolves historical grievances over the accounting and management of tribal trust funds, trust lands and other non-monetary trust resources that, for far too long, have been a source of conflict between Indian tribes and the United States” (London Guardian, 4 May 2012). Ha!

The reality is that the successive defeats of the Native Americans in their struggles to preserve some independence from the capitalist state are reflected in the changes in the legal status of the tribes. In 1830, the Supreme Court ruled that the tribes “had always been considered as distinct, independent, political communities, retaining their original natural rights,” only to be informed by President Andrew Jackson that the Court could try to enforce this decision, but he controlled the army and was going to relocate the Cherokee. He did so under his bluntly named Indian Removal Act of 1830. Some 20,000 Cherokees were marched at gunpoint from Georgia to Oklahoma, with a quarter of those perishing on this Trail of Tears.

The Dawes Act of 1887 broke up, with few exceptions, what remained of the native communal holdings through a land-allotment system that gave small parcels to individual Native Americans and threw the rest onto the open market. Although citizenship was finally granted to Native Americans in 1924, the government has maintained an essentially custodial relationship to the reservations, holding the land “in trust.”

Until the New Deal’s Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934, the reservations were ruled autocratically by BIA agents. Designed as a reform measure to introduce limited self-rule, the IRA resulted in the creation of a layer of Indian bureaucrats on the reservations who rubber-stamp government policies and sell tribal land and mineral holdings. Later the government attempted to terminate tribal status and thereby end federal assistance programs and tax exemptions, the economic margin upon which many survive. Through this, the capitalist rulers washed their hands of the remnants of the Native American population.

Denied the old world of the tribe, shattered forever, and the new world of capitalist society, whose doors were closed, Native Americans have borne the full brunt of a capitalist system that long ago entered its period of decay. V.I. Lenin insisted that the revolutionary Marxist party must act as a tribune of the people, and it is as such that we call for the return of the Wounded Knee Massacre site to the Oglala Sioux, whose blood was spilled in a vindictive U.S. war crime. Proletarian revolutionaries seek to sear into the collective memory of the working class and the oppressed the genocidal near-destruction of the Native peoples. Under workers rule, new generations will be instructed in the history of capitalist barbarism, smashed once and for all through victorious proletarian socialist revolution. As the youth group of the Spartacist League wrote in the concluding part of the Young Spartacus three-part series on “Marxism and the American Indian Question” (Nos. 27, 28 and 31; December 1974, January and April 1975):

“Oppressed national and racial minorities throughout the world will look to the future workers state in this country to measure the commitment of the American proletariat to provide for the social emancipation and voluntary assimilation of Indians into society....

“Indians represent a significant part of the historical development of mankind, and revolutionary socialists understand their cultural uniqueness and share a mutual interest in preserving aspects of the Indians’ cultural heritage. This knowledge will help correct centuries of cultural erosion and social stagnation, to overcome the backwardness of reservation life and at the same time allow Indians, if they choose, to maintain their social identity.”