We Shall Remain

Wounded Knee (1x5)

: 11, 2009

On the night of February 27, 1973, fifty-four cars rolled into a small hamlet on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Within hours, some 200 Oglala Lakota and American Indian Movement (AIM) activists had seized the few major buildings in town and police had cordoned off the area beginning the occupation of Wounded Knee. Demanding redress for grievances the siege lsted for 71 days. With federal troops tightening a cordon around meagerly supplied Indians, the event invited media comparisons with the massacre of Indians at Wounded Knee almost a century earlier. In telling the story of this iconic moment, we examine the broad political and economic forces that led to the emergence of AIM as well as the immediate events that triggered the takeover. Though the federal government failed to make good on many of the promises that ended the siege, the event succeeded in bringing the desperate conditions of Indian reservation life to the nation's attention.