THEY STILL CALL IT A BATTLE
Violet Catches cried when the answer came. Her great-grandfather was killed at Wounded Knee in 1890 and buried in the mass grave. She’s a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, and the answer she got is that the United States is keeping the Medals of Honor it gave soldiers for the killing.
According to South Dakota Searchlight, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced in a video that the medals won’t be rescinded. He called Wounded Knee a “battle.” He said the soldiers earned the honor.
Garriott says the review never took up the question the descendants came with. Wizipan Little Elk Garriott, a Rosebud Sioux Tribe member who sat on the panel for the Interior Department, told Searchlight the Defense panelists went looking for individual war crimes. Whether a massacre of women and children disqualifies a medal on its own “was simply not part of the conversation,” he said.
Not whether the panel weighed the evidence and got it wrong. Whether the panel was ever handed the question in the first place.
Go back to the morning. Dec. 29, 1890. About 370 Lakota people were camped near Wounded Knee Creek, moving toward the Pine Ridge Reservation, looking for safety. Around 470 soldiers of the 7th Cavalry surrounded them. Twenty-two years earlier the government signed a treaty recognizing Lakota authority over western South Dakota. It broke the treaty in the 1870s when gold turned up in the Black Hills.
The soldiers moved to disarm the camp. A shot went off. Historian Jerome Greene, author of “American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890,” wrote that the shooting turned into “purposeful yet indiscriminate killing.” As many as 200 Lakota died that day or later from their wounds, Greene writes, and likely more. Other accounts run higher. The Army left the bodies to freeze, then paid a contractor to bury many of them in one grave. A year later, about 20 soldiers got the Medal of Honor. According to Searchlight, the records behind some are incomplete or unclear, and one award was based on a brief note from a commanding officer.
Wendell Yellow Bull, an Oglala Sioux Tribe member whose great-grandfather lived through it, answered Hegseth’s description. “You don’t disarm people and then call it a battle,” he said. A descendant of the colonel who commanded the 7th Cavalry that day says the same thing. It was a massacre.
Now the mechanism. The review ran through a five-member panel, three named by Defense, two by Interior. It finished its report in October 2024. The Defense Department hasn’t published it. Hegseth held it up in a video and put it back down.
This week the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee moved to pry it loose. South Dakota Searchlight reported that the committee’s version of the defense bill for fiscal 2027 directs the secretary of defense to turn over the full review and the unredacted materials behind it, and to brief both Armed Services committees by Feb. 1. Sen. Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican, listed it among his wins in the bill.
Those files are the test of Garriott’s claim. If the materials show the panel argued the massacre question at length, his criticism weakens. If they show the question never came up, it holds. The committee report won’t settle it alone. The documents that would are the ones behind it: the panel’s charter, its instructions, what it was tasked to decide, who voted how. Those say whether the panel reached the wrong answer or was never asked the right question.
Those are two different stories. The first is an argument. The second is a reporting question, and the answer sits in documents the public hasn’t seen.
Congress regretted Wounded Knee in 1990 and left the medals alone. The panel’s report has sat unpublished since October 2024. The Senate now wants it whole. What it says about the question Garriott raised has not been made public.