From Wounded Knee to Oak Flat
How the U.S. Still Chooses Violence Over Indigenous Sovereignty
On September 25, 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the U.S. soldiers awarded Medals of Honor for their actions at Wounded Knee in 1890 will keep them. A review ordered in 2024 by his predecessor Lloyd Austin had reportedly considered revocation, but Hegseth accepted the final recommendation: the medals will stand.
The response from tribal communities was swift. The National Congress of American Indians condemned the decision, calling it a “disgraceful reaffirmation of state-sanctioned atrocity.” Others demanded full public release of the Pentagon’s internal report.
But this decision doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It lands in the context of a larger and longer truth: that for Indigenous peoples in the United States, history is not only unwelcome in the present. It is actively being weaponized against them.
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Wounded Knee: Massacre, Not Battle
On December 29, 1890, U.S. Army troops of the 7th Cavalry surrounded a Lakota camp at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. Ostensibly there to disarm the Lakota, what unfolded instead was a massacre. An estimated 350 men, women, and children were killed or wounded, most of them unarmed.
Yet in the months following, the Army awarded 19 Medals of Honor for the “engagement.” That framing — a battle rather than a slaughter — would become part of the national mythology. It wasn’t until 1990 that Congress formally expressed “deep regret” over the massacre. But the medals remained.
See friend of the Chronicle, Greg Sandman’s, recent post on this topic here:
Now, in 2025, they still do.
This Isn’t a New Scandal. It’s a Pattern
Oak Flat: Sacred Ground Mined
Just months before the Wounded Knee decision, the sacred Apache site known as Oak Flat (Chi’chil Biłdagoteel) in Arizona was once again under threat. Despite being listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the land remains targeted by Resolution Copper, a mining giant with plans to hollow out the site for its mineral wealth.
Legal appeals by Apache Stronghold were unsuccessful in stopping the project. Although an emergency injunction has temporarily halted the land transfer, the outlook remains grim. For tribal members, the mining project doesn’t just threaten water or land — it threatens ceremonial life itself.
See our reporting here:
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ICE Stops: Citizenship Questioned
In early 2025, reports emerged that ICE agents were stopping Native Americans in the Southwest — including members of the Navajo and Mescalero Apache Nations — and questioning their citizenship.
The actions drew condemnation from lawmakers and tribal leaders alike. Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren called the incidents “shameful” and “a violation of the very sovereignty the federal government claims to respect.”
It was a bitter reminder that even citizenship — officially granted in 1924 — is conditional when Indigenous identity meets racial profiling and state power.
Policy as a Weapon: The One Big Beautiful Bill
If the Medals of Honor represent the nation’s refusal to confront past violence, then the One Big Beautiful Bill represents how that violence continues through policy.
Passed in 2025, the OBBB was pitched as a “reset” of federal spending. In practice, it gutted multiple initiatives tribal communities had fought for — and briefly begun to benefit from — under the previous administration.
Clean energy incentives, tribal infrastructure loans, climate adaptation programs, and food sovereignty grants were eliminated or drastically scaled back. These weren’t abstractions — they were working projects, from solar panel installations in the Southwest to battery storage for remote villages in Alaska.
The bill also altered tribal gaming tax codes, making operations less profitable. Changes to Medicaid eligibility and SNAP work requirements jeopardized the health and nutrition of thousands of Native families — despite carve-outs that looked better on paper than in practice.
For many tribal governments, the message was clear: You’re on your own.
Symbolic Progress Meets Strategic Backlash
Just a few years ago, it seemed like the country was beginning to see, and perhaps finally hear, Native communities. Land acknowledgments were appearing at major events. Native languages and films were finding space in classrooms and on streaming platforms. Museums were returning stolen artifacts.
However, the backlash has now arrived. The Wounded Knee decision, the mining at Oak Flat, the ICE profiling, the OBBB rollbacks — together, they mark a strategic retrenchment, not an accident, but a recalibration of the state’s willingness to let Indigenous people thrive.
The Legacy That Never Sleeps
For generations, tribal nations have endured forced relocation to unfamiliar, often unlivable terrain. Their spiritual practices were banned. Their children were stolen into boarding schools designed to erase them. Their food systems were destroyed. Alcohol was introduced — sometimes as trade, sometimes as a weapon — into communities reeling from grief.
And in 1924, the U.S. finally granted Native Americans formal citizenship, more than 400 years after colonists first set foot on this land. Even then, many were denied the right to vote, to serve on juries, or to own land. Citizenship was not granted as a right, but rather as a strategy to erase tribal identity and force assimilation.
The results linger, and so does the resistance.
Reckoning or Regression?
These stories — the massacre medals, the sacred lands, the profiling, the policy sabotage — they aren’t separate. They form a living pattern.
And that pattern demands we ask: Are we a nation ready to confront our past — or determined to relive it?
Because if we cannot even bring ourselves to revoke medals awarded for the killing of unarmed Lakota women and children, then our talk of justice is just that — talk.
Indigenous communities are still here, still fighting, and still waiting for a country that claims to value freedom to start by respecting theirs.
Stay Informed. Stay Loud.
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Sources:
“Hegseth says Wounded Knee soldiers will keep their Medals of Honor,” AP News (Sept. 2025)
“Native Americans condemn Pentagon move to preserve Wounded Knee medals,” Reuters (Sept. 27, 2025)
“Hegseth says Wounded Knee massacre soldiers will keep Medals of Honor,” The Guardian (Sept. 26, 2025)
“Soldiers from Wounded Knee will keep their Medals of Honor,” The Washington Post (Sept. 26, 2025)
“Federal Court Halts Transfer of Oak Flat to Mining Company,” Native News Online (Aug. 2025)
“Federal Appeals Court Blocks Oak Flat Land Exchange,” Center for Biological Diversity (Aug. 2025)
“Court stops sacred Oak Flat land transfer to Resolution Copper in emergency order,” Arizona Mirror (Aug. 21, 2025)
“Court delays land transfer that would enable copper mine at Oak Flat,” High Country News (Aug. 2025)
“Supreme Court declines to review Oak Flat case involving land used for Native American religious ceremonies,” Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (May 28, 2025)
“Ranking Member Huffman Statement on Supreme Court’s Refusal to Hear Apache Religious Freedom Case on Mining in Oak Flat,” House Committee on Natural Resources (2025)
“Medals awarded for Wounded Knee Massacre won’t be rescinded, Hegseth announces,” South Dakota Searchlight (Sept. 26, 2025)
“Pete Hegseth Letting Wounded Knee Soldiers Keep Medals Sparks Fury,” Newsweek (Sept. 2025)
“Hegseth’s predecessor, Lloyd Austin, ordered the review of the awards in 2024 after a Congressional recommendation in the 2022 defense bill,” Military Times (Sept. 2025)
“Wounded Knee Massacre” Wikipedia
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Time to stop the regime! Anyone that voted for tRump should be held responsible for all the damage and cruelty their vote has caused others. ALL of them, no excuses!
trump supporters are ignorant morons