Debate Over, Hegseth Says: Wounded Knee Butchers Deserved Medals of Honor

We were working our way toward a civilized consensus that we should rescind the Medals of Honor awarded to 20 United States Seventh Cavalry soldiers who slaughtered Lakota people in the dead of winter at Wounded Knee in 1890. Congressman Dusty Johnson voted to rescind those medals in 2021. In 2022, South Dakota House Republicans (including now-gubernatorial candidate Speaker Jon Hansen) voted to kill House Resolution 7001 calling on Congress to rescind those medals, but in 2024, the South Dakota Senate voted 32–1 (the lone nay-sayer: Senator Julie Frye-Mueller of Rapid City) for the similar Senate Resolution 701, recognizing that honoring the butchers of Wounded Knee “is an implication of hostility and genocide against the Great Sioux Nation”:

WHEREAS, the United States’ highest honor for valor is the Medal of Honor, and Congress established that, in order to obtain the Medal of Honor, the deed of the person must be so outstanding that it clearly distinguishes the soldier’s gallantry beyond the call of duty from lesser forms of bravery; and

WHEREAS, allowing honor to the Seventh Calvary for acts in the Wounded Knee Massacre dishonors the Medal of Honor and is an implication of hostility and genocide against the Great Sioux Nation and the persons who were killed by the United States at Wounded Knee; and

WHEREAS, Chief Big Foot and his band were impeded by Major Whiteside on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation at Porcupine Butte, where surrender took place unconditionally under a white flag of truce, causing Chief Big Foot and his band to be led to Wounded Knee Creek, where Colonel James W. Forsyth assumed command; and

WHEREAS, the Seventh Calvary stripped the Lakotas of all belongings and disarmed them of weapons of any kind; a shot was then heard, and the calvary opened fire indiscriminately while discharging Hotchkiss cannons, resulting in the killing and wounding of no less than three hundred unarmed men, women, children, and elderly Lakotas; and

WHEREAS, the Seventh Calvary was recognized to have killed a sizeable number of women and children by Major General Nelson Miles who said, “[w]holesale massacre occurred and I have never heard of a more brutal, cold-blooded massacre than that at Wounded Knee;” and

WHEREAS, Lakota Holy Man, Black Elk, described Wounded Knee as follows, “I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth, you see now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead;” and

WHEREAS, Medal of Honor recipients are under an obligation, through their actions, to exemplify courage to those who are serving in the Armed Forces and to those who are planning to serve; and

WHEREAS, to date, the Medal of Honor has been bestowed only three thousand five hundred twenty-two times, including one hundred twenty-six instances for World War I, one hundred forty-five instances for the Korean War, twenty-three instances throughout the Global War on Terror, and twenty times for the Wounded Knee Massacre; and

WHEREAS, no action has been taken at the federal level to correct this injustice:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, by the Senate of the Ninety-Ninth Legislature of the State of South Dakota, that the Senate hereby requests that efforts be made to investigate each Medal of Honor awarded to the United States Army members who acted at Wounded Knee Creek, Pine Ridge Agency, South Dakota on December 29, 1890; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the Senate requests support in this effort from Senators John Thune and Mike Rounds and Representative Dusty Johnson, with support from President Biden, the Commander in Chief, to do so; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that it is requested that upon congressional passage the name of each person awarded the Medal of Honor for the acts noted above be removed from the Medal of Honor Roll enabled under section 1134a of title 10 of the United States Code [2024 SR 701, approved 2024.02.12].

Last year Defense Secretary Lloyd ordered a special review panel to review the Wounded Knee medals:

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin directed the Pentagon to review the 20 Medals of Honor awarded to U.S. troops for their actions at Wounded Knee in 1890, when soldiers killed and injured between 350 and 375 Lakota men, women and children.

Austin ordered the creation of a special panel to determine whether to retain or rescind the medals, the Department of Defense announced Wednesday. In a July 19 memorandum ordering the review, Austin said the panel would investigate “each awardee’s individual actions” and also “consider the context of the overall engagement.”

“It’s never too late to do what’s right,” an unnamed senior defense official said in a statement Wednesday. “And that’s what is intended by the review that the secretary directed, which is to ensure that we go back and review each of these medals in a rigorous and individualized manner” [Nikki Wentling, “Pentagon to Review 20 Medals of Honor from Wounded Knee Massacre,” Military Times, 2024.07.24].

But Senators Elizabeth Warren and M. Michael Rounds urged Austin to extend the October 15 deadline for that panel’s recommendation to allow more public input from tribes, victims’ descendants, historians, and the general public—a reasonable goal—but the Pentagon issued no announcement on the panel’s work, and now it’s too late to do what’s right, because the new administration is determined to do what’s wrong. Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued an Orwellian order rebranding the massacre as a “battle” and declaring that we will never forget what the Wounded Knee murderers did to deserve their Medals of Honor:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Thursday evening that soldiers who participated in the 1890 Battle of Wounded Knee will keep their Medals of Honor.

“Under my direction, we’re making it clear, without hesitation, that the soldiers who fought in the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890 will keep their medals, and we’re making it clear that they deserve those medals,” Hegseth said in a video posted on the social platform X.

“This decision is now final, and their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate,” he continued. “We salute their memory, we honor their service, and we will never forget what they did” [Filip Timotija, “Hegseth: Wounded Knee Soldiers Will Keep Medals of Honor,” The Hill, 2025.09.26].

Waving some papers in his Twitter video, Hegseth claims his predecessor’s panel supported his debate-over/honor-to-Indian-killers-forever diktat:

“Now, upon deliberation, that panel concluded that these brave soldiers should, in fact, rightfully, keep their medals from actions in 1890. The report was concluded in October of 2024,” Hegseth continued. “Yet despite this clear recommendation, former Secretary Lloyd Austin, for whatever reason — I think we know he was more interested in being politically correct than historically correct — chose not to make a final decision.”

He added that such “careless inaction has allowed for their distinguished recognition to remain in limbo until now” [Timotija, 2025.09.26].

Increasingly mealy-mouthed Senator John Thune declined to directly endorse or condemn Hegseth’s contemptible order, instead telling everyone to bend over and take it:

South Dakota Searchlight asked Thune if he agreed with Hegseth’s use of the word “battle” and Hegseth’s statement that the soldiers “deserve those medals.”

“Whenever you’re talking about those types of events in our nation’s history, you need to do it in a respectful way,” Thune said. “I didn’t watch what he said, but like I said, I think the decision that he issued is the one that everybody will end up having to adhere to” [Joshua Haiar, “Medals Awarded for Wounded Knee Massacre Won’t Be Rescinded, Hegseth Announces,” South Dakota Searchlight, 2025.09.26].

Honor the butchers heroes of Wounded Knee, now and forever—this is the Republican Party that Pine Ridge legislator Peri Pourier joined this week, for strategic reasons. Have explaining that, Peri, to your Pine Ridge neighbors, who I suspect will follow one part of Secretary Hegseth’s order: never forget what the Seventh Cavalry did at Wounded Knee.

Commanded by James W. Forsyth, the troops waited until “bright and early” the next morning to avoid provoking the tribe, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat wrote. With four Hotchkiss machine guns mounted on a bluff overlooking the camp, the troops demanded the tribe forfeit its weapons. The Miniconjou complied. But the troops were unconvinced that the Miniconjou had really given up all their weapons. They searched the camp, shaking out blankets and rifling through tepees.

The troops only found two rifles. One belonged to Black Coyote, a deaf member of the tribe who either didn’t understand the orders or didn’t want to comply. By some accounts, he fired first. By others, a soldier tried to grab his gun and it went off. Either way, a shot rang out and the massacre began.

“In the first seconds of violence,” Brown wrote, “the firing of carbines was deafening, filling the air with powder smoke.” Sitanka died early on. Then, soldiers fired the Hotchkiss guns.

“We tried to run,” a Miniconjou named Louise Weasel Bear reportedly said afterward. “But they shot us like we were a buffalo.”

Sensationalist white accounts agreed. “The soldiers shot the Indians down wherever found, no quarter being given by anyone,” the Globe-Democrat reported.

“To say that it was a most daring feat, 120 Indians attacking 500 cavalry, expresses the situation but faintly,” the Globe-Democrat continued. “It could only have been insanity which prompted such a deed.”

…As the sun set on December 29, there was little life left at Wounded Knee. The U.S. Army killed 300 Miniconjou, by some estimates, leaving them in the frozen plains and in mass graves, wounds dug into the American earth [Eli Wizevich, “On This Day in 1890, the U.S. Army Killed Nearly 300 Lakota Peoplein the Wounded Knee Massacre,” Smithsonian Magazine, 2024.12.29].