Massacre At Wounded Knee Research Paper

On December 29, 1890, the United States’ Seventh Cavalry surrounded a camp of Sioux Indians at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. According to eyewitness to history, Massacre at Wounded Knee, 1890, the Cavalry’s mission was to arrest the Miniconjou Lakota’s chief, Big Foot, and disarm his warriors, because of their involvement in the Ghost Dance Movement. Conflict quickly arose, as a result of the tension that had been building up between the two sides for the past few months. During a search for weapons among the Sioux people, one shot was fired, which quickly lead to a violent outburst between the U.S. Army and the Sioux. The battle, which was typically one-sided due to the dominance of the Seventh Cavalry, resulted in the massacre of 150 to 300 Sioux warriors, women, and children. This massacre went down in history as the last major act of resistance of the American Indians and ultimately marked the end of the Native American’s reign over the Great Plains.

The United States army had the same views about Native Americans as the U.S. government did. The U.S army did not see Sioux as equals to U.S. citizens, in fact they saw them as wards of the government. They also did not acknowledge the Sioux as their own nation. In contrary to this, the Sioux had their own views about themselves. The Sioux did believe that they were their own nation, and that they were entitled to their own beliefs and systems. They did not trust the U.S. army because they did not trust the American people. They felt that there were too many times where they had been betrayed by the Americans. There is truth to this matter, according to the Chronology of Events Leading Up to the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, on March 2,1889, Congress agreed to use fraud and coercion to acquire the signatures of adult male Indians, in order to pass an Act that would divide the Sioux reservation into six smaller