Thread by @Jeff__Ostler

Was the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre a massacre?

I was dismayed to learn today from @develvishist that a 2019 publication by a prestigious academic press @OxUniPress @OUPHistory claims Wounded Knee was not a massacre.

A thread on why OUP should retract this publication:

The claim that WK was not a massacre appears in this book:

"In Harm's Way: A History of the American Military Experience."

It purports to be "the most current, comprehensive, clear, yet concise survey of US military history from colonial times to the twenty-first century."

Here is what the book says about Wounded Knee (thanks to @develvishist):

There are numerous falsehoods in this account, which should have been caught in peer review and fact checking but were not.

1. The Seventh Cavalry did have orders to attack. General Nelson A. Miles, commander of the military division of the Missouri, ordered the 7th Cavalry to disarm Chief Big Foot's people and "if he fights to destroy him."

1a. This meant that when Lakotas, for perfectly understandable reasons, did not want to be disarmed and did not immediately give up all their weapons, the 7th Calvary was instructed by the highest military authority to commit a massacre.

1b. (This, parenthetically, was entirely consistent with U.S. policy since the 1770s, that it was legal to commit genocide against Indigenous people when they appeared not to comply with U.S. demands, no matter how unjust these demands).

2. The assertion that the "Indians delivered the first lethal volleys" is false. Some Army officers claimed this, but they were lying. Multiple witness, Native and non-Native, contradict this transparently self-serving narrative. Many historians have pointed this out.

2a. That a major university press would publish this nonsense in the year 2019 is a stunning abrogation of responsibility to the truth. Who reviewed this? Who fact checked it?

3. But even if Lakotas had fired first, the idea that it was now "too late to prevent an inevitable slaughter" is a laughable excuse for the massacre that did in fact follow.

3a. Are these experts in military history aware that the Seventh Cavalry had placed four Hotchkiss guns atop a nearby hill, each capable of firing exploding cartridges weighing 2.5 lbs. with a range of over two miles?

Not a word about this.

3b. Are these experts in military history aware of the damage these Hotchkiss guns did as they rained death on Lakota men, women, children desperately seeking shelter in ravines and thickets of brush?

Nothing.

3c. Are these experts in military history aware of the testimony of Dewey Beard, a survivor of the massacre, who recalled "there went up from these dying people a medley of death songs that would make the hardest heart weep"?

Apparently not.

3d. Are these experts in military history aware of how Lakotas later discovered bodies several miles away that were found in the fetal position with powder burns near fatal wounds, evidence of point-blank executions?

Silence.

3e. Do they know that Charles Eastman, the physican at Pine Ridge Agency, who went to the killing fields three days later, found the bodies of young girls who had wrapped their head with shawls so as not to see the soldiers who were about to murder them?

No.

3f. Do they know that military sources corroborated these stories? Captain Frank Baldwin discovered the bodies of a woman and three children THREE MILES AWAY shot a "so close range that the person . . . of each was powder-burned."

They did not do their homework.

4. The authors' conclusion that Wounded Knee, like all the violence of the "Indian Wars," can be attributed to misunderstanding, mistrust, and mistakes reproduces the tired cliché that it was all a "tragedy" and "both sides" were equally to blame.

4b. This was a standard argument in 1963 when Robert Utley wrote The Last Days of The Sioux Nation, but it is a position that is no longer credible.

4c. The authors are obviously reliant on Utley. They list his 1973 book Frontier Regulars in their "suggested reading."

Oxford apparently did not wonder why their authors failed to consult more recent scholarship.

4d. Never mind my own work, they could have at least been educated by military historian Jerome Greene's American Carnage, which although far too kind to the Army, does call Wounded Knee what it was: a massacre.

4e. Greene's book was published FIVE YEARS before "In Harm's Way."

For three historians claiming to be experts in military history not to have used the latest work by a fellow military historian is malpractice.

OUP should apologize and retract this publication.

5. To conclude this thread, here is a painting by the Dakota artist Oscar Howe.

It was massacre.

Addendum: Books that describe Wounded Knee as a massacre (2001-present)

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Anti-Indianism in Modern America (2001)

Sam Maddra, Hostiles? (2006)

Rani-Henrik Andersson, The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890 (2008)

continued . . .

@HC_Richardson, Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (2010)

Josephine Waggoner, Witness (2013)

David Grua, Surviving Wounded Knee (2014)

Louis Warren, God's Red Son (2017)

continued . . .

@nickwestes Our History is the Future (2019)

@JustinGage We Want the Gates Closed Before Us (2020)