History of the United States II / Unit 15 USH2 2105 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Wounded Knee, 1973
The idea
In February nineteen seventy-three AIM occupied Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, after a failed effort by Oglala residents to impeach a tribal president they accused of corruption. Federal marshals and FBI agents surrounded the town, and a siege lasted seventy-one days, wounding a marshal and an FBI agent and killing two Native Americans. Dennis Banks and Russell Means were arrested; the charges were later dismissed.
In practice
The village where the Seventh Cavalry had killed Lakota people on December twenty-ninth, eighteen ninety, occupied again eighty-three years later.
Where people slip
The site was chosen. The anchor says Wounded Knee carried historical significance as the place of the eighteen ninety massacre, and AIM used the occupation to accuse the government of failing to keep its treaties. The misreading treats the two events as a coincidence of place; the second was staged where it was because of the first. Unit two taught the massacre.
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