Under her mother’s frozen body, they found her. A baby girl in a buckskin cap, wrapped tightly in a shawl. She was breathing. Four days earlier, her mother—a Lakota woman on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota—had been shot by federal soldiers. Through a three-day blizzard, her mother’s still body had sheltered her. Now a rescue party was pulling her out into the cold air. Around one hundred men and two hundred women and children were slaughtered at the Wounded Knee Massacre, on December 29, 1890. Accounts differ about how the incident started, but it seems clear that it was rooted in misunderstanding and distrust. At one tense moment, a gun went off, and the prairie exploded in smoke and blood. “When the firing began,” the chief of the Oglala Lakota, American Horse, later told the U.S. commissioner of Indian affairs, “of course the people who were standing immediately around the young man who fired the first shot were killed right together, and then they turned their guns, Hotchkill guns, etc., upon the women who were in the lodges standing there under a flag of truce, and of course as soon as they were fired upon they fled.” He continued: The women and children of course were strewn all along the circular village until they were dispatched. Right near the flag of truce a mother was shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was dead was still nursing, and that especially was a very sad sight. The women as they were fleeing with their babes were killed together, shot right through. The baby who survived became known as Zintkala Nuni, or, in Lakota, Lost Bird.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 17:21:41 +0000
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