In 1890, U.S. soldiers massacred 250–300 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee.
Twenty soldiers received the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military award, for their role.
Historians, veterans, and Native leaders have long called these awards a disgrace.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Thursday they will not be rescinded.
Keeping the medals insults Native lives lost and devalues the honor of those who truly earned it.
On December 29, 1890, the U.S. 7th Cavalry surrounded a Lakota band led by Chief Big Foot on the Pine Ridge Reservation. These Lakota weren’t warriors; they were starving, sick, and trying to find safety. Big Foot himself was dying of pneumonia, carried on a wagon under a white flag of truce.
That morning, soldiers tried to confiscate weapons. A accidental shot went off from a deaf Lakota man, Black Coyote. The response was brutal and indiscriminate. Soldiers opened fire with rifles and Hotchkiss cannons, mowing down families as they ran. By the end, hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children lay dead in the snow.
Three days later, their frozen bodies were dumped into a mass grave. Photographs from that grave are still some of the most haunting images in American history.
The Medals That Should Never Have Been
For this slaughter, 20 soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor. Their citations praised “gallantry” and “bravery.” Some explicitly mention chasing down fleeing Lakota or firing artillery into the camp.
To be clear: these men weren’t honored for holding their ground against an enemy force. They were honored for killing women, children, and elders.
Even by 1890 standards, the awards were questionable. Today, they look like medals for war crimes. And keeping them cheapens the honor itself. It demeans those who earned it with true valor: the soldiers who risked everything, and in many cases lost their lives, in acts of real bravery and sacrifice.
Why It Still Matters
These medals aren’t just old history. They’re symbols that tell us what America chooses to honor.
For decades, Native leaders, historians, and even some veterans have pushed to revoke them. Congress formally expressed “deep regret” in 1990, but the medals remained. Multiple review boards have since acknowledged that Wounded Knee was a massacre not a battle.
By keeping the medals, the U.S. government sends a message: the killing of Native families can still be decorated as “heroism.”
A Political Statement, Not a Historical One
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcement that the medals will stand fits a broader pattern. He’s resisted renaming military bases named after Confederate leaders, framing such debates as “woke politics.”
But this isn’t about politics. It’s about truth. The Army’s own historians call Wounded Knee a massacre. To call it anything else is revisionism.
What Wounded Knee Represents
Wounded Knee marked the end of the so-called Indian Wars, a final act in the U.S. campaign to destroy Native resistance. The Ghost Dance, the spiritual movement that so terrified the government, was peaceful. It promised buffalo herds and reunion with loved ones, not war.
But to U.S. authorities, Native spirituality was threat enough to unleash cannons on starving families.
For Lakota people, Wounded Knee is sacred ground. It is also an open wound. To honor their killers with the highest military medal is to rub salt into that wound, generation after generation.
Why You Should Care
This isn’t just a Native issue. It’s an American issue.
What we choose to honor reflects who we are. Keeping these medals means our nation is still willing to decorate mass killing when the victims are Native. And beyond that, it erodes the meaning of the Medal of Honor itself. Every soldier who earned that medal through real courage, charging enemy fire, protecting their brothers and sisters in arms, or giving their own lives, has their sacrifice diluted when the same award is handed out for slaughtering unarmed families.
Conclusion: What Kind of Nation Do We Want to Be?
We can’t change what happened at Wounded Knee. But we can decide what values we honor today. By refusing to rescind these medals, America not only dishonors the Lakota lives lost it betrays the soldiers who truly earned the Medal of Honor through acts of selfless valor.
The medals stay, for now. But the questions they raise about honor, memory, and justice are not going away. As America grapples with its complex history, Wounded Knee reminds us that the past isn’t really the past, it lives on in the symbols we choose to keep, and in the stories we tell about who we are.