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Doctor Sally Wagner Testifies At Wounded Knee Hearings My name is Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner. I received my Ph.D. in 1978 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, one of the first doctorates awarded in the country for work in Women's Studies. Currently a Research Affiliate at the University of California, Davis, I've taught, lectured and written in the filed of Women's Studies for twenty years. A native of Aberdeen, South Dakota, my roots are deep in the state. Both sets of grandparents settled here before the turn of the century, and my family has been active in political and community activities. Granpa Aldrich was mayor of Aberdeen for four terms, and I grew up with senators and governors as family friends. My mother always reminded the current governor that she taught him how to swim when he was a little boy. I've recently come home to reside with my elderly father following the death of my mother. I became interested in Wounded Knee while researching the book series I'm editing on South Dakota pioneer women entitled Daughters of Dakota. The biggest surprise for me has been the frequency of stories indicating a cooperative and friendly relationship between Indians and settlers, generating the obvious research question, "what went wrong?" The answer ultimately led me to the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. What I'd like to share with you is some of that research journey. A solid grounding in my discipline of women's history has given me a healthy skepticism of current historians, so in my work I limit myself to first-hand accounts of people who were present at the event, and/or had access to the most knowledge of it. Hence, I went to the words of the commanding generals, soldiers in the fields, Indian agents, government officials, teachers, those who cared for the wounded, etc. I decided initially to limit myself to the accounts of non-indians, and concentrate on the testimony of the men in charge, to see how they described the events at Wounded Knee. There are only a few key white women included; the only Indian voice you'll find in this testimony is quoted by Governor Sigurd Anderson. Let us begin with the final story in the second volume of my book series, Daughters of Dakota, which is essentially where I began: "One of the oldest friends of the Ashcrofts was the famous Sioux Indian leader, Sitting Bull. He often visited them and bought butter and chickens from Grandmother. One day he came to buy potatoes from their garden. Grandfather was busy and did not want to take the time to dig them, so his daughter Ethel, ten years old, slipped away and dug a half-sack of potatoes and dragged them up to the house for Sitting Bull. He was so pleased that he promised her a pony, and soon a little bay horse was delivered to her. He was named "Two-John" and she had him until she was married to Jack Jacobs in 1896. The Role Of The Press This story, I discovered, was in marked contrast to the newspapers throughout the nation at the time, which were calling for the total "extermination" of the Sioux nation, beginning with Sitting Bull. For example, the Minneapolis Tribune after his death, regretted only that he "should have been hung higher than Haman and with less ceremony than is observed by a Texas lynching party towards a horse thief." As the press whipped-up fear, the fact was lost that Sitting Bull had been residing in friendship and peace with his white neighbors, with his only "crime" taking part in a religious worship, the Ghost Dance, labeled the "Messiah craze" by the press. A frightening lynch mob mentality prevailed, with one North Dakota paper declaring: "The most wholesome way to put the quietus on the Messiah racket is to hang old Sitting Bull, and the other disturbance plotters, for conspiracy..." It was clearly not just the papers back East that created an atmosphere that made genocide thinkable, but it was the local small-town papers, as well. In my home town of Aberdeen, which is in the opposite corner of the state from the Pine Ridge reservation, there was a kind and mild-mannered newspaper editor named L. Frank Baum who starred in an opera with my grandmother during the state fair in 1890. Mr. Baum wrote,
Calling in the Army The white people closest to the scene "deeply resented the soldiers," wrote Elaine Goodale Eastman, who was Supervisor of Education for the two Dakotas at the time. "Army officers frankly admitted that 'the army doesn't know what it is here for' and even asserted that 'these Indians don't deserve punishment,' but we heard that the men were bored with inaction and spoiling for a fight." The notable exception was the hysterical new agent at Pine Ridge, Dr. Daniel Royer, who reportedly later lost his license to practice medicine in California because of his sever drug addiction. A man with "no previous experience with the Indians," whose appointment was "purely a political one," according to his wife, Dr. Royer repeatedly and frantically called for the army, and reluctantly, for the first time in the twelve year history of the reservation, troops came in to Pine Ridge. Business Interests There was one group that wanted the army to come into the area, according to Elaine Goodale Eastman, who wrote,
The Wall, South Dakota, Chamber of Commerce believed that the business pressure Eastman mentions had been a major force leading up to Wounded Knee, as an historical brochure published by them in 1972 shows: This unrest among the Indians and the Indian Agent's [Royer] request for soldiers fit well into the slow economy of the area and the business men in Rapid City and other towns in the west saw an opportunity to improve it. They joined with the Indian Agents in sending telegrams to Washington urging that troops be sent west. This was also welcome news to the Army that had been inactive for so long. They responded promptly and within a short time there was a cordon of regular army completely surrounding southwestern South Dakota. According to one newspaper report, this was the greatest peacetime concentration of U.S. Troops that had ever been staged. The soldiers were stationed from the Rosebud to Hot Springs, North to Slim Buttes and East to the Missouri River. The newspapers sent out great numbers of reporters and photographers. Business in the frontier towns was never better." My friend Vic Runnels, an Oglala Lakota artist whose Uncle Jim High Hawk was shot and wounded by a soldier at Wounded Knee in 1890, reminds me that it must be remembered that the Indians read the newspapers calling for genocide against them. Graduates from boarding schools and day schools were reading, speaking and writing English by this time. They knew what the white nation was saying about them, and had reason to fear that would all be killed. Emma C. Sickels, who established the Indian school at Pine Ridge, wrote that the Indians were getting
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