The Wounded Knee Medal of Honor Fight

On December 29, 1890, the systemic starvation and cultural collapse of the Lakota Sioux culminated in the tragic Wounded Knee Massacre. In a desperate spiritual response to broken treaties and the near-extinction of the buffalo, the Lakota turned to the peaceful Ghost Dance revitalization movement, which was quickly weaponized by anxious settlers and the U.S. government as a prelude to an uprising. Seeking political optics to reassure white voters, President Benjamin Harrison authorized deploying nearly one-third of the U.S. Army to South Dakota. When the Seventh Cavalry attempted to disarm Chief Spotted Elk's band—consisting of roughly 350 people, more than 200 of whom were women and children—at Wounded Knee Creek, a kinetic moment of miscommunication involving a deaf Lakota named Black Coyote sparked an immediate, point-blank firefight. Utilizing rapid-fire, breech-loading Hotchkiss mountain guns, U.S. troops killed between 250 and 300 Lakota, actively pursuing and executing fleeing non-combatants across the freezing prairie.

The tragedy did not end on the battlefield, initiating a century-long struggle over historical memory and military honor. To shield officers from culpability, an Army Court of Inquiry engineered a legal defense that retroactively defined the Lakota as active combatants, laying the administrative groundwork to award 19 Medals of Honor for actions during the massacre—medals originally utilized as loose campaign badges to validate a heroic narrative and cover up the slaughter. Congressional efforts to revoke these awards reached a deadlock in the 2020s under the "Remove the Stain Act" due to constitutional separation of powers, shifting the responsibility to the executive branch. In September 2025, the Department of Defense officially closed the review and opted to retain the medals, but a May 2026 leak by the South Dakota Searchlight exposed severe flaws in their methodology, revealing that DOD panelists bypassed deep historical context and instead relied on an artificial intelligence tool that ingested and validated the legally whitewashed 19th-century military reports. Despite this bureaucratic resistance, the Oglala Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes reclaimed their sacred soil in 2022, ensuring the truth remains preserved through physical custodianship and the annual Bigfoot Memorial Ride.

• Campaign Badges of Massacre: How the loose administrative criteria of 1890 allowed the military to issue 19 Medals of Honor at Wounded Knee, utilizing the nation's highest decoration for valor to institutionalize and validate the slaughter of non-combatants.
• AI and the Perpetuation of Cover-Ups: The controversial revelation that DOD review panelists utilized artificial intelligence to scan digitized 19th-century military files, allowing the algorithm to process whitewashed historical cover-ups as objective, modern facts.
• The Separation of Powers Deadlock: Why legislative efforts to strip the medals collapsed, as legal analysts argued Article I of the Constitution does not permit Congress to retroactively rescind military awards issued by the executive branch.
• Reclaiming the Sacred Soil: The historic September 2022 purchase of the 40-acre Wounded Knee massacre site by the Oglala Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes, legally taking back the ground from commercial exploiters to control their own narrative.

Source credit: Research for this episode included transcript materials and supporting scientific discussions accessed June 10, 2026. Content is summarized and adapted for commentary and educational use.