Cultural Dictionary
Wounded Knee definition
A creek in South Dakota where United States soldiers killed large numbers of Dakota Native Americans — Sioux — in 1890. The Sioux, under Chief Big Foot, had been resisting settlement of the area and had fled to Montana, but United States troops brought them back to South Dakota for detention. As the soldiers were disarming the warriors in an army camp at Wounded Knee, a rifle shot alarmed the soldiers, and fighting broke out in which more than two hundred Sioux were killed, including women and children. The massacre was the last major military conflict between whites and Native Americans.
