Darkest Night : Pine Ridge to Bombing Range (Part 1)

Episode 4 of our series picks up after the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 which, along with the 1883 Code of Indian Offenses, dramatically marked the U.S. federal government’s new policy of forced assimilation against its indigenous people.

Part 1 of the episode begins with the 1889 establishment of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, a much-diminished version of the Great Sioux Reservation established under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. The next segment starts our discussion of the worst “mass shooting” in American history - the Wounded Knee Massacre of December 29th, 1890. Referring to the Massacre, the well-known Black Elk said, “I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.” After an extended montage of participants’ stories, we hear archival testimony from survivor Wasu Maza(“Iron Hail”), otherwise known as Dewey Beard.

This part ends with a lengthy section on boarding schools, the first of which forcefully established the assimilationist philosophy of “Kill the Indian, save the man.”