Wounded Knee 1973: Still Bleeding

On the night of Feb. 27, 1973, beat-up cars carrying dozens of angry young men sped into Wounded Knee village in Southwestern South Dakota, where 83 years earlier, Chief Big Foot and 150 Lakota Sioux were massacred by the U.S. 7th Calvary. 


Members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the local Native American Lakota had come to occupy the symbolic site on the Pine Ridge Reservation to protest their grievances. Shortly thereafter, police and Federal agents cordoned off the small town which would soon became the stage of a violent standoff. The AIM and local Lakota would hold out against the firepower of the U.S. Government for 71 days. By the time the occupiers left, the village had been destroyed, two were dead, an activist had gone missing, and a U.S. Marshal left paralyzed. 


In Wounded Knee 1973: Still Bleeding, award-winning Washington D.C.-based journalist Stew Magnuson explores the events and personalities of this still unresolved struggle between Native Americans and the Federal Government.  


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A native of Omaha, Nebraska, Stew Magnuson is the author of The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder: And Other True Stories from the Nebraska Pine Ridge Border Towns, which was named the 2009 Nebraska Nonfiction Book of the Year and a finalist for the Center of Great Plains Studies’ 2008 Great Plains Distinguished Book of the Year. He has also written The Song of Sarin, a fictional account of the 1995 subway gas attacks in Tokyo, Japan. A former foreign correspondent, Magnuson has filed stories from throughout Asia for wire services and various publications. He lives with his wife and daughter in Arlington, Virginia.