Abstract :
On February 27, 1973, approximately 200 American Indian Movement (AIM) activists and local residents began an occupation—ultimately to last 71 days—of the village of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. By aggressively raising issues of treaty rights, and the claims of sovereignty for which they stood, the Wounded Knee occupation placed American state authority and national identity in radical question. This paper analyzes the Wounded Knee conflict through the lens of boundaries. It focuses in particular on how the issues of power and authority at the root of the conflict were played out over a series of boundaries that constituted this contested geographic space: what one government official referred to as a ‘protest platform.’ The contentious manner in which questions of authority and power on the Pine Ridge Reservation were played out during the occupation was particularly apparent with respect to the various roadblocks and perimeters that determined who and what had access to Wounded Knee. In broader theoretical and conceptual terms, I argue, while recent use of metaphors such as ‘jumping scales’ and ‘scaling up’ are evocative in characterizing contemporary political spectacles, they can also obscure the actual work that goes into such political statements, both on the part of activists and representatives of the state. As such, they can also obscure the fundamental spatiality of such work. The eyes and the ears of the whole universe are now focused on Wounded Knee. And little Wounded Knee turned into a giant world. Wallace Black Elk, Lakota Medicine Man (in Anderson et al., 1974: 110). The occupying force out there has proclaimed an ‘independent state’ at Wounded Knee. In any other nation this would be called revolution. I haven’t figured out yet what they call it here! Stanley Lyman, Pine Ridge BIA Superintendent (1973; in 1991: 20). On February 27, 1973, approximately 200 American Indian Movement (AIM) activists and local residents began an occupation—ultimately to last 71 days—of the village of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Within a short time, the Wounded Knee site was surrounded by an impressive show of government force: FBI agents and specially trained federal marshals equipped with high-tech hardware provided, it was only later revealed, by the U.S. Army. Just as importantly, a virtual army of both domestic and international television and print reporters also surrounded the site. As the site of a famous massacre of approximately 300 American Indian men, women and children at the hands of U.S. soldiers in 1890, Wounded Knee was a particularly charged geographic symbol of the violence that accompanied American westward expansion and state building (Brown, 1971). By claiming this famous historical site, the occupiers sought to raise awareness of American Indian issues. More specifically and immediately, they sought to bring attention to, and ultimately remove, what they claimed was a corrupt reservation political structure. The occupiers were particularly concerned with the political rule of new Pine Ridge Tribal Chairman Richard (Dick) Wilson, whom they accused of corruption and of aggressively stifling political dissent. Such relatively modest goals, however, were tied into the far grander issue of treaty rights, the boundaries that spatially defined those rights, and the claims of sovereignty for which they stood. As such, the occupation questioned the very basis on which the most powerful nationstate in the world existed. Not unlike more recent events like those which occurred in Waco, Texas (Kirby, 1997; Luke, 1996) or the political spectacle that surrounded the case of Elián González in Miami, the Wounded Knee occupation placed American state authority and national identity in radical question. To make this point in clear language, on March 10th the Wounded Knee occupiers declared a new state: the Independent Oglala Nation (ION). The boundaries that defined this contested site were now declared ‘borders,’ whose status was to be aggressively maintained by a ‘border patrol.’ With dramatic images of Indian ‘warriors’ manning their bunkers to protect this territory gracing the pages of major national magazines like Newsweek and Time (Time, 1973a; Newsweek, 1973; Time, 1973c) and the screens of primetime television, the Wounded Knee occupation was an early example the power of mediated protest. Wounded Knee was what one commentator at the time referred to as “a test-tube case of confrontation politics and its symbiosis with the media” (Hickey, 1973: 8), and what critics referred to as an example of ‘guerrilla theater.’ Writing in the Nation, for example, Desmond Smith (1973: 806) lamented that Wounded Knee constituted “an example of a new and expanding strategy of political manipulation that neatly circumvents the ordinary process of government [and] makes a direct and powerful appeal to the public through the mass media.” Through AIM’s successful ‘media coup’—in which reporters from all of the major news organizations in the U.S., as well as a significant foreign contingent, quickly rushed to the scene of the story—Wounded Knee became “[o]vernight ... the national headline and Washington found AIM’s media gun pointed at its head” (Smith, 1973: 808). The Wounded Knee occupation was noted for its spectacular symbolic politics, in which issues of treaty rights and the sovereignty claims for which they stood were articulated, in quite dramatic fashion, on a global media stage. Because of this, the occupation also attracted the intense interest of the federal government, which responded with one of the most significant deployments of American state power in domestic space in the 20th century. For the White House, the Wounded Knee occupation was an issue of national concern. While senior Washington officials tried to ‘low-key’ the incident, as Attorney General Kleindienst put it early in the occupation (Kleindienst, 1979: 268), they recognized their authority and responsibility to do so in the ‘national interest.’ Particularly as media coverage and pubic attention raised the profile of the occupation, senior Washington officials insisted on a policy of restraint. In spatial terms, this policy was manifested in a strategy of containment. Rather than forcibly remove the occupiers, federal forces worked to limit the movement of people, things, and images back and forth across the boundary that defined the occupation site. Yet just as the conduct of the drawn-out occupation was fluid and changeable, so too was the status of the various boundaries that constituted the spatial form of this political spectacle. The contentious manner in which questions of authority and power on the Pine Ridge Reservation were played out during the occupation was particularly apparent with respect to the various roadblocks and perimeters that determined who and what had access to Wounded Knee. In this paper, I analyze the complex geographical dynamics of this political event. By drawing, in particular, on the large collection of FBI documents made publicly available in the years since the occupation, I am able to explain the actions and motivations of various state officials as they worked to manage a significant challenge to their authority. As a relatively early example of a televised protest—and because of the large number of documents available on the event—the Wounded Knee occupation sheds important light on the geographical dynamics of contemporary mass-mediated protest, and on how states act in the context of such political spectacles. This paper focuses in particular on how the issues of power and authority at the root of the conflict were played out over a series of boundaries that constituted this contested geographic space: what one government official referred to as a ‘protest platform.’ Such analysis, I argue, allows insight not just into this important historical event, but also broader issues of contemporary political protest and state power.
