Gordon Belray
The Tragedy of Wounded Knee
2015
200” x 54”
Archival print
A depiction of the 71 day occupation by the Lakota (Oglala) Sioux of the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, beginning February 27th, 1973. Wounded Knee is the burial grounds of an estimated 200-300 Lakota men, women and children massacred in 1890 in the last battle of the U.S. Indian Wars and the third major occupation of significant sites by the American Indian Movement (A.I.M.)1.
The scene shows the standoff between A.I.M. supported Ogala Pine Ridge Reservation residents seeking to impeach their elected president Dick Wilson, whose office falls under the jurisdiction of U.S. Marshalls and the F.B.I.
The image is created from local and world press footage and photographs.
1 Alcatraz Penitentiary 1960-71 and the Indian Affairs Office, Washington D.C. 1972
Roadblock, CBS film crew and U.S. Marshalls.
The sermon from the occupied local church by A.I.M. Leader Russell Banks as an eagle and U.S. fighter jet wage symbolic battle overhead. To the left is the mass burial grounds from the 1890 massacre. To the right, a tattered U.S. flags flies upside down from a commemorative plaque to mark the use of the Hotchkiss Gatling-type gun in the last battle of the U.S. Indian Wars.
Pipe ceremony given by Black Elk, Russell Means, Dennis Banks and Ken Frizzell of the Department of Justice in attendance.
A "Buffalo Woman" standing by the historic plaque of the 1890 massacre.
Tribal president Dick Wilson and his G.O.O.N. squad.
Gildersleeve’s general store and gas station. Anna Mae Aquash sits laughing, she would later be executed under suspicion of being a government informant.