When Joe Biden calls for some government action, the contrarian reaction should be to reject it immediately. However, there are rare instances when Biden is calling for action that both Republicans and Democrats have agreed on previously, and still do.

In this case, it is the revocation of Medals of Honor that were awarded to U.S. Cavalry in 1890 who were involved in what is wrongly called the “Battle of Wounded Knee” and rightly called the “Wounded Knee Massacre,” the sight of which is now a National Historic Landmark. The confrontation with Lakota natives near Wounded Knee Creek on December 29, 1890, was a lethal example of failed military leadership during the Plains Indian Wars.

What began as an order to surrender arms, in a charged environment where there was concern about the Lakota Ghost Dancers, ended up in the slaughter of mostly unarmed people.

One prominent account claims that a deaf Lakota native named Black Coyote did not want to give up his rifle because he had paid much for it and relied on it for subsistence hunting. In a struggle to take his rifle, it discharged, resulting in the Cavalry opening fire on the tribal group, most of whom had already been disarmed.

Lakota Sioux Chief Spotted Elk was among the estimated 250 Lakota men, women, and children killed that bitter winter day — with 51 known wounded (four men and 47 women and children).

There were precedents for such attacks on native peoples, most notably, the Sand Creek Massacre decades earlier on November 29, 1864. U.S. Army cavalry units in the Colorado Territory killed more than 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho, mostly women, children, and the elderly.

Among COL James W. Forsyth’s 490 Seventh Cavalrymen, there were 31 killed and 33 wounded. Disgracefully, in my long-held view after researching the primary historic accounts of the Wounded Knee confrontation, there were Medals of Honor awarded to 20 Cavalrymen, most if not all of whom did not meet the most rudimentary service threshold to receive our nation’s highest award for valor in combat.

For context regarding my assessment of this revocation effort, I have a decent historical understanding of and disdain for the repeated treaty betrayals of native peoples by 19th-century American presidents. My interest in those betrayals was sparked first by learning the history of Tennessean Andrew Jackson’s “Trail of Tears” removal of the Cherokee tribes — in defiance of a Supreme Court decree that he did not have the authority to do so.

To be clear, I don’t romanticize the Cherokee or any other native tribal peoples. In addition to violent attacks by the Cherokee on settlers, they have their own violent past with other tribal people, including the Shawnee and Muskogee-Creeks.

In fact, in 1780, my earliest ancestors in what would become Tennessee in 1796 were among the leaders of the Overmountain Men, who won a decisive victory against the British at Kings Mountain, a turning point of the American Revolutionary War. But the Overmountain Men alliance was formed as a result of constant attacks by warring bands of Cherokee, many under the leadership of Dragging Canoe, a Red Coat sympathizer. Those bloody attacks near what is now the Eastern Cherokee reservation did not end until Col. John Sevier’s 250 “Nolichucky Riflemen” pursued Dragging Canoe and his Chickamauga band, defeating him on the palisades of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, on September 20, 1782. That battle, almost a year after Yorktown, is considered to be the last of the Revolutionary War before the November 30 preliminary signing of the peace treaty with the British.

I have visited many native ancestral lands in North America and have been fascinated by both the culture and weaponry of Eastern and Plains tribes. From the earliest records of native immigration into the North American west thousands of years ago, once those nomadic groups established tribal territories, many unleashed unmitigated violence upon other native tribes, both defending their own territories and in conquest of others. They slaughtered men, women, and children, they raped and enslaved survivors, and then claimed their lands.

Reading deep into the historic autobiographies of tribal leaders, including Lakota Chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, Apache leader Geronimo, Tecumseh of the Shawnees, and local Cherokee Chief John Ross, those histories dispel the notion that these were the peace-loving naturalists as popularized in Kevin Costner’s 1990 epic American West film “Dances with Wolves,” or other similarly idyllic portrayals of peaceful tribal bands.

That notwithstanding, I was moved by Dee Brown’s 1970 book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee — one of the first books to chronicle the lives of the Hunkpapa Lakota, Oglala Lakota, and other tribes from their perspective.

I have visited the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where the arrogant and derelict George Armstrong Custer met his most deserving end on June 25, 1876, at the hands of the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho. Notably, Custer, who was instrumental in cornering Robert E. Lee at Appomattox in April of 1865 in a war ostensibly to free enslaved men, women, and children, then headed west to enslave native men, women, and children on government plantations called “reservations.”

The sentiments about the defeat of Custer at Little Bighorn had much to do with shaping the antagonistic attitudes of both civilian and military leaders regarding native populations in the years leading up to the Wounded Knee Massacre. Those sentiments undoubtedly informed the racial bias of the troopers who fired on the Lakota at Wounded Knee.

For the record, the order by Biden that SecDef Lloyd Austin review the Wounded Knee Medals of Honor is, indeed, political virtue signaling. Biden could have ordered this review in July two years ago when legislators pushed for the revocation of those Medals, a push that actually started in November of 2021. But he saved this action as a badge for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.

In fact, congressional support for revocation of the Wounded Knee Medals actually goes back 35 years. In 1990, both the House and Senate passed a resolution on the centennial of the attack, condemning the massacre.

Additionally, the revocation of unearned Medals of Honor has a well-documented history.

In 1917, a Medal of Honor Board revoked 911 Medals. Most were erroneously awarded to Union soldiers for actions during the War Between the States that clearly did not meet the standard for valor above and beyond the call of duty. Among them was the only woman to hold the Medal of Honor, Dr. Mary Walker, whose Medal was unlawfully restored by the Department of Defense in 1977 under Jimmy Carter.

As for consideration of the merits of the Wounded Knee Medals now, I think the Department of Defense should be more focused on accelerating the long-overdue awarding of Medals of Honor to qualified recipients. That was the case three weeks ago with PVTs Shadrach and Wilson, the last of the Andrews’ Raiders to receive Medals of Honor for their actions in 1862. But there are more than 10 contemporary nominees currently stalled in the DoD pipeline, including Vietnam Vets SFC(R) Cliff Newman and CPT(R) Ike Camacho and nominees from more recent combat theaters.

However, the Wounded Knee wrong should be righted.

I am in agreement with my colleague, GEN B. B. Bell (USA, Ret.), who offered me his assessment this week: “The heroism, valor, and intrepidity that are necessarily attached to the combat actions associated with the awarding of the Medal of Honor are tarnished by allowing the Wounded Knee awards to stand. Similar to hundreds of other Medals of Honor that have been revoked in our past, the Wounded Knee awards should also be revoked.”

(Read more Profiles of Valor here.)

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

Follow Mark Alexander on X/Twitter.

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