Wounded Knee Medals Are Coming Back – Outside the Beltway

Wounded Knee Medals Resume

New information has changed my thinking about this topic.

James Joyner
·
Saturday July 27, 2024
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A comment by Dr. Dwight S. Mears on yesterday’s post “DoD to Review Knee Medals” significantly changed my thinking on the subject by drawing my attention to context I was unaware of. As this was his first comment, his note got stuck in the moderation filter and was only discovered this morning. So, rather than continue the discussion in an outdated comments section, I decided to highlight it here.

Mears is currently a reference librarian at Portland State University, but he is a retired Army officer and West Point graduate with a J.D. from Lewis & Clark Law School and a Ph.D. in American history from the University of North Carolina. He has just published an article on this topic, “Removing the Stain Without Diminishing Military Awards: Revoking Medals Won at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890,” in the current issue of Native American Law Review.

His article expands significantly on the history of the Medal of Honor (about which Sears wrote a book published by the University Press of Kansas) that I discussed in the article and explains in detail why we have been and should continue to be cautious about revoking old awards based on new policies. But he also reminds me that the actions at Wounded Knee were prohibited by existing military law, the so-called Lieber Code (General Orders 100) signed by President Lincoln in 1863.

Also, this little bit of context changes things radically for me:

The War Department’s award of twenty Medals of Honor for actions at the Wounded Knee massacre was part of the government’s efforts to influence public memory of the event. According to one historian, the awarding of the medals “reinforced the emerging national consensus that the ‘Battle of Wounded Knee’ was the final triumph of ‘civilization’ over ‘savagery’ in North America.” As both commemorative objects and symbols of distinguished conduct, the medals implicitly reinforced the Army’s original narrative that Wounded Knee was primarily a consequence of “treachery” … by the Indians, whether by a concerted plan or by the actions of the Indian who fired the first shot.

The Seventh Cavalry also erected a twenty-foot granite monument at Fort Riley, Kansas, to commemorate their fallen comrades at Wounded Knee. At the dedication, the speaker said that the soldiers had “paved the way for the advent of our splendid civilization,” which required the elimination of a “savage race that had made no progress for a thousand years.” The Lakota were cast in this mold, portrayed as “a cunning and savage enemy” who possessed only “ignorance and barbarity.” The speaker said that he did not “mourn the fate of the poor Indian or lament his wrong,” because “no land belongs to any people or race…when the claims of a better civilization are asserted.”

To the extent that the initial awarding of the medals was an attempt to whitewash history, reviewing them to ensure that they were actually earned is a corrective, not a retrospective imposition of today’s values ​​on a bygone era.

I maintain, as Mears does, that simply removing the medals en masse would be unfair and contrary to tradition. Moreover, there are good reasons to believe that Congress has no authority to remove medals awarded by order of the Commander in Chief. But in this case, the Secretary of Defense has ordered a review, and the details of the order require that each of the twenty awards be evaluated on its individual merits using contemporary standards and information based on official Army histories. Given the new context for me, this seems entirely reasonable.

Mears points to the commissions set up in the 1990s to examine whether African Americans and later Pacific Islanders* had been unfairly denied the Medal of Honor as a guideline for how we might look at this issue. These commissions involved professional historians as subject matter experts to assist in the investigations. I would support that model in this case.

*I was offered a position on the latter shortly after leaving grad school, but ultimately declined. I would have jumped at the chance to be on the project, but it was a temporary GS position (I think it was a GS-9, but it was a long time ago) in an expensive area (Monterrey, CA, I think) that would have both morally obligated me to stay until the end of the project, and then immediately fired him, leaving me unemployed. It was too big a financial risk.