Medals for a Massacre

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Edited by Tanmayi Patil, Aliza Susatijo, Owen Andrews, and Sarah Ahmad

On Thursday, September 25th, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the 19 soldiers who received Medals of Honor for their actions at Wounded Knee would retain their awards. In pursuance of Congress’s recommendation for review in the 2022 Defense Bill, former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin created a panel to determine whether they were, in fact, deserved. Hegseth’s statement claimed to present their conclusion, namely that the medals would not be revoked. This is an egregious violation of the values America purports to uphold. Wounded Knee was a horrific display of violence against innocents, and as such, these awards are incongruent with the standard they demand. The decision to not revoke them is yet another example of the current administration’s harmful conception of American exceptionalism.

Wounded Knee was not a battle. It was a massacre. One that left over three hundred Indigenous people, including children, dead or wounded. In the years leading up to it, many Indigenous peoples embraced a movement called the Ghost Dance with the hope of this spiritual practice eventually restoring the autonomy they had lost to European colonization. In 1890, as part of the government’s actions to thwart the spread of this movement, the army confined a group of Lakota to a camp near Wounded Knee Creek. At some point, a gun went off. Soldiers opened fire, and innocent Lakota tried to flee, only to be hunted down and shot. Most killed were unarmed. 

In his account of Wounded Knee, American Horse, an Oglala Lakota chief, recounted that “the women as they were fleeing with their babes were killed together, shot right through, and the women who were very heavy with child were also killed.” This week, Hegseth has decided that these are the actions worthy of a Medal of Honor. The slaughter of mothers and innocent children. It is unequivocal that these individuals were not threats to the military force. Their deaths were the result of bloodlust, of viewing them as subhuman, and as such, the conduct of the US Army at Wounded Knee is entirely inconsistent with the standard a Medal of Honor warrants. 

According to the Congressional website, a Medal of Honor is awarded for “gallantry in action. Intrepidity. Above and beyond the call of duty. Risk of life. Selflessness. Exemplary action. Unwavering devotion. Conspicuous gallantry. Extraordinary heroism.” Do the events at Wounded Knee warrant these descriptions? Did it require intrepidity to shoot unarmed civilians? Did facing down children constitute a “risk of life”? Is this what America should consider “extraordinary heroism”? Allowing these soldiers to retain their Medals of Honor answers all of these with a resounding yes.

Those who are given a Medal of Honor are said to “capture the best of what it means to be human.” It cannot be said that the soldiers exemplified this characteristic; the Department of Defense has thus blinded the American people to a tragedy. It doesn’t matter how beautiful of a shroud they drape over it or how many awards they bestow upon the perpetrators of such violence; Wounded Knee was a massacre, and it is a grievous betrayal of basic human decency to recognize its perpetrators as heroes. 

Revoking these medals was a chance to correct a wrong: to state that the actions of the American military at Wounded Knee were not a reflection of the kind of country the United States is or the country it is working to become. Hegseth’s statement that “they deserve those medals. This decision is now final, and their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate” is a refusal to condemn Wounded Knee—constituting a celebration, rather than a condemnation, of senseless violence.

And, unfortunately, this administration’s refusal to recognize the errors of the American government is in no way confined to this single instance. It is just one of the consequences of Trump’s Executive Order 14253 on “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which does the exact opposite of what it professes to accomplish by exposing the American public  to an exclusively whitewashed and sanitized version of American history. While claiming that there has been an effort to “rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” the government has systematically eliminated “controversial” teachings, leaving only stories of America’s accomplishments and none of its mistakes. The “facts” this administration purports to uphold are, in reality, propaganda purporting an unending prosperity of the United States. 

Revoking the Medals of Honor would be to admit that the United States military committed a massacre and the government then made the mistake of awarding this conduct, something that this administration refuses to recognize, as it would challenge the idea of American exceptionalism that it is such an ardent supporter of. Anything that paints American history in an unpleasant light is scrubbed from the record, and this history is then not something a country can learn or grow from. The United States has an abundance of sins to atone for. But if the only narrative given is one of unending justification of faults, it is impossible to recognize these errors, and so the country will be rendered stagnant. 

This administration does the very thing it claims to end by skewing America’s understanding of its history. Rather than accepting that a mistake had been made, that soldiers were awarded for committing atrocious human rights violations, the Department of Defense doubled down on its stances. It does not matter how much “patriotism” is projected onto this egregious massacre; it is still just that—a massacre, not a battle. It is worthy of atonement, not appreciation.