29 DECEMBER 1890
Hundreds massacred at Wounded Knee
Native Americans are brutally gunned down by US soldiers
By nightfall on 29 December, blood stained the winter snow shrouding the frozen bodies of men, women and children of the Lakota people. They had earlier gathered to peacefully perform the "Ghost Dance". The Sioux people (to which the Lakota belong) believed this ritual would invoke the destruction of the punitive world in which they were prisoner to the colonising white people, and recreate the world anew.
The Ghost Dance was not a new phenomenon. Threatened by its meaning, the US army had banned Native American people from conducting it throughout reservations across the country. As part of the crackdown, in December 1890 a
