The specific conditions on Pine Ridge that led to the Wounded Knee occupation were complicated and local. The elected tribal chairman, Richard Wilson, was accused by his political opponents of running a corrupt administration with enforcement provided by a paramilitary group informally called the GOON squad — Guardians of the Oglala Nation. AIM’s allies on the reservation, many of whom were traditional Lakota people skeptical of the elective tribal government structure that had been imposed by the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, invited AIM’s leadership to Pine Ridge in early 1973 to address their situation.
The occupation began as a complex tactical decision. Wounded Knee was chosen for its historical and symbolic significance — the 1890 massacre there, in which soldiers of the 7th Cavalry had killed approximately 300 Lakota people, mostly women, children, and elderly men who had been promised safe passage, was one of the defining events in the history of US-Native American relations. The site had already been the subject of Dee Brown’s bestselling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, published in 1970, which had brought the history of westward expansion and its violence to a broad popular audience for the first time in decades.
AIM’s demands were specific: a Senate investigation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a Senate investigation of Pine Ridge reservation governance, and renegotiation of the Sioux treaties. The federal government responded with an armed perimeter. FBI agents, federal marshals, and eventually military equipment surrounded the settlement. The confrontation settled into a standoff that lasted seventy-one days.