During those seventy-one days, two Lakota men were killed by federal agents: Frank Clearwater and Buddy Lamont. A federal marshal, Lloyd Grimm, was paralyzed by a bullet. The federal government’s position throughout was that AIM had no legitimate standing to make demands, that the occupation was a criminal act, and that the appropriate response was law enforcement rather than political negotiation.
The media coverage of the standoff was limited by the physical inaccessibility of the site and by federal restrictions on press access. Most Americans in March 1973 were aware that something was happening at Wounded Knee, but the specific conditions, demands, and political context were not widely understood. The occupation did not become a major cultural reference point until years later, when the trials of Russell Means and Dennis Banks — charges that were eventually dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct — kept the story in the courts.
Littlefeather’s appearance at the Oscars mentioned Wounded Knee by name. In sixty seconds, before an audience of 85 million people, she put the word “Wounded Knee” into the same sentence as “American Indians” and “film industry” — a concatenation that the media coverage had not yet made available to most Americans. The ceremony was the largest audience she would ever have, and she named the occupation that the federal media management had been partially successful in containing.
Whether this had any effect on public awareness of the situation at Wounded Knee is impossible to measure. The occupation continued for another six weeks after the ceremony. But the naming — in that context, before that audience — was a specific act of political communication in a space that had been organized to exclude it.