The AIM members who occupied Wounded Knee were responding to immediate local conditions as well as historical ones. They viewed the Oglala Sioux Tribal President, Dick Wilson, as corrupt and dictatorial, and they charged that Wilson had been suppressing political opposition on the reservation with the implicit support of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. They demanded Senate investigations of the BIA, of the Pine Ridge reservation’s governance, and of the broken treaties between the United States government and Sioux nations.
Federal marshals surrounded the settlement. Gunfire was exchanged within the first days of the occupation. Two Lakota men were killed by federal agents during the standoff. One federal marshal was paralyzed by a bullet. The siege lasted 71 days — it ended on May 8, 1973, six weeks after the Academy Awards ceremony. AIM leaders Russell Means and Dennis Banks were arrested; the charges were later dismissed by a federal judge who cited the government’s unlawful handling of witnesses and evidence.
The federal government, at the time of the Oscar ceremony, was maintaining something close to a media blackout around the Wounded Knee situation. Coverage was limited by the physical and political constraints of access to the reservation. The occupation was happening, and most Americans had only fragmentary awareness of its details or significance.
Littlefeather’s appearance at the Oscars was, among other things, a breach of that media containment. On a broadcast watched by 85 million people, in a context in which the words “American Indians” and “Wounded Knee” were almost never mentioned together in prime-time entertainment television, she said both. The brevity of her speech was not a limitation on its reach. It was the concentrated delivery of a message into a space that had been systematically closed to that message.