Recognition Withheld and Revisited: Wounded Knee Since 1891

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

An Army court of inquiry exonerated Colonel James Forsyth's conduct at Wounded Knee within a year of the killing, and twenty of his soldiers were later awarded the Medal of Honor for their actions that day, a decision that has remained a subject of controversy and formal rescission requests into the twenty first century. No international body has ever made a genocide or crimes against humanity determination for the massacre, a vocabulary that postdates it by decades, but the characterization of the event as a massacre rather than a battle is nonetheless the settled position of modern historians, and the United States Congress formally apologized for it in a 1990 resolution marking the killing's centennial.

The massacre is properly read as the violent suppression of a Native American religious movement by federal authority, not as a war between the United States and a Lakota nation seeking to impose its own faith on others. The site is now a National Historic Landmark, and it remains a central and painful reference point in Lakota historical memory, a status neither the 1891 exoneration nor the unresolved Medal of Honor question has altered.