Pete Hegseth Announces Soldiers Who Committed Wounded Knee Massacre Will Keep Medals Of Honor

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is, once again, using the power of his office to ensure that U.S. history is appropriately whitewashed and that white supremacist violence remains rebranded as American heroism.

One of Hegseth’s first orders of business as defense secretary was to restore honors to Confederate leaders who fought to preserve the institution of chattel slavery. Now, he’s doing the same for U.S. soldiers who committed the violent, genocidal atrocity that has been sanitized and canonized in American history as the “battle” of  Wounded Knee.

According to the Associated Press, Hegseth announced Thursday that the 20 soldiers who received the Medal of Honor for their actions in 1890 at Wounded Knee will keep their awards after his predecessor, four-star General  Lloyd Austin, ordered the review of the awards in 2024. The review came as a result of a Congressional recommendation in the 2022 defense bill to rescind the awards for those who participated in the bloody massacre on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation near Wounded Knee Creek.

Of course, that’s not how Hegseth views the event.

“Under my direction, we’re making it clear, without hesitation, that the soldiers who fought in the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890 will keep their medals, and we’re making it clear that they deserve those medals,” Hegseth said in a video he posted to X. “This decision is now final, and their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate. We salute their memory, we honor their service, and we will never forget what they did.” 

Oh, sure, “we will never forget what they did” — we’ll just completely reimagine it, apparently.

From AP:

While the events of that day are sometimes described as a battle, historical records show that the U.S. Army, which was in the midst of amid a campaign to repress the tribes in the area, killed an estimated 250 Native Americans, including women and children, of the Lakota Sioux tribe, while attempting to disarm Native American fighters who had already surrendered at their camp.

After the fighting, Medals of Honor were given to 20 soldiers from the 7th Cavalry Regiment, and their awards cite a range of actions including bravery, efforts to rescue fellow troops and actions to “dislodge Sioux Indians” who were concealed in a ravine.

The event also became a celebrated part of the regiment’s history, with their coat of arms still featuring the head of a Native American chief to “commemorate Indian campaigns,” according to the military’s Institute of Heraldry.

In 1990, Congress apologized to the descendants of those killed at Wounded Knee but did not revoke the medals.

When it comes to U.S. history, this is simply what white conservatives do.

America needs to be a noble nation — a “shining city on a hill.” Americans need to be patriots, and, in the minds of conservatives, that can’t happen unless the version of U.S. history the populace is taught excludes the parts where the nation was built on the backs of the enslaved and the blood of both Black people and the indigenous.

So, slavery becomes a necessary evil on the journey towards American exceptionalism, Confederate soldiers become heroes instead of traitors who fought to keep Black people in intergenerational bondage and servitude, and events such as the Wounded Knee massacre become “battles” as opposed to the massacres they actually were.

This is why President Donald Trump has moved to purge the Smithsonian and national parks of references to slavery and other forms of anti-Black oppression; it’s why Republican officials have always been so adamant about honoring the Confederacy and protecting its monuments, and it’s why it was announced recently that the U.S. Department of Education has partnered with 40 right-wing organizations, including Prager U, which specializes in revisionist American history from a white nationalist’s standpoint, to create a “patriotic” civics lesson to (mis)educate America. (And I can’t think of a more appropriate time to remind you all that, in June, Education Secretary Linda McMahon essentially revealed during a congressional hearing that she had never heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre or the story of Ruby Bridges.)

Hegseth isn’t out here fighting for the legacies of 20 soldiers who have been dead for at least 135 years because their legacies are important or because their descendants deserve to celebrate them (as if he even knows who those soldiers’ people are); he’s doing it because it reinforces the big, beautiful lie of America’s nobility.

The so-called “patriots” are so insecure about this supposedly great nation of theirs that they’d rather bury its dark history than have their delusions disrupted by the truth. It’s really that simple.

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