Wounded Knee Medal of Honor Awards to Be Reviewed

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Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin this week ordered the Pentagon to review the Medal of Honor awards to the soldiers who participated in the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890.

The Wounded Knee massacre occurred in December 1890, during a period in which the U.S. military was regularly fighting Native American groups in the Midwest and the Great Plains regions. when the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment shot and killed more than 300 Lakota men, women, and children.

At the time, the incident was viewed as a battle, and 20 of the soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor, but in later years the event became seen as a massacre. A group of Democrat lawmakers in 2021 coordinated a letter calling on President Joe Biden to order a review of the Medal of Honor awards given to those soldiers.

Austin on Wednesday issued a memo directing the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness to create a panel to conduct a review that will examine every soldier who was awarded the Medal of Honor for their individual actions at Wounded Knee Creek, which remains the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. This review is set to be released by Oct. 15.

The memo comes after the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act included a congressional recommendation that the Pentagon conduct a review of the awards, and states that the special review panel “may consider the context of the overall engagement as appropriate, including as necessary to understand each [Medal of Honor] recipient’s individual actions.”

A senior defense official, whose name was not given, said in an interview with DoD News: “It’s never too late to do what’s right. And that’s what is intended by the review that the secretary directed, which is to ensure that we go back and review each of these medals in a rigorous and individualized manner to understand the actions of the individual in the context of the overall engagement.”