In July 2024, the Department of Defense (DoD) announced that it would review Medals of Honor awarded to Seventh Cavalry troops who participated in the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, in modern-day South Dakota, in 1890. Reactions to this news revealed Americans’ divergent perception, memory, and knowledge of this controversial event. For many, Wounded Knee represents the last gasp of indigenous peoples’ resistance to white settlers’ encroachment on indigenous lands and autonomy, seeming to complete Euro-American conquest. For others, including many Native Americans, Wounded Knee represents not just tragic loss but a historical narrative hijacked by the US government, and indigenous peoples’ continued demands for sovereignty. The American Indian Movement’s occupation of the site in 1973 dramatically signified Native Americans’ militant civil rights activism.

Yet revoking the nation’s highest military award to US soldiers raises vexatious questions for historians and citizens, including Native Americans, who ever since disproportionately served in the armed forces. How should shifting public opinion about past conflicts, and Americans’ changing historical memory of them, affect the status of military honors awarded in a very different past, and its many contexts? What role should historians and their expertise have in official and public policy discussions regarding how the US military recognizes soldiers’ heroism, in past and present? What are the most appropriate ways for historians, the public, and the government to recognize both soldiers’ valor and the suffering and indignity inflicted by American atrocities, in war and beyond? How does a review of the Wounded Knee Medals of Honor invite scholars to reconsider the politics of knowledge and memory, displayed in official and academic histories as well as popular narratives and cultural representations regarding violence against Native Americans, and others?

This late breaking session offers preliminary answers to these questions from historians of Native America, war and the US military, and American colonialism representing a diverse set of perspectives, backgrounds, and academic careers. Brief comments by panelists are meant to launch a broader discussion moderated by the chair, Phil Deloria. Dwight Mears, the nation’s leading historian on the Medal of Honor, will discuss the legal and policy-related dimensions of the Department of Defense’s review, and a documentary film on the question currently in production. Stefan Aune will discuss how the violence of Wounded Knee continued to reverberate in US military practice and culture, including Americans’ constructed memory of the nineteenth century’s “Indian Wars,” long after they ended. W. Fitzhugh Brundage carries these questions into other conflicts, focusing on how Americans after the Civil War, including historians, obscured atrocities against white and black American prisoners by invoking the violence of “uncivilized” and “savage” peoples. Justin Jackson argues that Americans’ Civil War-era law of war influenced US troops’ notions of “honor” in counterinsurgency in the Philippines in ways that enabled them to conduct and cover-up the largest single atrocity of the Filipino-American War. Liza Black, discussing violence against Native American women, argues that the stories of atrocities, as terrible as they were, must be told and engaged by historians.