The final episode of PBS American Experience series We Shall Remain brings the series to more contemporary times with events taking place in 1973 at what is known as “Wounded Knee II.” Themes prominent in the previous episode-leadership, resistance, self-determination, sovereignty, the impact of assimilation policy-are obvious again in the actions and beliefs of the Indian activists from 35 years ago.

The Library Event Kit and the Teacher’s Guide for the PBS television series We Shall Remain provides a list of questions you might explore, asking you to consider questions similar to the following:

1. Consider the atmosphere at the Pine Ridge Reservation before the arrival of AIM. How were the styles of the leaders, Dick Wilson and Fools Crow, different from each other?

2. Unlike other social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, those at Wounded Knee followed more violent means. Why do you think the leaders at Wounded Knee II made this decision?

3. How effective was the content about the Indian boarding school experience?

4. What was the impact of Wounded Knee II?

Further information to support your students or library patrons about the events depicted in Episode Five can be found in the following resources on the American Indian Experience database.

• Episode Five features events in the history of the Oglala Lakota tribe. Find out more about the history of this people in the “Sioux” entry in Frederick Hoxie’s Encyclopedia of North American Indians.

• Find information about the Pine Ridge Reservation in the Tribal Communities Resource. The founders of AIM are identified as Anishinabe, also known as Ojibwe or Chippewa. For more about this tribe see entries in Hoxie’s Encyclopedia of North American Indians (look under “Ojibwa”).

• To gain better context, scan the Timeline to see events that occurred contemporaneous with the 1890 Wounded Knee and Wounded Knee II. Read brief entries about the 1890 Wounded Knee and Wounded Knee II in Encyclopedia of American Indian Civil Rights.

• For more about the 1890 Wounded Knee event see these entries in Hoxie’s Encyclopedia of North American Indians: “Ghost Dance,” “Wounded Knee Massacre, 1890,” and “Wovoka (Jack Wilson).”

• A number of primary sources in Great Documents in American Indian History are especially useful, including “An Account of Wovoka, the Paiute Messiah,” “A Defense of the Ghost Dance Religion,” “Reasons for the Trouble between the Indians and the Government During the Ghost Dance Excitement of 1890,” and “The Massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on December 29, 1890.”

• For additional background information on the Ghost Dance, see the Introduction and selected entries in Shelley Osterreich’s The American Indian Ghost Dance, 1870 and 1890: An Annotated Bibliography.

• You can find lengthier essays on Wounded Knee in the following resources: Enduring Legacies: Native American Treaties and Contemporary Controversies and Episodes in the Rhetoric of Government-Indian Relations.

• Relevant entries in Hoxie’s Encyclopedia of North American Indians include “Alcatraz, Occupation of,”"American Indian Movement (AIM),” “Civil rights movement-Participation, American Indian,” “Bureau of Indian Affairs,” “Pan-Indian Organizations,” “Radicals and Radicalism, 1900 to the Present,” and “Wounded Knee Takeover, 1973.”

• You can also find a wealth of material on many individuals mentioned in Episode Five. For more about Dennis Banks, see the entry in Hoxie’s Encyclopedia of North American Indians as well as in The Encyclopedia of Native American Biography. You will find other noteworthy inviduals such as Russell Means, Elder Frank Fools Crow, Leonard Peltier, and Anna Mae Aquash also listed in The Encyclopedia of Native American Biography. Find a more detailed reporting on Peltier and events associated with Wounded Knee in the chapter titled, “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: The Curious Conviction of Leonard Peltier,” in volume 2 of The Praeger Handbook on Contemporary Issues in Native America.

• Read about press coverage, including that of the local Rapid City Journal, of Wounded Knee II in Mary Ann Weston’s book, Native Americans in the News: Images of Indians in the Twentieth Century Press. Chapter six covers “The 1960s and 1970s: Direct Action and Self-Determination.” For coverage of Wounded Knee II in the American Indian press, the serious researcher can identify the titles of American Indian and Alaska Native Newspapers and Periodicals, 1971-1985. See, for example, the description of the “Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee Newsletter.”