Centuries of resistance, from Wounded Knee to Red Nation

Racial Justice

By Justice Ramon Ocasio III

Justice Ramon Ocasio III has served as a judge for 16 years and now is a justice for the 1st District Appellate Court. He may reached at ramon.ocasio@cookcountyil.gov.

Posted December 27, 2023 3:05 PM

The 133rd anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre, the deadliest mass shooting in American history, falls on Dec. 29.On the fourth day after Christmas in 1890, U.S. Army troops massacred as many as 300 Lakota men, women and children near Wounded Knee Creek on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.Undoubtedly, the Lakota people’s difficulties predated the massacre. By the 1890s, the Lakota nation lived on a reservation segregated from their ancestral lands. The United States government often failed …

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