The tragedies at Wounded Knee extend over the course of almost a century. Located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the small village is the site of two violent clashes between Native Americans and the United States government. Numerous books, movies, and television programs have examined the location’s painful history, including Dee Brown’s nonfiction narrative Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and the last episode of Chris Eyre’s five-part documentary series called We Shall Remain. Popular music, too, has explored the bloodshed at Wounded Knee, most notably in the songs recorded by Redbone, a Native American rock band from California.
Wounded Knee first landed in the public’s consciousness in December, 1890. Looking to quell the growing Ghost Dance movement, a spiritual prophecy introduced by Wovoka, a Northern Paiute religious leader, the United States 7th Cavalry killed some 250 Lakota Sioux men, women, and children (in an odd coincidence, it was the 7th Cavalry, led by George Armstrong Custer, which fought at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876). Twenty-five US soldiers also perished.
Nearly 100 years later, in February 1973, Wounded Knee was the site of another hostile confrontation. In an attempt to remove Oglala Lakota tribal president Richard Wilson from office, and in protest of the government’s treatment of Native Americans in general, approximately 200 members of the American Indian Movement occupied the town for 71 days. By the end of the standoff, two Native Americans were killed, one federal marshal was wounded, and multiple people were arrested. The remains of one have never been recovered.
The American Indian Movement’s choice of Wounded Knee for its takeover was purposeful. Russell Banks, co-founder of the group, explained the organization’s reasoning in a February 2023 interview with Levi Rickert of Native News Online.
“First there was a historical significance of Wounded Knee,” Banks says. “It was the scene of an absolute slaughter where over 250 men, women and children were slaughtered by the US military. And, up until that point, there was never no closure to what happened there. So Fools Crow says, ‘Let’s go back to Wounded Knee. Let the spirits help defend us there.’ They were the ones (spiritual leaders) who told us to go there.”
In November of 1973, several months after the end of The American Indian Movement’s siege at Pine Ridge, the group Redbone (a Louisiana Cajun slang term describing a person of mixed-race or multiracial ancestry) released Wovoka, its fifth album. Unbeknownst to the band, it would soon be embroiled in its own Wounded Knee controversy.
Calling Upon the Ghost Dance
The fact that Redbone dressed as Native Americans was no stage act; the four original members of this Los Angeles-based group were all of Native or Hispanic descent. This is reflected in several of the band’s album titles, including Beaded Dreams Through Turquoise Eyes and Potlatch. Formed in 1969 by brothers Lolly (guitars, vocals) and Pat Vegas (bass, vocals), the original lineup also included guitarist Tony Bellamy and drummer Peter DePoe.
The quartet signed with Epic Records and released its debut album in 1970; it failed to chart. The band’s third record, however, 1971’s Message from a Drum, produced “The Witch Queen of New Orleans”, which cracked the Top 30 (“Maggie”, an earlier single, also charted).
Although Redbone wrote plenty of boy-meets-girl material — “Give Our Love Another Try”, “I’ve Got to Find the Right Woman”, and “Suzi Girl” were all singles — the band was politically astute as well. Wovoka takes its name from the aforementioned Paiute religious leader who claimed he had a prophetic vision after falling into a coma. His vision detailed the resurrection of the Paiute people and the removal of whites from the North American continent. Wovoka taught his followers that to bring his vision to fruition, Native Americans must live virtuously and perform a religious ceremony known as the Ghost Dance.
The chorus found in the album’s title track puts Wovoka’s prophecy into song: “Our people must dance / Keep on dancing, keep on dancing / Our people must sing / Keep on singing, keep on singing for the good times to come.” The lyrics serve in part as a Wovoka origin story, acknowledging the spiritual leader’s arrival and his promise of a better future:
In the moon of the fallen leaves / Wovoka appeared one day / He had come from the land of spirits / With the message of prophecy
The flood will come and save you / Next spring when the good times come / From the lake of the pyramid / Wovoka was heard to say
“Wovoka” isn’t the only song on the album to reference Wounded Knee. The befittingly titled “We Were All Wounded at Wounded Knee” specifically addresses the 1890 massacre:
They made us many promises / But always broke their word / They penned us in like buffalo / Drove us like a herd
And finally on the reservation / We were going for our preservation / We were all wiped out by the 7th Cavalry / You and me, you and me
“We Were All Wounded at Wounded Knee” was slated to be one of nine tracks on Wovoka. Sensitive to the political tensions surrounding the 1973 standoff at Pine Ridge, however, Epic Records decided to withhold the song from the US version of the album. The label did include it on the European release; the song promptly went to No. 1 in both Belgium and the Netherlands.
Hail! Hail! What’s the Matter with Your Head?
Sadly, the 1973 standoff wasn’t the end of the violence at Pine Ridge. In June 1975, two FBI agents — Jack Coler and Ronald Williams — were killed at Jumping Bull Ranch while attempting to serve a warrant. Leonard Peltier was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison for the shootings in 1977 (his story is detailed in the 1992 Robert Redford-narrated documentary Incident at Oglala). In the last month of his presidency, in January 2025, Joe Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence to home confinement. Peltier was transferred to Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in Belcourt, North Dakota.
Redbone’s story ended the same year Peltier received his prison sentence; 1977’s Cycles was the band’s last major label album and its only recording for RCA Records. However, the group’s legacy lives on, a testament to its Native American influence on popular music.
In 2017, UK-based Beat Goes On Records repackaged three of the band’s albums — Already Here (1972), Wovoka (the European version) (1973), and Beaded Dreams Through Turquoise Eyes (1974) — and later compiled the group’s singles into a two-disc collection called A’s and B’s. Authors Sonia Paoloni and Christian Staebler, along with artist Thibault Balahy, published Redbone: The True Story of a Native American Rock Band (2020).
Tony Bellamy and Lolly Vegas died within six months of one another in December 2009 and March 2010, respectively. Fortunately, both lived long enough to see their hard work pay off; Redbone was inducted into the Native American Music Association Hall of Fame in 2008. Pat Vegas continues to record and tour as both a solo artist and under the Redbone name. In 2018, almost 50 years after forming the band with his brother, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Indigenous Music Awards.
Although “We Were All Wounded at Wounded Knee” didn’t make the final track listing for the US version of Wovoka, Redbone ultimately had the last laugh. The first single from the album was an infectious piece of ear candy called “Come and Get Your Love”, from which the above sub-header is sourced. It peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold one million copies.
Resources
Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1970.
Matthiessen, Peter. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. The Viking Press. 1983.