Wounded Knee Massacre and the Fifth Day of Christmas - December 29, 1890 - "Five Golden Rings"
The Biblical Domination Code and the "Ghost Dance"
SYNOPSIS: The Wounded Knee massacre occurred on the Fifth Day of Christmas in 1890, a day on which “five golden rings” are gifted in the 16th century Catholic poem, “The 12 Days of Christmas”. The “five rings” are code for the first five books of the Old Testament — the religious root of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery and Domination. The massacre was the “fruit” of the Fifth Day “gift”.
1) The Wounded Knee Massacre
The Wounded Knee Massacre of 29 December 1890 was the US Army slaughter of a Miniconjou Lakota band, mostly women and children, under the leadership of Chief Sitanka (Spotted Elk, aka Big Foot), who had surrendered quietly to the 7th Cavalry the night before and made overnight camp near Wounded Knee Creek.
Major Whitside, to whom they surrendered, reported them officially as numbering 120 men and 250 women and children, a total of 370. General Miles said that there were 106 warriors. During the night, they were surrounded by eight troops of the Seventh Cavalry under Colonel J. W. Forsyth.
Big Foot’s band was excited by prophecies of the coming of a Messiah and return of the Old Ways to be brought about by the “Ghost Dance”.
Sitting Bull had been afraid that US troops would stop the dancing as they had the Sundance, but he was reassured by the promise of the Messiah that there would be no violence, and no one could be hurt, because they would be wearing the sacred, bullet-proof ghost shirts.
US agents were alarmed.
Mari Sandoz, in The Buffalo Hunters (1954), her powerful account of the commercial destruction of the great buffalo herds, succinctly sets the stage:
At the Sioux agency at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, there was a new agent, with some newspapermen nearby who reported the ghost dancing as an uprising. With a little encouragement, particularly from one New York newspaper, they began to send out sensational stories of massacres, of white blood to flow and indeed already flowing, the bloodthirsty Sioux off the reservations and ravishing the settlements.
Nobody said that not one Indian had left his reservation, except the few scouts out to herald the buffalo's coming. …
The newspaper accounts alarmed both the settlers and the greenhorn agent, Royer, so he fled the agency and telegraphed for troops. They came, with four Hotchkiss guns….
Ethnographer James Mooney’s classic 1896 study, “The Ghost-Dance Religion and Wounded Knee” (submitted to the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology, of which more below), describes the details:
Orders had been given to intercept Big Foot’s party….
This was accomplished on December 28, 1890, by Major Whitside of the Seventh cavalry….
…Big Foot [and his people were on their way to the ‘agency’ at] Pine Ridge. On sighting the troops he raised a white flag, advanced into the open country, and asked for a parley.
This was refused by Major Whitside, who demanded an unconditional surrender, which was at once given, and the Indians moved on with the troops to Wounded Knee creek, about 20 miles northeast of Pine Ridge agency, where they camped as directed by Major Whitside.
The Army brought up major forces to surround the camp overnight:
… General Brooke sent Colonel Forsyth to join Major Whitside with four additional troops of the Seventh cavalry, which, with the scouts under Lieutenant Taylor, made up a force of eight troops of cavalry, one company of scouts, and four pieces of light artillery (Hotchkiss guns), with a total force of 470 men, as against a total of 106 warriors then present in Big Foot’s band.
The fight occurred the next morning:
…On the morning of December 29, 1890, preparations were made to disarm the Indians preparatory to taking them to the agency and thence to the railroad.
In obedience to instructions the Indians had pitched their tipis on the open plain a short distance west of the creek and surrounded on all sides by the soldiers.
In the center of the camp the Indians had hoisted a white flag as a sign of peace and a guarantee of safety. Behind them was a dry ravine running into the creek, and on a slight rise in the front was posted the battery of four Hotchkiss machine guns, trained directly on the Indian camp.
In front, behind, and on both flanks of the camp were posted the various troops of cavalry, a portion of two troops, together with the Indian scouts, being dismounted and drawn up in front of the Indians at the distance of only a few yards from them.
Big Foot himself was ill of pneumonia in his tipi, and Colonel Forsyth, who had taken command as senior officer, had provided a tent warmed with a camp stove for his reception.
Shortly after 8 oclock in the morning the warriors were ordered to come out from the tipis and deliver their arms. They came forward and seated themselves on the ground in front of the troops. They were then ordered to go by themselves into their tipis and bring out and surrender their guns. The first twenty went and returned in a short time with only two guns.
It seemed evident that they were unwilling to give them up, and after consultation of the officers part of the soldiers were ordered up to within ten yards of the group of warriors, while another detachment of troops was ordered to search the tipis.
After a thorough hunt these last returned with about forty rifles, most of which, however, were old and of little value.
The search had consumed considerable time and created a good deal of excitement among the women and children, as the soldiers found it necessary in the process to overturn the beds and other furniture of the tipis and in some instances drove out the inmates.
All this had its effect on their husbands and brothers, already wrought up to a high nervous tension and not knowing what might come next.
While the soldiers had been looking for the guns Yellow Bird, a medicine-man, had been walking about among the warriors, blowing on an eagle-bone whistle, and urging them to resistance, telling them that the soldiers would become weak and powerless, and that the bullets would be unavailing against the sacred “ghost shirts,” which nearly every one of the Indians wore. As he spoke in the Sioux language, the officers did not at once realize the dangerous drift of his talk, and the climax came too quickly for them to interfere.
It is said one of the searchers now attempted to raise the blanket of a warrior. Suddenly Yellow Bird stooped down and threw a handful of dust into the air, when, as if this were the signal, a young Indian, said to have been Black Fox from Cheyenne river, drew a rifle from under his blanket and fired at the soldiers, who instantly replied with a volley directly into the crowd of warriors and so near that their guns were almost touching.
From the number of sticks set up by the Indians to mark where the dead fell, as seen by the author a year later, this one volley must have killed nearly half the warriors. The survivors sprang to their feet, throwing their blankets from their shoulders as they rose, and for a few minutes there was a terrible hand to hand struggle, where every man’s thought was to kill.
Descent into massacre happened quickly.
At the first volley the Hotchkiss guns trained on the camp opened fire and sent a storm of shells and bullets among the women and children, who had gathered in front of the tipis to watch the unusual spectacle of military display. The guns poured in 2-pound explosive shells at the rate of nearly fifty per minute, mowing down everything alive. The terrible effect may be judged from the fact that one woman survivor, Blue Whirlwind, with whom the author conversed, received fourteen wounds, while each of her two little boys was also wounded by her side.
In a few minutes 200 Indian men, women, and children, with 60 soldiers, were lying dead and wounded on the ground, the tipis had been torn down by the shells and some of them were burning above the helpless wounded, and the surviving handful of Indians were flying in wild panic to the shelter of the ravine, pursued by hundreds of maddened soldiers and followed up by a raking fire from the Hotchkiss guns, which had been moved into position to sweep the ravine.
Mooney concluded:
There can be no question that the pursuit was simply a massacre, where fleeing women, with infants in their arms, were shot down after resistance had ceased and when almost every warrior was stretched dead or dying on the ground.
On this point such a careful writer as Herbert Welsh says: “From the fact that so many women and children were killed, and that their bodies were found far from the scene of action, and as though they were shot down while flying, it would look as though blind rage had been at work, in striking contrast to the moderation of the Indian police at the Sitting Bull fight when they were assailed by women.” …
Commissioner Morgan in his official report says that “Most of the men, including Big Foot, were killed around his tent, where he lay sick. The bodies of the women and children were scattered along a distance of two miles from the scene of the encounter.”
Mooney added:
This is no reflection on the humanity of the officer in charge. On the contrary, Colonel Forsyth had taken measures to guard against such an occurrence by separating the women and children, as already stated, and had also endeavored to make the sick chief, Big Foot, as comfortable as possible, even to the extent of sending his own surgeon, Dr Glennan, to wait on him on the night of the surrender. Strict orders had also been issued to the troops that women and children were not to be hurt.
The Army subsequently defined the massacre as a "battle" and awarded twenty medals of honor, the highest US decoration for valor.1
On New Year’s day of 1891, the Eighth Day of Christmas, three days after the massacre, a detachment of troops was sent out to Wounded Knee to gather up and bury the Indian dead in a mass grave.2
2) December 29 - the Fifth Day of Christmas: Five Golden Rings
The poem The 12 Days of Christmas was written in the 16th Century in England as a mnemonic device to encapsulate Catholic doctrine. The “true love” who gives gifts each day is the poem’s code for God. The various gifts are codes.
The gifts of the fifth day — five golden rings — represent the first five books of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
One Catholic site suggests celebrating the fifth day by meditating on quotes from the five books. Examples include:
Genesis 1:27: “So God created humankind in his image….”
Exodus 15:2: “The Lord is my strength and my might….”
Leviticus 19:18: “You shall not take vengeance….”
Numbers 6:24-26: “The Lord bless you and keep you….”
Deuteronomy 31:6: “Be strong and bold….”
For our purposes, there are other quotes to consider, revealing the Biblical Domination Code at the root of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery:
Genesis 12:1, 5-7; 15:18-21: (NIV)
The Lord … said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.”
They set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there. …At that time the Canaanites were in the land. The Lord… said, “To your offspring I will give this land.”
The Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, “To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates— the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites.”
Exodus 6:4: (NIV)
God also said… “I … established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, where they resided as foreigners.”
Numbers 33:50-56: (NIV)
The Lord said… “When you cross the Jordan into Canaan, drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you. Destroy all their carved images and their cast idols, and demolish all their high places. Take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have given you the land to possess….
“But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land, those you allow to remain will become barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides. They will give you trouble in the land where you will live. And then I will do to you what I plan to do to them.”
The Christian colonial agenda that gave birth to the doctrine of “Christian discovery” began in the Bible that Columbus carried, with the “covenant” story.
Moreover, God’s colonization project was not simply a promise; it was a command, and God’s wrath lay behind it as enforcement.
The Bible says that God was angered when His “chosen people” failed to take the “promised lands.” At one point:
The Lord’s anger was aroused . . . because they have not followed me wholeheartedly. . . . The Lord’s anger burned against Israel and he made them wander in the wilderness forty years. [Numbers 32]
God sent an angel to warn those who failed to oust the peoples living in the promised lands; although the colonists had subjected the Canaanites to forced labor, they had not driven them off the land:
The angel of the Lord . . . said, ‘I brought you up out of Egypt and led you into the land I swore to give to your ancestors.’ I said, ‘I will never break my covenant with you, and you shall not make a covenant with the people of this land, but you shall break down their altars.’ Yet you have disobeyed me. [Judges 2]
In 1609, English clergyman William Symonds applied these Biblical passages in a sermon defending the Virginia Company. He preached that the colonizers were like Abraham in Genesis; they were called by God to go to Virginia.
In 1954, the US Department of Justice brief for the United States in Tee-Hit-Ton v. United States cited Genesis and papal bulls to support the government’s argument that the US could take timber from Tlingit lands because “discovering nations asserted complete title in themselves … as against the heathen natives.”
The US brief argued that the Tlingit owned neither the timber nor the land:
The Christian nations of Europe acquired jurisdiction over newly discovered lands by virtue of grants from the Popes, who claimed the power to grant to Christian monarchs the right to acquire territory in the possession of heathens and infidels.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the US, saying:
The tribes who inhabited the lands of the States held claim to such lands after the coming of the white man, under …permission from the whites to occupy.
This position of the Indian has long been rationalized by the legal theory that discovery and conquest gave the conquerors sovereignty over and ownership of the lands thus obtained.
The court grappled with the wording of this last sentence up to the last minute. Archives of the justices’ papers reveal that drafts circulated prior to the final opinion referred to “Christian” discovery and conquest, to wit:
This position of the Indian has long been rationalized by the legal theory that discovery and conquest by Christian nations gave the conquerors sovereignty over and ownership of the lands thus obtained.
Tee-Hit-Ton is evidence of the truth of Professor Chris Mato Nunpa’s conclusion to his 2020 book, Great Evil - Christianity, The Bible, And The Native American Genocide:
The Indigenous Holocaust in the United States …was …the consequence of …the religious ideas …of the genocidal commands of Yahweh, the Old Testament God; the ‘chosen people’ and ‘promised land’ ideas; the religious imperialism of Jesus Christ; and of the . . . papal bulls.
3) Bureau of Ethnology & the “Scientific” View of the Ghost Dance
The Smithsonian Institution Bureau of Ethnology published James Mooney’s report on the Ghost Dance religion and Wounded Knee in 1896 as an “Accompanying Paper” in Part 2 of the Bureau’s Fourteenth Annual Report (for the years 1892-93).
In his Introduction (in Part 1), John Wesley Powell, Director of the Bureau, described Mooney’s report as:
…an extended account of the so-called "ghost-dance religion" …prepared by Mr. James Mooney, after visiting most of the tribes affected by this remarkable mental epidemic .
In fact, Mooney placed the Ghost Dance as one among the world’s religions rather than a “mental epidemic”.
Mooney wrote:
…How natural is the dream of a redeemer…. The hope becomes a faith and the faith becomes the creed of priests and prophets, until the hero is a god and the dream a religion….
The doctrines of the Hindu avatar, the Hebrew Messiah, the Christian millennium, and the Hesûnanin [“Our Father”] of the Indian Ghost dance are essentially the same, and have their origin in a hope and longing common to all humanity.
Director Powell rejected this perspective out of hand, saying:
Caution should be exercised in comparing or contrasting religious movements among civilized peoples with such fantasies as that described in the memoir; for while interesting and suggestive analogies may be found, the essential features of the movements are not homologous.
In mode of thought and in coordination between thought and action, red men and white men are separated by a chasm … broad and deep….
The ghost-dance fantasy …is a unique illustration of one of the characteristics of the aborigines which has long been under investigation in the Bureau of Ethnology….
Powell bemoaned the “potent influence on character and conduct of its devotees”:
Docile and contented Indians became morose, suspicious, bloodthirsty; peaceful tribes plunged into conspiracy and open rebellion against the guardian nation — …the influence of …association with the superior race was swept away and temporarily forgotten and thousands of tribesmen reverted to a primitive condition….
This curious evanescent cult…seems rather a travesty on religion than an expression of the most exalted concepts within human grasp [; it] is a dark chapter in the history of the aborigines.
4) Mari Sandoz can have the last word:
The Pine Ridge Indians who had withdrawn to the badlands were surrendering when they heard the guns over at Wounded Knee Creek, and later they saw the handful of terrified and bleeding survivors. Some gave the desperate war cry of the Sioux warriors riding to their death and charged away from their trooper escort over to the battlefield, where, now, two hours after the fight, the soldiers were still hunting down the living.
For a while the angry Sioux warriors drove the troops back, but it was only for a little while and with raw courage, for the Indians had no arms to fight off the cavalry. And in the afternoon snow began to fall, running in thin grey curls over the desolated ground at Wounded Knee, settling in little white drifts behind the bodies of the dead, the women and children, the chief and his men. As the snow deepened, they seemed more and more like great whitened carcasses scattered where they fell over the prairie.
Now the dream of the buffalo, too, was done.
On July 19, 2024, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin directed the Pentagon to review the 20 Medals of Honor. See also: “Pentagon to review 20 Medals of Honor from Wounded Knee Massacre”. The US has revoked hundreds of other Medals of Honor.
Is it consolation that the “gifts” of the Eighth Day of Christmas, “eight maids a-milking”, symbolizes the eight Beatitudes preached by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount?
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Keep putting it down for us, Peter. Eventually our anti-Domination/Authority libraries will be complete enough to provide a road map for those who survive the time to understand--and if they're lucky, to start again.
Thank you for this excellent post Peter. The clarity of your mind and your writing always astounds me. The domination framework of analysis is powerful.