Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that he has decided that the 20 soldiers who received the Medal of Honor for their actions in 1890 at Wounded Knee will keep their awards in a video posted to social media Thursday evening.
Hegseth’s predecessor, Lloyd Austin, ordered the review of the awards in 2024 after a Congressional recommendation in the 2022 defense bill — itself a reflection of efforts by some lawmakers to rescind the awards for those who participated in the bloody massacre on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation near Wounded Knee Creek.
While the events of that day are sometimes described as a battle, historical records show that the U.S. Army, which was in the midst of amid a campaign to repress the tribes in the area, killed an estimated 250 Native Americans, including women and children, of the Lakota Sioux tribe, while attempting to disarm Native American fighters who had already surrendered at their camp.
“We’re making it clear that (the soldiers) deserve those medals,” Hegseth said in the video, before adding that “their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate.”
After the fighting, Medals of Honor were given to 20 soldiers from the 7th Cavalry Regiment, and their awards cite a range of actions including bravery, efforts to rescue fellow troops and actions to “dislodge Sioux Indians” who were concealed in a ravine.
In 1990, Congress apologized to the descendants of those killed at Wounded Knee but did not revoke the medals.
According to Hegseth, the review panel ordered by Austin “concluded that these brave soldiers should, in fact, rightfully keep their medals from actions,” but an official from the defense secretary’s office couldn’t say if the report he was referencing in the video would be made public.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” that decried efforts to reinterpret American history and, since then, Hegseth has undertaken multiple actions that have subverted the recommendations of a Congressionally-mandated commission that examined the use of Confederate names and references in the military.
He reverted the names of several Army bases back to their original, Confederate-linked names, though by honoring different figures.
Hegseth also restored a 1914 memorial to the Confederacy that was removed from Arlington National Cemetery. The monument features a classical female figure, crowned with olive leaves, representing the American South, alongside sanitized depictions of slavery.
In September, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, also confirmed that a painting of Gen. Robert E. Lee dressed in his Confederate uniform was back on display in the school’s library after being removed in 2022. The portrait shows a Black man leading Lee’s horse in the background, which had been hanging in the library since the 1950s before it was placed in storage.
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