Voices of Wounded Knee

Summary: In Voices of Wounded Knee, William S.E. Coleman brings together for the first time all of the available sources - Lakota, military, and civilian. He recreates the Ghost Dance in detail and shows how it related to the events leading up to the massacre. Using accounts of participants and observers, Coleman reconstructs the massacre moment by moment. He places contradictory accounts in direct juxtaposition, allowing the reader to decide who was telling the truth. His balanced treatment suggests that the massacre grew out of decades of broken treaties, cultural misunderstandings, power struggles between the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Army and erroneous and inflammatory reports by irresponsible members of the press.