2025-09-26, 0847h

If you got mad at Pete Hegseth for saying the Medals of Honor for Wounded Knee “won’t be taken back,” because "the history is settled," and left it at that: "Wow, this guy sucks!"... ...you're doing the job he wants you to do. You think you’re resisting him, but you’re actually helping him “settle” the history.

Because you’re listening to him. You’re giving his words the weight. You’re spreading his speech, treating it like the narrative, the center of the story. You’re letting the whole event be framed by the state’s mouthpiece, instead of by the people who actually live with the memory of the massacre.

Meanwhile, Lakota people still live with and steward the land of Wounded Knee Creek. I realized a while back that most people who know about the Wounded Knee Massacre at all have no clue that there's a community there, today. It's very small, and very impoverished: there's a post office that's barely open, and that's it, in terms of settler infrastructure. At the site of the Massacre, when the weather isn't too bad, community members are using there to, superficially, meet tourists, but also to discuss community matters among themselves. And folk eat chokecherries, gather firewood, patch up their trailers, attend ceremony.

Life is lived, history is unsettled.

That’s where the history lives. But you don’t click that. You don’t boost that. You wait for some official in DC to say something outrageous so you can get mad at it. And in that exact moment, you “settle” history on their terms. You’ve made it about them. Again.

I was posting while living near Wounded Knee less than a year ago. I’ve was writing about trying to defend Native land from trafficking-linked violence. And you know what happens to that writing? Either it’s ignored, or it’s dismissed as “too personal." Because, apparently, if you’re close to the event you can’t be trusted to speak on it. And if I write from a researched, analytical perspective, it’s “too abstract," but because I'm not associated with an institution, it's also still "too personal."

So who the fuck is it you actually want to learn from? Who fits your little window of “good evidence”? The answer is obvious: only people who weren’t there. Only people who can repeat the story without threatening you with responsibility. Settler-brained nonsense.

Here’s the truth: every time you put Hegseth’s speech at the center, you’re settling history for him. You’re agreeing that what matters is what he says. You’re agreeing that the state gets to frame the story, and the rest of us just get to be “reactions.”

If you actually want history not to be “settled,” stop centering the people trying to lock it down. Stop sharing their speeches like they’re news. Stop acting shocked every time empire says something empire has always said. Pay attention to the real perspectives. The real grief. The real ceremonies. The real ways people have been remembering and resisting this whole time without needing Pete Hegseth’s permission slip.

Because history doesn’t settle in medals or titles or soundbites. It settles when you look away from the people who actually live it and decide your whole horizon of evidence is whatever the state or some liberal columnist feeds you. That’s how the lock stays on. That’s how their “place in history” gets made real: by your attention, not just by their speech.

So if you’re mad at what Pete said, good. Now do something useful with that anger: look past him. Stop playing into the game where your only role is to boo or clap at the lines they write for themselves. Start finding the people and the land that never forgot, and listen there. Otherwise, you’re not breaking the lock. You’re tightening it.