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Reporting Indigenous Women's Resilience at Wounded Knee through the Journalism of Susette Bright Eyes La Flesche

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 April 2024

Michael P. Taylor  and
Rebecca Purse Ballard
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Abstract

This essay recovers the newspaper writings of the Omaha journalist Susette Bright Eyes La Flesche as the first Indigenous woman to publish about the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre. Her eyewitness accounts challenge mainstream histories of the massacre that focus largely on frontier violence and Indigenous death by rewriting Wounded Knee as a place of Indigenous resilience and of an Indigenous community bound together by the rights and responsibilities of kinship. By prioritizing the stories of surviving Indigenous women and girls, Bright Eyes's reporting speaks to and becomes a precedent for ongoing acts and discourses of Indigenous activism, feminism, resurgence, and self-determination.

Type
Essay
Information
PMLA , Volume 139 , Issue 1 , January 2024 , pp. 16 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Modern Language Association of America

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