Washington (AP) – 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 in Wooded Knee will keep their awards in a video published on social networks on Thursday night.
The predecessor of Hegseth, Lloyd Austin, ordered the review of the awards in 2024 after a recommendation of the Congress in the 2022 defense bill, in itself a reflection of the efforts of some legislators to rescind the awards for those who participated in the bloody massacre in the Indian reserve of Pine Ridge of the southern Dakota near the unstable slot.
While that day’s events are sometimes described as a battle, historical records show that the United States army, which was in the middle of a campaign to repress the tribes in the area, killed some 250 American natives, including women and children, of the Lakota Sioux tribe, while trying to disarm the American native fighters who had already passed in their camp.
“We are making it clear that (the soldiers) deserve those medals,” Hegseth said in the video, before adding that “his place in the history of our nation is no longer in debate.”
After the fighting, medals of honor were awarded to 20 soldiers of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, and their awards cite a variety of actions, including courage, efforts to rescue other troops and actions to “get rid of the Sioux Indians” who were hidden in a ravine.
The event also became a famous part of the history of the regiment, with its coat of arms that still presents the head of an American native chief to “commemorate Indian campaigns,” according to the military’s Heraldry Institute.
In 1990, Congress apologized to the descendants of those killed in the injured knee, but did not revoke the medals.
According to Hegesh, the Austin ordered review panel “concluded that these brave soldiers should legitimately keep their actions of shares,” but an official of the Secretary of Defense’s office could not say if the report referred to in the video would be made public.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March entitled “Restoring the truth and sanity to American history” that denounced efforts to reinterpret US history and, since then, Hegseth has undertaken multiple actions that have subverted the recommendations of a mandatory commission that examined the use of confederate names and references in the army.
He returned the names of several army bases to their original names linked to Confederates, although honoring different figures.
Hegseth also restored a 1914 monument to the Confederation that was withdrawn from Arlington National Cemetery. The monument presents a classic female figure, crowned with olive leaves, which represents the southern United States, along with disinfected representations of slavery.
In September, the US Military Academy. Uu. In West Point, New York, also confirmed that a painting by General Robert E. Lee dressed in his confederate uniform again exhibited in the school library after being removed in 2022. The portrait shows a black man who led Lee’s horse in the background, which he had been hanging in the library since the 1950s The storage.
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