‘From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock’

From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock is not quite Kevin McKiernan’s Moby-Dick. It’s more like his personal creation myth as a lifelong journalist, as suggested by the film’s subtitle, A Reporter’s Journey. McKiernan, a Santa Barbara resident for more than 40 years, is an irresistible storyteller with an insurrectionist’s heart. Over the past 35 years, he’s put himself in harm’s way both at home and abroad as writer, photographer, and filmmaker, chronicling the bloody eruptions triggered by America’s imperial imperative. The occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1973 is where it all began for McKiernan. It’s clear from this documentary — finished more than four decades later — that his journey will never truly be over. 

The facts of Wounded Knee should astonish far more than they do. For no less than 71 days in the winter of 1973, the federal government engaged in a protracted military stand-off with a couple hundred activists with the American Indian Movement (AIM) who had occupied the town of Wounded Knee, the place where federal troops, by the way, had massacred 300 Lakota men, women, and children in 1890. U.S. Marshalls encircled the town almost immediately after the siege began. Gunfire was exchanged. Blood was spilled. A military blockade was erected to starve out the militants — many of whom were armed and ready to fight — and to keep new recruits from getting in.

McKiernan at the time was a young man of sharp wit and loose ends. Almost accidentally, he stumbled onto the story — and journalism in general — when an NPR affiliate in Minneapolis, where he then lived, asked him to cover the event. Two weeks into it, the feds ordered all reporters out. Those who stayed, the feds warned, would be arrested. McKiernan, not yet even a rookie, paid little heed and, with the help of a Lakota member of AIM, managed to smuggle himself behind enemy lines. The only reporter inside, he would remain there for the duration.