UC Davis

Oscar Howe’s painting Wounded Knee Massacre has been understudied and sparsely exhibited since its completion in 1960. The few scholarly analyses of the work that exist rely heavily on a written interpretation of the painting that Howe produced in 1974. Scholarship has been satisfied with a surface level discourse that concludes that the painting, as Howe himself states, is “a [record of a] true event.” Lack of rigorous examination and interpretation of this work fails to situate it within the social and political climate of the 1950s and 1960s in which Howe was working. This article rectifies this lack through a reevaluation of Wounded Knee Massacre and Howe’s writing about it to provide a more rigorous interpretation that accounts for the broader socio-political context of twentieth-century Native American-settler relations. Specifically, it articulates how Wounded Knee Massacre functions as a nuanced critique of settler colonial violence and the harm caused by its logic of elimination.