Reading discussion with Justin Jackson Part 2

Discussion of Justin F. Jackson, "Recognizing Atrocity, Obscuring Honor: The Politics of History, Medals, and Massacre between Wounded Knee and the Philippine-American War," article draft.

Description: The U.S. Department of Defense's recent review of the Medals of Honor awarded some 19 members of the 7th US Cavalry who participated in the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in December 1890 represented a historic opportunity for recognizing atrocity. In 2019, the Lakota people's long-running campaign to have these medals revoked culminated in Congressional legislation, the "Remove the Stain Act"; in 2022, the Pentagon instituted its own internal Special Review Panel to determine if they should be revoked. By early 2025, however, it was learned that the DoD board investigating the medals maintained them; its October 2024 report, since leaked, has not been officially released to the public.

This brief essay, under review at the Western Historical Quarterly, is part of a forum on the Wounded Knee Medal of Honor review and debate with contributions from Phil Deloria, Stefan Aune, Jeff Means, and Dwight Mears. It contextualizes the Medal of Honor debate as a struggle over the symbolic recognition of competing historical narratives of US empire, from western US "expansion" to the Philippines, by narrating the author's own discovery of the largest atrocity of the Philippine-American War, a US Army massacre of 27 Filipino prisoners which American commanders covered up. By reconstructing this atrocity, and how an American officer's receipt of a Medal of Honor there also helped shield this massacre from public knowledge, the essay suggests that US empire transformed military medals designed to recognize meritorious soldiers' conduct into instruments of obfuscation. Between Wounded Knee and the Philippines, the Medal of Honor, it argues, came to reflect and enact both histories of violence and the violence of history, creating and destroying narratives that either intentionally obscure the past, or help us recognize it in the present.