The Wounded Knee Massacre and Minnie’s escape

Roy Watzka’s account of the Wounded Knee Massacre and Minnie’s escape joins a historical atrocity to the private history of Delphine Watzka’s family. As Roy tells it, Minnie was eight when soldiers attacked a camp of starving Lakota who had sought refuge under a white flag. Her father and the woman sheltering her were killed; Minnie survived by fleeing across the winter landscape to a mission. The episode explains why, in Roy’s telling, Delphine’s mother became someone no one could tame, while Delphine’s later reflections show how a mother’s absence continued to shape her life.

The story Roy chooses to tell

Roy introduces the account as a painful secret about who Delphine’s mother became at eight, and asks Delphine to let him speak without diverting him with questions. His story is therefore not an impersonal historical survey: it is a revelation about her family, delivered by her father while he is ill. As he speaks, he sits up with pillows behind him and drinks water Delphine has mixed with ginger. The intimate circumstances of the telling set a personal frame around the violence he describes.

Roy places the events at Christmas on the plains. A group of Minneconjou Lakota, including women, children, and exhausted warriors, come to a church asking for food and mercy. They have suffered hunger and defeat; their chief is dying, and they believe the Ghost Dance might bring the dead back. The congregation turns them away. Roy stresses the disparity between their appeal for help and the refusal they encounter, making the failure of shelter the first step in the catastrophe.

Minnie and her father on the road

Among the travelers is Minnie, a young girl whose father is Cree. He has been sent by his people to learn about the Ghost Dance and report whether it can bring the dead back. He takes his youngest, favorite daughter with him, leaving his other children behind. The pair first travel to a Hunkpapa Lakota camp, then join Minneconjou people moving south toward Chief Hump’s village. By the time they reach the Badlands, the surviving believers are trying to get home, with neither food nor shelter beyond the steep bluffs near Medicine Root Creek.

At Porcupine Butte, Major Samuel M. Whitside persuades the group to follow a white flag of surrender to a military camp at Wounded Knee. There, Big Foot is gravely ill with pneumonia, and the people, hungry and without food, give up their guns and make camp where they are directed. Roy’s account emphasizes the concrete vulnerability of the travelers: they have surrendered their weapons, are seeking protection, and include children and families already weakened by hunger and cold.

Before the attack, Minnie and her father share a tent with a woman carrying a baby. Minnie’s father gives the woman their last piece of bannock. In return, the woman offers a hard, one-legged gingerbread figure she had received outside the church. She breaks it into crumbs to share among them. The small exchange briefly turns rejection into hospitality: the group that was denied food at the church finds a little care among people who have almost nothing.

The next morning, the woman melts snow in a pot over a fire and prepares a tea from roots kept in the bodice of her dress. She tends the brew and gives it to Minnie. A shot sounds just as the girl begins to drink. The moment of care is interrupted by the attack, and the woman’s effort to help Minnie becomes inseparable from the violence that follows.

The attack and Minnie’s escape

Minnie’s father runs out of the tent and is shot. Gunfire spreads through the camp. The woman takes Minnie by the arm and leads her toward the white flag, still carrying her baby. Soldiers fire into the camp, including with Hotchkiss guns, despite the surrender flag. The woman is killed while nursing; her baby remains at her breast. Minnie reaches her father and receives his final words before he dies.

Minnie then walks away from the camp, bewildered. She sees soldiers pursuing and killing women, including women holding their babies, and watches a soldier chase a young boy. Another soldier strips a dead girl of her patterned shirt. Roy says the soldiers leave Minnie alone, perhaps because her farmer’s clothes, lighter hair, paler skin, or French features distinguish her from the Lakota around her; his account offers these as possibilities, not certainties.

Minnie escapes by following other people fleeing the camp. When she falls behind and loses sight of them, their tracks in the snow keep her on the route. She continues walking until she reaches a mission run by a priest named Jutz. Roy ends his account there, saying he can tell no more. The escape is not presented as a return to safety or an account of recovery, but as the fact of one child surviving and reaching refuge after losing her father and her temporary protector.

A catastrophe carried into family life

Delphine initially receives Roy’s story with skepticism and feels overwhelmed by its suddenness. She remembers having heard of Wounded Knee but had forgotten how and why it happened. The revelation also alters her sense of family: she has known no Indigenous people closely except Cyprian Lazarre, and, if Roy is right, she may be related to him. History enters the present not only as information about Minnie, but as a possible connection to someone Delphine already knows.

Much later, beside Eva Waldvogel’s grave, Delphine reflects that losing her mother made her strong while also leaving her damaged, searching, and marked by dismay. Even close to middle age, she still misses her mother. She imagines lying down to hear the earth’s deep pulse and to be soothed by the sound of her mother’s blood. The image gives emotional form to the distance between survival and repair: Minnie’s escape preserves her life, but the childhood loss Roy describes remains part of the inheritance Delphine feels in her own longing.

The episode is also shaped by the way it reaches the reader. The massacre is first reconstructed through Roy’s spoken recollection, and Delphine’s response then reveals the personal consequences of hearing it. In a later wartime scene, Mazarine Shimek wonders whether the German forces have killed innocent people, and thinks of Jews while unable to voice the question aloud. That parallel does not make the histories interchangeable; it places the novel’s accounts of civilian suffering and unspoken family knowledge alongside one another. Roy’s story insists that the dead and the past remain close enough to alter how the living understand their relationships, their grief, and what they have inherited.