12 Days: The Murder of Thomas Becket and the Wounded Knee Massacre

Summary

This The Rest Is History episode pairs the murder of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170 with the Wounded Knee Massacre on the same date in 1890. The first half follows Becket’s transformation from Henry II’s chancellor and companion into an archbishop willing to confront royal power; the second places Wounded Knee within Lakota dispossession, the Ghost Dance, official fear, and a lethal disarmament operation.

The episode’s comparative claim is about Martyrdom as Historical Memory: violent death can give victims greater symbolic power than they possessed in life. Becket’s relics, shrine, pilgrimage cult, and the king’s penance are set beside the later reclassification of Wounded Knee from battle to massacre and its role in Native activism and American historical guilt.

Key Claims

• Henry II promoted Becket expecting continued personal and political loyalty, but the archbishop’s institutional and religious role displaced that expectation.
• Becket’s excommunication of bishops involved in crowning Henry the Young King turned an ecclesiastical jurisdiction dispute into an apparent dynastic challenge.
• Four knights converted Henry’s rage into action without the episode establishing a direct royal order to kill Becket.
• Becket refused escape and sanctuary precautions, making acceptance of death central to the later martyr reading without proving that he engineered the attack.
• Relics, miracles, pilgrimage, royal penance, literature, and later suppression made Becket’s posthumous cult politically more powerful than his living opposition.
• Lakota reservation confinement, bison destruction, cultural coercion, drought, hunger, and ration cuts made the Ghost Dance’s promises of restoration and reunion compelling.
• The Seventh Cavalry surrounded Big Foot’s group during disarmament; an unclear gunshot amid the struggle over Black Coyote’s weapon triggered mass fire that killed many women and children.
• Official battle language gave way to the massacre classification as force asymmetry, civilian deaths, likely friendly fire, and later Native-centered memory became harder to suppress.

Key Quotes

“Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” - famous wording that the hosts explicitly say is not contemporary and appears only in the eighteenth century.

“blood in the snow” - the episode’s closing image for Wounded Knee’s enduring symbolic force.

Connections

• Thomas Becket - archbishop whose refusal to retreat and subsequent cult converted murder into religious and political authority.
• Henry II of England - king whose anger helped precipitate Becket’s killing and whose later penance acknowledged its political power.
• Ghost Dance and Wovoka - renewal movement and teacher placed within dispossession, grief, and contested Christian influence.
• Wounded Knee Massacre - surrounded disarmament operation remembered increasingly through civilian killing and force asymmetry.
• Lakota People and Sitting Bull - people subjected to reservation coercion and leader whose killing intensified the immediate crisis.
• Atrocity Narrative Reframing - change from official battle language toward massacre and victim-centered interpretation.
• Martyrdom as Historical Memory - comparative framework joining sacred death, delayed guilt, commemoration, and posthumous power.

Contradictions

• No settled contradiction with the wiki’s fuller Wounded Knee sequence was found; this shorter 2021 account corroborates its massacre classification, disarmament trigger, likely friendly fire, and memory shift.
• The source gives approximately 300 Native deaths and 25 U.S. soldiers killed, while exact casualty totals remain source-scoped and require documentary comparison.
• The episode’s Christian-influence reading of Wovoka and its compressed formulation that white settlers would be buried should not erase the transmission boundary between Wovoka’s teaching and local Lakota adaptations.
• The traditional “turbulent priest” quotation is rejected as non-contemporary, and Henry’s anger is distinguished from a documented murder order.
• Becket’s willingness to face death supports a martyr interpretation, but his exact inner intention and the degree to which he consciously sought martyrdom remain interpretive.