The Inconvenient Indian (18 page)

The occupation of Alcatraz ended on June 10, 1971, when police and federal agents removed the last fifteen people from the Rock.

Whenever I’m out in California and cross the Golden Gate and look down on Alcatraz, I imagine how it might be if we went back
there with better advance planning. We’d bring plenty of food and water this time. Solar panels, generators, stoves, pots and pans, utensils, composting toilets, toilet paper, sleeping bags and blankets, computers, a video camera, a short-wave radio, cellphones. We’d make sure our community included at least one doctor, several nurses, an electrician, a plumber, a carpenter, storytellers and artists, a mediator to help with any conflicts that might arise, an embedded journalist to handle the publicity and news releases, a big drum, and someone with a guitar, who could sing Don Ross, Robbie Robertson, and Buffy Sainte-Marie.

We’d probably need a lawyer, and if we couldn’t endure living alongside the real thing, we could get an actor such as Wes Studi to play the part. Oh, and lots of large-print books.

Retired Indians. That’s the key to a new occupation. Assault Alcatraz with senior citizens. Native elders. Those of us who have nothing better to do and are looking for a good story that our children can tell our grandkids. Young people are too busy to sit around on a large, grey rock in the middle of a large, grey bay. They have their lives to live, families to raise. A second occupation of Alcatraz is a job for the bucket-list brigade. Sure, there’d be some physical labour involved, some exertion, but with any luck, no one would have a heart attack or break a hip, and Hollywood might even make a movie about us.

I wonder who they’d get to play me.

Deloria was right. Alcatraz’s value was largely symbolic. But it also revealed the complex of fault lines in Native-White relations, and almost before the aftershocks of the occupation had settled, new tremors began rattling doors and breaking windows across North America. The epicentre for much of this seismic activity
was the American Indian Movement. AIM had been a part of the Alcatraz occupation, and in November of 1970, while the Rock was still in full swing, AIM staged a Thanksgiving Day protest, taking over Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts and painting it red. Then, with Alcatraz in the rear-view mirror for less than a month, AIM showed up at Mount Rushmore on July 4, 1971, as uninvited and unwanted guests at America’s Independence Day celebrations.

There is no precise way to describe AIM. The original organization was formed in the summer of 1968 in Minneapolis, ostensibly to deal with police brutality against Native people in the Twin Cities area. Under the initial leadership of Native activists such as George Mitchell (Ojibway), Dennis Banks (Ojibway), and Clyde Bellecourt (Ojibway), AIM organized Indian patrols to shadow the police and to monitor their activities and conduct. As well, it helped to develop alternative schools—the Little Red Schoolhouse and Heart of the Earth—for Native children, many of whom were having a difficult time in public schools, and lobbied for programs on behalf of Native families who had been forced into the Twin Cities as a result of relocation.

I don’t know that the leaders of AIM ever imagined the organization to be a knight on a horse roaming the countryside in search of dragons. And even if they
had
thought of themselves as a paramilitary unit, a flying squad, as some have claimed, they were inadequately trained, badly coordinated, and poorly armed. AIM was, from the beginning, a loosely managed group of Native men and women who had simply had enough, who decided, given the choice between doing nothing or acting, that they would act.

As it turned out, how AIM would act and where was determined by circumstances not necessarily of its making. None of
AIM’s major confrontations and occupations was planned as such. Each began as an attempt to remedy an injustice and/or to garner some on-camera publicity. When these protests escalated into violence, as a number of them did, governmental antipathy and blinkered law enforcement were as responsible for what followed as was AIM. Sometimes more so.

In February of 1972, AIM went into Gordon, Nebraska, to protest the death of a fifty-one-year-old Native man, Raymond Yellow Thunder. Yellow Thunder had been kidnapped by four White men and a White woman, who stripped him of his pants, took him to the Gordon American Legion Hall, and shoved him, half-naked, out on the dance floor. Yellow Thunder was drunk at the time. So were his assailants. Afterward, they took the older man outside and beat him. The whole thing was supposed to be a joke. It was a Saturday night, after all. What better way to celebrate than to grab a couple of drinks, assault an Indian, have a good laugh? No harm done.

Eight days later, Yellow Thunder’s body was found in the cab of a pickup truck on a used car lot. Cause of death was determined to be a cerebral hemorrhage.

The Sheridan County Attorney called the affair a cruel practical joke. AIM called it murder, and they demanded and got a full investigation, which included a second autopsy. Melvin and Leslie Hare, the brothers who had done the lion’s share of the beating, were arrested, tried, convicted of manslaughter, and sentenced to one year in prison.

One year.

I know it doesn’t seem like much of a sentence, but, according to the oral history in the area, the Hares were the first White men to be convicted of killing an Indian.

In the fall of 1972, AIM, along with the National Indian Brotherhood, the National Indian Youth Council, and five other Native groups, organized the Trail of Broken Treaties, a car caravan that travelled from the west coast to Washington, D.C., to lobby for Native sovereignty and treaty rights and to call attention to the problems of poverty on reserves and reservations.

The caravan, about a thousand strong, arrived in Washington in early November, about a week before the presidential elections. Arrangements to house the protestors were supposed to have been in place, but either through poor planning or government duplicity, housing never materialized. Tired and angry, the protestors marched on the Bureau of Indian Affairs building and took it over. For the next seven days, frustrated Indians ransacked the building.

I was in Salt Lake City at the time, working as the Counselor for Indian Students at the University of Utah. The Native community in town met with the Trail of Broken Treaties when the caravan came through. Some of us provided overnight housing for the people. Others provided supplies—blankets, sleeping bags, canned goods—for the long trip east. Everyone offered support and encouragement.

At first none of us wanted to believe the reports of vandalism. Destroying BIA files might have had some symbolic power, but the loss of those records also had the potential to hurt tribes, to set them back in their negotiations with the government, to allow Washington to drag its feet. The damage didn’t make much sense. And when the media in Salt Lake came calling to get our views on the matter, we all mumbled supportive platitudes about Native rights and government deceit, but privately, among ourselves, we thought the destruction had been stupid.

Sure, we understood rage, but the vandalism was still stupid.

Many years later, at a conference in Phoenix, I ran into a guy who had been in the BIA building during the occupation. I made the mistake of sharing my opinion about the destruction, and we almost wound up in a fight. “You weren’t there,” he told me, “so you don’t get it. You didn’t see the files. Our lives were in those files. The bastards had us locked up in folders.”

We didn’t come to any agreement, but he was right about one thing. I wasn’t there.

And I wasn’t in Custer, South Dakota, either.

On January 20, 1973, Darld Schmitz and Wesley Bad Heart Bull were in Bill’s Bar in Buffalo Gap, a small hamlet some forty-two miles southeast of Custer. It was a Saturday night. Both men had been drinking. Schmitz was particularly offensive, bragging that one day he would “get himself an Indian.” Words were exchanged between the two men, and later, outside the saloon, Schmitz attacked Bad Heart Bull and stabbed him to death. Schmitz had threatened Bad Heart Bull inside the bar, shouting that he would “kill the son of a bitch.” There were witnesses who heard the threat, and there were witnesses who saw Schmitz murder Bad Heart Bull. Schmitz even admitted to killing Bad Heart Bull.

But instead of being charged with first-degree or second-degree homicide, Schmitz was charged with second-degree manslaughter and immediately released.

On February 6, Dennis Banks and Russell Means, two of AIM’s leaders, along with about eighty supporters, arrived in Custer in the middle of a blizzard to meet with County Attorney Hobart Gates. The charges against Schmitz, AIM argued, should be amended to first- or second-degree murder. Gates refused. In
spite of all the evidence and the testimony of the witnesses, Gates saw the killing as a barroom brawl gone wrong. Gates’s decision was met with outrage. Tempers flared. The police rushed in with nightsticks and tear gas. The Indians defended themselves with chairs and rocks and bricks, whatever happened to be at hand. And, in a flash, a full-scale riot, which lasted the afternoon, erupted inside and outside the courthouse.

About twenty-seven Indians were arrested, including Means and Sarah Bad Heart Bull, Wesley’s mother, who was charged with “riot with arson.” She would later be convicted and sentenced to one to five years in prison. Schmitz was charged with second-degree manslaughter and acquitted by an all-White jury. Sarah Bad Heart Bull served five months of her sentence. Schmitz spent part of one day in jail.

Twenty-one days after the confrontation in Custer, AIM and fifty-four cars filled with supporters left Calico, South Dakota, drove onto the Pine Ridge reservation, and took over the village of Wounded Knee. Pine Ridge was in the middle of a civil war that had many of the more traditional Lakota at odds with the tribal chairman, Dick Wilson, and his personal security force known as the “GOONs” (Guardians of the Oglala Nation). Even before AIM arrived, Pine Ridge was a divided, violent place where the per capita murder rate was higher than that of Detroit. Unnerving symbols of this division were the sandbags in front of the tribal council office and 50-calibre machine guns mounted on the roof.

AIM’s appearance at Pine Ridge was not a surprise to anyone. The organization had been invited by a faction on the reservation to help them in the fight against Wilson, and the FBI had informants inside AIM. In his memoir,
Wounded Knee: A Personal Account
,
Stanley Lyman, the Bureau of Indian Affairs superintendent at Pine Ridge, recalls asking U.S. Marshal Reese Kash how he knew so much about AIM’s plans. Kash responded that their information came from “a very reliable source.” So when AIM drove through Pine Ridge on February 27, federal marshals and FBI agents were waiting for them.

But instead of butting heads at the tribal council office, the fifty-plus cars in the AIM caravan drove right on by and took over the village of Wounded Knee.

Thus began the siege of Wounded Knee. At the height of the siege, the government had at its disposal some fifteen armoured cars, over 100,000 rounds of M-16 ammunition, submachine guns, gas masks, bulletproof vests, sniper rifles with night scopes, and an unlimited number of federal marshals, FBI agents, military personnel, and local law enforcement.

The number of people inside Wounded Knee hovered around two hundred and fifty. By contrast with the government’s arsenal, AIM had around thirty or forty weapons, mostly small calibre. The most potent piece was probably an AK-47 that belonged to a Kiowa from Oklahoma named Bobby Onco. If Dennis Banks’s recollections are correct, Onco didn’t have any bullets for the rifle, but was able to use the weapon as a prop to impress the media. Most of the other guns didn’t have much in the way of ammunition either. No one had done any advance planning on securing the village or on what would be needed for an extended occupation. From a logistics point of view, Wounded Knee felt a great deal like Alcatraz, albeit without the waterfront setting and the great views.

But unlike Alcatraz, the general goodwill that had attended the Rock was not to be found at Wounded Knee. From the beginning,
the media did not treat this occupation with the same grace and good humour. Celebrities did not flock to the Dakota plains to tour the encampment and show their support for the cause on the evening news. Money did not pour in, as it had in San Francisco. There was little of the magic that had been such a major component of Alcatraz. One newspaper story reminded its readers that South Dakota was not California. As though that needed saying.

Support for Wounded Knee was more grassroots, more militant. Almost immediately, all around North America, demonstrations and marches were organized to bring media attention to the occupation and to raise money. While the FBI and the U.S. Marshals tried to cut the village off from the outside world, determined groups and individuals, Indian and White, made air supply drops from small planes and used the rutted South Dakota landscape—the arroyos and the coulees—to run the government lines and bring supplies into the village under cover of darkness.

Sometime during the occupation, I don’t remember exactly when, there was a big rally on the steps of the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City in support of Wounded Knee. There were speeches, calls for action. A blanket was carried through the crowd to collect donations, and all of us tossed money and tobacco and food stamps on it. Then an older woman got up and asked the question that was asked again and again during this period of Indian history.

“Where are the warriors?”

Where are the warriors
? Even now that call to arms heats my blood. It certainly did on that day in Salt Lake. When the rally ended, about a dozen men climbed into a van and three cars and headed east on highway 80. I was one of those men. As we drove
into the mountains, as the passion of the moment cooled, I remember thinking that this was a mistake. I mean, I had a job. I had a wife and a baby. I was working with Indian students at the university. It wasn’t as though I wasn’t trying to do my part.

But then again, the people inside Wounded Knee probably had jobs, too. Many of them had children. I wasn’t special. I was simply … safe.