The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

by David Treuer

  National Indian Youth Council and Red Power

  Despite the ways in which Indian communities were growing, strengthening, and resisting, most change in the first half of the twentieth century had been imposed on Indian communities from the top down with every switch in federal Indian policy. But change was coming from within Indian communities, too. While the NCAI had attempted, through the 1950s and 1960s, to work with and from within the system, its more conservative members were purged in the 1960s, and the intellectual firebrand Vine Deloria Jr., a Sioux from Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, became executive director in 1964. Another organization sprang up in the 1950s, however, with a different philosophy and outlook: the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC). It was led by Clyde Warrior, a Ponca from Oklahoma who was a magnetic powwow dancer and truly a man of his people. Warrior had attended seminars and summer programs administered by the Southwest Regional Indian Youth Council meant to educate a new generation of Indian leaders on Indian history, federal policy, and the like, and he had learned from them, but he wanted more. In the late 1950s, he wrote that as the “white man tends to rate the Indian as being lazy and worthless . . . the Indian seems to make it a point to act and be exactly as he’s rated.” This was part of the problem. The other part of the problem was that programming meant to help Indians—national housing initiatives, health care, educational opportunities, and leadership training programs—was run by non-Indians: it came from the outside. The two parts of the problem came together in such a way as to prevent Indian people from charting their own destiny. As another young NIYC leader, Browning Pipestem, put it, Warrior wanted to take the “negative image of the Indians and shove it down people’s throats.”

  When he ran for the presidency of the Southwest Regional Indian Youth Council in 1960, rather than prepare a speech or outline a policy position, Warrior mounted the stage, pushed back his cowboy hat, rolled up his sleeves, and exposed his brown forearms. “This is all I have to offer,” he told the attendees. “The sewage of Europe does not flow through these veins.” He won. His message was beginning to win, too: being Indian was good, and what culture and tradition Indians maintained were good as well, and sufficient to the task of being Indian in the twentieth century and beyond. It doesn’t sound so radical in our age of identity politics, but it was radical then, especially among Indians. Hundreds of years of being missionized, colonized, reservationized, mainstreamed, marginalized, and criminalized had had a pernicious effect on Indian self-regard. How not to think of oneself as less, how not to think of oneself and one’s place as at the bottom of hierarchical America after being downtrodden for a century? As leader of first the Southwest Regional Indian Youth Council and, later, the National Indian Youth Council, Warrior managed to make his philosophy felt. Instead of holding meetings in city hotels, as the NCAI did, the groups met on reservations. Every meeting concluded with drumming and singing, often led by Warrior himself. By 1966 the NIYC was involved in direct action—in the Pacific Northwest—over treaty and fishing rights. Indians from around the country participated in “fish-ins” to protest the abrogation of treaty rights in the Pacific Northwest. “It was a major source of encouragement and hope to have a Ponca from Oklahoma, a Paiute from Nevada, a Tuscarora from New York, a Flathead from Montana, a Navajo from New Mexico, a Mohawk from Michigan, and a Pottawatomie [sic] from Ford Motors among others offering to fight for their cause,” remembered activist Hank Adams after the protest. It was doing what other organizations weren’t: pursuing tribal sovereignty by engaging in direct conflict with the U.S. government in a way that embraced Indianness as the most potent weapon in Indians’ arsenal, rather than settling for the weapons given to them by a government they were trying to change.

  Warrior published an essay in the NIYC newspaper titled “Which One Are You? Five Types of Young Indians.” The first type was the “Slob or Hood,” the Indian who lived up to the worst expectations of his character; the second was the “Joker,” who engaged in a kind of redface minstrelsy to prove to white society he was likable and harmless; the third was the “Redskin ‘White-Noser’ or ‘Sell-out,’” who likewise went to great lengths to ingratiate himself; the fourth was the “Ultra ‘Pseudo-Indian,’” who claimed to be Indian but had no real connection to anyone or any place; and the last was the “Angry Nationalist,” who rejected the path laid out for him by American society but who needed real connection to other Indians and to Indian homelands. In Warrior’s estimation, this last was the closest to the kind of Indian to be, as it was the best suited to provide the “genuine contemporary creative thinking, democratic leadership to set guidelines, cues and goals for the average Indian. The guidelines and cues have to be based on true Indian philosophy geared to the modern times.”

  By 1970, half of all Indians lived in cities rather than on the reservation. By government design and necessity, they had become “American,” but for the most part, they had become Americans at the bottom. Their life expectancy was between fifty and sixty-five years, compared with seventy and over for whites. Indian infant mortality was half again as much as that of white babies. Even as late as 1988, Indians age fifteen to twenty-five were twice as likely to die in vehicular accidents and three times as likely to commit suicide. Middle-aged Indians committed suicide twice as often as whites, had incidents of liver disease nearly six times higher, died in car wrecks three times as often, and were three times more likely to be murdered. And there were more than four times as many deaths due to diabetes among Indians aged forty-five to sixty-four as among whites of the same age. Some—like Clyde Warrior—turned their dissatisfaction into informed and passionate protest. Others, like Russell Means (later, when the American Indian Movement, or AIM, took the stage), embraced violence as an almost aesthetic calling, in their rhetoric and in fact. Others, as the statistics show, did violence to their loved ones and themselves in the form of assault, domestic abuse, rape, child abuse, drinking, drugs, and suicide. But for all the grim statistics, there were corresponding shifts in the direction of Indian lives. And the two tendencies were related.

  Even as many Indians had moved to cities, they had begun looking back over their shoulders. Perhaps the most important lesson of a government that had done its best to have its way with them might be that the good old days before the coming of the white man had actually been good after all, and that to think so offered something more than the pleasure of nostalgia. Indians began looking to themselves—to their cultures and religions and lifeways—to sustain them. As unrealistic or out-of-control as some of the activist leadership may have been, the aesthetic it promoted—long hair and big belt buckles and beadwork—spoke of something deeper: a profound sense that if America wasn’t going to serve Indian people, a newfound or lingering, never-quite-extinguished sense of personal and cultural dignity vested in Indian practices might. This didn’t mean dismissing all the skills and opportunities their American experience had afforded them, at great cost. Indians were figuring out how to be Indian and American simultaneously. Yet they did so with growing impatience with gradual systematic change. As the 1960s drew to a close, Indian activists began to look not toward the NAACP for a model of resistance but to the Black Panthers, which had been born out of a similar dissatisfaction with gradualist approaches.

  Panthers and Red Power

  While the combined efforts of direct action and the steady work of the NAACP had done much to reduce the structures of racism in the South and in federal law, they had done not quite as much to address the conditions of urban blacks in the North who encountered new forms of poverty and new iterations of racism. As white flight to the suburbs increased, African Americans found themselves isolated and concentrated in decaying urban centers with few job prospects, substandard housing, failing schools, and overtly racist, nonblack police forces. For young blacks in places like Oakland, where a mere sixteen of the city’s 661 police officers were black when the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in 1966, civi
l rights solved only part of the problem. Civil rights appeared barely able to deliver equality at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder; how were African Americans going to achieve economic and political power? In a country that valorized the middle class, exclusion from it was just another face of imperialism. It was in response to this dilemma (and pervasive police brutality) that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, both of whom had worked extensively in community clinics and organizations in Oakland, formed the Black Panther Party. One of the immediate catalysts was the killing of a black teen by police; the subsequent riots across the city prompted Newton and Seale to make good on their ideas to harness black urban rage and bend it toward the fight for political power. And so they set up the Panthers as a self-consciously militant force.

  The Panthers’ first big action was to make use of California’s lax open-carry laws and have members armed with shotguns and rifles follow Oakland police around the city. They set themselves up as watchdogs on a police force notorious for its excesses. Less than a year later, more than thirty Black Panthers showed up, nineteen of them armed, at the California statehouse, where the party promoted a ten-point plan (though “wish list” might be a better description) that was later published in the Black Panthers’ newspaper in November 1967. Each heading was followed by passionate and lucid argument. The headings read:

  We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.

  We want full employment for our people.

  We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community.

  We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

  We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.

  We want all black men to be exempt from military service.

  We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people.

  We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

  We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

  We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.

  Arresting as televised images of armed black men in leather jackets outside the statehouse or in the streets were, the group also worked hard in their own communities. Beyond the violence and theatrics for which most people remember them, they had a strong community-action component to their mission. They organized citizen patrols, health clinics, day-care facilities, and schools. They disseminated information and registered voters. The party itself eventually crumbled under internal and external forces: a power-hungry leadership given to excesses of violence and prone to internecine fights and undermining by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, who called the organization “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” By the 1980s, the Black Panthers had ceased to exist as a viable political force in the urban American landscape. But before it did, urban Indians in Minneapolis, San Francisco, and other American cities had been watching. And they liked what they saw.

  The Rise of the American Indian Movement

  The early founders of AIM—mostly Ojibwe in Minneapolis—looked around at the South Minneapolis neighborhood along the Franklin Avenue corridor and asked themselves what the Indian Reorganization Act, the Indian Claims Commission, termination, and relocation had done for them. In 1970, the unemployment rate for Indians was ten times higher than the national average, and 40 percent of Indians, on and off the reservation, lived below the poverty level. The average life expectancy for Indians was substantially lower than the average for whites. Indians in Minneapolis also endured, as African Americans endured, racist policing, redlining of residential districts, a lack of adequate schools, and terrible housing—the worst in the state. A particular grievance, according to Dennis Banks, one of the founders of the movement, was the police’s habit, on any given Friday night, of bursting into one of the Indian bars that lined Franklin Avenue and arresting everyone for drunk and disorderly conduct. They’d exploit the detainees for free labor over the weekend, then release them on Monday morning.

  Banks, along with the Ojibwe brothers Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt, George Mitchell, and the Oneida Harold Powless, formed the American Indian Movement. Like the Black Panthers, they were primarily concerned with Indians’ economic independence and freedom from police brutality. And they were drawn to the militant theatrics of the Black Panthers as a way of making visible the country’s most invisible minority. Their first act was to form AIM Patrols that, modeled on the Panthers, followed police around their neighborhood and documented instances of police brutality. Meanwhile other Indian militants—the National Indian Youth Council and the Red Power Movement—were planning other actions, with a view to the impact they’d make on TV.

  In November 1969, students and activists in the Bay Area took over Alcatraz Island. The takeover was, initially at least, the child of Red Power and student activists, but it would become part of the mythology of AIM. The Bay Area had become one of the urban power nodes for Indians beginning in the 1950s. Some Indians had migrated there on their own from tribes across the country; others had been moved there during termination and relocation in the 1950s, and yet others had been drawn to the liberal admissions policies of the University of California system. Interest in the former prison had been brewing ever since Alcatraz was closed in 1963 because of rising maintenance costs and crumbling structures. The activists were motivated by a clause in a treaty with the Lakota saying that they had the right to occupy any abandoned federal buildings for their own use. Alcatraz was federal and, though it was far from their homeland, it was abandoned. On March 8, 1964, some forty Indians—among them two welders, a housepainter, and a Lakota navy shipyard worker named Walter Means and his twenty-six-year-old son, Russell—took boats out to the island and claimed it on behalf of America’s first peoples. Allen Cottier, a descendant of Crazy Horse, read a statement in which the occupiers offered to pay the federal government forty-seven cents an acre (the going rate for unsettled one-hundred-year-old Indian land claims in California). The protesters were surprised by the degree and intensity of public support, and while the coverage eventually died out and the lawsuits fizzled, the Indians hoped that their publicity stunt would spark a movement. Five years later, it did.

  Among those inspired by the Alcatraz protest was Adam Nordwall, an Ojibwe business leader who had moved to the Bay Area from the Red Lake Reservation in the 1950s and owned a pest control company. (Later, in 1973, Nordwall would fly to Italy, don powwow regalia in the airplane bathroom, and upon landing claim the country by right of discovery.) Another was Richard Oakes, a charismatic young Mohawk steelworker who—while in the middle of a bridge contract in Rhode Island—pulled up stakes and drove to the Bay Area. “I just decided to go to California, gave up everything, and drove right across the country.” Once there, he ended up working as a bartender, where he saw the worst of urban Indian life on display. “What I saw . . . was the bickering and barroom fights between the Indians, the constant drinking. Drinking seems to fill a void in the lives of many Indians. It takes the place of the singing of a song, the sharing of a song with another tribe. . . . Drinking is used as a way to create feelings of some kind where there aren’t any. . . . I saw the end of the rainbow: the wrong end.” Like Nordwall, Oakes wanted something more for Indians in the Bay Area. As the men dreamed their separate dreams, San Francisco was trying to dream up its own solution to the crumbling hulk that was Alcatraz. Lamar Hunt—Texas oilman, founder of the American Football League, owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, originator of the Super Bowl—wanted to turn the site into a complex that would include a futuristic space exploration museum, shops, restaurants,
and apartments. But when the San Francisco American Indian Center burned to the ground in October 1969, Nordwall and Oakes had a place on which to pin their dreams for Indians: Alcatraz could be the site of an expanded Indian center in the mouth of San Francisco Bay.

  The spirit of the concept was laudable, but the practicalities were problematic: Why build a center reachable only by boat that even the federal government couldn’t afford to maintain, to serve a population so poor and so scattered that most lacked cars? As AIM chroniclers Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior note, “It was almost as if a collective hallucination had drifted over from the Haight.” Nevertheless, plans for a takeover of Alcatraz moved quickly. Oakes met with students, Nordwall met with other leaders, and the two met each other, at a Halloween party thrown by a local reporter, and joined forces. The activist equivalent of a soft opening was announced for November 9. Boats were arranged, reporters were notified. At the appointed time, everyone gathered at the wharf—except the boats weren’t there. Finally Oakes sweet-talked the owner of a three-masted schooner, the Monte Cristo, into bringing them across. When they neared the island, Oakes and some others stripped off their shirts and jumped into the bay to swim the last leg. They returned to the wharf an hour later, shivering, but alive with the possibility of a real takeover at some point in the future.