The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

by David Treuer

  AIM’s involvement in the quest for social justice in an off-reservation town known for exploiting Indians was exhilarating. Perhaps a little too exhilarating: On their way out of Gordon, a few hundred AIMsters stopped at the Wounded Knee Trading Post in the heart of Pine Ridge. The “trading post” epitomized the exploitation of Indians for outsiders’ gain. A tourist attraction owned by a non-Indian, James Czywczynski, it stood on the site of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee Creek and sold moccasins and plastic bows and postcards showing Chief Big Foot’s twisted, frozen corpse. It also lent money at supposedly punitive rates. And recently, Czywczynski had been accused of choking an Indian boy. The AIMsters trashed the place, stealing merchandise and smashing windows, and threatened and humiliated Czywczynski.

  It could be argued that the physical violence that had already become part of AIM’s signature style was a response to the institutionalized violence against Indians, but a tendency toward violence also permeated AIM’s internal conflicts. Referring to Levi Walker Jr., an Ojibwe-Ottawa who played the Atlanta Braves’ mascot Noc-a-homa, emerging from a teepee periodically during each game to perform a war dance, Means was quoted in a Newsweek article as saying, “It figures. All the Chippewas used to do was hang around the fort anyway.” The Chippewas (Ojibwe), who had founded AIM, were not amused. Means responded dramatically, saying that he was resigning from AIM’s board of directors and from the position of national coordinator: “The reasons are clear. The Whiteman has triumphed again!” His supporters rejected the resignation; after all, Means couldn’t “resign from being an Indian.”

  A year later, AIM was back in another border town because of another murder. On January 21, 1973, Wesley Bad Heart Bull was stabbed to death in front of a liquor store in Buffalo Gap, South Dakota, just off the western border of the Pine Ridge Reservation. The two incidents were only superficially similar. Bad Heart Bull had been arrested nineteen times in the preceding two years, once for assaulting a police officer. He had been jailed for assault, disturbing the peace, and disorderly conduct. He was, to put it mildly, a little rough. There were also conflicting accounts of what had happened during the lead-up to his murder. Some said Bad Heart Bull had been picking fights at Bill’s Bar in Custer, South Dakota, earlier that evening. Others said he had used an eighteen-inch log chain to beat a man named James “Mad Dog” Gleary before Gleary’s friend Darld Schmitz intervened. Still others said that Schmitz had said at some point during his own drunken, violent evening that he wanted to “kill him an Indian.” Whatever the cause, in front of six witnesses (four white and two Indian) Schmitz drove his knife into the chest of Bad Heart Bull, who died from blood loss on the way to the hospital.

  Schmitz was arrested the same day and was set to be arraigned in Custer on January 22. In the meantime, hundreds of Indians arrived in Custer to protest the charges of second-degree manslaughter (the lowest possible for murder in South Dakota), which was typical for non-Indians who killed Indians. State troopers and law-enforcement officials gathered as well. AIM had intended to pack the courthouse with protesters, but the court said that only five of them could attend. The AIM leadership chose itself—Dennis Banks, Russell Means, Leonard Crow Dog, and Harry David Hill. They asked the court for stiffer charges and were refused. Means left the courthouse to find Bad Heart Bull’s mother, thinking that perhaps her anguish would sway the court, but state troopers barred him from reentry. Law enforcement began to draw closer, and officers grabbed Sarah Bad Heart Bull, wrestled her to the ground, and began choking her with a baton. Other Indians jumped in to help her. Law enforcement—by this time including tactical units, state troopers, sheriffs, sheriff’s deputies, and FBI agents—outnumbered Indians four to one. What had begun as a protest quickly became a riot. Two police cruisers were torched. The chamber of commerce (about the size of a hotdog stand) was set ablaze. Bottles, tire irons, and cinder blocks were hurled at police and through windows. A Texaco station was smashed and set alight, as was a Standard Oil bulk station. When the riot was finally quelled, thirty Indians were charged with rioting and arson. Sarah Bad Heart Bull was convicted of starting a riot and was sentenced to one to five years in prison. She served five months. Darld Schmitz was acquitted by the all-white jury. He served one night in jail. Clearly there was little justice to be had in a white border town. And there seemed to be little justice to be had at Pine Ridge either.

  While AIM had continued to grow, it lacked a solid base of support on the reservations. The movement had been born in the city, and it was essentially urban-oriented, geared to do battle with white aggression and injustice through symbolic occupations and agitprop. Despite its focus on reclaiming Indian pride by way of Indian cultures and ceremonies, and by privileging the old ways, reservation communities were not entirely sold on AIM. And where some portion of the community might be sympathetic, tribal leadership often was not. This was the case at Pine Ridge in the early 1970s.

  At that time the reservation was led—some might say controlled—by Dick Wilson. Wilson had been born in the town of Pine Ridge in 1934, the same year the Indian Reorganization Act was passed, and had come to represent everything that was wrong with reservation electoral politics—a fitting symmetry. The village of Pine Ridge was the seat of the reservation. And just as Washington, D.C., is a seat of power different from, and in some ways divorced from, the rest of the country it represents, such was the relationship of such “urban centers” to their reservations. Pine Ridge held the clinic, the best schools, the municipal buildings, and the few businesses that catered to the reservation. Its residents were somewhat better off and more racially mixed than the Indians from smaller villages around the reservation. It was largely Christian, and its Episcopalian and Catholic networks were primary paths to power: traditionals and fluent Lakota speakers were often frozen out of jobs and politics. Wilson had entered politics in the late 1960s, when he ran for and won a seat as a district representative at the age of thirty-two. Almost immediately his detractors accused him of nepotism, favoritism, and mismanagement. It was said that he diverted funds for public projects into his own coffers and hired a private security force to intimidate his opponents. Nonetheless, in 1972 he was elected chairman of the reservation in a narrow contest where, again, most of his support came from village of Pine Ridge.

  Wilson had had good things to say about AIM during its direct action in Gordon, Nebraska, after Raymond Yellow Thunder’s murder. Wilson himself set up a housing authority on the reservation to deal with the epidemic of substandard housing, the first of its kind. But he also continued firing reservation employees and replacing them with family members. He appointed his wife as director of the tribal Head Start program and paid his brother to organize his inauguration. He stopped consulting with the large tribal council and met only with the more easily controlled four-member executive council. He awarded cheap grazing leases on tribal land to white interests and proposed opening up large portions of the reservation to mining. All of that might have been regarded as reservation politics as usual. Six previous tribal chairmen had been through impeachment proceedings, and only one had served more than one term. But Wilson went further. At the outset of his tenure, the Indian Claims Commission had been ready to award the Lakota damages for ongoing land claims dating back to the 1870s, when Custer and his Seventh Cavalry broke open the Great Sioux Reservation after the discovery of gold in the Black Hills. Claims had been filed first in the Court of Claims and again through the Indian Claims Commission. Tribal members were split over the proposed settlement, with more traditional Indians from outlying areas strongly rejecting it and progressives wanting the cash because Pine Ridge was (and still is) crushingly poor. Wilson wanted the cash. As unrest grew, so too did his reliance on his ever-growing private security force, who were aided and advised by Nixon’s domestic commando force, the Special Operations Group: an illegal domestic CIA intelligence outfit. Pine Ridgers referred to them as goons, and Wilson’s thugs proudly appropriated the name:
they began calling themselves GOONs, Guardians of the Oglala Nation.

  Until this point, AIM had not had a significant presence at Pine Ridge, but now it waded into the fray at the behest of traditional Pine Ridge residents. Russell Means was Oglala, and he called the leader of his tribe a dictator, a liar, and a drunk. Wilson said that if Means came to Pine Ridge, he’d cut off Means’s braids. He said that AIM was merely a bunch of “bums trying to get their braids and mugs in the press.”

  In February 1973 there was enough of a backlash against Wilson to spark impeachment proceedings. Astonishingly Wilson opened the process by showing the documentary Anarchy U.S.A., a film produced by the John Birch Society, an anticommunist organization that had its roots in relatively centrist conservative movements of the late 1950s and early 1960s but had veered further to the right. By this point it saw communist conspiracies everywhere, including in the American and Soviet governments, which were supposedly under the control of a “conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians” who might “betray the country’s sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a ‘one-world socialist government’” if left unexposed. Civil rights, collectivism, and liberals were the sharp point of the conspiracy, and the society had created Anarchy U.S.A. to prove their point. What a strange world it had become, that a Lakota-elected tribal chairman would enlist such a piece of propaganda in his own defense!

  What one wouldn’t give to have been in that room that day. As it turned out, Wilson was not impeached, because of technicalities. More and more AIM members came to Pine Ridge. Wilson remained in office, and the village of Pine Ridge became increasingly militarized, packed with GOONs, Special Operations Group forces, U.S. marshals, and FBI agents. Tribal headquarters were sandbagged and crowned with a .50 caliber machine gun. It was under these circumstances that Russell Means did in fact come to Pine Ridge, along with much of the rest of AIM’s membership, including Dennis Banks, Carter Camp, and Vernon and Clyde Bellecourt. AIM, always marked by opportunity in ways good and bad, was already on the reservation in force to attend the funeral of Ben Black Elk, the son of renowned spiritual leader Nicholas Black Elk. Two GOONs jumped Means in a convenience store parking lot and beat him up. Undeterred, he continued to a meeting convened by traditional people in Calico to discuss what to do now that the effort to impeach Wilson had failed. Within hours, disgusted and frightened by the militarization of Pine Ridge and on the advice of spiritual leaders there, principally Frank Fools Crow, AIM caravanned from Calico to Wounded Knee. They held a ceremony at the gravesite of the victims of the 1890 massacre, and while that was going on, AIM militants attacked the village and were able to control it almost immediately. They took over the trading post and the lonely, picturesque Sacred Heart Catholic Church, along with most of the village. Again they looted the store, and one man donned a turkey-feather headdress and danced on the glass cabinets until they broke. Federal, state, and tribal law enforcement, already at Pine Ridge because of the political situations of the past year, blocked the roads and surrounded the village by the evening of February 27. The militants were surprised when it seemed clear the government was going to neither storm the village nor disappear. They were in for a siege. The protesters would remain in the village for seventy-one days.

  Almost immediately they exchanged gunfire with federal and state agents. Law enforcement fired back. Backup forces and supplies arrived. Somehow the activists were able to deliver a list of demands to federal negotiators in the first days of the siege. Among the demands were that Senator William Fulbright convene the Foreign Relations Committee to hold hearings on Indian treaties; that Senator Edward Kennedy convene a subcommittee to investigate malfeasance at the Bureau of Indian Affairs; that Senator James Abourezk investigate “all Sioux reservations in South Dakota”; and that their negotiating partners be restricted to Kennedy, Abourezk, Fulbright, Ehrlichman, their top aides, or the commissioner of the BIA or the secretary of the interior. Over the next few days the list of demands grew to include the immediate removal of Wilson from office and the appointment of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as their negotiator.

  By this point, the U.S. government had some experience dealing with Indian militants. Alcatraz was behind them, as was the takeover of the BIA; in both cases, the federal government had been careful and crafty and had managed to keep violence to a minimum while giving up relatively little. This time the occupiers were armed, however, and they held eleven hostages from the village of Wounded Knee, most of them elderly non-Native residents of the village. Russell Means, always good for a sound bite, said he wasn’t afraid to die, and if he did, the hostages would die, too. The government decided to wait them out. The occupiers hadn’t planned on enduring a siege. They quickly organized themselves, but they lacked food: the town’s grocery store had been looted clean on the first night of the takeover. In response, Dick Wilson’s GOONs set up roadblocks in every direction for fifteen miles surrounding Wounded Knee. No one was allowed through, and Wilson even required the accumulating federal agents to pass inspections at his roadblocks. The government was none too happy about this.

  After ten days a cease-fire between the government and the protesters was arranged. The feds were also able to get Wilson to make his GOONs stand down and disperse. But when the roadblocks were lifted, more activists and supporters flooded into Wounded Knee, bringing with them guns and supplies. The leadership declared the Wounded Knee site the “Independent Oglala Nation” and said that as a sovereign nation it would negotiate directly only with the U.S. secretary of state. Americans across the country were shocked (and many were sympathetic) to see armored vehicles, helicopters, and federal troops on American soil. It was as if all the antiwar and countercultural protesters had been right: America had become a war zone herself.

  On March 1, George McGovern and James Abourezk, South Dakota’s two Democratic senators, came to Pine Ridge to see for themselves what could be done. They spoke to the eleven hostages and were surprised to learn that they were, and always had been, free to go. One of them, Wilbur Reigert, told reporters, “The fact is, we as a group of hostages decided to stay to save AIM and our own property. Had we not, those troops would have come down here and killed all of these people.” The militants traded gunfire with federal agents regularly, but no serious injuries were incurred, at least at first. The militants had an odd assortment of shotguns and deer rifles, and most of their arms couldn’t even reach the federal troops in their bunkers. Rumors that AIM had an M60 machine gun were untrue. The feds, however, escalated. Fifteen more APCs (armored personnel carriers) arrived along with heavy machine guns and helicopters. Despite the continued insistence of the federal government that this was a military operation, the Pentagon had a surprisingly lucid view of the situation. In a memo to the military leaders on the ground the Pentagon noted:

  C. The main objective of the Indians is to draw attention to their real or imagined complaints via national media coverage to stimulate public sympathy and congressional action.

  D. the Indians do not appear intent upon inflicting bodily harm upon the legitimate residents of Wounded Knee or upon the Federal law enforcement agents operating in the area, even though small arms fire has been exchanged between opposing forces.

  E. Because of its isolated geographical location, the seizure and holding of Wounded Knee poses no threat to the Nation, the State of South Dakota or the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation itself. However, it is conceded that this act is a source of irritation if not embarrassment to the Administration in general and the Department of Justice in particular.

  It could be axiomatic that in conflict if a weapon exists it will, ultimately, be used because it exists. Such was the case with the Wounded Knee siege. Despite the fact that the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act forbade using the military against American citizens, even before the siege began on February 27, General Alexander Haig authorized the use of APCs and the U.S
. Air Force at Pine Ridge. The agents who manned the roadblocks were FBI agents, and U.S. marshals and military personnel wore civilian clothes rather than uniforms to disguise their presence. The military was there, illegally, and everyone knew it. Early negotiations with Ralph Erickson, assistant to the attorney general, were laughably unproductive. First he threatened force and then, abruptly, said no force would be used and disbanded the National Guard and withdrew. The government’s hopes were that without a military standoff everyone would lose interest. Dennis Banks declared victory. Journalists reported that the siege was over. Instead, more protesters arrived with more weapons and more food.

  On March 11, federal postal inspectors arrived at Wounded Knee to, as they claimed, investigate mail tampering. In reality they were trying to get a sense, on the ground, of what was happening in the village. With journalists observing, Means ordered the postal workers held at gunpoint and said, “If any foreign official representing any foreign power—specifically the United States—comes in here it will be treated as an act of war and dealt with accordingly.” He concluded by saying spies would be “shot by a firing squad.” A couple of hours later there was a gunfight between militants and federal agents. One of the agents was wounded. And the real siege was back on as APCs, tanks, and agents moved back into place.