The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

by David Treuer

  A couple of weeks after the siege began, Harlington Wood Jr. (World War II veteran, noted legal expert, and historian of Abraham Lincoln), an assistant attorney general with the Civil Rights Division who had negotiated with Indian activists during the Alcatraz takeover, arrived to negotiate. He was the first unescorted, nonmilitary official to enter Wounded Knee. He met and talked with AIM leaders for days and brought the Indians’ demands to the U.S. government. They were still fighting for the recognition of earlier treaties and for some way to deal with the corruption and violence of Dick Wilson’s regime. Wood did his best but failed. Ultimately, he tried until he could no longer continue, pleading illness and exhaustion. After Wood left, one of the most intense gunfights erupted, with federal agents firing on the village with M16s and a .50 caliber heavy machine gun. One man, Rocky Madrid, was hit in the stomach but survived. This cycle—violence, demands, negotiation, breakdown, more violence—would continue.

  The next negotiator was not so sympathetic or as effective as Wood had been. A month into the siege, Kent Frizzell was sent by the Department of Justice to end it. One of the first things he did was cut off power and water to the village in an attempt to starve out the protesters. Food and fuel continued to make their way in as Indians with backpacks hiked in over the hills. As the siege wore on, gunfire continued. In late March, firefights were so frequent that government agents told reporters they could no longer guarantee their safety. Many of them left. Those who remained were unable to report directly about the siege and so it began to drop from the daily coverage on TV and in newspapers. On March 25, Leo Wilcox, a Dick Wilson ally on the tribal council, was found incinerated in his car. Early reports called his death suspicious, and even though later, more extensive reports determined it was an accidental death due to a faulty fuel line, it gave Wilson all the reasons he needed to ramp up his own activities. They reestablished their own roadblocks beyond those of the government. And on March 26 a federal agent was shot in the chest and paralyzed, possibly by friendly fire, though that was never determined. After that the last news crews left and the last phone lines went down as well.

  Demands, meetings, breakdown, violence, repeat. April came around, though it didn’t feel like spring. The government, getting nowhere, removed the BIA and the Interior Department from the negotiations and this helped: Means and other leaders saw it as a move to more formal government-to-government relations. In early April an agreement was reached: the Oglalas would have their grievances heard by the White House, and the Justice Department would investigate criminal activity on Pine Ridge. Another stipulation was that Russell Means would turn himself in and face the charges against him. A helicopter landed to pick up Means, who was applauded and cheered by his people. Means was already accustomed to being treated as an important person: he demanded that whoever wanted him to speak on their behalf fly him first class. As Robert Warrior and Paul Chaat Smith note, dryly, that helicopter ride almost qualified as luxury travel. Before jail, however, Means was to appear in Washington, D.C., at a meeting to conclude the terms of the agreement. Misunderstandings arose immediately. The government said that Means had to order the evacuation of Wounded Knee before the meeting commenced. Means said he wouldn’t do so until after. Means held a press conference and then left on a national speaking tour. He never returned to the Wounded Knee siege. On April 15, an AIM supporter and pilot from Boston dropped supplies by parachute over the village. When the militants came out to collect the supplies, government agents opened fire. On April 16, a newly arrived protester, Frank Clearwater, who had found his way to the camp with his pregnant wife, was shot in the head as he lay sleeping on a couch; he died instantly. Firefights grew in intensity and duration after that until, nine days later, Buddy Lamont was shot by a government sniper. Unlike Clearwater, Lamont was from Pine Ridge. He was a Vietnam veteran, well-liked and low-key. Everyone knew him. He wasn’t a zealot. He had worked for the Pine Ridge tribal police until he was fired for criticizing Dick Wilson. After his death the Oglala who had invited AIM to come and help them, who had wanted AIM to help rid them of Dick Wilson and bring fairness and due process and clean politics to the reservation, ended the siege. They’d had enough. The AIM leaders—not from Pine Ridge—wanted to continue, but the rank and file didn’t support them. A hasty agreement was drawn up and the siege ended. Banks and Means were charged with conspiracy and assault; they both got off because of a technicality.

  Wounded Knee was both the high-water mark and a deeply disappointing action for AIM. The siege successfully drew national attention to many of the issues that had plagued Indian country for some time: corruption, violence, lack of due process, and the importance of treaties and sovereignty. The government, however much it had met the resistance with violence and lack of imagination, never really felt the occupation was more than a sideshow. It had been, in the words of a reporter, “war games without a war.” Dick Wilson remained in office. Dissidents and Pine Ridge tribal members continued to be killed at an astonishing rate on the reservation. Violence continued to plague AIM. Before the siege was even over, and a week after his arrival, an African American activist named Ray Robinson, an avowed pacifist who had marched on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963, disappeared from Wounded Knee. AIM leadership claimed not to have met him or even to know who he was, which seems unlikely.

  In documents acquired by Robinson’s widow under the Freedom of Information Act in 2014, witnesses interviewed by the FBI said that a security team consisting of Leonard Crow Dog, Carter Camp, Dennis Banks, Frank Blackhorse, Stan Holder, Harry David Hill, and Clyde Bellecourt were with Robinson in a bunker after an altercation. When they confronted him, he grabbed a butcher knife that was lying nearby, and then “the next thing,” the witness reported, “I heard a loud bang and saw Mr. Robinson’s lower leg spin from the knee and rotate outward as he started to fall forward. His eyes rolled up as he went down.” Another witness claimed that in the hours after his arrival Robinson was eating oatmeal when he was ordered to report to AIM leadership. He refused to get up before he finished his meal and was shot. He was then taken to the clinic, where he died. Bernie Lafferty, who claims he was present at Wounded Knee, alleges that a group perhaps including Banks, Camp, Means, Holder, and Hill were overheard discussing the murder of a black man whom they buried in the hills inside the AIM-controlled village.

  Years after the siege, as federal authorities tried to solve the murder of Anna Mae Aquash (more on this later), they leaned on and got help from Darlene Nichols, Dennis Banks’s onetime common-law wife. In the process of securing testimony and convictions for Anna Mae Aquash’s murder, she uncovered more about Robinson. In 2001, Nichols showed up at Dennis Banks’s house on the Leech Lake Reservation ostensibly to visit their daughter Tiopa; really she was there to probe Banks about Aquash’s death. Nichols was nervous and failed to get Banks to talk about Aquash. But he did end up talking about Robinson’s death. According to The New York Times, Banks said that Robinson had been shot by another AIM member during the siege. Banks recounted how he saw the corpse “shortly afterward and puzzled what to do.” Banks told Nichols that eventually he found someone to “bury him where no one will know.” The person tasked with disposing of Robinson’s body was gone for five hours, and when he came back he told Banks that he had been buried “over by the creek.” Prosecutors thought they could use this to roll up witnesses from one case (Robinson) and use them on the other (Aquash), but it went nowhere and Robinson’s murder is still unsolved, his body presumably remaining somewhere along the creek. According to the Associated Press (among others), a witness told federal agents that Vernon Bellecourt knew Robinson had been murdered and that AIM “really managed to keep a tight lid on that one.” Later, the murder of Anna Mae Aquash would haunt AIM as well.

  Despite the destructive antics of its leadership, which hurt a great many people, Indians as well as non-Indians, and arguably accomplished little, AIM did manage to make changes in Indian co
untry, thanks mostly to its rank and file. And the rank and file, were, perhaps, energized by the radical notions that figures like Means and Banks put forth: that Indians need not accept their position of disenfranchisement, and, even more radical, that simply “being Indian”—choosing to be Indian—constituted a social good. So in that sense, the leadership truly led. AIM was never very well organized. People joined and left, joined and left. You didn’t need to do anything to join AIM other than say you were in. Leaving was just as easy.

  In 1972, AIM members opened a new school in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Despite the empty promises of relocation, many families who had moved to the Twin Cities from their reservation homelands had stayed in the city. But if the new government policy toward Indians was “self-determination” (this was Nixon’s new directive for and direction of federal Indian policy—the chance for Indian polities to decide their own direction if not their own fate), it was clear that high dropout rates and poor academic performance were two of the greatest issues. Even now, Indians drop out or don’t complete high school at a rate more than three times the national average. In the 1970s, part of the problem, as community members saw it, was the ways in which education had been used against Indians for as long as anyone could remember. Boarding schools weren’t far in the past. The attempts to mainstream Indians into the American educational system posed a different set of problems. The conventional curriculum, and the teachers who taught it, existed far outside Indian experience. One had to look hard to find schools that had any special programming for their Indian pupils. And what they did learn not only was far afield from their lived lives but also stood in opposition to their own self-regard. In teaching about Columbus’s “discovery” of America and Thanksgiving and the “opening” of the Western frontier, Indians figured either as subaltern welcomers or impediments to progress. The Indian parents of the Twin Cities decided they wanted a school for Indians, managed and staffed by Indians, that taught the usual subjects as well as classes on American Indian culture, ceremony, and life. They wanted a school for their kids.

  In 1972 the doors of the Red School House, an Indian-controlled community-based charter school, opened in Saint Paul. Other schools—the Heart of the Earth Survival School in Minneapolis and the Indian Community School—soon followed. When the government abruptly pulled grant funding from Indian schools following AIM’s takeover of the BIA in 1973, members successfully lobbied to get the grants restored. By 1975 there were sixteen Indian-run schools across the United States and Canada with culturally specific curricula designed to suit the needs of their Indian students. More schools across the country would open in the decades to come.

  Indians in cities sought to better their position in other ways as well. In Minneapolis, Indian community members and AIMsters worked together to launch the Little Earth housing project in 1973. Little Earth, in the center of Minneapolis’s Southside, was meant to provide homes for low-income urban Indians along with on-site day care and health care and Indian-centric cultural programming. At its inception, Little Earth was the only HUD-funded Section 8 assistance-based housing project in the country that gave preference to Indians. It still is. In 1975, when the community suffered a number of financial and managerial challenges that threatened the continuance of the program, it was reorganized, and AIM—for once opting for a low-key supporting role rather than a public flameout—stepped in and became part of the governing structure of the project. Little Earth still serves the Indians of South Minneapolis.

  Although AIM had a national presence, the depth of leadership and community buy-in were especially strong in Minnesota. In 1978, AIM members threw their weight behind Indian education in prison. Indian educators and spiritual leaders led classes and ceremonies at Minnesota Correctional Facility–Stillwater and in St. Cloud, a program that continues to this day. The following year, AIM created the American Indian Opportunities Industrialization Center in Minneapolis, which was meant to fulfill another empty promise that the government had made back in the 1950s. Over the past four decades it has helped train more than twenty thousand Indians for entry into clerical, construction, plumbing, and other occupations. But the growth of such opportunities through the 1970s wasn’t only the product of grassroots activism. Just as the history of boarding schools and relocation had brought Indians from vastly different and scattered tribes into fruitful and sustained contact with one another, new alliances had been formed by other means as well.

  War on Poverty

  On January 8, 1964, with the temperature hovering around the freezing point, President Lyndon Johnson declared “war on poverty” in an impassioned State of the Union address. Speaking before a joint session of Congress, he told the assembled lawmakers:

  Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope—some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity. This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort. It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest Nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it. One thousand dollars invested in salvaging an unemployable youth today can return $40,000 or more in his lifetime. Poverty is a national problem, requiring improved national organization and support. But this attack, to be effective, must also be organized at the State and the local level and must be supported and directed by State and local efforts. For the war against poverty will not be won here in Washington. It must be won in the field, in every private home, in every public office, from the courthouse to the White House. The program I shall propose will emphasize this cooperative approach to help that one-fifth of all American families with incomes too small to even meet their basic needs. Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls where other citizens help to carry them. Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children. But whatever the cause, our joint Federal-local effort must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists—in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks or in migrant worker camps, on Indian Reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas. Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.

  Johnson’s remarks were the first time that Indians had been mentioned in a State of the Union address not as belligerent enemies of the state, or a special “problem” bedeviling it, but as American citizens who deserved and needed the help of the government as much as other citizens excluded from the American Dream. The shift was profound. Indians were depicted as sharing a problem with many other Americans: more than 19 percent of the population lived below poverty level. Lack of access to day care, employment, job training, adequate housing, and schools was not just an Indian problem: it was an American problem. Eight months after Johnson’s speech, the Economic Opportunity Act was signed into law. It contained eleven broad measures meant not only to alleviate poverty but also to provide structures that would help eradicate it, among them Job Corps, Youth Conservation Corps, Federal Work-Study for low-income college students, Adult Basic Education, Voluntary Assistance for Needy Children, loans to rural families, VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), assistance to migrant workers, and small business loans. A new Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) was tasked with implementing the legislation, and one of its directives was
to bypass federal and state bureaucracies to work as closely as possible with the poor themselves, on a local level. Designed to stymie proponents of states’ rights and to deal a blow to segregationist structures in the South, this directive had the perhaps unintended side effect of empowering Indian tribes to seek and secure funding without the intervention of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

  On Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota, this meant that a young, handsome, energetic, idealistic Jewish Holocaust survivor, World War II veteran, labor union organizer, and erstwhile BIA employee could do what he did best—put power in the hands of people who, until then, didn’t have any. In 1965, my father, Robert Treuer, began working as a local coordinator for a Community Action Program (CAP) administered by the OEO. At Red Lake and Leech Lake and White Earth, he met with tribal councils and district representatives and organized meetings for tribe members in small villages and larger towns. At these meetings he did what few white people had done when meeting with Indian people over the many years whites and Indians had been meeting: he asked people what they needed and what they were willing to do to get it. The lists were long: School lunches. Community centers. Job training. Elder assistance. Credit unions. An ambulance (Red Lake Reservation had none). One of his colleagues at CAP was a young Indian woman from Leech Lake, fresh out of nursing school, whom Robert had met when he was a teacher at Cass Lake High School. Now they began to date, and eventually they married. The OEO evolved an unofficial partnership with the NCAI, another marriage of sorts, and together they were able to provide real services to Indian people. Ambulance service, housing, reservation-based credit unions—these and more were the result of CAP and other government programs. Nonetheless, Nixon did his best to dismantle the OEO by installing first Donald Rumsfeld and then Frank Carlucci as director. They restructured the OEO to limit the direct involvement of the people it served, and finally, in 1981, Reagan dismantled it. But the effects of its seventeen years of existence are still being felt in Indian country and across America. The OEO was the beginning of the end of the top-down control that had been exercised on Indian people from the beginning of contact with white people.