Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143)

by Dog, Leonard C.

  OSCRO handed out petitions to impeach and get rid of Wilson. But people were afraid to sign them, because those who did were worked over by the goons. They fired guns into people’s homes. They threatened to hurt Indian children. By the middle of 1972 there was a civil war situation on the rez. Members of OSCRO and AIM were shot at. In spite of all this, the government supported Wilson, because he was their goon, their stooge, who had given away eighty thousand acres of tribal land as a gift to the National Park system.

  At the end of 1972 and the beginning of 1973, AIM had come in force to Rapid City to demonstrate, educate, and sensitize the white people there. AIM called South Dakota “the most racist state in the Union, and Rapid City the most racist town in the state.” In Rapid, Indians were discriminated against in every way. They were made to feel unwelcome in stores, restaurants, and bars. They were called all kinds of names and beaten up. If they got any jobs at all they were paid less than whites.

  Conditions were worst at a place called Sioux Addition, three miles out of town. This was a kind of apartheid slum the city had set aside to get rid of its Indian population. Sioux Addition was a jumble of more than a hundred shacks and rusting trailers without running water or sanitation. The fire department would never come in there. It was a place of neglect and despair.

  At that time Ron Petite was executive director of the Sioux Indian Emergency Rehabilitation Center in Rapid City. He was very worried about Indian veterans who were being mistreated and could not get the services they were entitled to by law. Instead of an open door they got the back of the hand. Ron Petite called on AIM for help. So, many reservation people and about two hundred AIM members from all over came to Rapid City to clean up the situation. Dennis Banks, Russell Means, and the Bellecourts were in charge of the operation. I was there, too, as the protest’s spiritual leader. Most of us stayed at the Mother Butler Center, a Catholic church hall, which became our headquarters. There were three thousand Indians living in and around Rapid City, and we were going to deal with their grievances. Dennis Banks declared a freeze on the whole city. He said, “We will shut the whole business district down on account of the discrimination and mistreatment of Indian veterans. We’ll literally chain up the doors of the big business enterprises, federal agencies, and local community service centers.” We boycotted Northwestern Bell Telephone, Black Hills Power and Light, Kmart, Piggly Wiggly, Dunkin’ Donuts, Sooper Dooper, and the law enforcement agencies. We put up posters: WELCOME TO THE MOST RACIST STATE IN THE U.S.A. and SEE SOUTH DAKOTA LAST. Dennis tried to train the people in nonviolent tactics, giving orders by blowing a whistle, but he gave it up soon, because young AIM kids weren’t good at being drilled.

  I was resting at Mother Butler’s when someone came to warn me that the town was about to blow up. A Pine Ridge man had brought the news that still another Lakota, Wesley Bad Heart Bull, had been killed by a white man and that the murderer had been charged with only involuntary manslaughter, which meant that he would go free. Without waiting for any leaders to tell them what to do, all the young AIMs went down into the streets. The real trouble started when an Indian went into a bar crammed with white customers. One of them threw a glass of whiskey in the Indian’s face. A real battle began. These saloons had always been places of humiliation for us. So now the young Indians did a thorough job on them. Whites and Indians fought each other with fists, bottles, ashtrays, bung starters, whatever they could get their hands on. The police went amok and arrested every Indian in sight. The mayor ordered a bus and a fire truck to be used as extra paddy wagons. Hundreds were arrested and wound up in the Pennington county jail. I myself knew the jail from the inside. Being a South Dakota Sioux, you couldn’t avoid it. Not a single white man was arrested.

  I led some one hundred fifty Indians to protest in front of the jail. We were faced by a line of police in full riot gear. We had a drum and were singing and chanting. Then we went to the courthouse and did the same. The situation was dangerous. Anything could have happened. Bloodshed was averted when Dennis Banks created a “demilitarized zone” between wasichus and Native Americans, but Rapid City was just a warm-up for what took place immediately after—the confrontation at Custer.

  It started with a murder on January 20, 1973, at Bill’s Bar, in a place called Buffalo Gap at the edge of the Black Hills. The town got its name from being on an old buffalo trail at a spot where the hills opened up to make a passage. Buffalo Gap and the bar look like a set from a western movie. It was a Saturday night, and there was a big crowd at Bill’s Bar, mostly white cowboys and ranchers from Hot Springs, Hermosa, and Custer. In the bar was also a young Lakota named Wesley Bad Heart Bull, his mother, Sarah, and a friend, Robert High Eagle. Wesley was only twenty years old. The bar’s owner had told Wesley several times that he did not want him around, but Wesley had come anyway. Why should a white man tell him that he couldn’t have a drink in there? It was the only bar for miles around. Also in the bar was Darald Schmitz, a thirty-year-old air force vet who ran a gas station in Custer. Schmitz made some racist remarks about Wesley, and Wesley answered back. They had had words before that, and Schmitz had threatened several times that someday he’d kill “that son-of-a-bitch Indian.” The next morning, Sunday, January 21, Wesley Bad Heart Bull was lying in the street near the bar with a knife stuck in his chest. He died on the way to the hospital at Hot Springs.

  Sarah and High Eagle had seen Schmitz with a knife in his hand, leaving the bar after Wesley. Schmitz himself boasted of “having got myself an Injun.” The white bartender said that Wesley had attacked Schmitz. High Eagle said that the stabbing had been unprovoked. Schmitz was arrested on a charge of second-degree manslaughter, the smallest charge they could use. He was taken to Custer and there released on bail.

  The news spread fast that another Lakota had been killed by a white man, almost exactly a year after the murder of Raymond Yellow Thunder. People from Rosebud and Pine Ridge went to Custer to see that justice be done. They asked AIM for help. It was a coincidence that so many AIM people were already in Rapid City for the protests. Rapid is only about an hour’s drive from Custer. We hated that city already for its name. It is deep inside our sacred Black Hills, stolen by the government in violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty after gold had been discovered in the hills. On February 6, we formed a caravan of more than thirty cars out of Rapid City to drive the forty-five miles to Custer and join the Indians already there. It was snowing and it was cold, six or seven degrees above zero. We got there in the early afternoon.

  About two hundred of us, AIM and reservation people, assembled before the courthouse, an old stone building with a white wooden porch. Wesley’s mother, Sarah, was there too. At the start, things were peaceful. We had made up a delegation of five to speak to the DA, Hobart Gates, and the sheriff, Ernest Pepin. Dennis Banks, Russell Means, and I were part of the delegation. Bob High Eagle was already there as a witness, but the DA told Bob that he believed Darald Schmitz’s version of what happened. It was going to be the same old story—a white man who had killed an Indian would go free.

  As word of this got out, there was a big howl of protest from the crowd at the steps of the courthouse. Some twenty-five Indians forced the door and got in. During the scuffle that followed, law enforcement shoved a young boy down the porch steps. The sheriff ordered the courthouse cleared. About two dozen highway patrolmen had been hiding on the second floor. They now came down on us, swinging their long clubs. They wore red jackets, gray pants, and fancy golden helmets. They were armed with shotguns, rifles, and nightsticks. The sheriff and his deputy had huge six-shooters. They drove us out of the building with their clubs and tear gas. I busted a window on the first floor and jumped out. Dennis jumped after me. Outside, nobody was smiling. Russell was down on the ground, dazed, clubbed, bleeding, handcuffed. Sarah Bad Heart Bull, who tried to get in and talk to the DA, was stopped by a highway patrolman. He grabbed her from behind, put a nightstick across her throat and, using both hands, was almost choking her to deat
h. Her jacket was gone, her glasses smashed. The police used more tear gas, smoke bombs, and firehoses on us. Some of the elders told the sheriff that we hadn’t come here to riot, we only wanted to be heard. But it was no use. There was fighting in front of the courthouse and all along Main Street. Some kids were trashing two patrol cars. Others were chucking rocks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails through the courthouse windows. A crowd of young people tried to storm the building. Two guys came running up and poured gas all over the steps and door. One patrolman pointed his shotgun at them, screaming, “If you set a match to this I’ll shoot to kill!” A dozen of our girls were making the wichaglaka—the high-pitched, trembling brave-heart cry that gets the blood pumping in your veins. Someone tossed a match and the front of the courthouse caught fire. A gas station was in flames. Then some of the AIM boys set the chamber of commerce on fire. The police had two fire trucks going but couldn’t prevent it from burning to the ground. The police and highway patrol were all over us. I saw two of them dragging a young girl along the ground. It was twenty below zero and they had ripped most of her clothes off. Ashes and snowflakes were swirling around them. I saw a middle-aged Indian lying beaten unconscious on the ground, like a heap of rags. The billboard WELCOME TO CUSTER, THE TOWN WITH THE GUN SMOKE FLAVOR went up in flames. Stores along Main Street were torched and wrecked. I saw brothers and sisters spread-eagled against a wall, being frisked and handcuffed. The sheriff was saying to Russell, who was still handcuffed, “We were waiting for you AIM sons of bitches. We knew you were coming. You were looking for trouble and you got it!” Russell told him, “If we had wanted to have a war here, we wouldn’t have brought our women and children.”

  Forty-one Indian men and women were arrested and charged, among them Sarah Bad Heart Bull. She was later tried for rioting and attempted arson, and served five months in the penitentiary. Her son’s killer did not serve a single hour.

  twenty-one

  THE SIEGE

  “Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.”

  They might bury more than

  just our hearts here.

  There are three hundred bodies

  buried up there, buried in 1890.

  They could bury some more soon in

  that place unless the marshals stop firing.

  Wounded Knee occupier

  On February 27, 1973, started the biggest event in Indian history during this century—the seventy-one-day occupation of Chankpe Opi, Wounded Knee. This place has great meaning for me because my great-grandfather Jerome, the first Crow Dog, was a ghost dancer. At the time they massacred our people there, in the ravines along Wounded Knee Creek, his own band was dancing deep inside the Badlands not so far away. He and his people also had been surrounded by the soldiers, and would have been killed if Crow Dog had not had an inspiration, given to him in a vision, through which he could save his dancers. In 1973 our close relative and member of our clan, Uncle Dick Fool Bull, was still living, close to ninety years old, and he was a survivor of what had happened back in 1890. He was the last flute maker and player in our tribe, and he told me his story many times. I still have on tape what he told me in 1968.

  “I’ll tell you what I remember about the trouble, the terrible trouble. I was born in Indian Territory, in 1883, I think. I’m not sure, really. They didn’t have a census in them days. They didn’t have birth records like they have today. There was the ghost dance going on, in 1890. We happened to be in Rosebud, camping under guard—soldiers, cavalry, cannons. They rounded up all the fathers and grandfathers and made sure they didn’t mix up with the hostile bunch—that’s what they called the ghost dancers, ‘hostiles.’

  “My father was hauling freight with an ox team from Valentine, Nebraska. He went there in the morning and camped there overnight and then came back to Rosebud and unloaded. Sometimes he used horses, hauling rations, flour and stuff like that, for the government. Rosebud had been an agency, a reservation, for some time.

  “Things were bad up north at Standing Rock. They killed Sitting Bull and his men for ghost dancing. Everybody was scared. My father and my uncles got a twenty-day pass to haul freight to Pine Ridge Agency. After twenty days the police would send them back. Pine Ridge was just a few buildings then, a couple of offices and the stockade. The tipis were all pushed together and crowded, and they were guarded day and night. But some of the people got away in the night to join the ghost dancers in the Badlands.

  “We camped near Wounded Knee. We went there with a team and covered wagon. My father was a medicine man and as kids we had learned the ghost dance and the ghost dance songs. It was winter and very cold. There was a little snow on the ground, here and there. Other people were camping near us. The soldiers said that if we gave them our bows and arrows, our knives and guns, they would let us visit our friends. So the men stood around in a circle and piled up their weapons. Even the women’s awls, which they used for sewing, they called them weapons too. But the last guy, an old man, he had a blanket around him, and he had an old carbine under it and wouldn’t give it up. And the sergeant, or lieutenant, or whatever he was, almost had us killed over it.

  “A little ways off, at Wounded Knee, they had trenches dug for reinforcements, you know, and quick-fire guns, big ones, pointing at Big Foot’s band of Minneconjou from all around. In the morning I was playing with my cousins when I heard the cannons, the quick-fires. Everybody was scared and hollering, ‘War is on! War is on!’ And the women started weeping: ‘They are killing our people!’ Everybody was running around: ‘What shall we do?’ I heard the gunshots, the cannons, the rifle fire. Then it was still for a while. I guess they had already killed most of them. But it started all over again, shooting, shooting, shooting. That’s when the soldiers went down into the ravine, killing the women and children who were hiding in there, killing mothers with babies on their breasts. I don’t know how many they killed there or how many were in that camp. They left them to lie there, I guess, overnight. The next morning they were digging the grave, a long ditch, and they had mule teams and wagons, and so they took the frozen bodies and just piled them in the wagons and took them to that ditch and threw them in there. When they had them all in there, they took shovels and covered them up. When it was safe, my father, my uncles, and cousins went there. I saw it all.”

  The second Wounded Knee happened just three weeks after Custer. At Pine Ridge the goons were running wild. Things had gotten to where the people just could not endure it any longer. Nobody was safe, not even women and children. The goon squad beat up people every day. They shot into windows. Houses were firebombed. There were murders that never got investigated. So the elders, the traditionals, the AIM followers and the OSCRO people, and all the medicine men called on AIM for help, and AIM answered the call.

  Pedro Bissonette and his OSCRO people were holding a get-rid-of-Wilson powwow at Calico, six miles north of Pine Ridge. So AIM went there to meet with the Oglala people. The chiefs were there and all the medicine men and a lot of strong-hearted women. There was a big crowd, about three or four times as many as we had in the AIM caravan out of Rapid City. It looked peaceful. People were drinking coffee. Kids were playing ball. Then everybody crowded into the community hall. The place was crammed, but only two AIM leaders took part in this meeting, Dennis Banks and Russell Means. I was glad that the two most respected and oldest medicine men, Pete Catches and Frank Fools Crow, were there too. It seemed as if all the main speakers were women. One of the women said, “We’re going to make a stand. We’re going to Wounded Knee and make our stand there. If you men want to hold back, we women will do it. If we’re going to die, then we’ll die there!”

  As soon as Wounded Knee was mentioned, I got very serious. Everybody did. Wounded Knee was our most sacred site. To be standing up there would be the greatest thing we could do. Why hadn’t the leaders thought of this? One of our women had shown the way. So you see, the occupation of Wounded Knee wasn’t planned. It came about naturally, as the spirit inspired the woman. So we took off to
meet our destiny.

  Someone started worrying about roadblocks. Wilson and his goons had been watching us. They reported by radio, telephone, teletype, and walkie-talkie on our every step. And they were waiting for us, all got up in their riot gear. Wilson was happy. He had told his men, “The AIMs want to be martyrs. Let’s accommodate them!”

  We drove right through Pine Ridge, the whole caravan of fifty-four cars crammed with people. We roared right by them. We saw them standing on the roof of the tribal council building. It was all lit up. We saw Wilson standing there, open-mouthed. We passed some goons on the road. They were bug-eyed. They didn’t catch on. It didn’t occur to any of them where we were headed. We got to the Knee after nightfall.

  Standing on that hill where so many of our people were buried in a common grave, standing there in that cold darkness under the stars, I felt tears running down my face. I can’t describe what I felt. I heard the voices of the long-dead ghost dancers crying out to us. Their ghosts were all around. They had been waiting for us for a long time. They had known that we were coming. They were standing with us on that hill. It was the night of all nights.

  A wind was playing with the eagle feathers some had stuck in their hair or hatbands. I heard birds. Toward morning I saw two magpies in the ravine. They were black and white, standing for night and day. Magpies are sacred to the ghost dancers, who have pictures of magpies painted on their ghost dance shirts. Maybe, I thought, these birds wanted to tell us that the long night was over for Native Americans and that for us a new day was dawning. Coyotes were whooping. I took it all for a good sign.