There are flowers and bows on Zintkala Zi’s grave, and on many others, perhaps because it is Good Friday.
Not all of the graves are marked with wooden crosses; a few have modest granite tombstones. One of these is on the grave of Zintkala Zi’s father, Bob Yellow Bird. A U.S. Navy Vietnam veteran who lived much of his life in Gordon, he was the leader of the Nebraska American Indian Movement (AIM). In 1996, while drinking in a bar in Martin, South Dakota, a border town near the southeast corner of the rez, Yellow Bird shot himself in the head while playing Russian roulette with a group of fellow veterans (they must have seen The Deer Hunter). Somehow, Bob survived but was paralyzed on his left side. A heavy smoker his entire adult life, he died a year later from lung cancer.
I see the name Phillip J. Black Elk on the next tombstone and remember meeting him during the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation. A nephew of the great Lakota spiritual leader Black Elk (made famous by the book Black Elk Speaks), Phillip Black Elk was blown to smithereens a few days after the occupation when he tried to light his propane burner to heat up a cup of coffee. Because he was an AIM supporter, many people believe he was assassinated, but because an FBI investigation revealed there had been an earlier gas leak in his house, the odds are pretty high it was an accident.
There’s a gravestone for Vincent Fast Horse, a Lakota Vietnam veteran, who was only twenty-seven when he died in an automobile wreck involving alcohol in 1975.
And then there’s Lost Bird.
On a bittersweet slab of reddish-gray granite, the inscription inside a fancy border simply reads: LOST BIRD, BORN MAY—1890, DIED FEB.—1919. Something is terribly melancholic about this tombstone: the name, the simplicity. Lost Bird was only three months old when she was found frostbitten but still alive under her mother’s frozen corpse on the site of the Wounded Knee massacre. Carefully bundled in a buffalo blanket, she wore a warm cap decorated with tiny red, white, and blue glass beads. Dehydrated, her breathing labored, Lost Bird somehow managed to cry out just loud enough. The first to hear her was a half-blood Santee Dakota doctor with the white name Charles Eastman. He yelled, “Someone is alive. A baby, a baby is alive!” The same soldiers who had gleefully murdered Lakota women and children only three days earlier began frantically searching for her; it was a miracle that any human could have survived for even a few hours in the subzero weather. Dr. Eastman rushed Lost Bird on horseback to the Pine Ridge Agency, where he revived her and nurtured her back to good health. Indians and whites alike who knew about Lost Bird came forward to adopt her, some out of compassion, others because they thought she would bring them good fortune.
Stolen, retrieved, and stolen again, Lost Bird had four different names before the commander of the Nebraska National Guard, Brigadier General Leonard Colby, disobeying military orders, adopted the small living “curio” of the massacre, and later—after resigning as assistant attorney general of the United States—used her to convince prominent tribes to hire him as their lawyer. As an adolescent, Lost Bird was sexually abused by the general, and her adoptive mother, Clara Colby, divorced him. A suffragist and prominent newspaper columnist, Ms. Colby spoke up against the exploitation of Indian culture and defied her friends Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton by raising the girl alone.
Lost Bird was brought up to be independent and strong willed. She lived a charmed life full of special privileges—private schools, music lessons, shopping trips to New York, fashionable clothes—but Lost Bird had trouble resisting the many diseases of the white world; she caught colds easily, had allergies, came down with severe measles and mumps, and suffered her whole life from migraine headaches. As she grew into her teenage years, her exotic good looks, gold-brown skin, and long onyx ponytails attracted unwanted male attention, and jealousy from the white girls. Mean and spiteful, they called her names, sometimes shouting them out, other times whispering in her ear: “Squaw whore,” “Pocahontas bitch,” “Prairie nigger.” Confused about her identity and the animosity it created, she ran away from her boarding school, fled across country seeking other Native Americans, and even spent a few weeks in Pine Ridge, only to be more devastated as these girls too saw her as some sort of freak, a “Lakota white girl” who looked like them but acted white.
Slapped in the face at every turn, Lost Bird sought solace in alcohol and in the men who were always making passes at her—she became the promiscuous Indian princess of their lusty dreams, and when she got pregnant, she turned to her adoptive father for help. No doubt thinking he was doing the right thing, General Colby put her in the Nebraska Industrial Home for unwed mothers in Milford, which was established with good intentions as a rehabilitation home for “penitent girls” who had “no specific disease,” where, for a minimum required period of one year, they could bear their babies and “be trained in practical arts, homemaking, health and moral teachings.” The children, when born, could be kept by the mother, adopted out, or sent to an orphanage.
Soon after her arrival, Lost Bird gave birth to a stillborn son, and yet she continued to be confined against her will in the home for another year. She eventually returned to live with her mother in Washington, D.C., where one of the several men Lost Bird married gave her syphilis. Dressed as an Indian maiden, she worked in vaudeville and in the early movie business, and for a short time joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. She had two more children: one daughter, who died, and a boy, whom she gave to an Indian woman friend because she was too poor to take care of him.
Living in California, Lost Bird was only twenty-nine when she fell victim to the Spanish flu and was buried in a pauper’s grave in the remote town of Hanford. Seventy-one years after Lost Bird’s death, on August 8, 1990, Renée Sansom Flood, author of Lost Bird of Wounded Knee: Spirit of the Lakota, was invited to Wounded Knee, South Dakota, for a meeting of the Wounded Knee Survivors’ Association, a group of Lakota elders who mostly wanted to know where Lost Bird was buried and how to teach others how to deal with “Lost Bird syndrome,” moving from one foster home to another. It was at this meeting where someone spontaneously said, “We should bring Lost Bird home, and bury her with her relatives at Wounded Knee.”
Marie Not Help Him was put in charge of fund-raising, and thanks to Nelson Rockefeller’s daughter, Ann R. Robert, who provided the bulk of the money, a year later, on July 11, 1991, the Pine Ridge Wounded Knee Survivors Association’s painstaking efforts to return Lost Bird to her homeland became a sacred reality. This time she was buried as a symbol for all people of the world who have been deprived of their heritage.
Lost Bird lies at Wounded Knee now. And I suppose you might even say she was lucky, as the soldiers deliberately killed many children that day. In testimony to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., on February 11, 1891, Chief American Horse reported, “The women and children … were strewn all along the circular village until they were dispatched. Right near the flag of truce a mother was shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was dead was still nursing.… The women as they were fleeing with their babies were killed together, shot right through, and the women who were very heavy with child were also killed. All the Indians fled in … three directions, and after most of them had been killed a cry was made that all those who were not killed [or] wounded should come forth and they would be safe. Little boys who were not wounded came out of their places of refuge, and as soon as they came in sight a number of soldiers surrounded them and butchered them there.”
* * *
The grandest grave marker is just to the right of Lost Bird’s grave—a large block of granite resting on a separate, rectangular slab that covers the entire grave. It honors a young Lakota man, Lawrence “Buddy” La Monte, who was shot dead by a federal marshal sniper eleven days before the end of the 1973 takeover. The headstone is simply engraved “SON” above the image of the sacred pipe. There is a longer message on the rectangular slab:
TA CAN NUPE WAKAN
2000 AND 500 CAME TO WOUNDED KNEE 1973
/> ONE STILL REMAINS
LAWRENCE “BUDDY” LA MONTE
Etched below is a scene of a Lakota village: several tepees at the foot of a hill, a traditionally dressed Indian boy, bow slung on his back. About to jump on his horse, he waves good-bye to an old man wearing a war bonnet. Below this is inscribed in cursive:
Although he went away traveling alone,
we’ll meet one day at our final home.
The American Indian Movement was founded in 1968 by Native American leaders as a militant political and civil rights organization. Shortly before dawn on November 20, 1969, eighty-nine radical American Indians led by Russell Means and Dennis Banks boarded boats in Sausalito, California, and made the five-mile trip across foggy San Francisco Bay to Alcatraz Island. Upon landing, they declared the former prison Indian land “by right of discovery” and demanded the U.S. government provide funding to turn it into a Native American cultural center and university. No surprise, their terms were ignored, and in defiance of the authorities, the island was occupied for nineteen months, until June 1971. In November 1972, AIM members briefly occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, D.C., to protest programs controlling reservation development. This represented the culmination of a cross-country journey called the Trail of Broken Treaties, intended to bring attention to American Indian living standards and treaty rights issues. Protesters vandalized the building, overturned tables and desks against the windows, and set fire to the interior offices and the marble lobbies, destroying many historical documents.
The man who caused the American Indian Movement to gain worldwide attention was an Indian cowboy from Kyle, older than but related to Vernell White Thunder, who, like Vernell, lived his early days in a one-room log house, and who had a reputation for being friendly and always dependable. His name was Raymond Yellow Thunder, and on February 13, 1972, he was brutally killed by two racist thugs, brothers Melvin and Leslie Hare. After savagely beating him, they stripped Yellow Thunder of his pants, underwear, and shoes; put him in the trunk of their car; and drove around the racist border town of Gordon, Nebraska. They pushed him into the American Legion Hall to be ridiculed by those attending a dance before finally dumping him back where they’d found him. He later died of his injuries. The actual memories of the Wounded Knee occupation flood my mind. How it began on a perfectly still, cold winter night, February 27, 1973; snow was on the ground, the roads were icy, and it felt like a blizzard was on the way. Vernell and I both were living in the northeastern corner of the reservation, in the little village of Wanblee, about seventy miles from Wounded Knee. Melvin White Bull, one of the students I knew from Wanblee Crazy Horse High School, ran up to me as I was out walking with my dog, alternately smoking marijuana and tobacco in my pipe. He was so out of breath, I had a hard time understanding him. “Mr. Bunnell, have you heard? AIM took over Wounded Knee!” His mom had received a call from one of her cousins … a call from Wounded Knee, not from the pay phone outside the post office, but from the phone inside the museum. “AIM shot out the streetlights, set up roadblocks. The GOONs are coming,” Melvin said, referring to newly elected tribal president Dick Wilson’s vigilante group, Guardians of the Oglala Nation.
The night the occupation took place, a meeting with traditional Oglala elders took place in Calico, a tiny hamlet north of Pine Ridge. Speaking in Lakota (he never spoke English), Frank Fools Crow, the head medicine man, said to his followers, “Go ahead and do it. Go to Wounded Knee. You can’t get into the BIA office and the tribal office, so take your brothers from the American Indian Movement and go to Wounded Knee and make your stand there.” Fools Crow rode in the lead car along with AIM leaders Dennis Banks and Russell Means, and along the way he reminded them that Dick Wilson was “a heavy-drinking bootlegger known for corruption, who favor[ed] giving up more Lakota land, even the sacred Pahá Sapá itself.”
The takeover was hardly well thought out. People just jumped into their cars; drove through Pine Ridge yelling, honking their horns, and giving the finger to the Feds; and raced on to Wounded Knee. I feared for them. Hatred on the reservation was so thick, it made breathing difficult—another massacre, bloodier than the 1890 original, was not out of the question. I had to do something, so I rushed back to the trailer house where I then lived and called my dad, who was working late that night at the newspaper office. After telling him what I knew, I pleaded with him, “Dad, you need to post a bulletin on the Associated Press wire and do it now … or there will be bloodshed. The government will sit back and let Wilson’s armed thugs kill everyone.”
Killing a bunch of radical Indians was no problem, I figured, but it would be politically embarrassing to shoot reporters and TV anchormen. I don’t know if Dad believed it was really that serious, but he put a report out on the wire, which was instantly transmitted to TV, radio, and newspaper offices around the world. I will never know for sure what impact this had, but AIM leader Russell Means had similar ideas. When he showed up in Wounded Knee about an hour after the initial arrivals, having failed to stop people from looting the trading post, he got on the museum phone to call the media. By sunrise (6:31 a.m.), a CBS news truck from Denver was broadcasting from Wounded Knee, sending out reports and special bulletins. For the time being, the Wounded Knee occupiers were safe; no one was going to launch an attack while the whole world was watching.
I admit it was pretty exciting to go from living in the middle of nowhere to living in the middle of a media firestorm. Friends and family called to see if my family was safe, to learn what was happening. Nightly newscasts from Wounded Knee reported on the latest developments, stalled negotiations, new demands, the occasional glimmers of hope, disappointments. They interviewed the parade of celebrities, politicians, and self-proclaimed revolutionaries who came to Wounded Knee to show their support and get some free worldwide exposure. Among them were Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Johnny Cash, Abbie Hoffman, William Kunstler, Ralph Abernathy, Angela Davis, and South Dakota senators George McGovern and James Abourezk.
FBI operatives and federal marshals armed with M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, C-S gas, M-40 explosives, helicopters, and at least seventeen armored personnel carriers surrounded Wounded Knee, set up roadblocks, bunkers, sandbagged trenches, and communication outposts. They said their mission was peaceful—to keep people, guns, and ammunition from getting in, and keep the GOONs from trying to storm the place. They were successful with the latter but not so much with the former. There are too many gullies and trails going into Wounded Knee; within days, the population had more than doubled, as had the quantity and quality of the weapons. At five o’clock one morning, three single-engine planes swooped down on Wounded Knee and dropped ten giant, colorful parachutes, each balancing hundreds of pounds of food and supplies. Ironically, Vista workers, employed by the government to repair schools and provide services to Pine Ridge residents and students, were among the most active smugglers, sneaking ammunition and high-powered rifles into the village at night. Vista workers were young idealists; they saw themselves as Contras during the day, Sandinistas at night.
Hunkered down in my trailer house trying to stay warm, I felt goose bumps when I saw Russell Means on CBS Evening News with his long braids and ferocious eyes, wagging his finger, saying some of the most outrageous things ever broadcast: “We declare Wounded Knee an independent country!” “We demand the immediate return of the Black Hills!” “We insist Secretary of State Henry Kissinger come to Wounded Knee to negotiate an end to these hostilities!”
So utterly defiant, proud, unafraid; in my mind, Russell Means was the Lakota equivalent of Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, and H. Rap Brown; he was the American Indian Movement’s most important leader because he had by far the most charisma. It never mattered to me that AIM made a habit of occupying and trashing government buildings and burning down courthouses; nor that like the Black Panthers, they marched around with guns. Watching Russell Means on TV, I knew that no matter how things turned out, despite all the theatrical preten
tiousness, there was a watershed of change going on, a watershed of historic proportions. Whatever happened from here on out, pride had been restored to the American Indians, pride that would never again under any circumstances be taken from them.
I was, of course, anxious to do more, but it was complicated. Fired from my first teaching job in Kyle, I had moved with Linda to a nearby village, Wanblee (meaning “Eagle”), where she’d landed a position at Crazy Horse High School. I took care of our toddler daughter, Mara, during the day while Linda was working, as there were no day-care centers, nor babysitters. I couldn’t drop everything, head over to Wounded Knee with a tent and my sleeping bag, stay for the duration, write down my observations in a notebook, take photos. But I couldn’t stay away either.
Before sunup one morning about two weeks into the occupation, I bundled Mara into our blue 1970 Pontiac station wagon and took the 150-mile back route through Martin, South Dakota, and Gordon, Nebraska—which bypasses Wounded Knee—to Alliance. I left Mara with her more-than-happy-to-oblige grandmother and headed downtown to my father-in-law John Essay’s grocery store. He wondered why I needed a whole shopping cart filled with chicken and hamburger, another of canned food and produce, another of cereal, bread, rolls, and chips—and yet another of milk and soft drinks. I wasn’t sure what his reaction would be, so I opted for the truth. I was taking this food up to the Indians at Wounded Knee. He only laughed; he knew me well and wasn’t a bit surprised. John had inherited the store from his father, who immigrated to Alliance from Lebanon. Having faced discrimination all his life from some of the locals who distrusted “Arabs,” John was sympathetic to Indians, many of whom shopped in his store; he even spoke a few words of Lakota, and he was the only merchant in Alliance who gave them credit. I loaded up as quickly as I could to get back on the road, and by noon that day I found myself pulling up to a federal roadblock two miles south of Wounded Knee.
Good Friday on the Rez Page 8
