A personnel carrier blocked the road. Four or five federal marshals stood beside it with assault rifles, ammunition belts, high-powered binoculars, bulletproof vests—but they looked relaxed; one was eating sunflower seeds, another smoking a cigarette. Driving up to them, I worried I was doing something really stupid, but it was too late to turn back. Both sides had agreed to the first cease-fire, but shooting was still frequent. A U.S. marshal had been shot and paralyzed in March, and a Cherokee and an Oglala Lakota were killed in April 1973—plus Ray Robinson, a civil rights activist who joined the protesters, disappeared during the events and is believed to have been murdered.
After checking cars for weapons and taking down names, the marshals were letting people in, but not without comment. While one rummaged through my groceries and another looked underneath the car, a third sneered at me and sarcastically said, “You taking food to the Indians so they can keep shooting at us?”
“No, sir,” I replied. “Not in favor of shooting anybody.”
“You tell them that, OK?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll tell them that,” I lied.
One of the marshals got into the personnel carrier and drove it off the road just enough so I could get by. I was elated; this had been much easier than I had hoped.
The silly grin on my face quickly disappeared, however, when I came upon the next roadblock—two junked-out pickup trucks, their tires flattened, loaded up with sandbags, scrap metal, and cinder blocks so they would be too heavy to easily move aside. The words AIM CONTROL were spray-painted on their doors, and they were positioned so you could get past them only if you zigzagged around the first and then zigzagged the opposite way around the second. Two Indian men—boys, really—their scrawny arms hanging out of loose-fitting T-shirts like sticks of dried spaghetti, sat back-to-back on the road in front of the trucks, one holding a 12-gauge shotgun, the other a .22. A third Indian, who stood on the front truck bed, had a tired look on his face, and for some reason I tagged him as a Vietnam vet. He held up a hand and spread his fingers as a signal for me to stop.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”
“Brought food; I’m delivering it to the people.”
The boys stood up and moved to each side of my station wagon. I noticed two things about them: each had droopy long hair much in need of a shampoo, and each had a finger on the trigger of his weapon. The older man hopped down from the pickup bed and approached my car with purposeful, authoritative steps. “We’ll see about that,” he said as he waved the boy on the passenger side away from the door, which he opened; he slid in and sat next to me. Signaling again with his hands, he motioned for me to drive around the barricades. I took it as a hopeful sign that he was unarmed.
“Good you brought food, but you need to get clearance from security. We need to make sure you aren’t trying to poison us. You aren’t trying to poison us, are you?”
“I got all this food from my father-in-law’s grocery store. I’m on your side.”
Too nervous to get a good look at him, I kept my eyes straight ahead as he directed me off the main road and down the deeply rutted dirt turnoff that leads to the museum, a road I was familiar with. The front of the old log structure looked much the same as it had the last time I’d been there, except the sign above the entrance had been changed. Instead of WOUNDED KNEE MUSEUM, it read INDEPENDENT OGLALA NATION WOUNDED KNEE.
Inside was a shock. It was as if the entire museum had moved to a new location and the new tenants were now camping out until they figured out how to redecorate the place. Everything was gone: all of the display cases, picture frames, cabinets, and presumably their contents … gone, hidden away, or stolen. No quillwork, arrowheads, scrapers, war shirts, no painting of Martha Bad Warrior, no big mounted moose head, and no historic photographs of Big Foot’s frozen body. Same unpolished wooden floors, exposed log walls, and open ceiling. Chairs scattered all around, a long table or two, a few smaller tables, rolled-up sleeping bags and duffel bags pushed against the walls, kerosene lamps, typewriters, and a mimeograph machine. A noisy generator out back powered a coffeepot and a CB radio. I saw few Indians but a surprising number of white people, obvious radicals, typing and collating documents, looking at maps, chatting on the radio, discussing tactics—this was clearly the operational heart of the movement, and I wondered who was really in charge here. I was twenty-eight at the time; everyone else, it seemed, was really young, under twenty-five, men and women dressed in blue jeans, boots, cowboy shirts, and regardless of ethnicity wearing some sign of Indian identity—feather in the hair, choker, headband, bracelet. My “tour guide,” who had refused to give me his name on our trip over, escorted me to a table with a sign on it reading AIM SECURITY. He mumbled something to the huge man sitting there, part native; his long hair dishwater blond, he was wearing a red-checkered handkerchief headband, had bloodshot but otherwise brown, piercing eyes, and looked to me to be an extremely serious person. When the huge man stood up, I cringed; he was at least six foot five and had a powerful frame, more like that of a champion woodchopper than a weight lifter. He hovered over me, glaring down, and then turned to pick up the rifle (as if he needed it!) that was leaning against the back wall, pointed the barrel to within a few inches of my nose, and said, “Couple spies came in here yesterday pretending to be telephone repairmen. How do we know you ain’t another goddamn spy?”
I was too scared to answer.
He shoved the table aside, yelled at me to turn around. Handcuffed, I was pushed to the floor, the rifle barrel still inches from my nose. “Maybe we should take you outside and shoot you right now.”
Someone from the far side of the museum shouted, “Yeah, let’s shoot the motherfucker!”
Others joined in: “Shoot him! Shoot him!”
Things were not looking good … could this be real? Would they really put me up against a post, offer me a blindfold and a cigarette, ask me if I had any final words? Would they shoot me or fire a blank, laugh their asses off, and point at the big wet spot on my trousers? Just then came divine intervention from Wakan Tanka, Tunkashila (Grandfather), the Strong One Above. Russell Means walked into the room and my voice returned; I shouted, “Russell Means! Save me. I brought you food—what the fuck?”
And now you are going to know why I will always hold Russell Means in reverence. His entire face turned red as he stared down the scary man with the rifle and growled, “This dude brought food, and you are going to shoot him?” Means ordered the security man to take off my handcuffs, and then impulsively grabbed a notepad and wrote me a note, a security pass signed by Russell Means giving me permission to go anywhere I wanted to go in Wounded Knee as long as I left by sunset. Two years later, when AIM leaders were put on trial in St. Paul, Minnesota, I learned the identity of the huge man who pushed me to the floor and stuck the rifle in my face. He was an FBI informant named Douglass Durham, the real spy, an agent provocateur. Durham would not have shot me himself, but to discredit AIM he might have encouraged someone else to do it, and on that day in that place, there were plenty of trigger-happy fools hanging about.
From the moment of my release, I had a goddamn marvelous day. It was cold, clear, and sunny. Perhaps due to the cease-fire, people were relaxed, smiling, the energy upbeat. I walked up the hill from the museum, crossed the road, and wandered toward the white church. A simple hole dug in the ground in front of the church served as a bunker; there was a wall of cement blocks in front, pillowcases filled with dirt; two large wood posts provided overhead protection. A beautiful round deerskin shield was propped up against the outside of the wall, an eagle painted on its surface. Perhaps it came from the museum. An upside-down American flag was attached to a steel fence post—this was the steel fence post that marked the spot where the 7th Cavalry positioned its Hotchkiss guns that terrible day in 1890. A small metal sign on the post read:
BATTERY
HOTCHKISS GUNS
1st Field Artillery
Capt. Allyn Capron
&n
bsp; Captain war criminal Capron! After his death in 1898, he was posthumously awarded a Silver Star for gallantry for his role in the Sioux Campaign at Wounded Knee. They sent the citation to his widow in Washington, D.C. Widows of the twenty soldiers who actually died in the “battle” (no doubt from the army’s own crossfire) fared better—their husbands received the Congressional Medal of Honor.
I wondered if the robust Indian man with a double-barreled shotgun standing guard behind the cement blocks knew the significance of this sign. Did he realize that his modern-day weapon would not stand a chance against the Hotchkiss? Much too fat for such a young man, with long hair and loose-fitting clothes, he paid no attention to me. Walking around to the other side of the bunker, I saw two men sitting inside on dusty old upholstered chairs, one with his feet resting on a tattered ottoman, smoking a cigarette, reading a comic book. Both men had rifles, one with a clip, the other a single-shot bolt-action gun probably more useful for hunting rabbits than shooting at the machine-gun-toting federal marshals positioned behind personnel carriers. The man not reading had short hair and restless eyes that darted about; he wore a fancy embroidered vest over his I am popular in South Dakota T-shirt.
“Hi, honky. How’s your day?” he said with a laugh.
They were both young, talkative. I pulled the notebook and pen from my shirt pocket, told them I was a writer working on a story for the Chicago Tribune. The man reading the comic book claimed to be a Vietnam veteran, said he lived on the reservation. The other was from Minneapolis, where AIM started, had been with AIM since the very beginning. They were there to support the cause, for sure, but I had the sense there wasn’t much else going on in their lives.
Just beyond the bunker, a group of older men—who from this distance looked more like cowboys than Indians with their crew cuts, cowboy hats, and cowboy boots—stood on the front steps of the church. All of them were looking eastward across the valley where Big Foot had camped, the site of the massacre, to the ridge beyond. One had binoculars; another was peering through a surveyor’s leveling instrument. I realized they were watching the movement of the personnel carriers, perhaps being positioned for when the cease-fire inevitably came to an end.
Draped on the belfry was a large, flurrying banner—red, yellow, black, and white, the symbolic colors of the Lakota people, representing the four directions. To the left of the steps was a traditional sweat lodge, a dome-shaped structure covered with tarps and blankets. The entrance was just big enough for one person at a time to stoop down and squeeze through it; behind the sweat lodge was a traditional but unadorned tepee. The tepee was for negotiations between AIM leaders and government officials. As someone who had experienced the sweat lodge, I found it extremely funny that AIM insisted that before anyone entered the tepee to negotiate, they first had to be purified in the sweat lodge. If Henry Kissinger shows up, I thought, they will have had a hell of a time squeezing him into this sweat lodge, getting him to say mitakuye oyasin [all my relations] at the end of each of their chants.
There were mud-splattered cars and trucks haphazardly parked here and there, including a U-Haul van riddled with bullet holes, its back window apparently shot out; patches of snow; a half-melted snowman holding a BLACK HILLS NOT FOR SALE sign. People sat in small groups or strolled about, mostly young men but women and elders too, along with children playing, dogs yapping, horses grazing. Four men sat in a circle beating a large drum that lay flat between them, singing the hauntingly beautiful AIM song that some Cheyenne singers gave to the movement. The atmosphere was serene, like the Lakota version of Sunday in Central Park.
The more I walked about, the more relaxed I felt, and the easier it was to talk to people. I met an elderly couple who lived outside Kyle near the camp of Frank Fools Crow, the great spiritual leader, nephew of Black Elk, who, they say, was guiding AIM on strategy and tactics. I asked them if they felt safe here. They answered that as long as people followed the right path as prescribed by Fools Crow, no one would be hurt. “Eventually, the wasicu [white people] will get tired and go away. We will declare victory, and everyone will go home.” Contrary to the impression that the occupiers of Wounded Knee, like the ones inside the museum, were largely outsiders, radicals from Oakland and Minneapolis, nearly everyone I talked to the rest of that day was from one of the nearby villages: Porcupine, Kyle, Potato Creek, Oglala, Loneman, Manderson, Wanblee, Medicine Root, and Pine Ridge.
I asked one boy if he was missing school. He laughed. “This is my school.”
Inside the Sacred Heart Church, another surprise: everything looked normal, neat and tidy, from the baptismal water bowl to the flowers on the altar, the statues of Jesus and Mother Mary, even the candles. The hymnals were tucked into the racks behind the pews, the kneeling benches were in place; there were a few muddy footprints, but that would have been almost impossible to prevent. The militants clearly didn’t respect the museum or the trading post—they had trashed both thoroughly—but apparently they respected the church, a holy place if not their holy place. Except for bullet holes, the Sacred Heart church remained unscathed for the entirety of the seventy-one-day occupation, only to be mysteriously torched a few days later, no one knows by whom or why.
* * *
As the sun sank behind the pine-covered hills on the western side of Sacred Heart, the temperature dropped and people moved toward the church, the bunkers, the trading post and museum. There was a cease-fire that day, but most of the gun battles happened at night; it could start up again any moment. I hated to leave, and reluctantly I made my way back to my blue Pontiac wagon, still parked in front of the museum. Russell Means thanked me again for the groceries and waved good-bye as I pulled out onto the road and headed back to Alliance, reflecting on a trying but adventuresome day. The same Indian boys guarding the AIM checkpoint waved me through, as did the federal marshals at the government checkpoint.
I waved back at the Indians, ignored the marshals.
* * *
Of the 130,000 total bullets fired during the Wounded Knee Takeover, 129,995 missed their intended targets. One severed the pulmonary artery near Buddy La Monte’s heart. Visitors to the cemetery who see his tombstone and don’t know the history might get the impression that La Monte was the only Wounded Knee shooting victim, but he wasn’t. Another bullet went through the wrist of FBI agent Curtis Fitzgerald while he was sitting in his car at one of the checkpoints. A third shattered federal marshal Lloyd Grimm’s spine, paralyzing him for life. Rocky Madrid, a medic working for the Feds, was shot in the stomach but survived. And a fifth bullet blew off the top of Frank Clearwater’s head in much the same fashion the bullet from Lee Harvey Oswald’s Carcano rifle blew off the top of John Kennedy’s.
I know about Frank Clearwater because I was at his funeral, peered into the open casket, saw the ugly wound—he was shot while sleeping on a pew in the church, just two days after he smuggled himself into Wounded Knee in late April. One of his Indian comrades who carried him out of the church on a stretcher held the top of his skull so it wouldn’t fall to the ground. Under a white flag, they put Clearwater in back of the U-Haul van and drove him ninety miles to a hospital in Rapid City. He was dead by the time they pulled up to the emergency door. Called into emergency session, Dick Wilson’s tribal council passed a resolution barring Clearwater’s burial on the Pine Ridge reservation. Clearwater was obviously not full-blood, nor was he a member of the Oglala or Brulé tribes, so it was decided to bury him on the adjacent Rosebud reservation, as long as the burial took place on private not public land. From this point on, only full-blooded Oglala could be buried on the Pine Ridge reservation, and permission from elders would be needed to be buried at Wounded Knee itself.
I joined the procession of vehicles escorting Clearwater’s body to Leonard Crow Dog’s camp, sometimes referred to as Crow Dog’s Paradise, on the Rosebud reservation. Leonard Crow Dog, like Frank Fools Crow, was a spiritual leader; his grandfather was the Crow Dog, who in a fit of jealousy murdered Chief Spotted Tail i
n 1881. A long-haired journalist from Denmark named Jacob Holdt hitched a ride with me. Clearwater’s body was in a plain plywood casket hanging out the back of a pickup truck, second in line behind a tribal police car with lights flashing. There were a dozen or more vehicles. My car was last.
Finding Holdt infectiously friendly, I merrily chatted away with him as if we were on our way to an after-work cocktail party. In the United States since the previous August, he said he had originally come to cover the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami. The Secret Service had given him security clearance that allowed him access to the main convention hotel, the Fontainebleau Miami Beach, where he interviewed Julie Eisenhower, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, and others. He spun a good tale; ironically, on this particular day, it turned out his Secret Service security clearance did him a fat lot of good.
Up ahead, just before the Pine Ridge/Rosebud border, was a roadblock manned by tribal police and some not-very-nice-looking Indian men with crew cuts and double-barreled shotguns. Along with the others, we stopped. The police were going car to car checking IDs. When Holdt showed them his Secret Service security clearance and his Danish passport, one of the officers told him to get out. He was handcuffed and slammed against the hood of my car.
“Didn’t anyone tell you we banned foreigners from the reservation?”
And it was oddly true. In a brazen act of tribal sovereignty, the Pine Ridge Tribal Council had banned whole groups of people—movie stars, network TV commentators, reporters from The New York Times, members of AIM, and all foreigners—from treading on tribal land forever; doing so was punishable by a thousand-dollar fine or six weeks in the tribal jail. I wasn’t sure if I should go on ahead with the funeral procession or if I should go to Pine Ridge to see if I could bail Holdt out; but then they released him, saying that since the ban had gone into effect after he arrived in Pine Ridge, he could go, but only after he promised never to come back. Once our caravan crossed into the Rosebud reservation, the Pine Ridge tribal police and the FBI quit following us and we seemed to be home free, but there was another roadblock, this one manned by Rosebud tribal police. Unlike their Pine Ridge counterparts, they were relaxed, not interested in checking IDs; they just wanted to hold us up so their tribal council, convening nearby, could decide if Clearwater could be buried on their reservation. We waited for a long time. People got bored, someone honked a horn, and suddenly tires screeched and the pickup truck took off; somehow the casket did not slide off the back. The next car in line followed, and soon everyone was barreling past the Rosebud police, who hollered at us but didn’t bother giving chase. Apparently, they really didn’t give a damn.
Good Friday on the Rez Page 9
