Lakota Woman

by Mary Crow Dog

  Shortly after I ate lunch—baked beans out of a can warmed over a sterno—airplanes were flying low over the hamlet. Some had photographers in them. By late afternoon three hundred marshals and FBI agents had formed a loose ring around us, their armored vehicles blocking the few roads in and out of Wounded Knee. In answer we were establishing roadblocks of our own. Already we had our first casualty. A young boy, unfamiliar with firearms, shot one of his fingers off.

  Wounded Knee lasted seventy-one long days. These days were not all passed performing heroic deeds or putting up media shows for the reporters. Most of the time was spent in boredom, just trying to keep warm and finding something to eat. Wounded Knee was a place one got scared in occasionally, a place in which people made love, got married Indian style, gave birth, and died. The oldest occupants were over eighty, the youngest under eight. It was a heyoka place, a place of sacred clowns who laughed while they wept. A young warrior standing up in the middle of a fire-fight to pose for the press; Russel Means telling the photographers, “Be sure to get my good side.”

  We organized ourselves. The biggest room in the store became the community hall. A white man’s home, the only house with heat and tap water, became the hospital, and women were running it. The museum became the security office. We all took turns doing the cooking, sewing shirts, and making sleeping bags for the men in bunkers. We embroidered the words “Wounded Knee” on rainbow-colored strips of cloth. Everybody got one of those as a badge of honor, “to show your grandchildren sometime,” as Dennis said. We shared. We did things for each other. At one time a white volunteer nurse berated us for doing the slave work while the men got all the glory. We were betraying the cause of womankind, was the way she put it. We told her that her kind of women’s lib was a white, middle-class thing, and that at this critical stage we had other priorities. Once our men had gotten their rights and their balls back, we might start arguing with them about who should do the dishes. But not before.

  Actually, our women played a major part at Wounded Knee. We had two or three pistol-packing mamas swaggering around with six-shooters dangling at their hips, taking their turns on the firing line, swapping lead with the feds. The Indian nurses bringing in the wounded under a hail of fire were braver than many warriors. The men also did their share of the dirty work. Bob Free, our first chief of engineers, had a crew which built twelve fortified bunkers, made an apartment house out of the trading post, dug latrines and constructed wooden privies, kept the juice going, repaired cars, operated the forklift and an earth-moving bulldozer. The men also formed a sanitary squad, picking up garbage and digging trenches to bury all that crap. One day Bob laid down the law: “Okay, that’s it. The only electricity we keep is for the freezers to store the meat, for the gas pumps and three lights. That’s all!” And he enforced it.

  For a while I stayed at the trading post. But it was too much for me. Too many people and too little privacy. I figured that I would have my baby within two weeks. I moved into a trailer house at the edge of Wounded Knee. By then daily exchanges of fire had become commonplace. The bullets were flying as I got bigger and bigger. One day the government declared a cease-fire so that the women and children could leave. One of the AIM leaders came up to me: “You’re leaving. You’re pregnant, so you’ve got to go.” I told him, “No, I won’t. If I’m going to die, I’m going to die here. All that means anything to me is right here. I have nothing to live for out there.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether you want to or not, you’ve got to go. All the women and children are going.”

  But we were not going. I stayed, all the older women stayed, most of the young mothers with children stayed, the sweethearts of the warriors stayed. Only a handful took advantage of the cease-fire and left. The deadline passed. The firing started again. Heavy MGs, automatic rifles, tripwire flares, single shots from the government sniper experts. Some of our men burned the wooden bridge over the creek so the feds couldn’t sneak up on us across it. Somebody said, “Now we’ve burned our bridge behind us.”

  One morning I got up early to bring coffee to the security in their bunkers and the feds opened up on me. A young Apache boy named Carlos rushed up, pushed me down, and covered me with his body. I am short, but he was even smaller than me. Some of the shots barely missed us. When the shooting eased up he dragged me into the bunker. He got after me: “Are you crazy? You should stay indoors. You have no business out there.” I laughed at him: “I’m about to be a mother and you’re just a kid. You want to tell me what to do?” But I was touched. I was not really that much older than he. All the men were overprotective, worrying about me. We were down to dry beans and a little flour. No coffee, no sugar, no cigarettes. The head of the marshals had announced publicly, “We’re gonna change their diets!”

  Dennis was keeping an eye on our dwindling supplies. For Easter Sunday he had been saving some ham and potatoes. So we had something close to a feast in the second, smaller church on the other side of Wounded Knee. I walked down there with some feed on my back in a heavy knapsack. Stan Holder came up to me: “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you know better?” Some friends joined in: “Get that backpack off you! We’re responsible if you hurt yourself.”

  I told them, “You get off my back! You’re not responsible for me. The only person responsible for me is myself.” I continued doing my chores, cooking, bringing coffee to the bunkers. Pedro Bissonette was always teasing me whenever we met, pointing at my belly: “That little warrior in there is hungry. Here is a little something for him,” forcing me to accept a morsel of food that I knew came from his own meager ration. Or he would come up and ask whether I wanted to play basketball. That always got a big laugh because I was so huge. We actually laughed and kidded each other a lot. It helped us to last as long as we did.

  When the food situation got out of hand we sent out a party of young hunters to bring in some “slow elk,” that is, some of the white ranchers’ cattle which were grazing in the vicinity. “Get a young, juicy cow,” Dennis had told them. Instead they brought in a tough old bull. That poor old bull didn’t want to die. They had to shoot him about twenty times before he finally lay down and gave up the ghost. Then it turned out that our young men did not know how to butcher. Some hunters! They were all city kids from St. Paul, Denver, or Rapid City. One of the white reporters had to show them how to do it. The women pounded and pounded that meat. They boiled it for hours. It remained as hard as stone. It was like chewing on a rope when I tried my teeth on it. After that Dennis put up a large poster. It showed the rear end of a bull with huge balls and underneath the words: THIS IS A BULL. Next to it was drawn a cow’s ass with the udder and the legend: THIS IS A COW. And above the whole thing, very big: COW—SI, BULL—NO!

  The three hundred feds, the goons, and the BIA police were never able to seal us off completely. As Pedro Bissonette put it, “The land was on our side.” The whole landscape was a jumble of hills, gullies, ravines, dry washes, sagebrush, and clumps of cottonwood trees. The marshals got lost in there. They also had no stomach for nighttime, hand-to-hand, guerilla-style fighting. They were technological, long-range killers. So there was a lot of sneaking through the perimeter, a lot of coming and going. Indians from Denver, New Mexico, and L.A. trickled in, a dozen or half-dozen at a time. A group of Iroquois from New York joined us for a while. Most of them were guided in by some of our local Sioux who knew every bush and every little hillock around us and who could find their way blindfolded. Usually people started walking in from the Porcupine area about eight or nine miles away. Some carried heavy packs of food. The government had their APCs out and illuminated the nights with their flares. They also kept the whole area under steady fire, shooting blindly. A continuous stream of red-glowing tracer bullets crisscrossed the whole prairie around us. It never stopped the brothers and sisters from coming. Among the groups walking in were some North-west Coast people, Pullayups and Nisquallies, led by Sid Mills who had fought so long for native fishing rights in Washington State
. These were among our toughest fighters.

  One time Sid and two or three other guys went out to bring in some food. They walked and walked the whole night and never made their contact. When dawn came they discovered that they were barely a few hundred yards away from the Sacred Heart Church. The whole night they had been walking around in circles, never getting more than a stone’s throw away. Dennis conducted an honoring ceremony for them. Instead of an eagle feather Sid got a compass. He earned his eagle feather anyway.

  Another time a young Indian in our little Datsun chased one of the government’s huge armored cars. He was banging on the armor with a stick, “counting coup.” The APC did not know what to do and lumbered off, the little Datsun harassing it all the way to the roadblock.

  Some young Oklahoma boys brought off a big coup by raiding a government bunker, stealing all their supplies—coffee, eggs, cigarettes, K-rations, bread, and sausages. The marshals must have been drunk or sleeping. On another occasion some of our guys made a big show of burying a number of large, empty film containers left behind by a TV crew. Immediately you could hear the alarm spreading on the feds’ shortwave: “Those Indians are planting Teller mines!” All the APCs took off in a hurry and we had scored another coup. So the siege had its humorous aspect, too.

  All the time we were in communication with the other side, bantering back and forth, calling each other names, doing a lot of teasing. Then suddenly we heard the voice of the chief marshal: “The fun and games are over!” The ring around us was tightened. Elements of the 82nd Airborne were brought in, waiting their turn at nearby Hot Springs—just in case. A ‘copter called Snoopy suddenly had a sniper in it taking potshots at us. Heavy 50-caliber MGs opened fire on our perimeter. Our telephone lines to the outside world were cut, all except the one connecting Wounded Knee with the marshals’ headquarters. Special kill-and-destroy teams were being flown in, with attack dogs and infrared gun scopes which enabled the government sharpshooters to see us in the dark. Trip-wire flares saturated the whole area around us. If we touched the wire a flare would go up, bathing the whole landscape in a strange, ghostlike light. Press was no longer admitted. One of the last reporters to leave asked Russel, “Do you think you’ll still be around tomorrow morning?” Russ Means answered, “That’s up to the government.”

  Our reinforcements and supplies dwindled down to a trickle. Beyond our perimeter, the scene was right out of a cheap World War I movie. The feds were building themselves regular sandbag positions with stoves and all the comforts of home. They had radios and even TVs to entertain themselves. We could hear the rock ‘n’ roll music drifting in from their bunkers. They wore light blue Day-Glo man-from-Mars jumpsuits or camouflage outfits. Their positions were surrounded by ever-growing mounds of empty shells and beer cans. Their armored cars were fitted out with high-powered strobe searchlights and M-79 grenade launchers.

  We had little to put up against this sort of war technology. Ammo was as short as food. During a typical firefight the feds would be pouring in upon us some five to ten thousand rounds while we would answer them with maybe twenty-five or thirty shots. Whatever ammo we could scrape together was piled up on the altar of the Sacred Heart Church. The men came out of their bunkers from time to time to fill their pockets with bullets. The trouble was that they had a hard time finding the right kind of ammo to fit their oddball weapons, some of them real antiques that should have been in a museum. In spite of all their sophisticated weaponry I had the feeling that the feds were in a strange way afraid of us. While we were relaxed, as Indians usually are, they were nervous and trigger-happy. One night when we played Indian music—grass dance songs and powwow stuff—the marshals thought these were our death songs and got all worked up, expecting a banzai charge. One day Dennis found an old stovepipe and attached a thing to it that looked like a gunsight. We set it up and started a rumor that we had acquired a rocket launcher. This, too, upset the feds. We always had the moral edge, but they had the hardware.

  Again I come back to the old Cheyenne saying: “A nation is not lost as long as the hearts of its women are not on the ground.” As the siege went on our women became stronger. One bunker was held by a married couple. When the husband was hit by several bullets, the wife insisted on holding the position alone. Women “manning” a bunker got into a two-way radio argument with some marshals. The girls finally took up a megaphone, shouting across no-man’s-land so that everybody could hear: “If you SOBs don’t shut up, we’ll call in the men!” One girl got hit in the white church. A bullet ricocheted and grazed her hand. It was just a flesh wound. She went on as if nothing had happened. During a firefight there was one young woman in particular who held off seven marshals while some of the men got behind shelter. All she had was an old pistol. She used that to scare them off. That was Gray Fox’s wife. She was really good with a gun. I guess some of the men did not like her because of that. Especially, I think, those who scrambled to safety while she covered them.

  One of the good things that happened to me at Wounded Knee was getting to know Annie Mae Aquash, a Micmac Indian from Nova Scotia who became my close friend. She was a remarkable woman, strong-hearted and strong-minded, who had a great influence upon my thinking and outlook on life. I first noticed her when an argument arose among some of the women. One group, as I remember, called themselves the “Pie Patrol.” Why, I do not know. There were no pies and they did not do much patrolling; as far as I could see. They were loud-mouth city women, very media conscious, hugging the limelight. They were bossy, too, trying to order us around. They were always posing for photographers and TV crews, getting all the credit and glory while we did the shit work, scrubbing dishes or making sleeping bags out of old jackets.

  Annie Mae gave these women a piece of her mind and I took her side. So we hit it off right away and became instant buddies. Annie Mae taught me a lot. She could make something out of nothing. She made nice meals with seemingly no provisions except dried beans and yellow peas. After I gave birth she made a tiny Wounded Knee patch for little Pedro. She was older than I and already a mother, divorced from a husband whose heart was not big enough for her. Annie Mae found among us Sioux an Indian culture her own tribe had lost. She was always saying, “If I’m going to die, I’m going to die. I have to die sometime. It might as well be here where I’d die for a reason.” She had a premonition that her militancy would bring her a violent death, and in this she was right. She had heard the call of the owl. When we left Wounded Knee at the end of the siege she handed me a .38 and a knife, just in case we should run into the goons instead of surrendering to the feds. If we met Wilson’s gang we might have to fight for our lives, she told me.

  My brother was with us at Wounded Knee. He walked out one night to get food and ammunition and got busted. He had all his weapons taken from him, but the police had no proof against him and soon he was back at the Knee starting a new cycle of comings and goings. He brought me presents, things only a brother would risk his life to give to a sister—a little coffee, cigarettes, candy bars, and stuff like that, cheap, everyday articles but precious to one besieged, pregnant lady. At that time snipers with nonbarking attack dogs were harassing us. The feds could not see our men at night, but the dogs would smell them. It was a Vietnam vet, one of our few white brothers at the Knee, who told us how to fix those mutts. The thing to do was to have some pepper in your pocket and to urinate in one place and stomp and rub your feet in it. Walking off, one could start a good, hot urine trail for the dog to follow and then, after a few hundred yards, put a big pile of pepper on one’s tracks. When the dog got a noseful of that he was useless for the rest of the week. Oddities among our warriors were two brothers, Charles and Robert. They were great-grandsons of General George Armstrong Custer, whom we Sioux, together with our Cheyenne brothers, wiped out at the Little Big Horn in 1876. When Custer surprised a peaceful Cheyenne village on the Washita, killing most of the men, one of his prisoners was a young girl, Maotsi, called Monaseetah by the whites. She caught the
general’s eye. She was told to be “nice” to him, otherwise he would be hard on her people—and she had seen just how hard he could be. When Maotsi got pregnant Custer kicked her out. He had no further interest in her or her offspring. A son was born who survived the famous death march of the Cheyennes and later married a Sioux woman, moving in with his wife’s tribe into which he was adopted.

  Thus it happened that the great-grandsons of Yellow Hair, Custer, were counting coup on the Blue Coats of 1973. For them Wounded Knee was a grudge fight. Some of the reporters who did not like us called Wounded Knee a “guerilla theater.” A theater is make-believe, but the siege was very real, and so were the wounds and deaths. The Knee sure was dramatic, however, both in the many things that happened there and in the people who participated.

  Politicians, celebrities, and civil rights leaders came to Wounded Knee early in the siege when the feds were still letting VIP visitors and reporters through the roadblocks. Our South Dakota senators Abourezk and McGovern were among them. Abourezk was supportive, which ruined his chances to run for a second term. McGovern was not. He is a great liberal anywhere but in South Dakota, because being friendly with activist Indians would cost him his reelection. At one time he seriously proposed storming Wounded Knee, which must have pleased his white constituents. He came up to me while I was doing dishes and held out his hand. He had a sour face. He said, “Hello, I’m George McGovern.” I just looked at him and said, “So what,” turned around, and went on scrubbing dishes.

  Under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 the Sioux had been recognized as an independent nation. The government had unilaterally abrogated this treaty without asking the Indians who were a party to it. On March 12, 1973, a big day, Wounded Knee declared itself a sovereign territory of the independent Oglala Nation. Anybody of goodwill, Indian or white, could become a citizen. Whatever one might say about AIM, it was never racist. As Crow Dog expressed it: “We don’t want to fight the white man, but only the white man’s system.”