Manataka American Indian Council
February 28th 1973
But deadly violence tarnished movement
Peter Harriman
©Argus Leader, published: 3/16/2003
WOUNDED KNEE - A caravan of cars and pickups winds its way south among
the prairie hills at dusk toward the village of Pine Ridge.
A frothy wave of righteous activism - whipped up at a two-day meeting called
by the American Indian Movement and Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization -
propels the approximately 200 men, women and children in the procession.
In the village, U.S. marshals peer warily into the gathering darkness from
fortified positions on the roof of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building.
They are mindful of a series of AIM takeovers beginning in 1969 at Alcatraz
Island in California and a riot just weeks before at the Custer County
Courthouse. The marshals assume they will have to defend the BIA building on
the Pine Ridge Reservation from the Indians coming toward them.
But the vehicles turn off, pass through town and head east to Wounded Knee,
a scattering of houses and mobile homes, a store, small museum, Catholic
church, and a graveyard. There is a spiritual connection to this place. This
is where the U.S. Cavalry killed more than 250 Sioux in 1890, a massacre
that marked the close of the Lakota's free-roaming life.
In the caravan ride the destinies of Indian leaders such as Russell Means,
Dennis Banks, Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt. Amid the tired vehicles is a
cultural and spiritual rebirth. But also lurks the destruction of a
community, the death of two men and crippling of a third, and years of
bitter division and violence for the Lakota and AIM.
It is Feb. 28, 1973.
What started as a loosely conceived protest 30 years ago turned into a
71-day standoff with federal authorities at Wounded Knee.
The world glimpsed what it was like to be an Indian, to face bleak poverty,
an almost casual racism, and the frustrating powerlessness of being wards of
federal bureaucracy. What has been done with the knowledge? Thirty years
later, does the siege at Wounded Knee reach beyond the memories and
anecdotes of those who took part?
Yes, says Winona LaDuke, an activist, author and Green Party
vice-presidential candidate from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota.
The occupation was as significant as Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back
of an Alabama bus and igniting the Civil Rights Movement, says LaDuke. "In
our memory of why we have anything, we must remember Rosa Parks. In our
memory as to why we, as native people, have anything, we must remember
Wounded Knee," she says.
But to some observers the occupation and the violence it represents hinder
real progress between whites and Indians in South Dakota. In some ways, it
is best tucked away as a historical footnote to remember but not celebrate,
they say.
The occupiers originally presented a list of 20 demands that boiled down to
five topics ranging from examination of the hundreds of broken treaties
between the United States and the tribes to reform of government on the Pine
Ridge Reservation.
The siege grew into an international media event that ended May 8 after a
series of negotiations and intervention of the White House and Lakota
elders.
People on both sides of the Wounded Knee bunkers in 1973 agree the
occupation was a complexity of soul-lifting highs and crushing lows. It was
by turns boring and intense, enlightening and bewildering, tragic and funny.
But always it was fluid, vital, dynamic.
![]() Madonna Thunder Hawk visits the monument marking the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, reflecting on the American Indian Movement-led occupation of the village 30 years ago. Thunder Hawk, who served as a medic in the compound, says: "We made our stand. I knew modern day Indian history had been made... and I didn't want it to end." |
The occupation defined the lives of many involved and was a watershed
event in Indian history. It cemented the name of Wounded Knee as a contemporary symbol of Native American grievances with the government and its management of reservation land by the BIA.
|
the government
- such as Angela Davis of the Black Panthers - and everyone trying to hitch
a ride on Lakota traditions - such as actor Marlon Brando - linked to the
movement to enrich their own lives.
Means says he didn't think he would live through the occupation. Such
fatalism also hung over Clyde Bellecourt.
"At that point, we had made a decision," he says. "We were willing to give
our lives right there for what we believed in."
The Wounded Knee occupation was a desperate attempt to grab the world's
attention, they say.
"We were pushed to the limit of cultural survival. This was a statement we
had a right to live as Indians," Means says.
And South Dakotans had a ringside seat.
Gov. Mike Rounds was a high school senior in Pierre at the time.
"I think people were very disturbed by the violence involved," he remembers.
In a philosophy class at South Dakota State University a few years later,
Rounds was introduced to the classic narrative text about the 1890 Wounded
Knee massacre, "Black Elk Speaks." That added a level to his understanding
of the 1973 event.
"I got to thinking that what happened at Wounded Knee was one more symptom
of what we have suffered through in our state," he says.
Rounds carefully frames a thought that, while hurtful history should not be
forgotten, both Indian and white South Dakotans should make a conscious
decision to put away Wounded Knee in their contemporary dealings with each
other.
"For me, I try to start over rather than talk about areas that are so
sensitive or where we had people die because of the animosity in our races,"
Rounds says.
"I try to talk about where we go today, what we do today to get past the
issues of hard feelings and rejection that have occurred in the past, both
on the part of the white and Native American populations."
AIM Forms In Minnesota
In the beginning, AIM was a mainstream effort to improve the lot of Indians,
envisioned by the larger world as residents of a homogenous, urban society
where a red minority was just a different shade of white.
Banks and Clyde Bellecourt founded AIM in 1968 in Minneapolis to advocate
for Indians against alleged abuses by police and courts.
In North Minneapolis "you could set your clock when the cops would come down
Franklin Avenue with their paddy wagon to Bud's Bar. With their nightsticks,
they'd force everyone out the back of the bar into the wagon," Banks says.
He was arrested more than 30 times.
Soon after AIM's founding, Means traveled to Minnesota from Cleveland, where
he was working as an accountant in the federally funded Council of Economic
Opportunity, to meet the heads of the new group. He recalls Banks was
wearing his hair short and parted to the side, Clyde Bellecourt had an even
shorter haircut, and Means acknowledges he was wearing "my mod clothes at
the time, my ascot ties, loafers."
While the AIM leaders were beginning to reclaim their cultural history, at
Pine Ridge, Dick Wilson, a plumbing contractor, already knew how to be an
Indian. As tribal president, he was trying to bridge that culture to the
white world, says his daughter, Saunie Wilson.
She says her father's reputation suffers in accounts of Wounded Knee. He is
customarily cast as an oppressor of traditional Oglalas and a meddler who
thwarted an early settlement to the standoff.
What is not portrayed, she says, is "the way he cared for the people, the
positive change he brought.
"He was real instrumental in trying to establish Oglala Lakota College. He
knew we couldn't be comfortable in colleges in the outside world," she says.
"We needed something pertaining to who we were as an Indian culture."
Dick Wilson died in 1990.
His daughter was a college student in New Mexico in 1973. She moved back to
South Dakota after the Wounded Knee occupation and lived on the Pine Ridge
Reservation during the subsequent years of bloodshed, made infamous by the
shooting deaths of Wounded Knee participants Anna Mae Aquash and Pedro
Bissonette, FBI agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, and the arrest and
murder conviction of Leonard Peltier.
Women Elders Were 'Warriors'
Accounts of Wounded Knee usually feature the men who took part. Oglala women
elders were as important, Means says.
"Without Gladys Bissonette (Pedro Bissonette's aunt)and Ellen Moves Camp,
this never would have happened. They are bigger heroes than Banks, myself,
or anyone else in AIM," he says.
Clyde Bellecourt agrees.
At the two-day meeting at the Calico community hall leading up to the
occupation, AIM compiled nearly 1,500 grievances against the BIA and the
tribe.
As the meeting dragged, he says, Gladys Bissonette stood up, exasperated.
"Haven't you heard enough?" she asked AIM leaders. "Go back to Minneapolis,
Milwaukee, Los Angeles or Portland. We are going to stand here and be
warriors."
"I was stunned by that confrontation with an elderly woman, wrinkles all
over her face," Bellecourt says.
Oglala elders chose Wounded Knee instead of Pine Ridge for the occupation,
says Means, because the spirits of the 1890 massacre victims would protect
the occupiers.
Clyde Bellecourt says the decision was reached by elders and AIM leaders at
a meeting the previous week at Cedar Pass.
"There was discussion of taking over the BIA," he says. "I thought that was
foolish. We had already done that a few weeks before" in Washington, D.C.
The world had heard of the place because of the Dee Brown book, "Bury My
Heart at Wounded Knee," he says. "I threw out the idea of occupying land
already belonging to us that had already been exploited."
Saunie Wilson believes Banks called her father from the BIA building in
Washington, D.C. - which they took over in November - and said "we're coming
to Pine Ridge to celebrate."
"He said, 'The hell you are.' That's what started this thing," she says.
Gun Battles Take Heavy Toll
For all the talk of camaraderie, the siege was also marked by the death of
two occupiers and the paralysis of a federal agent.
Frank Clearwater was mortally wounded by a stray bullet in a firefight April
17.
After another vicious firefight April 27 - where marshals estimate they
fired 6,550 rounds and occupiers 2,875 - Lawrence "Buddy" La Monte was
killed. He was buried at Wounded Knee on May 6, two days before the
occupation ended.
No federal agents were killed, but on March 26, Lloyd Grimm, a U.S. marshal
from Nebraska, was paralyzed for life by a gunshot wound.
In the occupiers' camp, nothing changed after the deaths, Means says during
a recent trip to the Wounded Knee Cemetery on a raw, blustery winter day.
On the hilltop where the cemetery looks out over the ruined village and the
ground of the occupation, Means pauses from recounting the events of 1973 to
spend a few moments kneeling at La Monte's grave.
"That was the cost of doing business," he says. "That's why we were here.
Nobody was scared or ran off."
Means still owns a house and land at Porcupine, near Wounded Knee.
"There isn't a time I drive through here when I don't think about it," he
says. "The passage of 30 years has saddened me. Our people have saddened me.
"We won. We won, and our people don't even celebrate the victory here. There
were 600 arrests arising from Wounded Knee. There was not one conviction,
not one plea on the original charge."
Occupation Story Is Seldom Told
Winners write history.
But little scholarly work and only slightly more popular history has been
written about Wounded Knee.
"I find that appalling, to the point of genocide," Means says.
"We need filmmakers, writers, journalists," Vernon Bellecourt says, "because
our history is not being told here. We need to tell it."
A logical choice to do so would seem to be Sherman Alexie. The
36-year-old author, whose credits include "Reservation Blues" and "Smoke
Signals," grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington.
![]() AIM members and supporters march into Wounded Knee cemetery Feb. 28 during a celebration marking the anniversary of the 1973 occupation of the village of Wounded Knee. Some leaders call the standoff a watershed event in Indian-white relations but are disappointed so little has been written on the topic in history books. "I find that appalling to the point of genocide," AIM's Russell Means said recently. |
He is a prominent interpreter of
the contemporary Indian experience, who does not flinch from sardonic
examination of issues such as racism, sexism, drug and alcohol abuse, and
suicide.
But not Wounded Knee.
"I'm not sure how the gun-toting Indians of Wounded Knee present different
images than the gun-toting Indians of western movies. Certainly I agree with
much of AIM's politics but disagree completely with any violence, real or
implied," he says.
"I'm a pacifist poet Indian. Russell Means and Dennis Banks and Leonard
Peltier are anti-models for me.
"I've read everything I can about Wounded Knee and AIM, and have met Means
and Banks É and others who were active at that time, so it's certainly huge
in our collected history and my personal history. I'm not downplaying the
importance of Wounded Knee. I just see it in a whole different light than
most Indians, I suspect. Hell, Indians love war, any war, all wars. I'm
anti-war."
Bill Zimmerman organized an airlift of food to Wounded Knee and wrote a book
about the experience. But he says scholars have not looked at the standoff.
"It never has been treated seriously. It should be," Zimmerman says.
"When we made the drop, unemployment on the reservation was 40 percent. At
the 25th anniversary, unemployment was up to 80 percent. We didn't
accomplish anything for the people at Pine Ridge. It needs to be recorded,
analyzed and understood.
"Beyond what it meant for American Indians, an amazing set of lessons can be
teased out of that whole story about the role of media in American life."
Daily stories in the nation's newspapers, news magazine articles, and
television tape flown from South Dakota to Denver each night to make the
network news created a protective shield around the Wounded Knee occupants
the government was loathe to breach by forcibly taking back the village,
Zimmerman says.
Stan Pottinger, who was the chief government negotiator on two occasions,
disagrees.
He says President Richard Nixon made it clear to federal law enforcement
officials they were going to wait out the occupation and not storm the
encampment and run the risk of inflicting great casualties. Pottinger says
Wounded Knee has received scant scholarly scrutiny "because it didn't end
badly. You get more respect when your book ends badly."
Thunder Hawk is not dismayed that Wounded Knee still exists largely in the
memories of participants and has not yet been delivered to the future as a
body of ideas.
"Non-Indian people wrote our history in the 1800s. They picked and chose who
they would write about," she says. "Nowadays, more of our people are
becoming historians, writers, That's all right. We can wait. We're patient
people."
Does occupation matter to a new generation?
At Red Cloud High School at Pine Ridge, three teenagers struggle to see how
Wounded Knee is relevant to their 21st Century lives.
"The generation now is really very different. They try to live like other
people in big cities. Not
in traditional ways. They're trying to be something they ain't," says Cy
Patton, a student at the school.
![]() Mary Moran of Eagle Butte visits the Wounded Knee cemetery near a marker commemorating the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890. Moran was in Wounded Knee last month to mark the 30th anniversary of the occupation of the village by AIM supporters. |
Alex All Runner, Marie Zephier and Patton agree that alcohol, drugs and
gangs are the current realities for teenagers on the reservation.
AIM, they think, "is a cool gang," Saunie Wilson says.
Zephier vaguely alludes to stories about Wounded Knee she heard from her
grandmother, the woman leader Means singled out, Ellen Moves Camp.
There is a reason the children don't know about Wounded Knee and its
aftermath, Wilson says. "Those of us who had to live it, who had to arrange
our furniture so bullets would not come through the house, we didn't share
it with our children so they would not have to live it again," she says.
Red Cloud teenagers might not draw direct links between their lives and
Wounded Knee, says the Rev. Peter Klink, Red Cloud president. But their
knowledge of their Lakota culture suggests Wounded Knee is "more significant
than they are immediately and consciously aware," he says.
Thunder Hawk agrees and says Wounded Knee gave Indians a confidence that
they could determine their own destiny.
"It snowballed for us, for the average grassroots Indian on the street," she
says. "They had never had anything like that, where they actually had a
voice.
"What I see today is my grandchildren know treaty rights. That is not a big
mystery to them. They grew up with that."
Despite the lack of historical research, many of the participants and
observers say the occupation at Wounded Knee was a watershed event.
"What did transpire was a cultural renaissance," says Wilmer Mesteth, a
faculty member at Oglala Lakota College. His grandfather, Pedro Bissonette,
was a Wounded Knee leader. "A lot of young people are identifying with their
culture. You see a lot more Lakota culture practiced here now than before
the movement came here."
Pottinger, the government negotiator, calls the 71 days of Wounded Knee "a
furnace blast of Lakota culture."
The learning was not restricted to Indians, he says. "I realized I was as
ignorant as anybody I can imagine. I was worse than ignorant. My perceptions
of Indians were formed by Hollywood, which is deeply racist."
Still, Mesteth doesn't use Wounded Knee in his classes at Oglala Lakota
College.
"I'm reluctant to talk about it, because it is painful," he says.
He believes AIM abandoned the traditional Oglala people who asked its
leaders to come to Pine Ridge. "All the partying, drinking and drugging
going on, the traditional people backed off," Mesteth says.
"I think the traditional people felt they had been forgotten about," he
says. "In our family, after my grandfather was killed (in October 1973) we
felt like nobody cared. Even today he is hardly mentioned. Out of all the
AIM members, he was one of the only Lakota-speaking representatives. Our
people know he was a traditional person. That's why we followed him."
Hamlet, relations left in ruins by siege
![]() AIM members and supporters march into the Wounded Knee cemetery Feb. 28 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the occupation. People near the front of the column carry a "Free Peltier" banner, a reference to Leonard Peltier. He is serving two life sentences in prison in connection with the 1975 shooting deaths of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The killings were part of a violent period that continued to rock the reservation even after the siege at Wounded Knee ended. |
The occupation
was devastating to Wounded Knee itself.
The museum chimney of white and red stone stands as lone sentinel over the
foundations of the museum and store. The houses and mobile homes are gone,
recalled only by the basement slabs still visible in the brush, by piles of
rusting flat metal and cans and by a scruff of cottonwoods and cedars along
a gravel road.
Across the road and atop the hill on the south side of the 1890 memorial, a
basement, spray-painted with graffiti, recently has been filled in. It was
all that remained of the Catholic church that was here in 1973 and burned. A
new church sits north of the memorial.
Much as in
1973, houses are scattered on the surrounding hillsides, although manyof the
current homes were built after the occupation. On the northeast side of the
hill, a tribal housing cluster has been built.
Gov. Rounds first saw Wounded Knee in 1974, when he was working a summer job
for the state Department of Transportation.
BYHE NUMBERS | |
71 |
The site today is as plain and unadorned as the drought-parched prairie hills from which it springs, and it bears the signs of having withstood both hard weather and hard use. Probably it looked even rougher in 1974, just months removed from the occupation.
"One thing I remember, even now, is thinking, 'This is a place of consequence. It is a place of historical importance,' " Rounds says. "I wondered, even then, whether it was appropriate to leave it in the shape it was in."
Thinking out
loud, he speculates about the state reaching out now to those who have
family members buried at the Wounded Knee cemetery, and to the residents of
the Pine Ridge Reservation and offering to refurbish the site.
"Perhaps that is something we could do as a way of trying to address the
past and recognize that past," Rounds says.
Worse than property destruction, Pine Ridge families were split between
supporting AIM and the tribal government.
The bitterness lasted two decades, according to Saunie Wilson. "I think
people on opposite sides can finally talk about what those differences are
without violence."
Whether or not the changes are the result of Wounded Knee, the reservation
is different 30 years later, Wilson believes.
"You had to be white to make it here," she says. "My father didn't agree
with that. He always told me to be who you are and be proud of who you are.
Now there are people in positions formerly reserved for whites. The Indian
people are in charge here, for good or bad."
'Modern-day
Indian history had been made'
Wounded Knee's participants remain close to the event, but they are
beginning to realize how fragile the tie is becoming. Walking down a gravel
path from the monument, Means pats his stomach and remarks wistfully about
being as trim as he was in 1973.
Thunder Hawk still lights up when she talks about Wounded Knee. It was the
genesis of her lifelong career of activism, she says.
She was there from winter into spring, through three blizzards, periods of
hunger, and the deaths of Clearwater and La Monte. The worst time was when
she finally walked out of the encampment the night before it disbanded.
"We made our stand. I knew modern day Indian history had been made. I didn't
know how to articulate it. But I knew something had happened, and I was a
part of it, and I didn't want it to end."
In peace & solidarity,
Tamra
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a past so forgotten?"
This is a
excellent video!
Submitted by Henrietta Wise
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