6
For American Indians, injustice has been institutionalized and is administered by federal and state governments.
—Leslie Silko, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit
And here we are: 1887.
In Canada, there was a federal election that year, and the Conservatives under John A. Macdonald retained power. Some of Macdonald’s support surely came from his decision, two years earlier, to hang the Métis leader Louis Riel, though he probably lost votes in Quebec for this unnecessary act of hubris. The numbered treaties were underway, but none was signed that year. In British Columbia, delegates from the Commission of Enquiry into the Conditions of the Indians of the Northwest Coast were sent to meet with the Tsimshian and Nisga with instructions to assert Crown ownership of the land and to dismiss any claims of Indian title. The one bright spot was the birth of the Onondaga long-distance runner Tom Longboat.
In the States, fifteen-inch snowflakes fell on Fort Keogh in Montana. In Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, the first-ever Groundhog Day was observed. In May of that year, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show opened in London as part of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. Sitting Bull was not with the show, though he had been the year before. Black Elk, the Lakota medicine man who would later share his vision with the poet John Neihardt, did make the Queen’s party. But when the show wrapped up in Manchester, Black Elk missed the boat home and wound up stranded in Europe for two years, working for Mexican Joe’s Wild West Show.
That year, 1887, was also the year in which the U.S. Congress passed the General Allotment Act.
By 1887, Native people in North America had already spent the last 280 years laid up with European colonialism, a condition much like malaria. Malaria, in case you’ve forgotten, is an infectious disease that sickens and kills millions of people every year. The disease causes fever, headaches, retinal damage, shakes, vomiting, anemia, and convulsions. Children who contract malaria can suffer severe brain damage. The disease is incurable. There is a vaccine that works on mice, which is great if you’re a mouse. My brother Christopher got malaria when he was in Vietnam, and he can tell you all about it.
It’s a remarkable disease. Like colonialism, it can lie dormant for years. And it can flare up at any moment.
In 1887, it flared up again.
The General Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Act, would be Washington’s new and improved effort at assimilating Indians. Removal and relocation hadn’t been as successful as had been hoped. Nascent residential schools might prove to be the answer to the “Indian Problem,” but educating and assimilating children would take one or two generations, and delayed gratification is not a North American trait.
When I imagine this historical moment, I can see politicians, reformers, and the general public standing at the borders of reservations across America with their placards and signs, holding hands, and chanting:
“What do we want?”
“Assimilation.”
“When do we want it?”
“Now.”
Since the arrival of Europeans, private ownership of land has been one of the cornerstones of non-Native society and economy. Land, to the European mind, gave an individual station within society and was a certain source of wealth. Land could be bought, sold, and traded with more assurance than currency.
Indians, through inclination and treaty, held land in common, and when people of goodwill gathered together in Washington and at places such as the Lake Mohonk resort in southern New York to plan the future of Native people, they decided that land was too important to be left in the hands of a community that had no real sense of its value.
“While the Dawes Bill will change the Indian’s legal and political status, it will not change his character. The child must become a man, the Indian must become an American; the pagan must be new created a Christian. His irrational and superstitious dread of imaginary gods must be transformed into a love for the All-Father; his natural and traditional hatred of the pale-face into a faith in Christian brotherhood; his unreasoning adherence to the dead past into an inspiring hope in a great and glad future.” This was the conclusion that the Friends of the Indian came to when they met for their annual meeting at Lake Mohonk in October of 1886.
All these imperatives, all these insistences, and not one voice in the room took a moment to ask, “Why?” “Why?” was not a question anyone asked of assimilation. The only proper question was, “How?”
And, in 1887, the answer was allotment. Reservations, which had seemed a good idea earlier, were now decried as an affront to Christianity and capitalism. Indian agents and church officials complained that so long as Indians were allowed to live on reservations, they would retain their pagan customs and cultures. So long as Indians were allowed to hold land in common, they would lose the advantages that free enterprise offered.
The General Allotment Act directed the government to break reservations into individual pieces. As a general rule, each head of household received an allotment of 160 acres. Single Indians over the age of eighteen and orphans under the age of eighteen got 80 acres, while minors under the age of eighteen got 40 acres. The federal government would hold each allotment in trust for a period of twenty-five years, during which time the allotments could not be sold and were tax-free. Each allottee lost their treaty status but was given U.S. citizenship.
Rather similar to a “kiddie-deal” at a fast food outlet. Order the burger, fries, and a drink, and the citizenship is free. Whether you want it or not.
At the end of the twenty-five-year trust period, each allottee would own their own allotment free and clear, and Indians, who had been communal members of a tribe, would now be individual, private land owners. Reservations would disappear. Indians would disappear. The “Indian Problem” would disappear. Private ownership of land would free Indians from the tyranny of the tribe and traditional Native culture, and civilize the savage.
What’s not to like?
Instead, what allotment did was liquidate all of the reservations in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), along with the land base of many of the tribes in Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington, and give the surplus land to White settlers and business interests.
You might wonder where this “surplus land” came from. Okay, let’s create a hypothetical example, and we’ll work with nice round numbers to keep the math simple. Say you’re an Indian. Your tribe has a population of a thousand other Indians, and the community holds three hundred thousand acres of land in common. Allotment comes along, and the tribe’s land is divided up. You would expect that the government would divide one thousand into three hundred thousand and come up with three hundred acres per Indian.
But that’s not what happened. Three hundred acres, the government decided, was too much land for an Indian. One hundred and sixty acres was more than enough. One hundred and sixty acres was plenty. And, after you allowed multiplication and subtraction to work their magic, the tribe wound up holding onto just one hundred and sixty thousand acres of their original three hundred thousand acres, while the government miraculously came away from the exercise with one hundred and forty thousand acres of “surplus” land.
The actual size of each allotment varied with tribes and the land they held, but in almost each instance, Indian land went in one end of allotment and surplus land came out the other. Native people, who had held title to some 138 million acres in 1887, saw that figure reduced to around 48 million acres, much of it desert.
Then, in 1934, allotment, as U.S. government policy, was repealed, and colonialism went into a brief remission.
In Canada in 1934 the Dionne Quintuplets were born, marking the period, but aside from that, and the births of Jean Chrétien, Peter Gzowski, Leonard Cohen, and novelist Rudy Wiebe, it wasn’t a particularly exciting year. In the United States, Donald Duck appeared for the first time in a cartoon called “The Wise Little Hen.” John Dillinger, Bonnie Parker, and Clyde Barrow were killed in shootouts with FBI agents, and Alcatraz became an official Federal Bureau of Prisons prison.
And in Washington, the Indian Reorganization Act was passed.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933, his administration quickly put together a series of programs that were to lift America and Americans out of the depths of the Great Depression. At the same time, he appointed John Collier to the post of Commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Collier was a rare politician, a social crusader who rejected the forced assimilation of Indians and argued instead for a form of cultural pluralism whereby Indians could speak their languages and practise their religions without government interference. More importantly, Collier understood that if tribes were to maintain their traditions, they would have to maintain their land base.
It was under Collier’s leadership, with Roosevelt’s blessing, that the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), or the Wheeler-Howard Act, became national policy. In many ways, the legislation was a departure from previous programs and represented a positive shift in government thinking. Most importantly, it ended allotment as official policy and slowed the erosion and theft of Indian land by extending trust protection indefinitely. It allowed that surplus lands created by the allotment process might be returned to tribes. The IRA even created a fund, not to exceed two million dollars a year, to buy back lands that had been lost.
The act looked good on paper, and it was a reprieve from the programs that came before it. And to give Collier his due, his administration was more actively committed to the protection of Indian rights and lands than any before or after him.
As Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Collier could influence policy and he could advocate for Native people, but he could not control what the government actually did. While the Indian Reorganization Act “allowed” that Native people might control their own destinies, the reality was that all of the major decisions were still left firmly in the hands of the government.
I have a soft spot in my heart for John Collier, but for all his determination and reasonable ideas, he was not destined to prevail. While Collier was able to slow the destruction, he was up against a political cabal that was not about to let one man change the “proper” course of government Indian policy.
The Indian Reorganization Act was officially in effect for about nineteen years. But that’s misleading. With the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, Indians, in both the United States and Canada, vanished from their respective governments’ agendas. Canada declared war on Germany in 1939. America officially came on board in 1941. By the time the conflict ended in 1945, the small “generosities” that had been allowed in the Indian Reorganization Act were clawed back, and colonialism, which had been dormant, came back with a fierce virulence.
It came back in the guise of another new and improved government program.
This mid-century version of colonialism was called “termination,” and it became official U.S. government policy in 1953 with the passage of House Concurrent Resolution 108. HCR 108 declared the intent of the United States to abrogate all treaties that it had made with Native people and abolish federal supervision over tribes. The resolution called for the immediate termination of the Flathead, the Klamath, the Menominee, the Potawatomi, and the Turtle Mountain Chippewa, along with all the tribes in Texas, New York, Florida, and California. Passed at the same time, Public Law 280 allowed a number of states to assume control of Indian reservations.
And that was that. No treaties. No reservations. No Indians. Problem solved. Again.
For the next thirteen years, termination worked its way through America like a plague. Before the policy was officially ended in 1966, 109 tribes had been terminated and another million acres of Indian land was lost.
Canada tried its hand at termination three years after the United States gave it up. In 1969, Pierre Trudeau and then Minister of Indian Affairs Jean Chrétien released the 1969 White Paper, which, had it become law, would have been a first step in abrogating treaties, eliminating Indian status, and effectively breaking up the land base of every Native tribe in the country.
I know what Ottawa’s political managers were thinking. They were thinking the same thing their American cousins had thought. The Indian business was complex and difficult. Indians and treaty rights were irrelevant in a modern world. Treaties were an instrument between sovereign nations, and Ottawa decided it was now unwilling to deal with such sovereign nations, even though treaties were the way in which Canada and Native people had always conducted their business.
So, in terms of government action, government policy, and Indians, one could argue that the twentieth century was just like the nineteenth, was just like the eighteenth. Business as usual. But there was something else afoot. After five hundred years of being legislated, policied, and programmed out of existence, Native people began to say, rather loudly, “Enough.” Sure, we were worn out by the centuries of exploitation, neglect, mistreatment, and oppression, but by the 1960s, we were also angry as hell.
I say “we” in the generous sense of the word. I wasn’t even in North America. In 1964, I had signed on with a tramp steamer out of San Francisco and worked my way across several oceans to New Zealand. I worked in that country as a deer culler, a beerbottle sorter, and a photographer. I might have stayed, but I had entered New Zealand on a thirty-day tourist visa, and after I’d lived and worked there for about a year, immigration noticed that, while I had arrived, I hadn’t left.
I was in Auckland when I got a phone call. A fellow with a very British accent asked me if I was aware that I had been in the country for almost a year on a thirty-day visa. I told him I was aware of this. Had I been working? he wanted to know. A little, I told him.
“When might we expect you to leave?”
As I said, I liked New Zealand, and I was keen on staying longer, so I asked if there was a way I could apply for an immigration visa. The immigration man said that this wasn’t normally the way it was done, that one generally applied for such a visa before arriving in the country.
“But I shall look into the matter,” he told me.
In the meantime, he wanted some particulars. And then he read off a list of items. Height, weight, colour of eyes, colour of hair. Race.
“Six-foot-six, two hundred and fifty pounds, brown, black. Indian.”
There was a long pause and then the immigration man said, “Oh dear, I’m afraid we can’t accept an immigration application from you.”
I was somewhat taken aback. “Why not?” I wanted to know.
“Well,” said the immigration man, “we don’t accept immigration applications from Indians.”
I tried to imagine just how many immigration applications New Zealand could possibly get from Indians in any given year. So I asked. “How many immigration applications do you get from Indians?”
“Thousands,” said the immigration man. “Thousands.”
The Cree were a good-sized tribe. So were the Navajo and the Lakota. There were lots of Native people in Oklahoma, Alberta, Minnesota, Saskatchewan, the Dakotas, and British Columbia who might want to settle down in New Zealand. “These Indians,” I asked, “where are they coming from?”
“New Delhi,” said the immigration man. “Bombay.”
“Ah,” I said. “Wrong Indians. I’m North American Indian.”
There was another long pause. “What?” said the immigration man. “You mean like cowboys and Indians?”
I didn’t get a visa. I left New Zealand, went to Australia, worked there for a couple of years, and in 1967, I returned to California. By the time I arrived home, the Vietnam war was in full swing, while throughout North America, marginalized groups were taking to the streets to protest both the war and the institutions and the social structures that assisted the rich in the accumulation of wealth and power, that kept the poor knee-deep in poverty, and that allowed racism to flourish. In Canada, Quebec separatism was gathering strength, but the country’s focus was on celebrating the centenary. In Montreal, Expo 67, the most successful of the world fairs, opened its doors.
That year, 1967, was the one historian Pierre Berton called “Canada’s last good year.”
In the United States, 1967 wasn’t quite so dazzling. Well, there was the whole hippie thing. Flower power, free love, tiedyed T-shirts, Haight-Ashbury, drugs and communes and young men and women dressed up as Day-Glo Indians. I guess that was somewhat dazzling. But by 1968, the dazzle had begun to fade.
That year saw the assassination of Martin Luther King in April and the assassination of Robert Kennedy in June. In August, at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, police clashed with demonstrators opposed to the war and determined to end it. Meanwhile, in Canada, in June of that year, separatists rioted in Montreal on Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, while politicians in Ottawa passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which decriminalized homosexuality and allowed abortions and contraception.This was the bill that Pierre Trudeau defended by saying that “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” In that year, Leonard Marchand became the first Status Indian to be elected to the House of Commons.
It was also the year that N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa-Cherokee) won the Pulitzer Prize, the first and only Aboriginal author to do so, while in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the American Indian Movement (AIM) was slouching towards Wounded Knee.
For me, 1968 was the year I enrolled at Chico State University, in Chico, California, and became involved in Native activism. There were hardly any Indians on campus. The only other Native I remember was a Mohawk, an artist named Richard Glazer Danay. Richard and I got together with a professor from the Anthropology department to form what I think was the first Indian organization on that campus. But my memory for those years is terrible. The only thing I remember with any real clarity is a survey.
Neither Richard nor I had any idea how many Indian students were on campus, but, in 1969 or 1970, the registrar’s office included a brief survey in the packets of all incoming students that allowed them to declare ethnicity. When the surveys came back, there were about sixty incoming students who had marked the “Indian” box. I was ecstatic. I had been hoping Chico State might have a dozen Indians, and here we were with five times that many. So Richard and I began calling the students to say hello, to welcome them to Chico, and we discovered that the vast majority of the students who had marked “Indian” in the box were not Indian at all. “I’m not actually Indian,” one student told me, “but I support you guys one hundred percent.”
That was the way it was in the late ’60s and early ’70s in North America. Everyone wanted to be an Indian. Even the Indians.
In 1969, many Native people weren’t really aware of what was happening in Indian country. Those of us on campuses throughout North America liked to believe that we were up to date, but our knowledge was limited by our background and experience. Universities didn’t offer “Indian” courses. We knew what we knew in bits and pieces, and I suspect that this was equally true for Indians on reservations/reserves, in cities, and in rural areas. Momaday winning the Pulitzer in 1968 was certainly a source of pride, but I’m not sure many Native people actually read House Made of Dawn. The book we did read was Vine Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins (1969). We knew about AIM, of course, without knowing exactly what the organization did. Indian role models were few and far between. In 1969, they were the usual suspects, individuals who were—for one reason or another—on public display in the consciousness of White North America. Sitting Bull, Louis Riel, Crazy Horse, Big Bear, Jim Thorpe, Tom Longboat, and Billy Mills.
Then, on November 20, 1969, eighty-nine American Indians from a variety of tribes set sail from Sausalito, a boutique town for wealthy folk just across the bay from San Francisco, and took over the defunct federal prison known as Alcatraz. Or “the Rock.”
It wasn’t the first time Indians had been on the island. Native oral stories from the area tell of Alcatraz as a place where people gathered bird eggs, and as a sanctuary to escape the Franciscan monks, who used Indians in California as slave labour in the building of their missions. Some of the tribes in the area regarded the island as a holy place. Others avoided it altogether.
Whatever else the island might have been, by the early 1860s Alcatraz was a prison, and in 1895 the U.S. government shipped nineteen Hopi Indians to the Rock. An article in the San Francisco Call reported that the Hopi had been arrested because “they would not let their children go to school.”
A capital offence, to be sure.
The Call went on to assure its readers that the Hopi (whom the paper had earlier misidentified as “murderous-looking Apaches”) were not badly treated. “They have not hardship,” said the paper, “aside from the fact that they have been rudely snatched from the bosom of their families and are prisoners and prisoners they shall stay until they have learned to appreciate the advantage of education.”
Exactly what that advantage was, the paper did not say.
The Hopi, by the way, weren’t the first Indian prisoners on the island. In 1873, a Native man named Paiute Tom was sent to Alcatraz from Camp McDermit in Nebraska. He didn’t stay long. He was shot dead by a guard two days after he arrived. In that same year, two Modoc, Barncho and Sloluck, were sent to the Rock. In 1874, Native rights activist Sarah Winnemucca’s brother Natchez (Paiute) spent a couple of less-than-pleasant weeks in the prison, while a Chiricachua Apache chief named Kaetena wound up on the island in July of 1884, courtesy of the old Indian fighter General George Cook.
Nor was the 1969 occupation the first time Native people had “captured” Alcatraz. In 1964, a group of Lakota had landed on the island and claimed it in a peaceful demonstration. They were removed by federal marshals before the day was out.
So, even before the armada landed on the island in 1969, Alcatraz and Indians already had a long and mixed history together. Still, the 1969 event was an electrifying moment. Talking about taking action was one thing —and there had certainly been enough talk—actually doing something was another thing altogether. Action. The takeover of Alcatraz was action.
That is not to say that the takeover was the most well-organized action. No one, it seemed, had thought much about the matter of clothing, food, blankets, toilet paper, potable water, items that might be needed for an extended stay on the Rock.
From an aesthetic point of view, Native people would have been hard put to come up with an uglier or bleaker piece of geography to occupy. Weather on the island could be windy, cool, warm, clear, foggy, and rainy all on the same day. The Rock was grey, the buildings were grey, the sky was grey, the ocean was grey. Even in bright sunshine, even without being locked up in a cell, Alcatraz was depressing.
Several clever protestors suggested that the reason Indians took Alcatraz was because it looked and felt so much like a reservation. In fact, as Helen reminded me, the original “Alcatraz Proclamation” listed the similarities:
1. It is isolated from modern facilities, and without adequate means of transportation.
2. It has no fresh running water.
3. It has inadequate sanitation facilities.
4. There are no oil or mineral rights.
5. There is no industry, and so unemployment is great.
6. There are no health-care facilities.
7. The soil is rocky and non-productive, and the land does not support game.
8. There are no educational facilities.
9. The population has always exceeded the land base.
10. The population has always been held as prisoners and kept dependent upon others.
On the positive side, Alcatraz did have some lovely rock pools and a resident colony of western gulls, cormorants, and egrets. More than that, the views of the San Francisco skyline and the Golden Gate Bridge were to die for.
Still, it was an island, which meant that people and goods had to be ferried across San Francisco Bay by boat. And because it was an island, and a small one at that, it should have been an easy matter for the authorities to seal it off, cut the water and power, and force the Indians off the Rock before the second week was out.
But that’s not what happened. Maybe it was the times. Maybe it was the crazy magic of San Francisco. Maybe people were looking for a diversion to take their minds off the war in Vietnam and the My Lai massacre. Maybe it was a little of all of these. Whatever the reason or reasons,Alcatraz became an instant cause celèbre. While the Indians were struggling with organizing and outfitting the occupation, while the government was trying to come up with a plan to evict the “pesky redskins,” famous people were lining up to visit the island. Hollywood stars such as Jonathan Winters, Jane Fonda, Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Dick Gregory, and Candice Bergen came to Alcatraz to show their support. Many gave money. No one knows how much money came to the occupation. Records of donations were not all that tidy. Horace Spencer, who sat on the Alcatraz council, estimated the amount of money donated at between twenty dollars and twenty-five million.
Ironically, Alcatraz the media event was, in many ways, more successful than Alcatraz the occupation. In spite of problems with resources, in-fighting, and the constantly changing population, the occupation lasted almost nineteen months. But it was effectively over much earlier than that. There were too many people on the Rock, and there were too few. Some were committed, some were looking for a free lunch. Even with the adrenalin of enthusiasm, the environment was harsh, the conditions austere. There was no consistent plan, no consistent leadership, no continuity. The media quickly tired of the event in the way that the media always tire of such things, and many of the celebrities who had flocked to Alcatraz found other worthy moments and other worthy causes that held the promise of network coverage and camera crews.
This is not to impugn, in any way, the commitment of people such as Richard Oakes, LaNada Means, Stella Leach, Joe Bill, John Trudell, Ed Castillo, Denise Quitaquit, and Ross Harden. The occupation simply had too many loose ends and loose cannons to succeed.
And yet succeed it did. Not in its attempt to occupy the island and turn the facilities into a cultural park, or an institution for Native American Studies, or a spiritual gathering place, or an Indian foundation for ecology. Rather, the occupation turned Alcatraz into an emblem of Native resistance and pride.
Vine Deloria, Jr., said it well: “Alcatraz was a big enough symbol that for the first time this century Indians were taken seriously.” Certainly the episode caught the government’s attention, though I suspect that Alcatraz was forgotten a month after the island was cleared. But I like to imagine that Deloria wasn’t talking only about the politicians in Washington. I like to imagine that he was talking about Native people taking ourselves seriously, that for perhaps the first time in a long time, we were able to see what might be possible with imagination, commitment, and a little organization.
The occupation of Alcatraz ended on June 10, 1971, when police and federal agents removed the last fifteen people from the Rock.
Whenever I’m out in California and cross the Golden Gate and look down on Alcatraz, I imagine how it might be if we went back there with better advance planning. We’d bring plenty of food and water this time. Solar panels, generators, stoves, pots and pans, utensils, composting toilets, toilet paper, sleeping bags and blankets, computers, a video camera, a short-wave radio, cellphones. We’d make sure our community included at least one doctor, several nurses, an electrician, a plumber, a carpenter, storytellers and artists, a mediator to help with any conflicts that might arise, an embedded journalist to handle the publicity and news releases, a big drum, and someone with a guitar, who could sing Don Ross, Robbie Robertson, and Buffy Sainte-Marie.
We’d probably need a lawyer, and if we couldn’t endure living alongside the real thing, we could get an actor such as Wes Studi to play the part. Oh, and lots of large-print books.
Retired Indians. That’s the key to a new occupation. Assault Alcatraz with senior citizens. Native elders. Those of us who have nothing better to do and are looking for a good story that our children can tell our grandkids. Young people are too busy to sit around on a large, grey rock in the middle of a large, grey bay. They have their lives to live, families to raise. A second occupation of Alcatraz is a job for the bucket-list brigade. Sure, there’d be some physical labour involved, some exertion, but with any luck, no one would have a heart attack or break a hip, and Hollywood might even make a movie about us.
I wonder who they’d get to play me.
Deloria was right. Alcatraz’s value was largely symbolic. But it also revealed the complex of fault lines in Native-White relations, and almost before the aftershocks of the occupation had settled, new tremors began rattling doors and breaking windows across North America. The epicentre for much of this seismic activity was the American Indian Movement. AIM had been a part of the Alcatraz occupation, and in November of 1970, while the Rock was still in full swing, AIM staged a Thanksgiving Day protest, taking over Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts and painting it red. Then, with Alcatraz in the rear-view mirror for less than a month, AIM showed up at Mount Rushmore on July 4, 1971, as uninvited and unwanted guests at America’s Independence Day celebrations.
There is no precise way to describe AIM. The original organization was formed in the summer of 1968 in Minneapolis, ostensibly to deal with police brutality against Native people in the Twin Cities area. Under the initial leadership of Native activists such as George Mitchell (Ojibway), Dennis Banks (Ojibway), and Clyde Bellecourt (Ojibway), AIM organized Indian patrols to shadow the police and to monitor their activities and conduct. As well, it helped to develop alternative schools—the Little Red Schoolhouse and Heart of the Earth—for Native children, many of whom were having a difficult time in public schools, and lobbied for programs on behalf of Native families who had been forced into the Twin Cities as a result of relocation.
I don’t know that the leaders of AIM ever imagined the organization to be a knight on a horse roaming the countryside in search of dragons. And even if they had thought of themselves as a paramilitary unit, a flying squad, as some have claimed, they were inadequately trained, badly coordinated, and poorly armed. AIM was, from the beginning, a loosely managed group of Native men and women who had simply had enough, who decided, given the choice between doing nothing or acting, that they would act.
As it turned out, how AIM would act and where was determined by circumstances not necessarily of its making. None of AIM’s major confrontations and occupations was planned as such. Each began as an attempt to remedy an injustice and/or to garner some on-camera publicity. When these protests escalated into violence, as a number of them did, governmental antipathy and blinkered law enforcement were as responsible for what followed as was AIM. Sometimes more so.
In February of 1972, AIM went into Gordon, Nebraska, to protest the death of a fifty-one-year-old Native man, Raymond Yellow Thunder. Yellow Thunder had been kidnapped by four White men and a White woman, who stripped him of his pants, took him to the Gordon American Legion Hall, and shoved him, half-naked, out on the dance floor. Yellow Thunder was drunk at the time. So were his assailants. Afterward, they took the older man outside and beat him. The whole thing was supposed to be a joke. It was a Saturday night, after all. What better way to celebrate than to grab a couple of drinks, assault an Indian, have a good laugh? No harm done.
Eight days later, Yellow Thunder’s body was found in the cab of a pickup truck on a used car lot. Cause of death was determined to be a cerebral hemorrhage.
The Sheridan County Attorney called the affair a cruel practical joke. AIM called it murder, and they demanded and got a full investigation, which included a second autopsy. Melvin and Leslie Hare, the brothers who had done the lion’s share of the beating, were arrested, tried, convicted of manslaughter, and sentenced to one year in prison.
One year.
I know it doesn’t seem like much of a sentence, but, according to the oral history in the area, the Hares were the first White men to be convicted of killing an Indian.
In the fall of 1972, AIM, along with the National Indian Brotherhood, the National Indian Youth Council, and five other Native groups, organized the Trail of Broken Treaties, a car caravan that travelled from the west coast to Washington, D.C., to lobby for Native sovereignty and treaty rights and to call attention to the problems of poverty on reserves and reservations.
The caravan, about a thousand strong, arrived in Washington in early November, about a week before the presidential elections. Arrangements to house the protestors were supposed to have been in place, but either through poor planning or government duplicity, housing never materialized. Tired and angry, the protestors marched on the Bureau of Indian Affairs building and took it over. For the next seven days, frustrated Indians ransacked the building.
I was in Salt Lake City at the time, working as the Counselor for Indian Students at the University of Utah. The Native community in town met with the Trail of Broken Treaties when the caravan came through. Some of us provided overnight housing for the people. Others provided supplies—blankets, sleeping bags, canned goods—for the long trip east. Everyone offered support and encouragement.
At first none of us wanted to believe the reports of vandalism. Destroying BIA files might have had some symbolic power, but the loss of those records also had the potential to hurt tribes, to set them back in their negotiations with the government, to allow Washington to drag its feet. The damage didn’t make much sense. And when the media in Salt Lake came calling to get our views on the matter, we all mumbled supportive platitudes about Native rights and government deceit, but privately, among ourselves, we thought the destruction had been stupid.
Sure, we understood rage, but the vandalism was still stupid.
Many years later, at a conference in Phoenix, I ran into a guy who had been in the BIA building during the occupation. I made the mistake of sharing my opinion about the destruction, and we almost wound up in a fight. “You weren’t there,” he told me, “so you don’t get it. You didn’t see the files. Our lives were in those files. The bastards had us locked up in folders.”
We didn’t come to any agreement, but he was right about one thing. I wasn’t there.
And I wasn’t in Custer, South Dakota, either.
On January 20, 1973, Darld Schmitz and Wesley Bad Heart Bull were in Bill’s Bar in Buffalo Gap, a small hamlet some forty-two miles southeast of Custer. It was a Saturday night. Both men had been drinking. Schmitz was particularly offensive, bragging that one day he would “get himself an Indian.” Words were exchanged between the two men, and later, outside the saloon, Schmitz attacked Bad Heart Bull and stabbed him to death. Schmitz had threatened Bad Heart Bull inside the bar, shouting that he would “kill the son of a bitch.” There were witnesses who heard the threat, and there were witnesses who saw Schmitz murder Bad Heart Bull. Schmitz even admitted to killing Bad Heart Bull.
But instead of being charged with first-degree or seconddegree homicide, Schmitz was charged with second-degree manslaughter and immediately released.
On February 6, Dennis Banks and Russell Means, two of AIM’s leaders, along with about eighty supporters, arrived in Custer in the middle of a blizzard to meet with County Attorney Hobart Gates. The charges against Schmitz, AIM argued, should be amended to first- or second-degree murder. Gates refused. In spite of all the evidence and the testimony of the witnesses, Gates saw the killing as a barroom brawl gone wrong. Gates’s decision was met with outrage. Tempers flared. The police rushed in with nightsticks and tear gas. The Indians defended themselves with chairs and rocks and bricks, whatever happened to be at hand. And, in a flash, a full-scale riot, which lasted the afternoon, erupted inside and outside the courthouse.
About twenty-seven Indians were arrested, including Means and Sarah Bad Heart Bull, Wesley’s mother, who was charged with “riot with arson.” She would later be convicted and sentenced to one to five years in prison. Schmitz was charged with second-degree manslaughter and acquitted by an all-White jury. Sarah Bad Heart Bull served five months of her sentence. Schmitz spent part of one day in jail.
Twenty-one days after the confrontation in Custer, AIM and fifty-four cars filled with supporters left Calico, South Dakota, drove onto the Pine Ridge reservation, and took over the village of Wounded Knee. Pine Ridge was in the middle of a civil war that had many of the more traditional Lakota at odds with the tribal chairman, Dick Wilson, and his personal security force known as the “GOONs” (Guardians of the Oglala Nation). Even before AIM arrived, Pine Ridge was a divided, violent place where the per capita murder rate was higher than that of Detroit. Unnerving symbols of this division were the sandbags in front of the tribal council office and 50-calibre machine guns mounted on the roof.
AIM’s appearance at Pine Ridge was not a surprise to anyone. The organization had been invited by a faction on the reservation to help them in the fight against Wilson, and the FBI had informants inside AIM. In his memoir, Wounded Knee: A Personal Account, Stanley Lyman, the Bureau of Indian Affairs superintendent at Pine Ridge, recalls asking U.S. Marshal Reese Kash how he knew so much about AIM’s plans. Kash responded that their information came from “a very reliable source.” So when AIM drove through Pine Ridge on February 27, federal marshals and FBI agents were waiting for them.
But instead of butting heads at the tribal council office, the fifty-plus cars in the AIM caravan drove right on by and took over the village of Wounded Knee.
Thus began the siege of Wounded Knee. At the height of the siege, the government had at its disposal some fifteen armoured cars, over 100,000 rounds of M-16 ammunition, submachine guns, gas masks, bulletproof vests, sniper rifles with night scopes, and an unlimited number of federal marshals, FBI agents, military personnel, and local law enforcement.
The number of people inside Wounded Knee hovered around two hundred and fifty. By contrast with the government’s arsenal, AIM had around thirty or forty weapons, mostly small calibre. The most potent piece was probably an AK-47 that belonged to a Kiowa from Oklahoma named Bobby Onco. If Dennis Banks’s recollections are correct, Onco didn’t have any bullets for the rifle, but was able to use the weapon as a prop to impress the media. Most of the other guns didn’t have much in the way of ammunition either. No one had done any advance planning on securing the village or on what would be needed for an extended occupation. From a logistics point of view, Wounded Knee felt a great deal like Alcatraz, albeit without the waterfront setting and the great views.
But unlike Alcatraz, the general goodwill that had attended the Rock was not to be found at Wounded Knee. From the beginning, the media did not treat this occupation with the same grace and good humour. Celebrities did not flock to the Dakota plains to tour the encampment and show their support for the cause on the evening news. Money did not pour in, as it had in San Francisco. There was little of the magic that had been such a major component of Alcatraz. One newspaper story reminded its readers that South Dakota was not California. As though that needed saying.
Support for Wounded Knee was more grassroots, more militant. Almost immediately, all around North America, demonstrations and marches were organized to bring media attention to the occupation and to raise money. While the FBI and the U.S. Marshals tried to cut the village off from the outside world, determined groups and individuals, Indian and White, made air supply drops from small planes and used the rutted South Dakota landscape— the arroyos and the coulees—to run the government lines and bring supplies into the village under cover of darkness.
Sometime during the occupation, I don’t remember exactly when, there was a big rally on the steps of the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City in support of Wounded Knee. There were speeches, calls for action. A blanket was carried through the crowd to collect donations, and all of us tossed money and tobacco and food stamps on it. Then an older woman got up and asked the question that was asked again and again during this period of Indian history.
“Where are the warriors?”
Where are the warriors? Even now that call to arms heats my blood. It certainly did on that day in Salt Lake. When the rally ended, about a dozen men climbed into a van and three cars and headed east on highway 80. I was one of those men. As we drove into the mountains, as the passion of the moment cooled, I remember thinking that this was a mistake. I mean, I had a job. I had a wife and a baby. I was working with Indian students at the university. It wasn’t as though I wasn’t trying to do my part.
But then again, the people inside Wounded Knee probably had jobs, too. Many of them had children. I wasn’t special. I was simply . . . safe.
When we crossed the border into Wyoming, we were stopped by the police. A warrior might have leaped into the van in Salt Lake City, but what jumped out was just a frightened twenty-nine-yearold university administrator. I had had some experience with police, but up to that moment, I had never had a gun pointed directly at me. Somehow the cops had known that we were coming. They asked questions about the rally in Salt Lake and about Wounded Knee. We said we were just sightseeing, and the police told us to “shut the fuck up.” This comedy routine went on for most of an hour until a tow truck came along and took the van away.
After that, the police left. I must have seen them go, but I can’t remember them leaving. Suddenly, they were just gone. We waited for a while by the side of that cold road, not sure what we were supposed to do. Then, we all squeezed into the remaining cars and drove home.
For seventy-one days, government forces on the perimeter of Wounded Knee and the Native people inside the village yelled at each other, threatened each other, tried their hand at negotiations, and shot at each other. When the occupation ended, one U.S. Marshal, Lloyd Grimm, had been wounded, paralyzed from the waist down, and two Indians, Frank Clearwater and Lawrence Lamont, had been shot and killed by government snipers.
A great many people fixate on AIM as the first truly militant Native organization in North America. And they believe that AIM was concerned primarily with initiating confrontations and occupations at a national level, activities that would garner media coverage, activities that would give AIM an international profile and Aboriginal concerns a public face.
Both notions are true, and both are false. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Opechancanough, Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, Pontiac, Osceola, and others led resistance actions long before AIM came along, actions that were far more intense and deadly. Nor was AIM the first pan-Indian organization in North America. The Society of American Indians was founded, ironically enough, on Columbus Day in 1911 by many of the Native intellectuals of the time: Dr. Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai-Apache), Charles Eastman (Dakota), Thomas L. Sloan (Omaha), Charles E. Dagenett (Peoria), Laura Cornelius (Oneida), and Henry Standing Bear (Oglala Lakota). For the next twenty years it was the main Indian lobby in the United States. In the 1930s the Society faded from public engagement, and the slack wasn’t picked up until 1944, when the National Congress of American Indians was formed. While NCAI has been effective in many of its lobbying efforts—in 1954, it was successful in defeating legislation that would have allowed states to assume criminal and civil jurisdiction over Native people—like the Society of American Indians, it has tended to be conservative and conciliatory. At one point in the ’60s, one part of its working slogan was, “Indians Don’t Demonstrate.”
The “Indians Don’t Demonstrate” sentiment did not endear the National Congress of American Indians to organizations such as the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) and the Women of All Red Nations (WARN). NIYC was formed in 1961 at a conference in Chicago under the leadership of people such as Clyde Warrior (Ponca) and Mel Tom (Walker River Paiute). WARN was organized in 1974 under the leadership of Lorelei DeCora Means (Minneconjou Lakota), Madonna Thunderhawk (Hunkpapa Lakota), and Phyllis Young (Hunkpapa Lakota).
In many ways, both NIYC and WARN were as proactive on Native issues as AIM. During the 1960s, NIYC was involved with civil rights activities and was on the front lines of the Indian fishingrights dispute in the Northwest. In the ’70s, the Council assisted tribes who were trying to resist coal and uranium exploration and mining. At the same time, NIYC worked hard to improve access to education and job training and to encourage Native people to participate in the political process on their own terms. WARN was initially formed to support AIM, but they quickly expanded their activities, focusing their energies on Native civil rights and especially the rights of Native women and their families.
Still, for better and for worse, AIM was the organization that got most of the media attention. And it was this organization, and in particular its leaders, who took the brunt of law enforcement.
In Canada, Native political organizations began with the League of Indians of Canada in 1919. The League was founded by F.O. Loft (Mohawk) and was an extension of the American-based Council of Tribes. Its mandate was to encourage Ottawa to recognize Aboriginal land rights and to deal with the various grievances that Native people had with the federal government.While the League may have been a good idea, it wasn’t widely supported by many tribes and was actively discouraged by the government. In fact, Ottawa’s dislike for such ideas was codified in 1927 when a provision was added to the Indian Act that forbade Native people from forming political organizations. Along with a provision that prohibited Indians from speaking their Aboriginal languages.
Blacks in the United States got the vote in 1870, though the Jim Crow laws in the South made participation in the political process virtually impossible. American women got the vote in 1909. Non-Native Canadian women got the federal vote in 1918. If Blacks and women could vote, Loft reasoned, then it might be time for Natives to have a political organization of their own.
It was an error in logic, of course, but you can see how Loft might have got the notion that equality was in the air.
So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the League of Indians of Canada didn’t last very long. And given the generous attitudes and encouragements of the government, another Native political organization wouldn’t be attempted until after World War II. Of course, Indian political organizations didn’t disappear just because the government didn’t like them. They went underground. One story I’ve heard is that at the beginning of some of these political meetings, to avoid the possibility of prosecution, the participants would sing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” If anyone asked, they could say that they belonged to a Bible study group. I don’t know if this is a true story, but I believe it. More than that, I like it. It makes us sound downright . . . subversive.
In 1945, Canada saw another short-lived attempt at a national organization, the North American Indian Brotherhood, which failed quickly, partly because it was seen as a parochial (Catholic) organization. Sixteen years later in 1961, the National Indian Council was formed. It was to include Status Indians, non-Status Indians, and the Métis, but when these three groups failed to work together, the organization was split into two forums, the Native Council of Canada, which was to look after the needs of non-Status Indians and the Métis, and the National Indian Brotherhood, which was to look after the needs of Status Indians in Canada.
The Native Council of Canada didn’t fare much better than the National Indian Council, and in 1983, the Métis separated from the Native Council of Canada and formed their own national organization, the Métis National Council. Even before that, the Inuit, in 1971, organized under the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada. The Inuit had not joined up with either the Native Council of Canada or the National Indian Brotherhood but had bided their time, forming their own organization to look after their specific needs. Then, in 1982, the National Indian Brotherhood broadened its mandate to try to include all Native people, changed its name to the Assembly of First Nations, and made itself over as a more representative national organization, even though, in the end, it really only represented Status Indians.
Not every band in Canada belongs to the Assembly of First Nations, just as not all tribes are members of the National Congress of American Indians. Still, these two organizations, for better and sometimes for worse, are the main players in North American Native politics.
And after all the dust had cleared from this shuffling and restructuring, Native people found themselves in the new millennium with the National Congress of American Indians on the American side of the line and the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, the Métis National Council, and the Assembly of First Nations on the Canadian side.
As for AIM, while its influence was potent, its tenure was short-lived. By 1990, most of the leadership of AIM was either in jail or had had their lives destroyed by government sanctions, legal and illegal.
There are many people, Indians as well as Whites, who have little good to say about AIM, who continue to describe the leadership as thugs and criminals. Detractors point to the looting of the BIA building in Washington, D.C., the riot in Gordon, Nebraska, and the seventy-one-day occupation of Wounded Knee in the winter of 1973 as proof that AIM believed in violence and the destruction of property as legitimate responses to injustice.
Over the years, I’ve sat on panel discussions with such wellmeaning people. Their default position is always that organizations such as AIM need to have more faith in the laws of the land and the judicial system. It’s a great theory. Simple and elegant. I can see the attraction. It’s the kind of theory that someone unfamiliar with Native history and the integrity of the justice system might consider proposing.
The idea that justice is blind and that everyone is equal before the law reminds me of a traditional story that I’ve heard over the years, in which Coyote tries to convince a band of ducks that he has their best interests at heart. Even if you don’t know the story, the premise alone should make you chuckle.
Besieged by coyotes in Ottawa and Washington, Native people stopped asking for justice and began demanding it. Asking had gotten Indians little more than a paternalistic pat on the head. AIM and other activist groups were tired of begging, tired of being ignored. Were there ways to frame Native concerns other than with demonstrations, confrontations, and, on occasion, violence? No.
I’m not trying to be provocative here. The fact is, the primary way that Ottawa and Washington deal with Native people is to ignore us. They know that the court system favours the powerful and the wealthy and the influential, and that, if we buy into the notion of an impartial justice system, tribes and bands can be forced through a long, convoluted, and expensive process designed to wear us down and bankrupt our economies.
Be good. Play by our rules. Don’t cause a disturbance.
It’s a fool’s game. AIM and the other Native activist organizations knew this. Hell, any activist organization should know this. It’s not a secret. But governments here and around the world also know that fear and poverty can hold an injustice in place in perpetuity, no matter how flagrant, no matter how obscene.
During the 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said, “If the world’s richest and most powerful nations do not deal with the world’s hardest and most intractable problems, they simply will not be dealt with.”
Turns out he wasn’t being satiric. Which explains, I guess, why global warming, global poverty, and global conflict are all doing so well.
But enough. While pessimism and cynicism have been the salt and pepper in the stew that is Native-White history, there is no reason we can’t change the recipe. We could, if we wanted, put the past behind us. We could say that today is a new day. We could, if we were so inclined, decide to start all over again.
Why don’t we do that? What don’t we give that a try?