The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

by David Treuer

  On November 20, Oakes and seventy-seven other Indians—mostly students—arrived on the island with plans to stay. But the occupation was fraught from the beginning. Many of the Indians hadn’t brought clothing, basic supplies, warm jackets, or bedrolls. Many of them, however, brought a lot of pot. In the egalitarian and anarchic spirit of the times, the activists initially eschewed a leadership structure, but they soon had to accept that that didn’t work, so they formed a leadership council. Oakes was tagged as spokesman for the occupation, but he and Nordwall quarreled from the start. (Jockeying for power and position became a recurring melody in the song of American Indian social movements beginning with Alcatraz.) At some times, the occupiers scrounged to feed themselves; at others, donated food and other supplies threatened to sink the island. On Thanksgiving the island was littered with frozen turkeys. The rock group Creedence Clearwater Revival donated a boat to the cause but failed to donate a skipper. In the news the occupation sounded great, but on the ground it was a mess.

  The leaders met with representatives from the state of California, but the negotiations soured. President Nixon, notoriously uninterested in domestic affairs, nevertheless was something of a friend to “the Indian.” He had been raised Quaker, and the Quakers had a long history of supporting Indian causes. His revered football coach at Whittier College, Wallace “Chief” Newman, was a full-blooded Luiseño from the La Jolla Reservation. Nixon wrote that “I think I admired him more and learned more from him than any other man aside from my father. He drilled into me a competitive spirit and the determination to come back after you have been knocked down or after you lose. He also gave me an acute understanding that what really matters is not a man’s background, his color, his race, or his religion, but only his character.” Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, urged him to find common ground with the Indians on Alcatraz as well. Nevertheless, negotiations with the federal officials Nixon sent failed. But nothing hurt the effort more than the internecine fights between the group’s leaders. They used the attention of celebrities like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Anthony Quinn and Jonathan Winters to jockey for attention. Oakes was accused of keeping donations and money for himself. In early January 1970, his twelve-year-old daughter, Yvonne, fell from a structure on the island; she died five days later. Oakes and the rest of his family left, though he continued to fight for Indian rights until he was shot to death in an altercation with a YMCA camp manager in 1972.

  Conditions on the island worsened. Communication to the mainland was cut and the death of Yvonne Oakes soured many occupiers and supporters on the whole endeavor. People were living in squalor, violence spiked. Public support waxed, then waned. Cut off on the mainland, Nordwall drifted away from the occupation. With Oakes and Nordwall gone, LaNada Boyer Means (unrelated to Russell Means), John Trudell, and Stella Leach took the lead. LaNada Means (Shoshone-Bannock) was the first Native student at UC Berkeley when she entered in 1968; two years later there were only four. (She was later instrumental in establishing the Ethnic Studies Program at Berkeley: a positive and powerful postscript to a troubled moment in Indian activism.) They tried to continue negotiations to turn the island into a cultural center, but talks with Bob Robertson of the National Council on Indian Opportunity soured and died. Fires destroyed several buildings. The federal government began the process of transferring the island to the National Park Service, and on June 11, 1971, it had the remaining fifteen protesters forcibly removed. After nineteen months, the occupation was over.

  In the end Alcatraz became part of the national park system. No Indian educational and/or cultural center was built there. The episode had a deep and lasting impact, however. It caught the attention (and sympathy) of the Nixon administration and was hugely influential in Nixon’s decision to formally end the termination period. And it inspired AIM to bigger actions. In 1970, AIM occupied an abandoned property at a naval air station in Minneapolis in order to draw attention to Indian educational needs. In the same year, the organization took over a dam on the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation in Wisconsin in order to secure reparations for the largely illegal flooding of much of the reservation. (The damage claims from the dams were eventually settled, though it would be a stretch to suggest that AIM’s involvement led directly to the settlement.) In 1971, AIM also briefly took over BIA headquarters in Washington, D.C., in order to protest BIA policies and paternalism. Twenty-four members were arrested for trespassing. Although there were no concessions, at a BIA meeting convened after the protesters were removed, BIA commissioner Louis Bruce showed his AIM membership card.

  In 1972, AIM embarked on its biggest action yet. In the summer, Robert Burnette, chairman of the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, gave voice to the idea of a caravan that would travel from reservation to reservation across the country in order to draw media attention to the struggles of Indians there and to the federal government’s failure to address them or to meet its treaty obligations to sovereign Indian nations. He dubbed the procession the “Trail of Broken Treaties.” AIM, sensing an opportunity—and eager to get back to Washington and get what it wanted, fortified with many more people and a bona fide mission—jumped on board and began organizing in cities across the country. They were emboldened by the support of tribal leadership on the reservations, including the blessing of traditional elders, and spurred on by the murder of Richard Oakes in September. George Mitchell and other leaders in Minneapolis drafted a twenty-point list of demands, and in October a caravan of cars, vans, and buses started off from the West Coast, gathering momentum as it moved east. In Minneapolis a critical mass collected, pausing for a week of meetings, civil disobedience, and car repairs before continuing on. AIM was a relatively new organization at this point and had the chance, in 1972, to learn that coalitions matter, that allies matter, that methods matter. The Trail of Broken Treaties was widely supported by Indian citizens and by a host of other organizations. Material, administrative, social, and political support for the action was offered by the Native American Rights Fund, the National Indian Youth Council, the National Indian Leadership Training Program, the American Indian Committee on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, the National American Indian Council, the National Council on Indian Opportunity, and even the National Indian Brotherhood (an organization from Canada). But the resulting standoff with the government would be AIM’s show. Never again would AIM receive that kind of broad support, especially after violence seeped into its character in the way it did.

  The caravan began to arrive in Washington, D.C., a few hundred Indians strong, on November 1, 1972, a week before the presidential election. As at Alcatraz, they arrived with no food and no place to stay. The permits they had applied for, to protest near the Washington Monument, had been denied, and government officials (keenly aware of the advancing caravan) had quietly shut down any places where the Indians could protest, hold press conferences, or even stay. They found refuge in the basement of St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church at Sixteenth and Newton in the northwest quadrant of the city, a predominantly black area. Police convened at the church and refused to leave when the pastor told them to get lost. Meanwhile, the congregation was confused, the kitchen staff was overwhelmed, and there was no space for the youth activities the church normally sponsored. Tensions escalated between the Indian activists and the black teens who wanted their space back, and soon the police stood between the two groups. Eventually the police left and tensions eased, but the situation was obviously untenable.

  On November 3, the Indians headed to Lafayette Park and then, without much forethought, to the Bureau of Indian Affairs: if the White House was going to shut them out of D.C., they would go to the agency tasked with helping Indians. Late in the morning, they entered the BIA with their bedrolls and belongings and gathered in the auditorium. The leaders crowded into the offices of Harrison Loesch, assistant secretary for public land management, and John Crow of the BIA. Loesch, alarmed that the Indians intended to stay, complained that th
ey had been let into the building only for a meeting. Everything went south from there. At an AIM press conference on the building steps, Russell Means channeled the legitimate grievances that had brought the caravan to D.C., and its frustration at the government’s failure to engage with them, into what would be his characteristic tendency toward violence. He told the crowd that “without meaningful change white America will not have a happy Bicentennial celebration. You can see the frustration here, in the young people and even in the old. Our full-bloods, the chiefs of our tribes, are saying it’s time to pick up guns.”

  Almost immediately, the government scrambled to find accommodations for the protesters—more to keep the machinery of Washington running smoothly before the election than because they were seriously worried about armed resistance. Loesch worked a minor miracle and found housing at churches, synagogues, the Salvation Army, and even at Bolling and Andrews Air Force Bases. But sensing a shift in power, the Indians not only refused to leave the BIA but also demanded a meeting with one of Nixon’s representatives, preferably John Ehrlichman (who twenty months later would be convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury for his part in the Watergate scandal and subsequent cover-up). Ehrlichman appointed Brad Patterson to represent the White House, and a meeting was scheduled, initially for three in the afternoon. But then the government postponed the meeting till eight that night, and in the meantime police began to mass outside the building. The occupiers got nervous, and around five p.m. they took over the building and barricaded the doors. Panic ensued. BIA workers escaped out of windows and down fire escapes. One pro-Indian lawyer was lowered to the ground out of a window by AIM leader Clyde Bellecourt.

  On Friday, November 3, there were resolutions and meetings and countermeetings and then more resolutions. Security forces were ready to forcibly evict the protesters but received instructions from Nixon not to. He preferred to stall through court orders and negotiations rather than risk confrontations on the eve of the election. Some agreements were reached and the occupiers were set to leave when, suddenly distrustful, they reoccupied the building. The occupiers put out a call for help, and boxes of food and clothing were donated, and so was a teepee, which was set up out front with a sign that read “NATIVE AMERICAN EMBASSY”—just the sort of photo op AIM was keen for. Marion Barry, then on the Washington, D.C., school board, stopped by. So did LaDonna Harris, president of Americans for Indian Opportunity, who was later instrumental in helping the Menominee regain tribal recognition and Taos Pueblo regain control of sacred Blue Lake. Late on Friday, more than a hundred protesters armed with broomsticks and makeshift clubs faced off with U.S. marshals in front of the BIA, but the marshals didn’t engage them, and the situation deescalated. By Saturday the battle had moved to the courts after a judge issued an order for the arrest of the protesters, but the occupiers were still restive. Means and others painted their faces, again fanning the flames of violence. “War paint traditionally means that the Indian who is going into battle is prepared to die,” he told reporters. “If federal officers are ordered to evict us, we know there will be Indian deaths.” But why? And over what exactly?

  The occupiers finally released the twenty-point memo they’d drafted back in Minneapolis. Its provisions included:

  Restoration of constitutional treaty-making authority

  Establishment of treaty commission to make new treaties

  An address to the American people & joint sessions of Congress

  Commission to review treaty commitments & violations

  Resubmission of unratified treaties to the Senate

  All Indians to be governed by treaty relations

  Mandatory relief against treaty rights violations

  Judicial recognition of Indian right to interpret treaties

  Creation of congressional joint committee on reconstruction of Indian relations

  Land reform and restoration of a 110 million-acre Native land base

  Revision of 25 U.S.C. 163; restoration of rights to Indians terminated by enrollment and revocation of prohibitions against “dual benefits”

  Repeal of state laws enacted under Public Law 280 (1953)

  Resume federal protective jurisdiction for offenses against Indians

  Abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs by 1976

  Creation of an “Office of Federal Indian Relations and Community Reconstruction”

  Priorities and purpose of the proposed new office

  Indian commerce and tax immunities

  Protection of Indians’ religious freedom and cultural integrity

  National referendums, local options, and forms of Indian organization

  Health, housing, employment, economic development, and education

  Many of the demands were sensible and might have been enacted with little difficulty. Framing crimes perpetrated by non-Indians against Indians as federal crimes would certainly have taken the prosecution of those crimes out of the racialized localities in which they were committed. Termination and relocation legislation was already being rolled back and could have been pushed along faster and more completely. The government might have been pressured to recommit to, and to privilege, the treaty agreements it so rarely honored. It was also not only possible but necessary to restructure or at least to restaff the BIA, given the corruption and mismanagement that had plagued the office since its inception. Other demands, however, were plainly out of the realm of possibility: giving 110 million acres back to the Indians; reopening the treaty-making process; removing the U.S. Congress from the government-to-government relationship between tribes and the federal government. The AIM leadership demanded a meeting with Nixon. Nixon refused. The “leadership,” after all, had not been elected or otherwise officially appointed, so they were hardly in a position to reaffirm a government-to-government relationship between tribes and the federal government.

  By Monday, whatever goodwill had existed within the government had evaporated. Election Day was twenty-four hours away. The government had in its hand a court order for the eviction and arrest of the protesters. Upon hearing this, the protesters erupted into an orgy of violence. They made a big show of ripping open cabinets, burning files and desks, and tearing out fixtures. By the time they were done, they had caused more than $2 million worth of damage. Nixon muttered that he was “through doing things to help Indians.” His special consultant Leonard Garment, however, thought it was worth the effort to try for one last round of meetings. Garment tagged Frank Carlucci to do the talking. Carlucci, a midlevel CIA agent who would later be implicated in the murder of Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba, would become part of the “government within the government” in the CIA and then the Department of Defense and an informal adviser under presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Bush. He seemed perfect for the job—stable, dark, sneaky, and sensitive to the place where power and desire overlapped. He immediately engaged the AIM leaders in negotiations, and by the next day, the government had agreed to give them $66,650 to help the caravan return home. The money was transferred in cash to Vernon Bellecourt in the presence of AIM leaders and officials from the NCAI, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and the White House. It is unclear what happened to it after that, but most of the caravan had to find their own way back to their communities. Rumors circulated that while a portion of the money was later used at Wounded Knee, some of it paid for AIM leadership to fly home in comfort. This was never proved. In any event, the occupation was over, with little accomplished.

  Meeting during the American Indian Movement takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C., 1972

  AIM had begun to forge its image, however—that of the proud Plains warrior fighting the overwhelming forces of whiteness that sought to erase him. And it was a “him”—wome
n were often forced to march in the back of a protest or asked not to march at all, as were lighter-skinned Indians. The leaders were obsessed with image and given to grandstanding. Yet in the midst of the counterculture movement that co-opted so much Indian aesthetic and culture, AIM was doing one thing right: it was showing Indians around the country that they were proud of being Indian, and in the most uncomfortable ways possible for the mainstream. Indians from reservations and cities alike were, for the first time, pushing back against the acculturation machine that was a part of America’s domestic imperial agenda, and doing it loud and proud. My uncle Bobby Matthews was of that generation. AIM came up when he came up, though violence and tradition were combined differently in him.

  Black Community Survival Conference, Oakland, California, March 30, 1972

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  BOBBY’S FATHER, Howard Matthews, was one of nine kids born to Izzie Matthews in Bena, Minnesota, on the Leech Lake Reservation. She was a full-blooded Ojibwe. Her on-again, off-again husband, Harris Matthews, was a lumberjack, bar owner, and bootlegger, originally from Chicago. Harris was notorious. He wore an eye patch (he’d lost the sight in his right eye to shingles). He drove a Model A. By all accounts, he’d try anything to make a buck. He’d rice. He’d bootleg. He trapped wearing ice skates because it was faster. Howard and his brothers and sisters grew up fending for themselves. Most of them were sent to Tomah Indian Industrial School in Tomah, Wisconsin, where they learned English and fought Ho-Chunks. Howard inherited his father’s roving, hard-driving, not entirely legal ways of putting money in his pocket and bread on the table. He would cut pulp by hand in the woods, and when Bobby and his brother Mikey got home from school they’d put down their bags and go out to the woods and help Howard and their mother, Betty, peel and stack the logs. In the summer they all traveled to Ray, Minnesota, near the Canadian border, to pick blueberries. The owner of the general store there, Ben Huffman, paid Howard, Betty, their five children, and a handful of their cousins who came along twenty-five cents a quart to pick blueberries.