Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

by Chris Hedges

  Michael Red Cloud is five feet, eleven inches and two hundred and eighty pounds, with the thick, muscular arms of a weight lifter. We sit and speak quietly. A tiny brown field mouse darts in and out of the rocks, sometimes pausing on a boulder, its face twitching. Michael, who is related through his biological mother to Chief Red Cloud, was born in Rapid City. His father, whom he has never met, is Mexican. His blood ties to Red Cloud, whom he defends as a great and misunderstood chief, give his perspective on Lakota history an interesting edge. Red Cloud, one of the principle chiefs of the Oglala Teton Sioux, successfully fought back the prospectors and settlers who carved out a wagon route known as the Bozeman Trail, which ran through the heart of Lakota territory in Wyoming to the Montana gold fields from Colorado’s South Platte River. Red Cloud’s campaign, known as Red Cloud’s War, which lasted from 1866 to 1868, closed the trail and destroyed the forts that guarded it.35 He was the only Indian chief to win a war with the United States. His victory resulted in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie.36 The treaty ceded to the Indians the western half of South Dakota, including the Black Hills, along with much of Montana and Wyoming. But, like most treaties Washington signed, it would soon be violated.

  After Custer’s 1874 discovery of gold in the Black Hills, the government set out to seize the land promised to the Indians. Custer’s defeat a year later gave the government the opening it was looking for and, threatening to cut off the rations of Indians living on the Indian agencies, it forced a compliant group of Sioux leaders to sell the Black Hills. Federal law required three-quarters of the adult males of the tribe to approve any new treaty. It proved impossible to collect this number of signatures, but Congress ratified the agreement anyway. Red Cloud, who signed the new treaty, later said he did not understand what was in the documents, which historians suspect is true.37 But his compliance, as well as his decision to remain at peace while Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull continued to resist westward expansion, tarnished his reputation among many Lakotas. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull bitterly denounced him.38

  The four of us sit in the harsh sunlight on the top of Sheep Mountain and listen as Mike narrates over the next couple of hours the story of his life.

  Michael Red Cloud takes us later that afternoon to visit his cousin, Will Andrews, who is a gang leader. Recently released from prison, where he was serving time for armed robbery, he now is hiding out on the reservation after Rapid City police put out a warrant for his arrest for a fight that violated his parole. We find him with his girlfriend and small daughter, in a small house built by Habitat for Humanity. Twenty-five and heavyset, he sits shirtless in his living room. The word FOLKS is tattooed across his chest. His face is bruised and bloodied from the gang fight. He was hit in the head with a brick and a chair during the brawl, which took out one of his front teeth and left a gash on his forehead. On his arms are gang tattoos from the Gangster Disciples. The words RIP Manuel are tattooed on his right forearm along with praying hands. He says he never had a job and made money “husslin’.”

  He describes in detail the brawl, the bricks thrown, the broken chair legs used as weapons, and the squad cars that arrived and forced them to run. But he offers no more than a few vague words about the workings of the gang.

  “Gangs function like your family,” Andrews says. “The gang has been my family since I was twelve.”

  Robert E. Gamer’s book The Developing Nations includes a chapter called “Why Men Do Not Revolt.” In it Gamer notes that although the oppressed often do revolt, “the object of their hostility is usually a particular incumbent in an office, an individual they attack in a fight, or another racial group.” There is a deliberate set-up of people of the same race as targets for this hostility. Tribal leaders willing to do the dirty work for the railroads, Indian agents, missionaries, white ranchers, and federal programs are effective masks for what Gamer calls the “patron-client” networks responsible for oppression. This plays out at the highest and lowest levels of the power structure. Gangs of Native Americans, such as the one led by Andrews, vent their fury on rival Native American gangs.

  “The fact that alienated people can be counted on to vent their spleen in ineffectual directions—by fighting among themselves—relieves the government of the need to deal fundamentally with the conditions which cause their frustrations,” Gamer writes. “It even relieves authorities (except following moments of shrill violence) of the need to minimally affect environment and attitudes to reduce alienation. The government merely does the minimum necessary to prevent those few who are prone toward political action from organizing into politically effective groups.”39

  The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 was the last blow to the traditional leadership structure. It replaced traditional tribal elders with elected tribal governments that were easily controlled and manipulated by the federal authorities. This form of colonialism—one perfected by the British, French, and much earlier, by the Roman Empire—permitted the colonialist to rule behind a local, indigenous hierarchy, obscuring the real beneficiaries of colonialism. These collaborators sought to instill the rules and beliefs of the oppressor’s culture.

  Will Andrews, Pine Ridge Reservation.

  This attempt at forced integration, however, can backfire. The Indian children shipped to boarding schools became at times the most potent rebels. They could, like their educated counterparts in the Occupy movements, communicate with the dominant culture as well as the oppressed. They spoke, in essence, two languages. Those who were on track to be assimilated, but who were endowed with a conscience, were acutely aware of the suffering of their people as well as the duplicity and mendacity of the colonialist. They understood power and oppression. They returned to the rez as bicultural and bilingual residents to battle the oppressor. Ho Chi Minh, Mohandas Gandhi, Patrice Lumumba, and the Indians who led the 1973 uprising at Wounded Knee were products of the colonialists’ attempts at assimilation.

  The last act of government assimilation directed toward Indians came in the 1950s, when the federal government created the Relocation Program, an effort to detach Indian people from their land and send them to urban areas where the government would subsidize them while they received job training. Desperate Indian families moved to Minneapolis, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Cleveland, Chicago. Once there, they found that the government provided no assistance if they wanted to go home.40

  “It was the children of these relocated parents who became the American Indian Movement,” said Abourezk:

  Young people who were turned on by the civil-rights movement, who were still connected by family, funerals, summer trips back home, and who were searching for an identity, came back to the reservations in the early 1970s. They were a perfect marriage with the traditional people who had been disempowered and largely ignored on the reservation. These traditional people, who had held off the dominant culture, needed allies against the mixed-bloods, called iyeskas in Lakota language. It was the iyeskas who dominated tribal governments and who soaked up most of the resources and power within the tribe.

  The internal contradictions between Native history and American history are evident the morning Joe, Thomas, and I drive to Crawford, Nebraska, where about one hundred Native Americans on horseback wait a few yards from the spot where Crazy Horse was murdered at Fort Robinson. They are about to begin the fourteenth annual Crazy Horse Ride, a week-long horseback journey to Pine Ridge. American flags, which were once detested strips of cloth to Crazy Horse, are carried by the lead riders. Amid the American flags are the red Lakota flag and a black MIA-POW flag. Many Native Americans insist they fly the American flag as a trophy, since it was captured by their ancestors at Little Big Horn, but the explanation is not entirely convincing. Native Americans, like many minorities and the poor, serve in disproportionately high numbers in the military. The ride this year coincides with the naming of a portion of Highway 20, from Fort Robinson to Hay Springs, as the Crazy Horse Memorial Highway. Nebraska governor Dave Heineman speaks at the event, a
long with John Yellow Bird Steele, chairman of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. Near the speakers is a small marker that reads: “On this spot Crazy Horse, Oglala Chief, was killed September 5, 1877.” A riderless paint horse serves as Crazy Horse’s honorary mount.

  There are few resistance figures in American history as noble as Crazy Horse. He led, long after he knew that ultimate defeat was inevitable, the most effective resistance on the plains, wiping out Custer on the Little Big Horn and two other large cavalry units. “Even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was,” Ian Frazier writes in his book Great Plains, “because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn’t know what a jail looked like.” His “dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic,” Frazier writes. “He never met the President” and “never rode on a train, slept in a boarding house, ate at a table.” And “unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter.”41 He was bayoneted to death after being tricked into walking toward the jail at Fort Robinson. The moment he understood the trap he pulled out a knife and fought back. General Phil Sheridan had intended to ship Crazy Horse to the Dry Tortugas, a small atoll in the Gulf of Mexico, where a U.S. Army garrison ran a prison with cells dug out of the coral, covered with metal bars. Crazy Horse, even dying, would not conform. He refused to lie on the white man’s cot. He insisted on being placed on the floor. He was guarded until he died by armed soldiers. And when he breathed his last, Touch the Clouds, Crazy Horse’s seven-foot Miniconjou friend, pointed to the blanket that covered the chief’s body and said, “This is the lodge of Crazy Horse.”42 His grieving parents buried Crazy Horse in an undisclosed location. The legend says that his bones turned to rocks and his joints to flint. His ferocity of spirit remains, a guiding light for all who seek lives of defiance.

  The Crazy Horse Ride.

  Heineman helps unveil the green road sign, covered by a traditional Indian star quilt that reads “Crazy Horse Ride.” He thanks the Crazy Horse Ride organizers for their commitment to the warrior’s legacy.

  “This is a special day as we honor an iconic leader and warrior,” says Heineman, dressed in gray slacks, a blue blazer with an American flag lapel pin, a white dress shirt, and a red tie. “This marks a very important moment in our collective past.

  “Nebraskans have a tremendous admiration and respect for those who have defended freedom,” Heineman says, adding that he is also a veteran. “We are honored to be part of this important tribute today.”

  Before the riders set off on the trip to Pine Ridge, drummers and singers perform traditional Lakota songs. An Indian leader in a war bonnet drapes a brown and white Indian quilt over the governor’s shoulders. Heineman holds it around himself uncomfortably in the sweltering heat. The tension between service to the nation and service to the ancestors which that nation sought to exterminate plays out at the spot where Crazy Horse had his arms pinned behind him and was bayoneted to death by a white soldier. It imparts to Indian existence a peculiar schizophrenia.

  “Poverty has a lot to do with it,” Jake Little, an Army veteran, tells me as we speak one night in Rapid City, “along with the concept of the akicita, the Lakota protector and provider concept, the male concept”:

  This has been true since the boarding schools from the late 1800s on, although it stopped in 1990. Students were regimented in military fashion, and during the process of being stripped down psychologically, losing their ancestors, their cultural understanding. This concept of being a provider and a protector was directed toward the military. It became honorable to fight in wars on behalf of the U.S. That’s the way it stands. It’s an overwhelming majority of the people on Pine Ridge who honor that U.S. military participation. The strange thing about it, I guess, maybe it’s expected, maybe it’s the whole Stockholm syndrome idea. I don’t think the akicita principle would transfer to any other military around the world. You wouldn’t say, “Well, I’ll fight for Venezuela.” I disagree that there is a valid comparison between our ancient akicita principle, where the akicita were protectors and providers, and the modern use of akicita to enlist in the U.S. military and do as you are told.

  “You see someone standing there saying, in a meeting like, they’ll be talking, ‘The United States violates treaties, they don’t respect international law, they don’t even uphold their own Constitution,’ they go on and on like that but turn around and be proud of how they served in Vietnam for freedom, you know? It drives you nuts when you sit there and you try to . . . I guess, reason in a conversation, try and point some things out, but it all doesn’t fit.”

  “Poverty causes people to enlist,” he goes on. “They do not see beyond the recruiting posters, video games, and Pentagon sponsored movies. All they know is that they are going to make their lot in life. But the biggest recruiting machine, bigger than the movies, is the Pow Wow, Teca Wacipi Okolakiciye, especially school-sponsored Pow Wows, held for students in K through 12 about twice a month from about October to the end of April. Veterans march in front of the dancers, behind the Lakota staff but holding an American flag. They dress in military garb and sometimes hold dummy rifles. Some are on leave status for recruiting. Hundreds of children every other week witness this. And keep in mind this is a cultural event. Pow Wows are supposed to be about cooperation and life. Now they are a major recruiting tool. I am an Army veteran, but I have never been proud of it. In fact, I am ashamed of it.”

  The United States, unlike the European powers, colonized its own country before extending its empire overseas. It is through the process of colonialism, especially when Indians went to fight in Vietnam, that many came to recognize their own status as colonial subjects.

  “I had a revelation when I was in Vietnam,” said AIM leader and U.S. Army veteran Bill Means, whom we meet one afternoon at a Pizza Hut in the town of Pine Ridge. “Whenever we took over a village, first thing they brought in was these MACV pacification teams,” Means says:

  One of the first things they would do is have an election. The only ones that would vote was the ones that hung around us Army guys gettin’ the handouts. The ones that stood in the background, they didn’t know who we were. They didn’t vote. They didn’t even participate. So here you get a leader elected who’s basically a lowlife of society. They actually were sellouts, the ones takin’ handouts. Now he’s runnin’ things. He doesn’t work. He’s a dependent person and kinda like an alcoholic. He depends on the United States government. That was kind of a revelation. I saw the method of colonization and an election that totally ignores the traditional leadership. So when they made decisions like . . . they’re gonna use Agent Orange on these rice paddies ’cause they’re sympathizers with the Vietcong . . . they never asked traditional leadership. They never asked them if they wanted to move to the strategic hamlets. And so a lot of the traditional leadership was forced into backing the Vietcong. That’s why the movement was so overwhelming when the United States left. Many just wanted to be left alone, but they had no choice. Either go live in a strategic hamlet or join the movement, fight for your land, which Ho Chi Minh had been teaching them a long time.

  The first public protest by the emergent Indian radicals occurred when some two hundred Indians, led by a Mohawk activist, Richard Oakes, who would be shot and killed in a dispute not long afterward, occupied Alcatraz Island in 1969. They demanded that it be turned over to Native Americans.43 In 1972 Indian leaders, including Means, occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington during Richard Nixon’s Inauguration. The activists called for the restoration of the 1868 treaty.44

  But the most dramatic standoff came when some two hundred armed activists, protesting the killing of Raymond Yellow Thunder in Gordon, Nebraska, and the series of beatings, drive-by shootings an
d assassinations of Indian activists on Pine Ridge, occupied Wounded Knee on February 27, 1973. The activists took over the 1890 massacre site and demanded tribal chief Dick Wilson’s removal. They called on the federal government to fulfill the promises of broken treaties. The activists were swiftly encircled.

  The U.S. Marshalls, FBI agents, BIA police, and a collection of local and state law enforcement surrounding the activists were issued fifteen armored personnel carriers mounted with .50 caliber machine guns, automatic rifles, sniper rifles, grenade launchers, night flares, and 133,000 rounds of ammunition. Helicopters and planes carried out aerial photography. The siege would last seventy-one days. By the end, an FBI agent had been paralyzed from a gunshot wound, and Frank Clearwater, a Cherokee, and Oglala Lakota activist Lawrence “Buddy” Lamont were killed.45 It was after Lamont was shot dead by a government sniper on April 26 that the tribal elders called for an end to the occupation. The activists agreed to disarm on May 5.

  Perry Ray Robinson, a black civil-rights activist who joined the AIM militants at Wounded Knee, disappeared on April 25, 1975, apparently after a dispute with AIM security guards. His widow, Cheryl Buswell-Robinson, insists he was murdered by AIM. Robinson, who refused to pick up a weapon and apparently criticized AIM leaders for using violence, may also have been suspected of being a government informant.46

  Robinson ran headlong into the radically different culture, history, and aspirations of Native Americans, who were acutely aware that African American soldiers, nicknamed Buffalo Soldiers, played an active part in the Indian Wars of extermination. The civil-rights movement, to activists such as Robinson, was about integration into white society. It was about becoming a full and equal partner in the American nation. The Native American activists were demanding something very different. They called for complete independence, a return of their sovereignty, and the removal of all federal and state power from their land. They declared the territory of Wounded Knee to be the independent Oglala Nation during the siege and demanded to negotiate directly with the U.S. Secretary of State. Robinson’s body was never found.