Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

by Chris Hedges

  Charlie Abourezk takes us to the Rosebud Indian Reservation, next to Pine Ridge, to meet Leonard Crow Dog, a medicine man. We find him at his plot of land, which he calls “Crow Dog’s Paradise.” Crow Dog, although he did not carry a weapon, joined the AIM militants who occupied Wounded Knee. He oversaw the religious ceremonies and sweat lodges and streaked combatants’ faces with war paint. Many of the Indian activists were born and raised in urban settings away from the reservations, and they turned to Crow Dog to recover their traditions, religious practices, and language. It was under Crow Dog’s influence that Indian activists began to wear their hair long and in braids, along with bead or bone chokers and ribbon shirts. Eagle feathers were tied to their hair or placed in their hatbands. And in 1971 Crow Dog brought Dennis Banks, Russell Means, and Clyde Bellecourt to a Sun Dance in Pine Ridge.47

  Leonard Crow Dog.

  Crow Dog was a victim of the witch-hunts following the murder of the two FBI agents and the manhunt for Peltier. Crow Dog spent twenty-seven months in prison, most of that time in solitary confinement. His home burned down while he was incarcerated. He was paroled in 1977 after a nationwide campaign on his behalf by the National Council of Churches.

  Crow Dog never went to school. His father, he says, chased away the truant officer with a gun so he could raise his boy to be a Lakota medicine man and protect him from teachers who would make his son white. Crow Dog’s first language is Lakota. He accuses the white missionaries and teachers in the tribal schools of carrying out a campaign of religious and linguistic “genocide.” He is a stocky man, with long braids. His arms are pocked with scars from numerous sacrificial offerings of skin and piercings from numerous Sun Dances. He has little time for the U.S. government or the mythology of the American West, heaping scorn on both. He refers to Mount Rushmore as the carved faces of “George Washington and the rest of his goons.”

  The violence on the reservation took the life of one of his teenage sons. Seven years after his son’s murder he met the killers.

  “My son was really good,” he says. “Real good, real nice. He was murdered. Goons. I met them at the post office. I walked in post office door and all of them standing right there. They asked for forgiveness. It’s hard . . . your son . . . you want to do something . . . but I put creator first, grandfather first.”

  Personal animosities, which see Indian murder Indian, have a way of dissolving in Lakota culture that is rarely replicated elsewhere.

  Duane Brewer, a Vietnam veteran, sits in a wooden rocking chair. He holds a black and white kitten. Brewer, who stands a little over six feet, is wearing shorts, a black and white striped polo shirt, and plastic brown Crocs. He has a brown moustache that droops down either side of his mouth, and tinted wire-frame glasses. Outside his small house in Pine Ridge, several grandchildren are playing in a small plastic pool on the front lawn.

  Mount Rushmore, in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

  Brewer, in the 1970s, was a BIA police officer and a zealous opponent of AIM. He was in the tribal police force during the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee by AIM, and he also worked closely with reactionary tribal president Wilson. Brewer had a reputation as one of Wilson’s prized enforcers.48

  Wilson, who sported a crew cut and denounced his opponents as communists, pilfered tribal funds to enrich himself, his family, and his supporters. He used fear and violence to silence opponents, and allegedly engaged in voter fraud to stay in office. He was cavalier with tribal lands, leasing huge swaths to white ranchers at bargain prices and handing over nearly one-eighth of the reservation’s mineral-rich lands to private companies for exploitation. AIM militants insist their own turn toward violence was a legitimate act of self-defense. They point out that at least sixty opponents of Wilson met violent deaths while he was in power, including Pedro Bissonette, executive director of the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization.49 Wilson was beloved, however, by state and federal officials.

  Brewer was in the Fourth Infantry Division, stationed in Pleiku in the central highlands, in 1968 and 1969.

  “I was a lieutenant during the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee,” Brewer says:

  My duties were to cover the outside perimeter of Wounded Knee, let’s say, the west side of it. I would go in whenever they had prisoners, the roadblocks, where the FBI and Marshals caught people sneakin’ in and sneakin’ out. I would go pick them up and bring them in. Then we did a long interview process with them to get all the information we could. I did that plus I answered calls, you know, your normal police duties, drunks and whatever. So there was a time, a number of times I went out there, like seven in the evening, to pick up prisoners, and there was a firefight going on, and there was automatic weapon fire comin’ from the inside, there was automatic weapons from the outside, so this . . . reminded me of Vietnam.

  “Russell Means and Dennis Banks and the Bellecourt boys, they had a way of communicating to people . . . ” he says. “They could come in to a rally. People would go just to listen. By the end of the meeting, shit, these guys would say, ‘I’m AIM, man.’ They had this thing about them, charisma and whatever. Russell Means was a hell of a speaker. But, yeah, they could influence people. We found out since the trials that . . . that they could order death.”

  He mentions Robinson.

  “They say they killed him and that he’s buried around the crick out there,” he says of Robinson.

  Brewer had left the tribal police force when FBI agents Williams and Coler were killed on June 26, 1975, in an exchange of fire with activists a few yards from the sod hut where Ivis Long Visitor, Jr., lives. He was in charge of the tribal Highway Safety Program, which sent the ambulance to pick up the bodies of the slain agents.

  “The driver’s door [on the agents’ car] was open,” he says. “Both were kneeling there, and both were executed. One of them had his co-worker’s shirt wrapped around his wounded arm. The other one, this spot right here”—he taps his temple—“was blowed away”:

  There was a whole bunch of bullet holes in their backs. Lot of them holes weren’t bleeding, so they really had to be dead when they shot them. Their heads looked like they were, you know, they weren’t blown about them . . . they weren’t all missing and stuff. It was a real hard thing to go up and look at their bodies. I had an ambulance worker tell me, “Hell, I quit, I don’t ever wanna do this again.” Apparently, one of the guys got wounded right away, so they went to the trunk to get the AR-15, and then they both got wounded. Apparently, they surrendered to ’em. You know, there was a lot of bullets fired at them before they surrendered. It looked like the ground was plowed up in front of that car, full of bullet holes, holy smokes, man, there was a lot of rounds fired at them guys. So when they surrendered, apparently they had them knelt and executed them.

  He insists Peltier carried out the executions, although the government case brought against Peltier included what later appeared to be falsification of evidence.50

  “He came walkin’ down, and shot ’em,” Brewer says, “Then there were these young guys there. Apparently he made these guys shoot into ’em. That’s why you see the bullet holes in the back.”

  But when I ask Brewer, a lifelong enemy of AIM, about the legacy of the radical Indian movement, I get a surprising answer.

  “I guess people started looking more at, you know, who they were as an Indian, you know, Indian nation,” he says. “Kinda opened their eyes to that and a lot of the history.”

  “I started working for Xerox in ’79,” he went on. “I was repair. Some of the things people said were real funny, like, ‘Where’d you come from?’ ‘Pine Ridge.’ ‘You mean they make you live with them people?’ I’d go, ‘No, I’m one of them people. I’ve lived there my whole life.’ Here you are, suit and tie, you know . . . off the reservation, they were wantin’ to know about Indian things, and on the reservation, people thought you were an FBI agent or you were a Mormon.

  “I started wanting to learn about it,” he says of traditional Indian ceremonies. “I s
tarted sweatin’ in ’70. I went to a medicine man and said, ‘Hey, I wanna learn about this.’ So, I started sweatin’.”

  I ask him about Leonard Crow Dog.

  “Yeah, he was their spiritual leader,” he says. “You know, Leonard is a pretty good guy. He got involved with AIM and he stood by ’em.”

  His son comes in the room and asks for the car keys.

  “Get out, kiddo,” Brewer tells him. “We’re almost done.”

  “I had a job to do, I liked my job, a family to support, and since I was back from Vietnam, I wasn’t afraid of death,” he says. “And I always thought, ‘I’m a federal police officer. If guys try to gang me, then, a .357 revolver with six rounds, then six guys are gonna be down with me,’ you know? ’Cause I wasn’t afraid, and that’s what AIM said. ‘Duane Brewer patrols by himself so there’s no witnesses when he beats them up.’ But I didn’t do that. I didn’t beat people up. But I wasn’t very flexible when I did my job. And that’s probably why I was the youngest BIA officer ever to be a lieutenant, twenty-five years old.”

  All that, he says, is over.

  “The sweats teach you that you can’t carry grudges, you can’t carry hatred in your heart. It’ll make you sick, so you have to learn to forgive,” he says:

  That took a long time when this medicine-man knew everything about me. He said, “You’ve been involved in a situation, you have a lot of enemies, and so when you get into this, your enemies are gonna be there. But if they’re true Lakotas, they’ll forgive you.” So I talked to him about—I have a list from here to that wall over there of all the guys I’m still gonna kick their asses—and he said, “You’re gonna have to put that list away.” I was able to find peace because I went to a lot of my enemies and I said, you know, “I am sorry, man, I did these things . . . ” They said, “You have to go and get forgiveness from your relatives, you know, from the creator, you have to ask him for forgiveness.”

  “When you first went to the sweat lodge, what did you ask forgiveness for?” I ask.

  “It’s a long process,” he says. “You don’t just go in there and ask for that right away. You work your way to it. When you’re in a sweat, you think about all these things that bother you, and you pray that the Great Spirit will give you the strength to forgive them, and for them to forgive you.”

  “What did you ask forgiveness for?” I ask again.

  “For all of my weakness,” he says.

  “And what were your weaknesses?” I ask.

  “It would’ve taken a day and a half to start talking about them,” he says.

  “Was there any particular thing that you wanted to be forgiven for?” I ask.

  “A lot of them,” he answers softly. “You’re not a priest, and can’t do a confession, but that’s kind of a personal thing and you deal with that. You always feel good when you come out of there because you don’t only pray for your weaknesses, you pray for all of the people that are in there and their families, all the sick, people who have lost loved ones, you know, they’re dealing with some real deep issues. Lot of things to pray for.”

  His son comes in again and asks for the keys. Brewer hands them to him with the admonition: “Don’t go south.”

  South is Whiteclay. His son, who has a drinking problem, goes there frequently to buy alcohol.

  Brewer rummages through a small desk before we leave and hands me a few pieces of paper. On one is a poem he wrote in 1989 titled “A Warrior Waits for Death”:

  O Grandfather, it has been twenty years since I returned from the war in Vietnam, yet the memories are so clear it seems like yesterday.

  Sitting in a bunker, rockets, mortars, bullets exploding all around. You can see the fear on the other faces, as the explosions continue, shaking the ground around you. Waiting for death.

  O Grandfather, why can’t I forget these times?

  The other is a story he wrote in 1991 called “Release Their Spirits,” about an Indian grandfather and his two grandsons who are drafted and sent to Vietnam. One grandson is killed by a land mine during a firefight. The second grandson returns to Pine Ridge severely crippled and psychologically broken. He drinks himself to death. At the end of the story the grandfather, Little Thunder, takes the medals and awards of his two grandsons, lays them in a pile on a hillside, lights them on fire, and in his prayer to the Great Spirit says that they “have no meaning to me without my grandsons.”

  The old conflict between Indians and Euro-Americans, between colonizers and colonized, between masters and serfs, is the template for the last act of the corporate state. The tyranny we imposed on others is now being imposed upon us. We too are wage slaves. We, too, no longer know how to sustain ourselves. We, too, do not grow our own food or make our own clothes. We are as dependent on the state as the Indians who were herded into the agencies and stripped of their self-sufficiency. Once trapped on reservations, once the buffalo herds no longer existed, once Indians could no longer move in bands to gather wild potatoes, wild turnips, berries, medicines, and cottonwood bark for their horses in the middle of winter, once they could no longer hunt in different places to prevent exhausting the game supply, they became what most of us have become—prisoners.

  I stand next to Michael Red Cloud on a July afternoon at the edge of a Sun Dance on the property of Richard Moves Camp. The dance ground, open to the sky, is ringed by a large circular arbor made of wooden posts draped with military camouflage netting. Inside the circle, more than a hundred men and about a dozen women move slowly to the music of drummers who chant traditional Lakota songs around a sacred cottonwood tree covered with colored ribbons. Many of the men are overweight and have crude prison tattoos. They hold eagle-bone whistles and eagle-wing fans, and they wear long skirts down to their bare feet. On the last day of the Sun Dance, ropes are run from the top of the tree in the center of the dance circle to small pegs that pierce their chests. At the end of the ceremony they step back from the tree and pull until the peg is dislodged and rips away a small portion of flesh. The families of the dancers sit on blankets and folding chairs in the shade of the arbor. Michael softly sings some of the songs in Lakota. He leans toward me and whispers a brief translation: “Grandfather, take pity on us.”

  The dancers fast for four days, only drinking sage tea. They appeal to Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery, and make their offerings of flesh, some by hooking a train of buffalo skulls to ropes fixed onto their backs for relatives, friends, and the community. The dance is a ritual that demands sacrifice and purification.

  The dancers move off the field for a rest. One of the medicine men speaks to the families in a mixture of Lakota and English.

  “Mahatma Gandhi was one of the most powerful men in this world, but he was one of the most humble men that we ever met,” he says. “And that’s the way we teach here in the Lakota belief. It is sad that some people see that as a weakness. But in reality that’s a strength, and that’s what these Sun Dancers learn here. When they leave, when they are out there in the world, it is hard for them at times. They have to turn around and show that forgiveness and show that humility to wasushala, other people, even though they treat them bad. The Sun Dancers have to learn to keep focused on their belief and their prayers, no matter what. This is a good time for them. It’s kind of a time to rejuvenate. Then they leave. A lot of them are gonna be by themselves this next three hundred and seven days till they come back here again to rejuvenate. A lot of them come here almost depleted of energy, depleted of spirit, so they come here to energize themselves.”

  Bill Means, seated on a folding chair next to his brother Ted, who is gaunt and hooked up to an oxygen tank, watches as his son moves among the dancers. Means did his first dance four years after he returned from Vietnam, when the Sun Dance was still banned.

  “Through sacrifice and prayer, you begin to understand that sometimes . . . you’re involved in things you don’t want to be involved in, but if you survive and live to tell about it, you could make it a life experience to better yourself,�
� Means says. “I thought that since I did what I did over there, my role in life was to help people, either through education or organizing, projects, anything I could. I would dedicate my life to doing that instead of trying to accumulate wealth. That’s why I dedicated my life to try to help people for the treaty rights.

  “For the first time you’re not saying prayers that come out of Christianity,” he says:

  I went to mission school. I knew what prayer was like on Lent. We went to church about three or four times a day. I knew all about that side. I never knew our prayers and our language. I never knew the sacred ceremony of songs. So it was like a whole cultural, Indian Bible opened up. We always taught parts of that through the oral history of our grandfathers, but it was like, we can’t practice it. It’s against the law. “If you go to this family over here they’ll tell you about it. They’ll maybe let you in one of the secret ceremonies.” The Sun Dance I first danced was 1973. It was one of the first Sun Dances since the 1890s. It was outlawed. It was at Crow Dog’s. Crow Dog’s family was like . . . how would you say, spiritual leaders of the American Indian Movement. They taught many of us where we came from. We have our cultural peers and our family, like Steven Young Bear, who was a singer, and my Uncle Henry, who taught me and my brother the songs of our ceremonies, the Sun Dance songs. I read Black Elk Speaks. I knew we had seven sacred ceremonies, but I never participated till 1973. Well, a few, like sweat lodge, stuff like that, probably started in about ’69, ’70. The Sun Dance, fasting, all that came later.