At first we tried to take stock of the situation. People were milling around the white-painted Sacred Heart Church, the “museum,” and Gildersleeve’s trading post with its garish sign: WOUNDED KNEE MASSACRE, NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE. TRADING POST, AUTHENTIC INDIAN ARTS AND CRAFTS. SEE THE MASS BURIAL GRAVE, VISIT THE MUSEUM. CURIOS FOR SALE. GAS, OIL. ALL CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED.
The trading post was the biggest building in “downtown” Wounded Knee. It was a combination general store, cafeteria, food market, curio shop, and pawn shop. It had a gas station with pumps and neon lights in front. It had started as a little peddler’s store and then had been added on and on until it was now a million-dollar emporium. The place on earth most sacred to us had been turned into a tourist trap. So now the people were taking it over, liberating cigarettes and food. A few people who were cold took some clothes. I told people not to take anything, but they did it anyhow. They were saying, “Gildersleeve has robbed us and overcharged us for years and years. We are only getting a little back of what is owing to us. We are the ones who made them rich.”
There were about three hundred of us occupiers. We had people from many tribes. Navajo, Cheyenne, Crow. Arapaho and Shoshone. We had Oto, Potawatomi, Sac and Fox, Ojibway, Kiowa, and Hopi. There were North Dakota and Northwest Coast Indians, too. Also Blackfeet and members of New York State tribes, Onondaga and Mohawk, one single beautiful Shinnecock lady from Long Island. We were joined by some Apache and Cherokee. Altogether we had close to fifty tribes at the Knee. Among our warriors were Charles and Robert Yellow Bird, who claimed to be descendants of either General George Armstrong Custer or his brother, Tom Custer, who had repeatedly forced themselves upon a Cheyenne woman prisoner who later married a Lakota. The thought of what had happened to their great-grandmother made them extra-militant. The leaders stood in front of the church, speaking to the people. Russell Means said, “I am ready to die right here. I’m not going to die in some barroom brawl, I’m not going to die in some car wreck on the side of a lonely road on the rez because I’ve been drinking to escape the oppression of white society. I’m not going to die walking through Pine Ridge because Wilson’s goons think I should be killed. That’s not the way I am going to die. I am going to die for my treaty rights, right here if necessary.”
Dennis Banks spoke: “This is not an AIM action, it’s an all-Indian action. They can’t do anything worse than kill us. The feds will be coming soon. Be prepared to defend this position with your life! What is at stake here at Wounded Knee is not just the lives of a few hundred Indian people, but our whole Indian way of life.”
I told the people, “Our movement began when the Great Spirit organized the creation. The sacred altar is this hemisphere, this earth we’re standing on, this Wounded Knee. They massacred us here, our women and children. We want to massacre only the white man’s attitudes. I am not afraid to die. If I die here I will go where Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull are.”
The first thing we did was establish a defense perimeter, at the start only around the top of the hill, around the church and the cemetery. We dug a trench and put up a low wall made of cinderblocks, sandbags, and sacks of masonry cement. Later we widened the perimeter to include all of “downtown.” Downtown was where we lived, and cooked, and ate, and had our meetings. It was made up of about ten buildings: the trading post, which we turned into our community center; the post office; the clinic; a low wooden house across from the trading post, which had running water and heat; the museum, which became the security center; and another wooden building, where some people slept. Overlooking downtown, about two hundred yards to the north, the Sacred Heart Church was used to house people. We established a kitchen in the basement. Toward the east were two small churches and the minister’s house. We put some seventy people in there. Wounded Knee was the hub of four roads, coming from Porcupine, Manderson, Pine Ridge, and Denby. The whole area around the Knee is rolling prairie with grass-covered hills. Way in the distance are patches of pine. It looks as if there is little cover for a man to hide. You can see far. But there are all kinds of little gullies and ravines that we could use to sneak in and out.
It was decided that I was not only to give spiritual guidance, but that I would also doctor the wounded and handle all gunshot cases. Wallace Black Elk, a Rosebud Sioux like myself, was the other medicine man. He had come with his wife, Grace. We both performed ceremonies. Stan Holder was named head of security and Bob Free would be our engineer in charge of electricity, the gas pumps, and all other equipment. Lorelei Decora was put in charge of the hospital. We lost little time getting organized.
We counted our weapons. We had twenty-six firearms, mostly hunting rifles, .22s and 30-30s, 12- and 16-gauge shotguns. Some had been liberated from the trading post. We also had maybe a dozen handguns. We had no high-powered rifles. There was only one automatic weapon, an AK-47. It belonged to Bobby Onco, a brother from Oklahoma and a Vietnam vet, who had brought it home as a war souvenir. Only one in ten was armed. One young kid had brought a modern hunting bow and arrows. One guy had an old Italian World War I rifle but could find no bullets to fit it. Ammo was a big problem. We piled up what little we had on the altar of the church and Dennis or Stan Holder rationed it out. That was all we had to challenge the greatest power on earth.
The feds, as we found out during the long siege, had armed personnel carriers (APCs), heavily armored tracked vehicles, like tanks. They had M-60-, 50-, and 30-caliber machine guns, aerial illumination flares, trip wire flares, M-16 automatic rifles, searchlights, fancy starlight and infrared night scopes, M-79 grenade launchers, and rockets to launch CS tear gas. They had three helicopters to watch us, and several times we were buzzed by low-flying phantom jets. They had mobile field communication systems. We had all this coming down on us.
We took stock of our food supplies. We had taken a lot of food, mostly in cans, from the trading post and stored it in the church basement. But we had no idea how long it would have to last. Some thought we would occupy the Knee for only a few days. I thought it could last for a month. As it turned out, the siege lasted for seventy-one days. The feds, of course, tried to stop supplies from coming in. Dennis announced that we would eat horses, dogs, cats, rats, and even dirt before we’d let the government starve us out.
Inside the church was an altar with a plaster cast Jesus, Virgin Mary, and Saint Joseph. Vases with paper flowers stood at each end. Some of our people slept in that church, so there was drumming, singing, and dancing—a spiritual dance. The priest came running. He seemed dazed and in shock. He asked us why we were doing “a heathen dance, a defilement” in a sacred place. A woman asked him what his church was doing here in our sacred place. “It was sacred long before you came. Those people who died here, whose bodies were thrown on top of one another, they weren’t Catholics. They believed in the Great Spirit, the pipe, and the ghost dance. They weren’t baptized. And you built a church over them and put a cross here. You made this a place to make money from the tourists who come to see where all those Indians were killed.”
It did not take long for the feds and the goons to arrive. We could feel them surrounding us. They were setting up roadblocks. A pickup full of goons drove up, and they fired some shots at us. A few of our young guys shot back. Some shot out some street lights to make us less visible. The war had started.
At sunup the next morning, February 27, we were already surrounded by two hundred fifty marshals and the FBI, with the goons hovering around the edges like jackals. Planes were flying overhead to keep tabs on us. Some of our men fired at them to keep them at a distance. We could see APCs moving back and forth on the ridge about a mile off. Some reporters sneaked in through the federal lines. Carter Camp told me later that if it hadn’t been for the presence of the press, the government would have moved in and slaughtered us as they did in 1890.
An FBI big shot, Joseph Trimbach, came up under a white flag to “negotiate.” He wanted to negotiate our surrender. We wanted to negotiate issues. He told us that he wasn�
��t there to bargain. He was authorized to offer only one thing: safe-conduct to BIA headquarters in Pine Ridge for further talks. Otherwise the feds would take Wounded Knee by storm. I refused. Russell gave him a choice: Either negotiate with us for meaningful results or kill us right here. So there was a stand-off. We put up a tipi in no-man’s-land between the church and the feds’ roadblock, to have talks on neutral ground.
There were some white people living in the village, and we didn’t quite know what to do with them. The feds called them hostages, but they really were nothing of that kind. Some did not want to leave. Those who wanted to go did so, and the feds picked them up at the roadblock.
It became clear that we were in for a long war. We put up our own roadblock, placing a row of old burned-out cars across the road. Then we built bunkers. Bob Free started a big yellow digging machine with a large front scoop, a sort of bulldozer. He and his crew dug twelve bunkers, made an apartment house out of the trading post, dug latrines, put up wooden privies, kept the juice going, repaired cars, and operated the forklift. When the juice got weak he made a rule that the only electricity we would use was for the freezers to store meat, to keep the pumps going, and to keep the three most important lights burning. And that was enforced. He also had a sanitary squad picking up garbage, digging trenches, and burying the trash in them. When gas was low, journalists, doctors, and lawyers coming in cars, whenever the feds allowed them through, often let us syphon off some of their gas.
After a while Bob Free had a confrontation with some of our leaders. He told them, “Things have gone to your head. Your noses are stuck up in the air. You want only to talk to the media. You guys better get your act together. Spend some hours a day with the people doing bunker duty. Spend an hour, now and then, digging slit trenches. Collect garbage. We’re all Indians here. There’s nothing here like a higher-class Indian for the media and a lower-class Indian doing the work.” And with that, Bob resigned.
They couldn’t persuade him to change his mind. So they elected me chief engineer as well as their medicine man. Russell Means just told me to take over. I continued with the bunkers. I made them four feet deep and put logs and sandbags on top of them. The women made the bags out of old jackets and things like that. I taught them to make zipguns and small bombs out of battery acid. I learned these things a long time before from a cousin who was talented that way. I used Coke bottles and light bulbs for bombs. What I did was to put fifteen hundred of those on one fuse all the way around, connected to a battery, so when you touched two wires together they would make a spark and set them off. That was part of our defense system. We had a few hundred pounds of coal, and I had some of the boys pound that up for charcoal, and we used that with battery acid for our bombs. Dennis Banks and I took forty people to dig up the ground and pretend we were planting mines. We also put up a stovepipe and spread the word that we had a trench mortar. That kept the feds at a distance.
We had a dozen bunkers. There was the Red Cloud Bunker toward Pine Ridge, the Black Elk Bunker near the Sacred Heart Church, the Little Bighorn Bunker on the Big Foot Trail by the creek, the Sitting Bull Bunker on the Denby road, the Coyote Bunker manned by Navajo, the Crow’s Nest Bunker near the clinic opposite the trading post. The northernmost bunker was the Hawkeye, the southernmost the Little California Bunker. We also set up the Last Stand roadblock up on Manderson road, near the tribal housing project. Carter Camp and Sid Mills distributed the men in the bunkers so that every two hours we changed the guard and another team took over. We had men out patrolling on shifts too. Sweat lodge fires were going most of the time. Wallace Black Elk took care of them. Every evening the guys on security purified themselves in the sweat lodge, taking turns. Sometimes they had sweats during the wee hours of the night.
The feds had their own bunkers. The main one was Red Arrow on the Denby road, which served as their headquarters. They had the whole area crisscrossed with trip wires. When somebody tried to sneak in and stumbled on one of those wires a flare went up, turning night into day. They also had sharpshooters out there with infrared sniper scopes, and attack dogs. Even so, they never could seal the area off. People got in and out with supplies all the time. Sometimes parties were guided in by Severt Young Bear or Oscar Bear Runner. They knew the land and could tell where they were going by the moon and the stars. People walked ten or fifteen miles from the drop-off points with their heavy packs. Some walked in their socks through the snow, making as little noise as possible. They knew all the little gullies and washes to come in unseen. The feds called this AIM’s Ho Chi Minh Trail. It was these backpackers who kept us alive.
Our clinic was just a two-room, one-story building. One room was supposed to be the surgery room, and I was the surgeon. The clinic was run by Lorelei Decora, who is now a nurse at the Rosebud tribal hospital. Madonna Gilbert was her main assistant. Both were Lakota women. Every week a team of one or two white doctors or medics came into Wounded Knee to help. This was arranged by the National Council of Churches. The doctors were closely searched before the feds let them in. They were run through a nationwide computer check on their credentials. The FBI rummaged through their things piece by piece and messed them up. These MDs had to go through a real hassle until they were allowed inside the perimeter. A volunteer team usually stayed for a week and then was relieved by another. Dr. Pat Kelly had heard on the radio that doctors were needed at the Knee, and so he came out of Seattle with a team, and also medicines and food. Kelly told me, “I am a veteran from Nam, and the things I’ve seen here, the tracers, the flares, the government burning off all the cover down to the last shrub to be able to watch for people coming in, the APCs—it’s identical to what I experienced in Vietnam. Every night it’s like an incredible flashback to Da Nang.”
During firefights, with thousands of rounds coming in, the medics made up first aid kits and waited, ready to go in, to help the wounded and bring them out. They also made stretchers. The medics and nurses worried about Indians walking around in the open, ignoring the bullets zipping by them. They worried about folks living in flimsy trailers and shacks, with slugs coming in through the walls. They worried about women standing in line to go to the toilets, joking while the bullets flew around them. It usually took the nurses and doctors three days to adjust to the situation. After that they no longer bothered with ducking and running for shelter, and went about their business like the rest of us.
Taking care of sanitary conditions was also the work of the medical team. They used lime to fill in pits where waste had been dumped to prevent disease. Carla Blakey, a Saulteaux Indian from Canada, turned an old garage into a four-way women’s toilet. There were always four or five women standing in line there, and after every firefight the medics came running, yelling, “Everybody all right? Anybody need tranquilizers?” Carla said to me, “Imagine a place where you gotta have tranquilizers to go to the can!”
I doctored people with Indian herbs. They are from the earth and we are from the earth. They work better than the white man’s wonder drugs. Operating was up to me. For this I used my pocket knife, my prayers, and taopi tawote, wound medicine. I also used an herb that numbs the flesh so that you don’t feel anything. One of the men I operated on was Rocky Madrid, a Chicano medic. There had been a firefight, and Rocky and Owen Luck, who had been a helicopter medic in Vietnam, started to run to the front with their first aid kits to see if anybody needed help. Suddenly there were tracers zinging around them. Rocky was hit in the stomach by a tumbling bullet that ricocheted. It was a miracle he didn’t get his guts blown out and could walk himself to the hospital. The bullet was stuck in the muscle. I dug it out with my knife. Chuck Downing, a white doctor, sewed up the wound. Rocky didn’t feel a thing. I fanned him off with sage and three days later he was walking around as good as new. Rocky Madrid was senselessly shot. When he was hit there were enough flares overhead that you could have read a newspaper by the light they gave off, and he wore a large red cross on a white armband. The feds were machine-gunning the w
hole area, they just opened up and sprayed everything. On the day of the airlift they fired on a man carrying a large white flag walking alongside a wounded Indian being carried on a stretcher.
I fixed up one wounded warrior, Milo Goings, who was shot in the knee. To take the bullet out I used a piercing knife, but first I used porcupine quills and a medicine, red wood, to make it numb. I put the red wood there, and after it had its effect, I took the bullet out. Then I used deer sinew to sew it up. One kid was wounded with an M-16 bullet in the wrist, just under the thumb. So I made a cut and pulled the bullet out with tweezers. Then I used the same medicine on it. I didn’t sew him up. I just wrapped the hand up, and in about two weeks he could use it again. Two Shoes got shot just under the ball of the foot, so I did the same thing, numbed him, cut it open, took the bullet out, and used that wound medicine. These medicines are powerful. To stop bleeding I use fine gopher dust. It stops the blood every time.
Almost right from the beginning, there was serious fighting. There were a lot of automatic weapons, and every sixth shot was a tracer bullet. It looked like long strings of lightning bugs. Things became serious as we settled in for a long standoff.
twenty-two
A GOOD DAY TO DIE
Obviously, somebody is going
to die at Wounded Knee and
if those guys do die, well,
that’s the way the ball bounces.
Dick Wilson
It was crazy the way the government treated us. One day there was a firefight; the next day we were negotiating. Sometimes there was negotiating and shooting at the same time. One day the roadblocks were up, the next they were down. The feds would shoot somebody and then fly him out in a helicopter to the hospital in Rapid City. The FBI armed the goons and worked closely with them, but the marshals would have nothing to do with “those murderous drunken bums.” The feds would curse us over the radio and the next moment chat and joke with us. Our bunkers were communicating with Red Arrow all the time. Witko wasichu, crazy white men, was all we could say. We could not figure them out.
Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) Page 19