The media were as fast getting into Wounded Knee as the feds. At first the FBI refused to let the press in, but some fifteen reporters made it past the perimeter anyhow. Later the press was admitted sometimes and refused entrance on other days. Here again it was hard to figure out what the government’s policy was. Some of the media were against us. They wrote that Wounded Knee was a “guerrilla theater offering blood and pageantry.” One reporter called us a “bunch of publicity seeking militants,” another called what we were doing a “cannily orchestrated news event.” Most of the journalists were friendly and rooted for us, because we gave them something to write about. The press used us and we used the press. As Carter Camp put it, “As long as we are good Boy Scouts behaving ourselves, nobody gives a shit. But as soon as we’re waving guns, the media come running. If it takes waving guns to get our grievances before the public, then that’s what we have to do.” Wounded Knee was reported by TV, radio, and newspapers all over the world. All of the AIM leaders “had a good mouth.” They were powerful speakers who could draw wonderful word pictures.
On March 1, Senators James Abourezk and George McGovern came to talk to us. Because Abourezk was sympathetic to us, his son’s house at Wanblee, on the Pine Ridge reservation, was firebombed. McGovern was not pro-AIM. He said he had not much time for us, he had to get back to Rapid to change into a clean shirt. Russell said, “He’s worried about his shirt. We’re worried about seeing another sun rise.” We had a lot of church support. John Adams, a Methodist, Paul Boe, a Lutheran, and Father Garvey, of South Dakota, did much to help us. A team of lawyers formed the Wounded Knee Legal Defense-Offense Committee, WKLDOC for short. We pronounced it “Wickledock.” The committee consisted of Bill Kunstler, from New York; Beverly Axelrod, who had defended Eldridge Cleaver; Ken Tilsen, from Minneapolis; Mark Lane, who had his own ideas about the Kennedy assassination; and Ramon Roubideaux, a local Lakota attorney. Later Bruce Ellison joined the team. They had a lot of paralegal help.
On March 3, the government sent in Colonel Volney Warner, chief of staff of the 82nd Airborne, to see whether the regular army would be needed to make an end of us. Warner turned out to be good for us. He changed the FBI order from “shoot to kill” to “shoot to wound,” and then to “do not shoot at all.” He reported that the Indians weren’t going to harm anyone. He thought that it was unlawful to use the army in a local domestic conflict. He told the marshals, “You guys are good only for handing out subpoenas. You aren’t worth shit as fighting men.” He said he would be only too glad to let the Airborne loose upon the goons. In the end the FBI, the marshals, and the goons hated Warner more than they hated us. Without Warner I could not have written this book. I would be dead.
On March 6, the feds’ spokesman, Erickson, told us to come out and surrender, or else. He tried to scare us by ordering us to send all women and children out of Wounded Knee before darkness fell on March 8. But he didn’t impress us. Dennis asked the women whether they wanted to leave. Not one of them did. Carter Camp told the feds, “I know we can’t whip the whole United States, but we’ll sell our lives as dear as we can.” We ran up an AIM flag on the church steeple. I painted the faces of our warriors with sacred red paint. Some of the people remembered Crazy Horse’s old war cry, “It’s a good day to die!” Then the government backed down and negotiations started all over again. They led to nothing.
On the morning of March 11, four postal inspectors, guided by two ranchers, drove into the village “to inspect the post office in the trading post.” That’s what they said. They were government agents armed with handguns and handcuffs. They carried fancy badges like the FBI. They were stopped and disarmed by our security. They were, of course, not interested in finding out how the mail service functioned during the siege. They had come to spy. Security brought them to the museum and put their pistols, handcuffs, and badges on a table. I served them coffee and scrambled eggs and gave them a half-hour lecture on Indian history and why we had taken over the place. Then I had them escorted back to the federal lines. For this I was later tried and convicted as an accessory preventing federal officers from performing their assignments.
March 11 was also the day on which we proclaimed the Independent Oglala Nation under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie that the government had broken. We declared Wounded Knee a liberated country and offered Oglala citizenship to everybody who was there with us. Dennis said, “This is no longer a perimeter, it’s a border.” We issued visas to members of the press. Russell Means declared, “If any foreign country, especially the United States, tries to enter the village, it will be considered an act of war and treated accordingly. Spies entering the village will be treated as spies anywhere.” The Six Nations of the Iroquois at once recognized the Independent Oglala Nation and sent a delegation to support us, led by Chief Oren Lyons of the Onondaga. So we established what Dennis called a provisional government. One of our women said, “I’m weeping with joy that we are a nation again, a tiny nation in a small space, but it’s a beginning. We don’t need a tribal council, we don’t need the BIA, we don’t need the Reorganization Act of 1934. We’re standing on the Treaty of Fort Laramie.”
In the meantime we tried to establish a routine of daily living. The women were cooking as long as there was food. They made blankets out of old skirts. They made mittens out of old sweaters, with trigger fingers on them. They made socks out of sleeves and headgear with holes for eyes, nose, and mouth. This was for the guys in the bunkers. The women would go down to the bunkers to see if the men needed coffee, blankets, or ammo. Every time a flare went up, the guys would yell, “Hit the floor!” but no one bothered. The women were really strong. During one firefight, one woman held off several marshals with an old six-shooter while everybody else got away. She was real good with a gun.
For the first three weeks we had enough food. After that it was rice and beans, and then not even that. At first we ate a lot of fry bread, and that was okay, but the women ran out of shortening, flour, and baking powder. When we ran out of coffee, sugar, and cigarettes, things got real bad. Without coffee and cigarettes even the greatest warrior can’t get it together anymore. It’s a question of how long you can stand up on an empty stomach.
One white rancher donated a steer to us. That wasn’t enough to last more than three hundred hungry people seventy-one days. So we took to liberating cattle. We called them slow elk. Dennis Banks sent a few young guys out to bring back a fat cow. They brought back an ancient skinny bull. It took eleven bullets to kill the poor beast. None of those great warriors knew how to butcher it. One of the white journalists had to do it.
The occupation was based on Indian religion. The sweat lodges were going twenty-four hours a day and we had yuwipi ceremonies almost every night and even a few peyote meetings. When things got really bad, men and women made flesh offerings. The leaders went so far as to pierce their chests as in the sun dance, thinking that their pain could help the people through spiritual power. Our medicine was strong. As an Indian you don’t divide life into little boxes: A—politics, B—education, C—religion, and so on. It is all one, it is life. You break it up, white man’s style, and it becomes just a jigsaw puzzle without meaning. I put on the ghost dance for four days and I felt that the bodies in their mass grave were dancing with us. Whenever negotiations went on inside the no-man’s-land tipi, Wallace Black Elk or I was there with the sacred pipe and our eagle bone whistle, smoking in a circle, cedaring the government negotiators as well as our own people. The feds were impressed, I think, but did not know what to make of it. We were not on the same wavelength.
Then the situation became ugly. Even when there was a ceasefire, Dick Wilson maintained that he and his people weren’t bound by any concessions the government made. He was angry at the government for being too easy on us. He was angry at the marshals for not blowing us away. He was angry at us for being Indians. He issued proclamations that read, in part, “What is happening at Wounded Knee is all part of a long-range plan of the Communist par
ty. Disrupt the normal function of society. Demand the resignation of key officials. Demand the resignation of the head of state. To combat this we are organizing an all-out volunteer army of patriots. We need able-bodied men over 18 years of age. We are requesting General Chesty Puller, United States Marine Corps, to take command.”
He continued, “Fellow patriots, we need you. Come in and sign up. We will organize and train you, and when the federal government has yielded, conceded, and appeased, we will march into Wounded Knee and kill tokas, wasichus, hasapas, and spiolas. They want to be martyrs? We will make it another Little Bighorn.” In short, he called on his goons to kill all non-Sioux Indians, whites, blacks, and Hispanics.
On April 5, we signed an agreement with Kent Frizzel, the government negotiator. The White House big shots would not come to the Knee to talk with us, but we would send a delegation to Washington to meet with them there. So we smoked the pipe together. I told Frizzel, “Many hundred years ago the white man and Indians smoked the pipe. Now, today, we smoke the pipe again. Before we smoke, I will blow the eagle bone whistle that has been given to the Indian people. At this time, Great Spirit, there are many, many things that we ask for. Many, many days we’ve been here at Wounded Knee, at this sacred altar, the sacred circle. At this time, Grandfather, I ask you to take care of my Indian people, my red man.”
The agreement called for both sides to disarm. On the same day we would lay down our arms, the feds would withdraw the APCs and the marshals, and the FBI would go home. In the meantime our delegation took off for Washington. It consisted of Russell Means, Chief Tom Bad Cob, our Sioux lawyer, Ramon Roubideaux, Judy Bridwell, and myself. The talks in Washington came to nothing. Nixon would not see us, and talks with his underlings were just hot air.
On April 11, while I was in Washington, Mary Ellen Moore gave birth under fire to a little boy. The people took it as a good sign. They held the newborn baby up for all to see. The people wept and sang the AIM song. Dennis Banks said, “We’ve been reinforced by a little warrior.” A few days later I managed to sneak back into Wounded Knee.
In the beginning, the feds had let some food and medical supplies through, but as the ring tightened, they tried to starve us out. They got a court order that made it illegal to bring supplies to us. Supporters on the outside organized an airlift. The first, which took place early in April, delivered four hundred pounds of food into Wounded Knee: rice, dried beans, powdered milk, oatmeal, yeast, flour, baking soda, bandages, antibiotics, vitamins, some clothing, and, most welcome, coffee and cigarettes. The machine was a single-engine plane piloted by a Vietnam vet. The co-pilot and navigator was also a Nam vet. It was all over in no time. We knew the plane was coming, so we rushed up and unloaded the plane in minutes. It took off bobbing and weaving to throw the feds off their aim and to prevent them from reading the numbers painted on the underside.
The big airdrop happened on April 17. It was made up of three planes, each carrying four parachutes with duffel bags full of supplies tied together. The cargo doors had been taken off for quick action. Each plane had a “kicker” who kicked out the bundles with the chutes on them. The planes flew in at first light. They knew that this time the feds would be waiting for them, so they did the mission when most of them would be sleeping.
Although the drop was successful, this turned out to be one of our saddest days. As the food was being distributed, Eddy Whitewater was walking back to his house with his little children when, suddenly, a helicopter was hovering above them. A sniper in the copter started shooting at them. So the guys in the bunkers began shooting back to protect the people moving on the ground and to keep the copter at a distance. That started the biggest firefight up to then. Frank Clearwater, a Cherokee brother from North Carolina, was resting inside the church, getting a little sleep after having walked all night with his pregnant wife, Morning Star, to join us. A bullet came crashing through the wall and hit him in the back of his head. Clearwater did not have any weapons and did not plan to use any. The medics were notified that he was badly wounded, but could not get to him for an hour because of the heavy fire. Finally three women just ran up the hill, zigzagging through the line of fire, and dashed into the church. They put him on a blanket and got him down to the clinic at a dead run, with the bullets flicking up dust at their feet. Even though they had Red Cross armbands and were waving a white flag, they were fired on all the way down. It took hours before the shooting died down enough for Clearwater to be carried to the roadblock, from where the feds took him in a copter to the hospital in Rapid City. His wife went to the roadblock to be with him in Rapid but was arrested and put in jail.
Clearwater died on April 25. The Independent Oglala Nation offered a plot of land inside the perimeter, but Wilson would not let his body into Pine Ridge because Clearwater was not an Oglala. (Of course, there are many whites buried all over the reservation.) Clearwater was part Cherokee and part Apache, he was a Native American. He had every right to be buried at the place where he had given his life for his people. We mourned for him for four days inside the Knee and I made a tape to be smuggled out to be played at his funeral.
I said, “Early this morning our brother Frank Clearwater left us for another world. I never thought they would try to kill us here. We at Wounded Knee are mourning. We are red men, fighting for our rights. So, brothers and sisters of our tribes throughout this continent, pray for Clearwater’s spirit. He was here only twelve hours. They massacred him. I use ‘massacred’ because our dead brother was not armed. He carried no gun. He was not in a bunker, he was inside a church. So all of you everywhere who believe in the Indian ways, you must pray for him. You must pray for the people at Wounded Knee.”
I had said that if Clearwater could not be buried at the Knee, he should be put to rest on Crow Dog land. And so his body was taken from Rapid City to Rosebud. The hearse had to cross Pine Ridge, and everywhere the goons and the FBI had put up roadblocks. Everybody was checked out. They let through only the widow and the hearse. Everybody else, Indians and whites, was turned back.
Finally, Clearwater came to Crow Dog’s Paradise. The casket stayed at my dad’s house for a day. During the night my father ran a Native American Church ceremony for Clearwater. They came out of the ceremony just as the sun was rising, painting the valley red. They put the casket on a pickup truck and drove it to a grassy hill near our vision pit. More than a hundred people followed on foot. They formed a circle around the grave. My father was there with his pipe, saying prayers in Lakota. The people sang the AIM song as the body was laid to rest. I think Clearwater’s spirit likes it there. From the grave he can see the Little White River and pine-covered hills.
At the Knee the fight continued. April 26 saw the biggest shoot-out of the whole siege. It was started by the goons who fired at the feds’ position. This provoked the marshals and FBI to open on us with automatic weapons. The night was lit up by flares and crisscrossed with tracer bullets. The shooting went on and on. The next day I learned that Buddy Lamont had been killed. I had always known inside of me that a Lakota friend of mine would lose his life, but the news still hit me hard. Lawrence “Buddy” Lamont was an Oglala from Pine Ridge, a marine and a Vietnam veteran. He was thirty-one years old. He had been shot through the heart and died instantly. Buddy was an only son. He received his honorable discharge in the mail just at about the time he was hit. Buddy was shot early in the morning close to his Last Stand bunker. A sniper from one of the feds’ positions had pinned him down. He jumped up, trying to draw fire so that he could locate the sniper and shoot back, and was hit.
Buddy had known that he was not to come out of the Knee alive. Maybe a spirit told him. Maybe the owl had called him. He had told friends, “If something happens to me I want to stay at Wounded Knee. Don’t make any fuss over me. Just bury me in my bunker.” Buddy’s mother was Agnes Lamont, whose grandparents had been with Crazy Horse at the Custer battle. Some of her ancestors had been massacred at Wounded Knee in 1890. Buddy’s sister, Lou Bean
, was one of our strongest women. Wilson could not stop Buddy from being buried at Wounded Knee; he was a tribally enrolled member of the Oglala tribe, and his being buried there was part of an agreement we made with the feds. With the sacred pipe in my hand I chanted the prayers over him in our Lakota language.
Wallace Black Elk also spoke at the graveside: “This boy was murdered by the United States government. He served in Vietnam, he fought for them. And then they shot him, right through the heart. So this is the total judgment. The government will have to face these two boys, Buddy Lamont and Frank Clearwater, when the time comes. Before the spirit, these two boys will be standing there.”
Buddy Lamont is buried close to that long trench containing the bones of Chief Big Foot and the three hundred ghost dancers, men, women, and children. He is there with the spirits. His burial took place two days before the long siege ended. Later a headstone was put up over his grave. It bears his army serial number and the name of his unit. It also says, “Two thousand came here to Wounded Knee, one stayed.”
The end was near. On April 29, the trading post burned down together with everything in it. A kerosene lamp had fallen over and set fire to the place. Nothing but black ashes remained. The electricity was gone, the food was gone, our ammo was nearly gone. The earth was scorched. The women and children were at the point of total exhaustion. Most of the press had left; they were now more interested in Watergate. There was a steady trickle of brothers walking out during the night with their weapons in order to escape arrest when the end came. Some of the leaders were no longer there. Russell Means had been prevented from returning after we had been in Washington, where Nixon had refused to see us. Dennis Banks managed to walk out at the last moment. An agreement was signed. We would have to lay down our arms, surrender, and submit to arrest. In return the government made promises that meant little and were not kept.
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