20
Raymond Yellow Thunder
The early 1970s were the days when Indians were forming local and national organizations for almost everything—the American Indian Press Association, the National Indian Association of Students, the National Association for Indian Nurses, even a national Indian pilots group. New ones were popping up every month, it seemed. Not all of them were as lucky as the Cleveland American Indian Center. Just as Dennis and Clyde had predicted in 1969, Jess Sixkiller’s group, the National Urban Indian Council, had faded away for lack of a constituency. As relocation continued and more and more Indians traded the stultifying poverty of reservations for the appalling squalor of urban ghettos, the Nixon administration proceeded to gut and fillet the few remaining OEO programs. The dire needs of many thousands of urban Indians became even more pressing. To find new and better ways to help them, a coalition of urban Indian groups invited me to be among those attending a conference in Omaha, Nebraska, in late February 1972.
Just before I left for the meeting, I heard from Birgil Kills Straight. He called to tell me about the shocking death of a Pine Ridge man, Raymond Yellow Thunder, in Gordon, Nebraska, a little town below the South Dakota border. Yellow Thunder, who was forty-seven, was a farm worker.
Through years of hard work and dependability, he had earned the respect of many white farmers and ranchers. Birgil said the Gordon authorities claimed that Yellow Thunder had died of “exposure” on the front seat of a panel truck in a used-car lot. In that part of the country, anytime a dead Indian turns up, white authorities say he died of exposure; then they bury him as quickly as possible. Yellow Thunder’s sisters weren’t going for it. They knew something terrible had happened to him: Just before the coffin was sealed, the sisters glimpsed the body, and it appeared to have been mutilated, Birgil said.
The weekly Gordon Journal had reported in its February 23 issue—three days after the body was discovered—that after an autopsy indicated “evidence of foul play,” the county attorney filed manslaughter and false-imprisonment charges and issued arrest warrants for four white men. Birgil said Yellow Thunder’s older sisters had become suspicious of a cover-up when authorities refused to let them see the autopsy report. The sisters had turned to their tribal council for help, and when they got none, they went to the BIA and then to the FBI. They had even tried to hire a private attorney, but nobody would do anything for them. I told Birgil that I was headed to Omaha for a conference that most of the AIM members would attend. I invited him to send somebody down to tell us everything the family knew about Yellow Thunder’s death.
We met with Severt Young Bear, a relative of Yellow Thunder, in an Omaha hotel room. In his own special brand of fractured English, Severt told us how, after his aunts had spoken to authorities in Sheridan County, Nebraska, county sheriff’s deputies and Gordon police had arrested Leslie D. Hare and Melvin P. Hare. They were the twenty-something sons of Dean Hare, a breeder of registered rodeo stock and one of the wealthiest, most influential ranchers and businessmen in that part of the state. Also arrested in Yellow Thunder’s death were Bernard Lutter, Robert Bayliss, and his girlfriend, Jannette Thompson. Lutter was charged with manslaughter, and Bayliss and Thompson were charged only with false imprisonment. All five were released on bond. Yellow Thunder’s family felt that second-degree manslaughter charges were ridiculous—the Hares and Lutter should have been charged with murder—but there had not been a proper investigation of Yellow Thunder’s death, and no one would open one.
On their own, however, the family members had pieced together a partial picture of what had happened. On the frigid night of February 12, 1972, Yellow Thunder had been walking down a Gordon street, minding his own business, when the four white men and Thompson came by in a car. Killing Indians remains a favorite sport in that part of the country, where even today, liquored-up white cowboys display their manhood by hunting down and stomping homeless Indians to death. The Gordon cowboys stopped to taunt and abuse Yellow Thunder, beat him severely on the face and head, removed his trousers and underpants, and locked him in the trunk of their car. After driving around town for a few hours, the young thugs pulled into the gravel parking lot of the American Legion post. They took Yellow Thunder inside the log-cabin-style building and forced him to dance—still naked from the waist down—for the amusement of about two hundred people at the legion’s regular Saturday night dance. A few days later, his body was found by some little boys who, while playing in a used-car lot, opened a truck door.
Severt Young Bear asked AIM to come to Gordon to help Yellow Thunder’s family get justice. We chartered a bus, loaded the overflow into several cars, and headed toward Pine Ridge, stopping at the Winnebago Reservation. We called ahead to invite people to a meeting, at which we explained what had happened and invited the Winnebago people to join us in a demonstration in Gordon. Many did.
At Pine Ridge, we met with tribal officials, including Gerald One Feather, the lame-duck tribal president, and president-elect Dick Wilson. Wilson had hair past his shoulders—hardly a trivial matter. In those days, only a few traditional Indian men and “militants” such as AIM members wore long hair. Wilson told us he was behind AIM “110 percent,” would support our efforts in Gordon, and once he was inaugurated, we would be welcome to come to see him. That was the last time I saw Dick with long hair.
AIM called a community meeting in Billy Mills Hall. We explained why we had come to Pine Ridge and why we would be going into Gordon—to demand justice for the killers of Raymond Yellow Thunder, to expose white racism, and to serve notice that Indians would no longer accept whatever the white man handed out when it included degradation and murder. People rallied behind us, many asking to join our caravan. On March 1, we held a press conference and announced that we were going to Gordon on March 6.
Many of the white farmers who founded and built Gordon and neighboring towns in the 1880s had sustained themselves through years of crop failures by plowing up Indian graves and selling the bones. These brought high prices from eastern manufacturers who turned them into pipe bowls, buttons, collar stays, corselets, and the fancy carved combs that modish white women wore in their hair. Since it is inconceivable that they would have dug up their own ancestors’ bones and sold them, it is plain that those white people regarded Indians as less than human. Things hadn’t changed much by 1972. Indians who lived in Gordon came up to tell us about the kinds of racially motivated atrocities inflicted on them. As cops in many of those border towns still do, Gordon police often forced young Indian girls into their cars, took them into the countryside, and raped them. The girls were told that if they dared to open their mouths about it, they would be arrested and taken to jail. At other times, police had even raped Indian girls right in the Gordon jail, the Indian people told us. They named a cop who had become notorious for that.
Besides occasionally killing us for recreation, ordinary white citizens of Gordon found hundreds of humiliating ways to discriminate against Indians for fun and profit. Merchants routinely jacked up prices for Indian customers. Landlords refused to rent decent housing to Indian families, and charged outrageous rents for filthy, tumbledown shacks and hovels. Indians were often refused attention by local hospitals and clinics. Many employers refused to hire Indian workers, or offered wages far lower than they paid whites. The schools used racist textbooks that fostered ugly stereotypes about Indians.
After our press conference, Gordon officials met with us in the Pine Ridge tribal offices, and begged us to stay away. “We can settle this without you all coming down,” they said. About the Yellow Thunder case, they said, “Everything has been done that could be done.” We told them, “Bullshit. We’re coming. Get ready.” The night before we went into Gordon, we heard that the National Guard, highway patrol, and local police had sent men to protect the city. We were warned that there might also be white vigilantes.
While getting ready that night, I recalled a paper I had written in the ninth grade, which discussed the international distress signal: a ship’s national ensign flown upside down. I recall telling the group, “When a ship is in trouble, they fly their national flag upside down to show that they need help. Now we, the Indian nations, are in distress. Let’s round up all the U.S. flags we can find around Pine Ridge, and tomorrow, when we go into Gordon, let’s fly them all upside down.” That caught on. To this day, AIM flies the U.S. and Canadian flags upside down.
Our caravan left early in the morning with more than one hundred cars plus our bus—about five hundred people in all—with dozens of inverted American flags flying from car antennae and from poles sticking out windows. From Pine Ridge, it is seventeen miles east on U.S. 18 to the Gordon cutoff, three miles to the state line, and then another dozen south to Gordon on Nebraska 27. The two-lane blacktop dips and rises through grassy, treeless sand hills intercut with dry, meandering streambeds. The country is almost empty except for a few farm buildings sitting well back from the road. The town begins at the top of a steep hill and descends a half mile to a saloon-studded business district through large, wooded lots dotted with smallish Victorian houses. On the day we arrived, American flags flew in front of many Gordon homes. We sent people to pull them down, and we wrapped ourselves in them.
Word of our arrival flashed through town like wildfire. People left half eaten breakfasts on kitchen tables, and abandoned their homes with doors wide open, as though their ancestors’ worst nightmares had come true—a horde of bloodthirsty savages was invading their town. Rather than allow themselves to be scalped or raped, hundreds drove in panic into the wintry countryside. I’m sure that’s why to this day my name is a curse on the lips of most Gordon citizens.
Some of Gordon’s Indian people had parked an old flatbed truck trailer in a vacant lot near the center of town. We stopped our caravan there, set up a portable microphone, and turned the trailer into a stage for a rally. The National Guard had been placed on standby alert. Dozens of state troopers, county sheriffs deputies, and local police were in town, but they kept their distance. Several AIM people made speeches and fired up the crowd.
We wanted to meet with city officials to discuss the Yellow Thunder case and our other concerns. The mayor responded with an invitation to meet “just four” of us in the basement of city hall. “This is an insult,” we said when we got down there. “Why aren’t you meeting with us up in the mayor’s office? Why are we in a basement?” When they didn’t invite us upstairs, we flooded the basement with people and took over the whole building. There was nothing they could have done except shoot us—all unarmed and defenseless people—in front of half a dozen television crews.
As more and more people came into the basement, we squeezed all the city officials into a corner. When I snatched the chief of police’s hat off his head, he got so scared that he said, “Oh, g-g-g-go ahead, Mister Muh-Muh-Muh-Means, feh-feh-feh-feel freh—ffeh-ffeh-ffee.” Still wearing the hat and with a flag draped around my shoulders, I went outside for an interview with a CBS television reporter. We took over the city hall for two days, scandalizing the town by wearing and sleeping on American flags.
On our second day in Gordon, Dennis, Clyde, and I, along with other AIM representatives, met with Mayor Bruce Moore, Police Chief Robert Case, County Attorney Michael V. Smith, and Clive Short, the personal emissary of Nebraska governor J. J. Exon. AIM’s leaders had developed a negotiating strategy based on our experience on the streets of America’s big cities—the good cop/bad cop routine. When we dealt with bureaucrats and politicians, Clyde and Dennis would be the angry shouters. Later, I would come in as a soft-spoken nice guy. Lacking street savvy, political hacks and appointed officials would always be so relieved to deal with an obviously educated Indian that they would give us almost anything we wanted.
We demanded that the people who had killed Yellow Thunder be charged with murder and kidnapping, and that the county attorney seek the death penalty. We said that we had permission from Yellow Thunder’s sisters to have his body exhumed, and we demanded that it be examined by AIM’s pathologist. We demanded that the cover-up of Yellow Thunder’s murder be investigated by a federal grand jury, by Congress, and by the U.S. Department of Justice. We also demanded that the town fire a local cop whom several Indian women had charged as their rapist.
Smith, the county attorney, agreed to suspend him, turn over a copy of the coroner’s report, attend AIM’s autopsy, and join us in asking for investigations. He insisted that charges against the Hares and Bayliss would remain second-degree manslaughter and false imprisonment unless his investigation could develop evidence of murder. He also told us that several days earlier, police had questioned Jannette Thompson and Bernard Lutter. Both had agreed to testify against the others.
Gordon’s schools got a lot of federal money through various programs, supposedly for educating Indian students. It had all been diverted to the benefit of white kids. We said that must come to a halt. We demanded that Indians be appointed to administer those funds and to review school curricula to eliminate racist texts and lessons. We also demanded that Indians be represented on the local police force, school board, city council, and chamber of commerce and have equal voting rights and whatever else might be needed for equal treatment. Gordon officials agreed to everything.
Our most important agreement was to create a biracial committee that consisted of local Indian people along with the chief of police, mayor, school superintendent, and hospital administrator. The committee would monitor racism in Gordon, making sure fair and accurate coverage of Indians was included in the local newspaper.
With a grant from the Native American Rights Fund, AIM arranged to have another pathologist examine Yellow Thunder’s exhumed remains. So controversial and highly publicized was the case that nowhere in Nebraska or South Dakota could we find a doctor willing to do that. Eventually, we persuaded Dr. George I. Ogura, chief pathologist for the Denver coroner’s office, to fly to Rapid City and examine the body. Along with him came NARF attorneys Bruce Greene and John Echohawk, a young, longhaired Pawnee who had been raised as a Mormon in Farmington, New Mexico.
Both attorneys were present, along with members of the victim’s family, during the postmortem. The first pathologist’s report said the cause of Yellow Thunder’s death was a subdural hematoma—bleeding in the brain—caused by a blunt instrument such as a fist, boot, or tire iron, and death had occurred within two days of the injury. Contemporary newspaper and wire-service account that reported that the second autopsy revealed nothing that the earlier procedure hadn’t were wrong. Newspaper stories also erroneously claimed that Dr. Jesse Samuels had performed the second autopsy, but he was merely a consultant to Dr. Ogura. Wire reports quoted Echohawk as saying he was satisfied that neither necropsy showed evidence of torture or mutilation—but the victim’s family told me otherwise. They said they had seen discolored areas that appeared to be cigarette burns on Yellow Thunder’s chest, stomach area, and thighs. Knowing the sensitivities of Yellow Thunder’s shy and gentle sisters, I wondered if they said thighs because they couldn’t bring themselves to say genitals.
AIM’s occupation of Gordon and the tale of Yellow Thunder’s humiliation at the American Legion dance made regional and national headlines. Television crews began to swarm through town. Faced with the most damning incident in the community’s eighty-seven-year history, the redneck Establishment went to extraordinary lengths to cast doubt and to explain away the facts. The Gordon Journal, like most small-town papers, survives on advertising from local merchants—among them several people who had attended the legion dance that night. The paper ran front-page stories and breast-beating editorials quoting whites who claimed to have attended the dance. The articles said that far from having been forced to dance, Yellow Thunder, naked from the waist down, had simply been shoved into the building through an outside door, and legionnaires had quickly gotten up from booths and tables to shield him from view. The articles also claimed that the incident lasted no more than thirty or forty seconds, and Yellow Thunder had been escorted outside immediately afterward. They claimed nobody had even attempted to interview any of the people who had witnessed the incident, and out-of-town reporters had simply embellished rumor and reported it as fact.
I heard the ugly truth from eyewitnesses, a couple of young white men who were decently ashamed that they had been at the dance and had done nothing to help Yellow Thunder. They came to city hall to tell us what they knew. Yellow Thunder had been forced to prance and shuffle for the amusement of the whites. The Gordon rednecks who tried to peddle their “it-never-happened” line of swill were simply perpetuating a local tradition inaugurated by their ancestors—the settlers who had taken possession of northern Nebraska’s sand hill country in the 1880s, land stolen from the original Lakota reservation.
In 1890, those settlers had fed outrageous lies and half-baked rumors to newspapermen who then flocked to Pine Ridge to report on “Sioux unrest.” The locals worked the reporters, feeding them whatever they wanted to hear so they would stick around to buy the town’s goods and services at inflated prices. The rumors invented and spread in that way created hysteria about a wholly fictional “Sioux uprising” that brought thousands of federal troops, some from as far east as Chicago. The presence of all those armed soldiers and the continued outpouring of incredible rumors generated by rapacious merchants in Gordon and nearby towns led directly to the massacre of more than three hundred Indian people at Wounded Knee. Given that history, already familiar to Pine Ridge residents, the Journal’s attempts to whitewash the Yellow Thunder affair were predictable and ridiculous.
After the Gordon city council gave in to our demands, AIM members and our supporters drove back to Pine Ridge in triumph. We felt that with so much publicity, the authorities would be obliged to make sure the killers of Raymond Yellow Thunder would at least get long prison sentences. Around Pine Ridge, everyone in AIM was treated as a hero. We were invited to address a packed house in Billy Mills Hall. It was an electric moment. I could feel pride and excitement and hope in the air and I was thrilled to realize that every person in the room—just about everybody who lived in Pine Ridge Village—was ready to join AIM and start to stand up for their rights.