21
Red Ribbon Grand Juries
Early in that spring of 1972, I joined an AIM contingent at Pine Ridge that caravanned to Denver and stayed a few days. We tried to boost our local membership and credibility by giving talks about what we had accomplished in Gordon, Nebraska. When I returned to Pine Ridge, I learned that there had been trouble at the Wounded Knee trading post, a store owned by Clive Gildersleeve and his son-in-law, Jim Czywczynski. Indian people who lived there didn’t like the fact that the Gildersleeves, along with the Catholic Church, had turned the mass grave of Big Foot and the three hundred other victims massacred there in 1890 into a tourist attraction. Several cars caravanned from Pine Ridge for a demonstration and a confrontation with the owners. Newspapers reported some minor property damage to the trading post. BIA police were called. Most of those participating in the incident were locals who had become brave the first time they had someone to back them up, but the press reported that AIM was responsible. That made many Pine Ridge people angry at us.
White commercial exploitation of the mass grave provided a genuine reason for protest, but Indian people who lived near Wounded Knee and elsewhere on the reservation had long harbored a smoldering resentment toward the Gildersleeves and other whites who ran reservation trading posts.
For generations, white traders had ruthlessly abused Indian customers. Nowhere on Pine Ridge was there a grocery, drug, clothing, hardware, or convenience store. Whatever people needed, if it could be found at all, was at a trading post. Because that setup is so obviously tailor-made for profiteering, Congress requires whites who do business with Indians on or near reservations to obtain licenses from the Department of the Interior, with license fees going into a fund to benefit Indians. In theory, any kind of serious misconduct by a storekeeper could result in loss or suspension of his license, thus endangering his livelihood. The BIA has virtually failed to enforce that law since it was passed early in this century. The Gildersleeve family, among many others, had taken frill advantage. They ran their trading post like the company store in a coal miners’ town, abusing customers and treating them like retarded stepchildren.
The Gildersleeves inflated prices outrageously while encouraging customers to buy on credit, so nearly everybody in the community was in perpetual debt to the trading post. Many Indian people lived on welfare, Social Security, unemployment, or pensions, but the Gildersleeves wouldn’t allow them to cash their checks. Instead, a white storekeeper would literally hang onto the check with two hands while an Indian endorsed it, then keep the proceeds, deducting a finance charge and applying the balance to the customer’s account. Even Indians who didn’t owe money couldn’t cash checks: The Gildersleeves turned them away or forced them to buy goods equal to the value of the check. Indian people therefore never had cash and couldn’t shop elsewhere, even when they had an opportunity to visit another part of the reservation or a border town.
Those practices were common on reservations. They became widely known in the late 1960s after publication of My Brother’s Keeper—The Indian in White America, a book edited by Edward S. Cahn, which described many of the abuses committed by whites against Indians. The government was well aware that traders on Indian reservations held their communities in virtual economic bondage, but still the BIA did nothing to enforce congressionally mandated licensing.
AIM remained at Pine Ridge in force for five or six days while looking into some of the programs the so-called tribal government had at the reservation. We found that we had almost unconditional support from the old people, especially the traditional ones. We also had wide support and admiration from the younger generation, those in their teens, twenties, and early thirties, who loved what we stood for. People between youth and old age, those in their forties and fifties—the generation that had endured the boarding-school ordeal—had a very different view of AIM. Like all colonized people, their livelihoods and identities depended on the federal government, either from menial BIA jobs or through the puppet tribal government. For those people, jeopardizing their relationship with the feds meant putting their entire lives at risk, so they were suspicious of AIM and antagonistic toward our goals.
After our experience at Gordon, Dennis Banks had another brainstorm. Taking his suggestion, we decided to stay in South Dakota and caravan from reservation to reservation, holding public meetings to expose evidence of government abuse. Thanks mostly to AIM’s 1969 challenges to the National Council of Churches in Detroit, mainstream churches had become responsive to community organizations and willing to fund certain projects, even on an emergency basis. That was how AIM usually got money to send out caravans. We also found that many Indian people would chip in.
Dennis dubbed our investigations the “Red Ribbon Grand Jury Hearing “ Several people from the Community Relations Service of the U.S. Department of Justice joined us. The CRS ostensibly functioned as arbitrators between dissenters and government authorities, trying to prevent violence and working to facilitate negotiated settlements. The ones who came with us to the South Dakota reservations were great human beings, wonderful people whose continuing presence served temporarily to restore a bit of our faith in America’s justice system. That restoration was, of course, a big mistake. It was also thoroughly Indian, and I make no apologies for it.
The first Red Ribbon Grand Jury was held at Pine Ridge where, as everywhere else, we took complaints in affidavit form. Then we drove east to the Rosebud Reservation, and held hearings in a hall lent by the Catholic Youth Organization. As we went along, we picked up more followers. Our caravan grew from about a dozen cars to more than fifty, plus several filled with newspaper reporters and camera crews. Heading east from the Rosebud to the Yankton Reservation, we held hearings at the Marty Mission, an enormous school complex run by the Catholic Church, a few miles north of Greenwood. It includes nearly the whole town of Marty. Next, we went to the Crow Creek Reservation on the Missouri River, then to Eagle Butte on the Cheyenne River Reservation. We finished in an auditorium in McLaughlin, a white town in the South Dakota portion of the Standing Rock Reservation.
Leonard Crow Dog opened each meeting with a pipe ceremony, which amazed many Indian spectators in those months of the rebirth of Indian spirituality. We sat in a circle on the floor and passed the pipe, as Indians always have. I was surprised at how many people my age and older didn’t know how to hold the pipe or pray with it. Leonard usually had to instruct people, even many who were in their forties.
After the pipe ceremony, Dennis would open the proceedings with a talk; then I would speak. Both of us touched on the same points—Indian people should be proud of who they are, they should not be afraid, and they should come forward to tell their stories. Those pep talks were necessary because in 1972, Indian people in general—and those on reservations especially—were so beaten down by white authority that most feared to voice any complaints. When we started the hearings, our talks were long. It was hard to instill courage in those people. But as word of our hearings preceded us through Indian country, our talks got shorter and shorter. By the time we got to McLaughlin, neither Dennis nor I had to say more than a few sentences. We learned that the key to getting people to open up was to ask a few older women to start things off. Those grandmas feared nothing. As people came forward with complaints, several stenographers took down testimony in longhand. At some places, we were able to borrow a typewriter.
Most of the problems were about land. Even today, it is still the biggest problem on reservations. A common complaint was about ancestral property lost to scams aided and abetted—sometimes instigated—by BIA officials. Many reservation people had inherited land from parents or siblings, but often that meant a single parcel might have several owners, all relatives. Typically, all but one of those owners had been relocated to a city while the remaining one, usually a full-blood, lived on the land. The BIA often approached one of the city dwellers with an offer from some white rancher. For a pittance, a white got title. Sellers had been told that they were selling only their own fraction. Without warning, the owner living on the land was told that it had been sold and he must leave immediately. The law then was, and is now, that before land could be sold, buyers had to get the permission of every owner. If those occupying the land protested, however, the BIA either ignored them or claimed that all that was needed was the permission of a majority of owners. BIA officials often threatened people. If they didn’t vacate the land immediately, they would lose their Social Security payments or their commodities food, or the state would take their children away. We heard those stories over and over, differing only in small details, at every reservation.
Along with a stream of horror stories about how trading-post proprietors were keeping whole communities in economic bondage, we heard many complaints about housing, especially from elders and traditional people. Most lived in dilapidated one-room shacks. For example, Charlie Red Cloud, grandson of the chief who forced the United States to beg his nation for peace in 1868, was to the BIA “the hereditary honorary chief “of the Lakota. Every time some big shot came out from Washington, Charlie Red Cloud was invited to put on his ceremonial clothing and a war bonnet and walk three miles to the BIA agency to shake the white man’s hand.
In any other country, visiting “dignitaries” would travel to their host’s official residence to pay their respects, but the BIA’s Pine Ridge minions never took visitors to Red Cloud’s dirt-floor hovel. He had to carry every drop of his drinking water from a well more than a mile away. When it rained, the roof leaked. Winter blizzards drove snow through the cracks between boards. Less than a hundred yards away, within clear sight—and smell—was a sewage pond overflowing with shit. Red Cloud, like Grandpa Fools Crow and Frank
Kills The Enemy and all the other respected elders who lived in the same miserable circumstances, was a man of such pride and integrity that he refused to beg the BIA for a better place to live.
After land and housing, the most common complaint of the Indian people was the cold, impersonal treatment that U.S. bureaucrats have made infamous. They have devised all sorts of dehumanizing ways to keep Indians in their places. Several people told horrific stories of relatives dying in hospital waiting rooms because they were forced to wait in line. Some went in suffering severe chest pains, had cardiac arrest, and died unattended in Indian Health Service waiting rooms. Others told of women going through miscarriages and bleeding to death while waiting to be seen by doctors and nurses who insisted on dealing on a first-come-first-served basis in cases of skinned knees, broken fingers, even common colds. This still happens today, although not as often.
Many Indians told us they could barely exist on welfare and wanted to work for their livings. Their only kinds of jobs available were as seasonal farm laborers. Even though their meager wages were paid in cash, those honest people reported the income. The BIA and the state deducted that amount from their welfare checks. No matter how hard they worked, they could never get more than survival wages. It was small wonder that with no financial incentive to work, many gave up and turned to drink. Hearing their stories, what touched our hearts and enraged our souls was that the white man relied on Indians’ honesty to screw them. The whites even deducted the few dollars a month that some people got from mineral-lease payments. The Indians could never get ahead, never save any money, never break out of hand-to-mouth poverty and dependency.
Wherever we went, we also heard how viciously Indians were treated by their own people in tribal courts and jails. Again and again, we heard stories of helpless and harmless drunks brought in by the BIA’s Indian police to be beaten bloody—not just one cop beating them, but often two or three at a time. On the Standing Rock Reservation, we heard testimony from a Hunkpaka Lakota grandmother, Mrs. Taken Alive, about how local white police had broken her arms, then arrested her for resisting arrest. That kind of thing had happened to me. While visiting the Rosebud Fair in 1971, Ted and I were worked over by a gang of BIA cops in a bar. Unconscious from the start, neither of us could recall the beating. A pal, Jimmy Claremont, said that when those thugs with badges found me on a barstool, they grabbed me by the hair and started to pound me. He said it was so bad that he stood there crying because he was powerless to help us.
Everywhere along our route, we heard bloodcurdling stories from young women and girls who had been raped by Indian men, then raped again by FBI agents or police supposedly investigating the crime. Victims said they were told to strip at hospitals and forced to submit while FBI agents fondled them or enjoyed a leisurely look at their private parts.
Day after day, I heard such stories, an unending river of horror. It came to me, long before the end of the Red Ribbon Grand Jury trail, that conditions were so extreme for Indian people that we were barely hanging on—our very survival was in doubt. I also heard that we were tired of that, very tired, and wanted to break out. We wanted to live. We wanted our children to aspire to lives of dignity. We wanted to be valued as human beings.
Hearing firsthand accounts of the most outrageous and shameful things I had ever heard enraged me. For a time, I had a death wish. I dreamed of going insane, taking an automatic weapon, and indiscriminately killing white people to make them feel the same fear and powerlessness they had inflicted on Indians. That was crazy thinking, but during those weeks I often voiced such thoughts. I wasn’t the only one. We were all outraged by what we saw and heard. Dennis made several fiery speeches, inflaming every Indian in the audience until they were ready to get up right then and fight whites.
Fortunately, we all remained linked to our culture. Deep down, I felt that none of us could ever grab an assault rifle and start to kill people. I didn’t think I could have worked myself into the state of mind that would have permitted me to shoot everyone in sight. We had our elders as living examples of how to endure a century of indignities without abandoning the humanity of our heritage. We shared the conviction that what goes around comes around; that we must each understand and embrace time and immortality; that we will survive and even prosper only as long as we maintain respect for our traditions.
Such notions didn’t crystallize for me in those years, but our culture has always taught patience and optimism. AIM had its own axiom: When we chose to fight, we would pick the time and the battlefield. Because we knew we were right, we took heart in the justness of our cause and proceeded straight ahead in whatever we did without fear, certain that nothing bad could befall us.