24
The Trail Of Broken Treaties
Before the white man came, we Indians had no chiefs. We had leaders, of course, men and women chosen by consensus for their wisdom and courage. The idea of a pyramidal hierarchy with a single person at the top was European. When whites first demanded to speak to a “chief,” my ancestors didn’t quite know how to respond. They pushed somebody out in front as spokesman—not necessarily the brightest or the bravest guy around, just someone willing to talk to the strangers and find out what they wanted in our country. But as far as the whites were concerned, he was our monarch, a sort of petty king, and therefore entitled to special privileges. That didn’t always serve our best interests, but we have been stuck with chiefs ever since, and we try to make the best of it. Our chiefs don’t rule. When important issues arise, they meet, discuss, seek consensus among themselves, and then tell the people what they think ought to happen.
Other leaders who represent their communities and who consult with the elders and among themselves are called headmen. After my naming ceremony, I was asked to a house in Porcupine, where the seven chiefs met to select new headmen. Conferring among themselves, they honored Birgil Kills Straight, Severt Young Bear, Ed Fills The Pipe, John Attack Him, and me with a ceremony that confirmed us as headmen. I was greatly honored to be chosen at so young an age. I went off to the sun dance feeling even more determined to serve my people.
After the sun dance, feeling very spiritual and free, I joined an AIM leadership meeting in Moccasin Park, south of Pine Ridge. The animosity between Clyde and Dennis surfaced again, this time in a shouting match. I was so disappointed about that kind of negativity that I resigned as national coordinator. There was no talk of electing a replacement, so that left AIM without someone to coordinate the activities of its different chapters. It didn’t seem to make much of a difference, since each had always pretty much done its own thing and asked for help only when it was needed.
I wanted to go to the annual Rosebud Fair on the last weekend in August, but I had business elsewhere and couldn’t. Dennis Banks was there, along with Robert Burnett, former chairman of the Rosebud Sioux. They organized an informal meeting that was attended by dozens of Indian people from reservations and cities around the country. We had heard nothing from the Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service about the affidavits that AIM’s Red Ribbon Grand Juries had gathered the previous spring, so they decided at the meeting it was time to dramatize the condition of America’s Indians and to shame the federal government into doing something meaningful. Out of those discussions came the idea to take as many Indian people as we could to Washington, D.C., and air our complaints at the BIA. Detailed planning was deferred until a meeting in Denver three weeks later. I was invited to that gathering.
I drove over with my cousin Dennis, son of my dad’s twin brother, Johnny. On the way, we each resolved to quit drinking, at least until the trip to Washington was over. Denver had been chosen as the meeting site because it was home to several other Indian organizations that we had invited to join us, but no one except Burnett and AIM members showed up. About eight of us met in a hotel suite for discussions that lasted two days. By the time we adjourned, we had agreed to call our planned trip the “Trail of Broken Treaties,” focusing attention on the two hundred years of lies and empty promises our people had received from the United States. We decided to start caravans from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, stopping to pick up more supporters and converging in Minneapolis/Saint Paul. From there, we would go to Washington in one big caravan. Dennis Banks was to organize a group leaving from San Francisco, visit Indian country in central California, Nevada, and Utah, then meet me in South Dakota. George Martin, from California was to leave from Los Angeles and recruit from there and Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.
My job was to lead the caravan leaving from Seattle, which would stop in Washington and Montana on our way to South Dakota. Since the 1950s, the Indian nations of the Northwest had been involved in a struggle over fishing rights. The treaties they had made with the United States in the 1850s had ceded vast tracts of Indian land. Fish—especially salmon—was as vital to their livelihoods as the buffalo had been to my ancestors, so the treaties forever reserved to Indians the right to fish taken from the rivers and lakes of Washington and Oregon. As the white man built hydroelectric dams and raped our Grandmother the earth with toxic pollution and overfishing, the salmon, which once had seemed an inexhaustible resource, became scarce.
Instead of changing their greedy ways and cleaning up their filth, Washington and Oregon officials, under pressure from white commercial and sport fishermen, began to arrest Indians who fished without licenses or who violated state laws in conflict with treaty rights. Indians who continued to assert fishing rights were assaulted by cops and game wardens. The most notable confrontations came at Frank’s Landing, at the mouth of the Nisqually River near Puget Sound. The conflict had gotten national publicity in the 1960s when actor Marlon Brando came to show his support for the treaty rights of the Puyallup, Tulalip, Nisqually, and Yakima Indians.
Members of the Survival of American Indians Association, especially its brilliant president, Hank Adams, had led the struggle for fishing rights. The members were receptive to the idea of joining us in a caravan to Washington, D.C. Hank was about my age, a midsized fellow with a slight build, a part Dakota from the Fort Peck Reservation, in Montana. He lived near Olympia, Washington, and had married a woman from one of the Washington state Indian nations. Author and lawyer Vine Deloria Jr. calls Hank one of the greatest Indians of this century.
Hank sent his right-hand man, Sid Mills, to meet me at the Seattle airport. Sid is about five years younger than me, a Yakima/Cherokee and a highly decorated Vietnam veteran. He took me to Frank’s Landing, where we held a press conference to announce the Trail of Broken Treaties. Our journey, we explained, would forge a trail across the whole country, through the lands that had been stolen from us by 371 solemn agreements, each ratified by Congress and proclaimed by the president as the law of the land. The United States had yet to live up to any of them, so we were going to confront the people responsible for Indian affairs in this country and ask them when they were going to start.
We departed downtown Seattle with four cars, including a green van. When we got to the summit of a pass through the Cascade Range above the city, we pulled off into a roadside park. We had brought two big sheets of plywood and on them we painted signs, red against a white background—“Trail of Broken Treaties, United States.” It showed the three caravan routes, where they would converge, and our route into Washington. Hanging one on each side of the van, we let the paint dry as we drove across the state to Spokane. We held another press conference in the Yakima Indian community. Many of those impoverished people contributed small sums of money, and another car with three or four people joined us. Several others, who had things to take care of before they could leave town, promised to catch up with us before we got to Washington. Most of them did.
I rode in the lead van with Sid and the others from the Survival of American Indians Association. We used walkie-talkies to stay in touch with several Indian auto mechanics who brought up the rear. Whenever a car broke down—which was constantly—we got it off the road and found rides for its passengers while the mechanics fixed it. We traveled slowly and stayed together.
We had to raise money for gas and food as we went along. At each place we spoke, people came forward to donate cash or something we needed. We met with local church groups, Indian organizations, and Indian nations to see what they could give us. People called ahead to folks they knew and asked them to put us up for a night. We slept in church basements and often dined on little more than fried bread or rice or beans, but somehow the Great Mystery always provided. By the time we reached Montana, we had more than a dozen cars and a bus—more than eighty people.
We “overnighted” at an Indian girls’ school in Missoula. After we spoke there and at the Indian center, many students from the University of Montana joined us. Quite a few other people came with us or said they would meet us farther along the trail. We stopped at Butte, and at Montana State University in Bozeman, and at Eastern Montana University in Billings. At each place, college kids joined up. Those young people were very adventurous, like most their age. Being among so many AIM supporters made them even bolder. When our caravans stopped for gas or to do some “AIM shopping,” local residents sat up and took notice. Unlike most Indians of that day, we were rough-looking types with long hair and braids, wearing vests festooned with buttons, and red berets or bandannas. We were always polite, but most white people assumed we were terrorists and stood back. I was always amazed that they wouldn’t lift a phone to call the cops while our guys came out of their stores with new jeans, shirts, gloves, axes, candy, soft drinks, chips—even coin boxes from soda-pop coolers. Everything that wasn’t nailed down went into someone’s jacket or pants pocket. We did that with clear consciences: We were repossessing, in another form, that which had been taken from us. As Clyde often said—and it took a lot of balls to say that to white men in those days—“We’re the landlords of this country, and we’re here to collect our overdue rent.”
When we arrived at the Crow Indian Reservation, southeast of Billings, the tribal leader officially welcomed us. We stayed in a gymnasium in the tribal headquarters complex. One of the young guys who came with us from Seattle was a sculptor who had brought welding equipment and a piece of steel plate. At the Crow reservation he made a plaque to honor the defenders of the Lakota and Cheyenne Nations who had fought in what whites call the Battle of the Little Bighorn, in that Montana valley where Custer got his “sensitivity training” in 1876. The Crows got excited about that. Several Crow scouts, including Curley, White Man Runs Him, Hairy Moccasin, Goes Ahead, Half Yellow Face, and White Swan, had been with Custer, but had left before the battle when they realized it was suicidal to stay. The sculptor included their names on the plaque. Some Crow people found a mason to build cement forms, and others volunteered to help us put the plaque on a column.
The next morning, we got cement and water, took the plaque, and, with almost twenty cars, drove to what was then called the Custer Battlefield Monument. I’m pretty sure it’s the only memorial the National Park Service ever built for a loser; there isn’t even one for Robert E. Lee. The Park Service superintendent, a middle-aged white man, came out to meet us, and we told him what we were going to do. Almost in tears, he begged us not to put up our monument, promising that he would ask the National Park Service to build an appropriate memorial commemorating the Indian dead and their valiant stand. There were so many Indians present that he couldn’t have stopped us from putting up our marker, but he seemed sincere, so we took pity on him and left.
Until then, AIM had been little more than rhetoric. We had taken over a few small towns and public buildings; we had collected some “back rent” from merchants; but we had yet to break even a window and had been arrested for nothing other than sit-in demonstrations. Even so, we were known as “militants.” We tried to make the Trail of Broken Treaties an all-Indian project. After leaving the West Coast, AIM became a minority among those involved in or supporting the project, but we had a tough time getting the pan-Indian aspect of the caravan across. We had planned the event, and of all the other participating groups, only the Survival of American Indians Association continued to identify itself separately from us. Nevertheless, until we reached eastern Montana, we had complete cooperation everywhere. Each state’s highway patrol and police agencies received us with open arms.
Nonetheless, as we moved across the country, the BIA circulated an internal memo warning that we were an AIM caravan out to stir up trouble. We found that out as we left Crow country for the adjacent Northern Cheyenne Reservation and a BIA school in the town of Busby, Montana. We had called ahead, and school officials gave us permission to speak to the children. But Busby’s principal must have read the BIA memo: When we arrived, he barred us from classrooms and other buildings, including dorms.
It was, however, a big campus with many low structures housing junior-high and high-school students—without fences. We pulled into an open area on the grounds and announced on our loudspeaker that we were going to give a talk right there. Within minutes, Indian kids began to climb out of classroom windows. One high schooler with more guts than sense got hold of a BB gun and held his teacher at bay until all the kids got out, then followed them. At least two-thirds of the student body swarmed into the sunlight to hear our speeches. The kids loved it. Some of the older ones wanted to go with us to Washington, but we couldn’t take people younger than eighteen unless they were escorted by a parent or had written consent naming a specific guardian. Nevertheless, long before we got to D.C., some of the adults in our caravan were appointed guardians of youngsters. Eventually, we had people of all ages, from babes in arms and mothers-to-be to elders well into their eighties.
We stopped at the far edge of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, in Ashland, Montana, at the infamous Saint Labra Catholic School for Indian Children, one of the world’s most proficient beggars. For decades, the school had solicited contributions for the Catholic Church, one of the richest institutions in the world, by using direct-mail campaigns. The school offered pseudo-Indian trinkets made by students’ slave labor in exchange for donations. Those were the people AIM had helped to expose at the welfare workers’ convention in Chicago a few years earlier, the ones using fifty-year-old photos of reservation children to milk money from well-meaning contributors, but never giving a dime to Indians. We had picked up a few more carloads of people at the Crow and Cheyenne Reservations, and so, with more than a hundred people, we were a formidable caravan when we pulled into the Saint Labra school. The Christian fathers being what they were, they wrote us a check for one thousand dollars in lieu of letting us speak to their kids. That was ten times what the impoverished Crows and Northern Cheyenne could afford. We knew exactly how the school had got that money, so we were happy to take it for an all-Indian cause.
Our next stop was Pine Ridge Village, where at the junction of Highway 18, we met Dennis Banks with six or eight cars, just rolling in from San Francisco. By that time, we had raised a few thousand dollars, Dennis a few hundred. We merged into a single caravan and turned all the money over to Robert Free, a short, light-skinned man from one of the New Mexico Pueblo nations, who managed our funds along the rest of the trail. At the Rosebud, we did more recruiting, starting with a meeting in the Catholic Youth Organization building.
By the time we rolled into the state fairgrounds at Saint Paul, Minnesota, we numbered more than three hundred. Dennis and the other AIM leaders left the caravan to attend to other matters. Until Dennis rejoined us in Washington, D.C., I became AIM’s representative on the trail. During our stay at the fairgrounds, more Indians joined us, including people from Oklahoma and Kansas. We broke up into workshops to tackle our major concerns—the federal courts, tribal government, treaties, international law, land rights, fishing and hunting rights, all the issues facing Indian people. As each of our concerns was voiced, the workshop moderator wrote down suggested solutions. Those filled a file cabinet, which we gave to Hank Adams. I learned then that he is a genius at analyzing problems and interpreting the Indian outlook vis-a-vis the Eurocentric male worldview. Hank shut himself in a motel room for forty-eight hours and produced a twenty-point document summarizing our key issues.
A Summary Of The Twenty Points
1. Restoration of Constitutional Treaty-Making Authority: This would force federal recognition of each Indian nation’s sovereignty.
2. Establishment of a Treaty Commission to Make New Treaties: Reestablishes all existing treaties, affirms a national commitment to the future of Indian people, and ensures that all Indians are governed by treaty relations without exception.
3. An Address to the American People and Joint Sessions of Congress: This would allow us to state our political and cultural cases to the whole nation on television.
4. Commission to Review Treaty Commitments and Violations: Treaty-based lawsuits had cost Indian people more than $40 million in the last decade alone, yet Indian people remain virtual prisoners in the nation’s courtrooms, being forced constantly to define our rights. There is less need for more attorney assistance than for an institution of protections that reduce violations and minimize the possibilities for attacks on Indian rights.
5. Resubmission of Unratified Treaties to the Senate: Many nations, especially those in California, have made treaties that were never ratified. Treaty status should be formalized for every nation.
6. All Indians To Be Governed by Treaty Relations: Covers any exceptions to points 1,2, and 5.
7. Mandatory Relief against Treaty Violations: Federal courts to automatically issue injunctions against non-Indians who violate treaties, eliminating costly legal delays.
8. Judicial Recognition of Indian Right to Interpret Treaties: A new law requiring the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Indian appeals arising from treaty violations.
9. Creation of Congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction of Indian Relations: Reconfigurement of all committees dealing with Indian affairs into a single entity.
10. Land Reform and Restoration of a 110-million-acre Native Land Base: Termination of all Indian land leases, reversion of all non-Indian tides to land on reservations, consolidation of all reservation natural resources under local Indian control.
11. Restoration of Rights to Indians Terminated by Enrollment and Revocation of Prohibition Against “Dual Benefits”: An end to minimum standards of “tribal blood” for citizenship in any Indian nation, which serves to keep people with mixed Indian ancestors from claiming either heritage.
12. Repeal of State Laws Enacted under Public Law 280: Eliminates all state powers over Indians, thereby ending disputes over jurisdiction and sovereignty.
13. Resume Federal Protective Jurisdiction over Offenses against Indians: Since state and local courts have rarely been able to convict non-Indians of crimes against Indians, Indian grand juries should have the power to indict violators, who will then be tried in federal courts.
14. Abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs: The BIA is so much a prisoner of its past that it can never be expected to meet the needs of Indians. Better to start over with an organization designed to meet requirements of new treaties.
15. Creation of an Office of Federal Indian Relations and Community Reconstruction: With one thousand employees or fewer, this agency would report directly to the president and preserve equality between Indian nations and the federal government.
16. Priorities and Purpose of the Proposed New Office: The previous agency would address the breakdown in the constitutionally prescribed relationship between the United States and the Indian nations.
17. Indian Commerce and Tax Immunities: Eliminate constant struggles between Indian nations and the states over taxation by removing states’ authority for taxation on reservations.
18. Protection of Indian Religious Freedom and Cultural Integrity: Legal protection must be extended to Indian religious expression, and existing statutes do not do this.
19. National Referendums, Local Options, and Forms of Indian Organization: An appeal to restrict the number of Indian organizations and to consolidate leadership at every level.
20. Health, Housing, Employment, Economic Development, and Education: Increased funding, better management, and local control.
We intended to present the document to the bureaucrats and lawmakers who made Indian policy in Washington, and to press them to commit to a timetable that spelled out when each of the twenty points would be implemented.
From the Twin Cities we went to Milwaukee, picked up more people, and went south around Lake Michigan to Indianapolis. With Indian country mostly behind us, our caravan started to pick up speed. Highway patrol cars shepherded us through each state on the interstates. We rolled into Washington, D.C., with more than a thousand people in cars and school buses in the autumn chill of early November 1972. We drove through darkened streets to a large church in the city’s black ghetto and bedded down in the basement, exhausted but thrilled with anticipation. In the morning, we would demand justice for Indian people everywhere.
There were hundreds of rats in that church basement, more than a few of which were the size of a small dog. Bold and hungry, they stalked past sleeping mothers to bite infants, and burrowed into baggage to steal small food items. After a restless, fearful night, we returned to our cars to find that many of them had been burglarized. Several people, including elders, had lost ceremonial clothing, priceless garments that had been in their families for generations. At daylight, Clyde Bellecourt said, “This is bullshit. We’re not letting our children stay here any longer. We’re going to go down and confront the BIA, make them meet with us.”
We got back into our buses and cars and motored to the BIA building on the Mall, not far from the present site of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial. Surrounding the BIA building with our vehicles, we demanded that officials find us a decent place to stay. The brass sent a junior “gofer” down to tell us that since we hadn’t been invited and had come on our own initiative, we would have to fend for ourselves. When representatives from Indian organizations with headquarters in D.C. came to the BIA building, the bureaucrats sent us down the street to an armory and said we could stay there. Although we had money enough to buy groceries for a few days, there was no place to cook meals and nowhere to eat them. Even worse, there were no showers, and the toilet facilities were very limited. We told the BIA’s flunky that the armory was unacceptable.
He told us to go to the BIA auditorium, and we packed in there. We wanted to meet with the authorities and explain the purpose of the Trail of Broken Treaties and why we were in Washington, but they kept stalling, never refusing to speak with us but never agreeing to meet. A few minutes before closing time on Friday, November 3, 1972—four days before the national election—some midlevel honchos came in, accompanied by Government Services Administration police, and said, “It’s five o’clock. You all have to clear out now.”
Nobody moved until Clyde stood up and bellowed, “We’re not moving! This is our home! We’re staying here!” I got up and yelled, “This is no longer the BIA building! This is now the American Indian embassy.” People cheered. Others yelled, “Take it over! Let’s go!” Spontaneously and with no thought of consequences, we took control, barricading the doors with furniture and finding chains and other things to keep them closed.
We let the officials and most of the bureau’s rank-and-file employees leave. Several decided to join us. When a few young Indians began to break into a cigarette machine, they were stopped by our own security people, who fanned out through the halls to secure everything. We put out the word: “No stealing or breaking in. Leave the desks and the offices alone.” That’s when we found a young GSA cop, a Latino, hiding in a secretarial room. Scared half to death, he had drawn and cocked his revolver and was keeping everybody at bay. I went in and said, “Look, I don’t have a gun. We have no quarrel with you. You can leave anytime. Just walk out the door.” He said, “I’m going out the window,” and climbed down a fire escape.
The next evening we were joined by Commissioner of Indian Affairs Louis Bruce and some of his key young executives, including Ernie Stevens, Lee Cook, and Sandy McNab. They must have known that it would cost them their jobs, at the very least. We also welcomed LaDonna Harris, the half-Comanche wife of a senator from Oklahoma. Then and now, she heads Americans for Indian Opportunity. They came to show that the Trail of Broken Treaties had wide support from Indians everywhere, and that our intentions were honorable. The public support of Commissioner Bruce sent political shock waves through Washington. He was acting against the express wishes of his boss, the assistant secretary of the interior, a rock-ribbed Southern conservative named Harrison Loesch.
Bruce and his people offered repeatedly to set up a meeting with Interior Department officials. At first, we turned him down, because we didn’t want to negotiate with a jerk such as Loesch. On Sunday night, however, after being guaranteed safe conduct, we decided to try a different approach, and went to the Interior Department building. When we got into Loesch’s office, filled with big overstuffed leather chairs and all sorts of mementos, Clyde didn’t even bother trying to talk with the man. He simply told Loesch to get out. A short, stocky, balding, red-faced guy in his mid-fifties with a purple-veined prizefighter’s nose, Loesch was choking on his own rage.
The other Interior Department guys said, “Here’s our best offer—vacate the BIA property, and then we’ll talk.” Naturally, we told them to go to hell. We also assured them that everything was safe inside the BIA building. If they wanted to come in with the media to see for themselves, we would arrange a tour. The Interior people held their position for a couple of hours, and then the meeting ended. I had walked out after thirty minutes because I could see it was going nowhere. Back in the BIA auditorium, where people were singing and dancing, I told them exactly what was going on, as we always did. On Monday morning, we were presented with our first threat. The GSA police said they were coming in to eject us. Most of those cops were African-Americans. The few whites remained on horseback behind those who were going to storm the building. We put empty filing cabinets on the fire escapes so nobody could climb up. We barricaded all windows and doors so that the only way in was through the front door. There, we would make our stand.
Some lawyers who had volunteered to help us arrived with an injunction, and the cops backed off. We used the lull that followed to get a few of our oldest people to donated facilities where they could be safe and comfortable. We found places for anyone else who wanted to leave—no more than a few people. Nixon was out of town on election eve campaigning against Senator George McGovern, but on Monday night, after we had rejected negotiations with the Interior Department for several days, some White House aides invited our leaders in to talk. I refused to go, preferring to remain with my people and find ways to boost morale. I won’t visit the White House until I can go as a free man, not as a hostage in my own country, over which the federal government has total control.
That afternoon the cops, armed with a court order for us to vacate, threatened again to come in. Again, we readied ourselves for the attack. At the last minute, our lawyers got a restraining order, but we had no warning that a legal maneuver was in the works. On Thursday, for the third time, the ranks of the GSA cops were reinforced by police from several other government agencies who massed on the grassy area across from the BIA, waiting only for the order. I asked one black officer, “Are you really going to attack this time?”
He said, “Yeah, we’ll be coming.”
“Isn’t it obvious to you that black people are going to do all the dirty work here while the white man stands back?”
“Sure. It’s very obvious. But we’ve got to follow orders, just like always. I’ll tell you one thing: I pity the first man through that door,” he added.
The third attack, like the two before it, fizzled. The Nixon administration probably didn’t want blood spilled on television in America’s living rooms quite so soon after the election. But neither could Nixon allow himself to seem weak. By Friday, the seventh day of our takeover, he returned to town in triumph, savoring his election victory. Busloads of cops and other uniformed mercenaries pulled up to the BIA building. Once again, they pulled on gas masks and face shields and formed ranks. We became convinced that there was now no turning back. We knew that Nixon didn’t want us to occupy that building and continue to paralyze the BIA for a second week. By six, it would be dark, making it hard for television crews to film everything. We figured the police would come then. I thought of the traditional song our ancestors had sung on similar occasions, “It Is a Good Day To Die.” I decided that our cause was everything. If it came down to it, that was a good day to die. While our elders and pregnant women huddled in the basement and tension rose steadily, we told ourselves that although we had no weapons but Molotov cocktails and homemade clubs, we would make those pigs pay dearly for our lives. We hung a sign inside the auditorium door, facing the front entrance: WHEN YOU WANT TO BUILD ANEW, YOU HAVE TO DESTROY THE OLD.
At 4:00 P.M., we met in the commissioner’s third-floor corner office, filled with overstuffed leather chairs and an enormous desk, all very plush. In the room were representatives of all Indian groups involved in taking over the building. Sitting behind the commissioner’s desk was Hank Adams. He and his people were adamant that we demolish the building rather than surrender, but most of AIM was against it because it would be counterproductive strategically and from a public-relations perspective. We had maintained firm discipline so far, and we wanted to leave that way. We also knew that we alone would take the heat for any vandalism. Clyde said, “If we destroy this building, it’s going to be AIM they come after.” Our debate went on, with Hank continuing to assert that we should smash the building. We were moving toward consensus on that, but Clyde and Vernon, backed by Dennis, still argued strenuously against destruction. I leaned toward Hank’s position, but I was with AIM. We hadn’t discussed it among ourselves and I didn’t want to publicly disagree with other leaders, so I said nothing. Suddenly Hank got out of his chair, pulled out a pocketknife, and said, “I’ve always wanted to do this.” As he cut the leather chair to shreds, Sid Mills and a couple of other Survival of American Indians guys followed suit, slicing up the leather couches. People began to pull books from library shelves and break furniture and anything else that came to hand. Disgusted, Clyde left the room. Vernon trailed him out the door. I stayed a while to watch.
At about five o’clock, the White House called. We sent a team there for a last-ditch negotiating effort. All our talks had ended with the politicians refusing to give an inch until we were out of the building, so we had very low expectations. Before the team members left, they understood that if we didn’t hear from them by six, we would torch the building. Meanwhile, wholesale destruction and looting continued. There was much beautiful, valuable stuff in those offices, and most of it was taken. People, including some of the leaders, “repossessed” paintings, pottery, jewelry, rugs—many of them artifacts that had been plundered from Indians in the last two centuries. I’m sure some of it was private property, but nobody knew what belonged to the bureau and what belonged to the bureaucrats, so we took it all. I decided not to take anything. If the police were going to arrest us, I didn’t want theft to be one of the charges. I hadn’t joined AIM to enrich myself.
People started to destroy bathrooms, then offices, and then the whole building. After a few minutes, I remembered something that Lee Cook, the deputy BIA commissioner in charge of education, had suggested earlier. “If I were to take the documents, I would take the financial, land, health, law-enforcement, and tribal-council records,” he said. I hollered, “Wait, wait! Let’s not burn the files! Let’s take them! Start getting them together!” My sister Madonna and I put together teams to go through each floor and collect the kinds of documents Lee had suggested. As the six o’clock deadline drew near, we piled all sorts of other records on the floor for fuel, soaking them in gasoline from Molotov cocktails we had stashed on the roof. When the attic and the floors below were spread with gasoline-soaked papers, we assigned men with matches to each floor. We planned to light them all, starting at the top, clearing people off each level just before torching it.
Across the street, the police were ready, with gas masks, flak vests, and riot shields in place. As we feverishly taped windows to prevent them from being shattered by tear-gas canisters, cops blocked off the streets on all four sides of the building. Along with several other men and women, I went out in front of the building and walked back and forth on the sidewalk, taunting the black cops and calling them “house niggers.” “Why are you going to kill for the white man?” I shouted. “We’re ready for you inside. Do you know what Indians do to buffalo soldiers? Do you know the tortures? Who’s going to be the first nigger through the door?” I was trying to play with their heads, but I got no response.
My job was to ensure that everyone was cleared off each floor before the fire was lit. Just before six, I went inside and up to the stairway between the third floor and the attic. Above me was our fire starter. In his left hand, he held a book of matches with the cover closed. The thumb and forefinger of his right hand grasped the stem of a paper match, its head resting on the top end of the striker. All he had to do was pull that match a half inch toward him, then flip it onto the floor—and the whole attic would go up in flames.
At exactly six, just as I was about to give the word, Vernon Bellecourt came running up to the foot of the stairs below, yelling, “Stop! Please stop, please!” Almost hysterical, he tried to persuade me not to torch the building. He said, “At least don’t do it until the negotiators get back.” I agreed to wait a little while. At about four minutes past six, one of our negotiators phoned and the word was passed upstairs to me: “Don’t do anything, the team’s on its way back. We’ve got a settlement.” If that call had come even two minutes later or if Vernon hadn’t come running just when he did, the building would have gone up and everyone involved would have been hunted down from then to doomsday. I would still be in prison—if I was alive.
The deal that had been struck was that the White House would “consider” our “Twenty Points” and would give us an answer within thirty days. We would have a police escort out of town, and money to pay for sending our elders and pregnant women back home by air and for the rest of us to drive back home. If we were out of the building by six the next morning, no one would be prosecuted. That night, we rented two U-Haul trucks and backed them up to the entrance. With a crowd of people standing around to block the feds’ view, we spirited three thousand pounds of BIA documents out of the building. We told the cops the trucks were carrying our bedrolls.
That last night, we let the media in to see the destruction. We held a press conference and said that we knew what they were going to report, but we wanted to tell our side of the story anyway. Of course, they never told our side; they focused on the damage to the building. Later that night, Caspar Weinberger and Leonard Garment, who then were lawyers serving as Nixon’s “special assistants,” came down to give us the money we had demanded for departure expenses. Weinberger handed us a brown paper sack filled with $66,650 in cash. I still have no idea how Robert Free, who was in charge of AIM’s finances on the Trail of Broken Treaties, came up with that figure. When a government negotiator said they would have trouble coming up with that much cash on a Friday night, one of his colleagues suggested tapping CREEP, the Committee to Re-elect the President. A few years later, when the details of the Watergate scandal became public, everyone in the country would learn that CREEP money included illegal campaign contributions. Perhaps the negotiators acted on the suggestion because the campaign had safes bursting with cash. If so, this was no donation: After we left town, the White House would have undoubtedly reimbursed CREEP. We later learned the money was charged to the Indian antipoverty program, money allocated by Congress to help the poorest people in the country.
We left Washington the next morning in jubilation. We had come, a thousand Indians from dozens of nations, but one people in spirit, bearing the sacred pipe, to tell the white man we had heard enough of his lies. We had taken over the alleged nerve center of the BIA for seven days and had trashed it so thoroughly that it would be more than six weeks before operations could resume—and no one missed it! We had confiscated tons of documents, had been paid to leave town—and no one had been arrested. I felt the growing force of our convictions and knew that spiritual power was our greatest strength.