28
Hunkering Down
When the roadblocks went back up on March 12, most of us prepared again to die. Crow Dog mixed a special red paint made from grinding certain rocks, and offered to mark every man among us who was willing to fight to the death. Quite a few guys said no, thanks. Just before sundown even more people, myself among them, gathered around a bonfire near the mass grave of Big Foot and the other victims of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre. Each of us accepted a single line daubed across the cheeks and the bridge of the nose, just below the eyes. William Kunstler, one of our attorneys, joined us as we circled the grave marker. He put his hand on it, and Crow Dog said, “The spirits will welcome you.” To this day, Kunstler recalls with awe that he felt the huge block of stone move beneath his fingers. Several other people also reported the same experience.
We let the media film that rite, and the reporters went into a feeding frenzy. That was exactly how they wanted to show Indians, circling a blazing fire, chanting and singing and putting on paint. Later, reporters and commentators who had not been at Wounded Knee said we had staged that for the cameras. Nonsense! We “staged” it for ourselves, the way a Catholic stages Mass or a Jew stages Yom Kippur or a Muslim stages a pilgrimage to Mecca. Of course it was dramatic and solemn. We were all pledging to die for our beliefs.
After proclaiming the Independent Oglala Nation, we put someone in charge of citizenship. Passports were issued to everyone. On one side was a copy of our 1868 treaty, on the other our own personal data—in Lakota.
With the roadblocks back up, food became a paramount concern. Thousands of cattle, most belonging to white ranchers, were grazing on leased Indian land on Pine Ridge. To find some of them, Edgar Bear Runner, Pedro, and I borrowed horses from some Indian people living in the area and rode north into the woods. After wading across a creek through freezing water belly-high to our mounts, we came across a small herd of cows that damn near asked us to take them back for dinner. We herded them back to the creek, where some changed their minds and ran back the way they had come. Edgar was riding rear guard. For some reason, he jumped off his horse and started to wave his arms, jumping up and down, trying to stop them. They ran right by him, of course, and spooked his mare. We had to chase after her. We teased him about that all the way back to Wounded Knee.
On March 13, Dick Wilson rammed a resolution through the Pine Ridge tribal executive committee to bar anyone who wasn’t Oglala from entering the reservation. Obviously, the feds weren’t going to leave, so that illegal “law” was intended only to make criminal the presence of our supporters from Indian nations around the country. That same day, Harlington Wood, an assistant secretary in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, flew through a blizzard to reopen negotiations. He told us that if he couldn’t take substantial concessions back to Washington, we would have to deal with someone else. He visited a couple of times, but just about all he said was that the government wouldn’t negotiate until we surrendered.
The next day, a federal grand jury handed down thirty-one indictments for conspiracy, burglary, civil disorder, and other felony complaints. Much of the AIM and OSCRO leadership was charged. Two days later, more than five thousand people marched in Denver to show support for us. At about the same time, marshals raided the Porcupine community center, perhaps hoping to find some of our supporters. On March 17, Wood presented us with a surrender plan, his “best offer.”
To make the point that we had no choice, after the “proposal” was delivered, the feds spent three hours spraying thousands of rounds at us. Rocky Madrid took an M-16 bullet in the belly. Normally, an M-16 bullet tumbles on impact, tearing huge wounds in the body. After striking Rocky, this bullet turned ninety degrees and traveled just below his skin for about four inches. At our little makeshift hospital in what had been the elder Gildersleeves’ home, Crow Dog treated Rocky. As everyone watched, he used a scalpel to make a tiny incision over the bullet, then pulled it out with his fingers. A little antiseptic, a few stitches, and Rocky was almost as good as new. The television crewmen, who had seen the horrific wounds made by M-16s in Vietnam, couldn’t believe it.
We presented Wood’s surrender offer at a mass meeting. Our people decided that we of the Independent Oglala Nation wouldn’t negotiate with a gun to our heads, either. The siege would continue until the government was ready to talk about honoring our treaty. The next day, Oglala people outside Wounded Knee presented Department of the Interior officials with a petition bearing more than 1,400 hundred signatures, calling for a referendum on the tribal constitution that allowed Dick Wilson to rule Pine Ridge through fear and intimidation.
At about that time, a copy of a letter written by Senator McGovern to the U.S. Attorney General was smuggled to us. McGovern was the man who had run for president on the Democratic ticket in 1972, and who for years had led the peace movement in condemning the United States for attacking Vietnamese villages and killing civilians. This time, however, the men, women, and children were in his own backyard. Such is the hatred whites harbor for Indians that the essence of McGovern’s letter to Nixon’s chief law-enforcement officer was a suggestion that the feds drive us out.
While all that was going on, Wilson was spouting a fountain of garbage. He told the media that the Indians occupying Wounded Knee were tools of a Communist plot designed to destabilize the U.S. government. He claimed that other AIM leaders and I had visited Hanoi and were receiving support from Russia and China, and that only he stood between America and our monstrous alien conspiracy.
The Wilson I knew was hardly so creative. I can’t even imagine who fed him such nonsense. Clearly, it was part of the feds’ strategy to get the American public to believe Wounded Knee was about radicals and Commies breaking the law. That strategy had always worked for the FBI. Whenever it wanted to crush someone, it accused him of being a Red. The FBI must have known from the first day, when we presented our demands to Trimbach, that Wounded Knee was about our treaty rights—about the Fort Laramie document that affirmed Oglala sovereignty. We were risking our lives not only for the right to elect our own officials, but also to choose our own system of government, which for us does not involve the electoral process. Eurocentric males can’t comprehend it, but majority rule guarantees minority suffering. The human, intelligent way—the Oglala Lakota and Indian way—is to rule by consensus. That is true democracy.
Wilson screamed so long and so often about Commie plots that the media started to play up that angle. I doubt that many people believed or cared about the supposed Red connection, however, because the Harris Polls showed that most of the country sympathized with us. In fact, only 13 percent of Americans were against us. More people were aware of what Wounded Knee was about than knew who Spiro Agnew was—and he had been Vice President for four years.
But if almost everybody knew about us, comparatively few whites cared enough to get involved. We in the Knee were pretty much on our own in the fight of our lives. A lot of Indian people came and went—more than a thousand by the time the siege ended—but this is Oglala country, Lakota country. It doesn’t mean nearly as much to an Indian who lives in Oklahoma or Florida or New York or Washington. Some came and showed support and helped, then went home. They used Wounded Knee to advance their own causes in their parts of the country. The Oklahoma Indians, for example, staged a local, miniature version of Wounded Knee, seizing some government real estate, turning it into an armed camp, and issuing demands. The nations in Washington, still struggling for fishing rights, took advantage of our notoriety to reinforce the message that they were, as always, ready to protect themselves by any means necessary.
What Wounded Knee told the world was that John Wayne hadn’t killed us all. Essentially, the rest of the planet had believed that except for a few people sitting along highways peddling pottery, there were no more Indians. Suddenly billions of people knew we were still alive, still resisting.
By the time Harlington Wood showed up to deliver his latest ultimatum, the feds had cut off all electricity and telephone service to Wounded Knee. When they wanted to talk to us, they opened the phone line to the trading post. Courtesy of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, however, we had our own tactical communications. They brought us not only expertise but also reliable, sophisticated radio equipment, enough to equip all our bunkers. Most of our vehicles had departed after the roadblocks were taken down, but we still had a few, including a van and a white Volkswagen. While our gasoline lasted, we used them to charge the batteries that powered our radios. We turned the museum into security headquarters. From it, we monitored the feds’ radio nets. They listened to ours, too, of course.
Since we were all constantly under the government’s guns, we had to stage a distraction whenever we wanted to move around. The van, which we called our APC, would roll out and start firing. The feds would retreat to bunkers or button up in their APCs. Meanwhile, we would run like hell. Sometimes at night we sent our noisy white Volkswagen toward a roadblock. The feds could see and hear it moving. While the guy riding shotgun fired a few times to make them think we were attacking, we ran through the dark in a different direction.
After the second day, we all thought in terms of staying at Wounded Knee for a long time. We tried to make ourselves as comfortable as circumstances permitted, working on our bunkers constantly, enlarging them, digging them deeper, reinforcing the walls. We found woodstoves to warm them.
Many of us had grown up in drafty shacks, so we knew how to live small; our bunkers were homelike. The feds, however, hoped that each day there would be their last. They had kerosene heaters and lanterns, but they were too lazy to put roofs on their bunkers. Most had no side walls. When it snowed, they were miserable. Many sipped whiskey to keep from freezing.
We took every opportunity to remind them just how uncomfortable they were. One way we did that was with a woman we came to call “Wounded Knee Winona.” I’ve forgotten her real name. She was from one of the Washington nations, and was only about five feet tall, with a sensational hourglass figure and a lovely face with very high cheekbones. She was a tough cookie who feared nothing. At daybreak after a wicked firefight, Winona got on a bullhorn and, in the tradition of Tokyo Rose and Hanoi Hanna, purred, “Hi, you federal marshals out there, how are you doing on this cold, cold morning? I’m down in our bunker and we’ve got a woodstove, so we’re nice and cozy. We don’t have any clothes on. Come on down and get warm with us. I’d sure like to meet you.” She went on like that for half an hour. It was great. Wounded Knee is in a bowl of hills; her voice could be heard for miles. It was colder than hell, but we went outside just to listen and to laugh at her jokes. The feds were not amused. We heard them on the radio, calling her every vile name they could think of.
A few nights later, I was hanging out in security headquarters, monitoring the feds as they made periodic communications checks or chatted back and forth on their radios. They patrolled the wooded areas between roadblocks with jeeps equipped with searchlights and machine guns. One of those units called Roadblock One and said, “Do you see those Indians out there?”
“What Indians?”
“There’s four of them…on horseback. They’re carrying shields and spears or bows and arrows.”
“No, we don’t see them.”
At first, that was intriguing—weird, really. I would have known if we had anybody out on horseback, but we didn’t. We damn sure had no shields, bows, or spears.
Suddenly, another roadblock chimed in. “Yeah, we see ’em.”
I saw nothing. Neither did anyone else inside Wounded Knee. We had nobody in that area. Then I realized that the apparition, four horsemen in traditional Lakota battle gear, could only be the benign spirits of those who protected us from the white man’s fury.
After Harlington Wood returned to Washington empty-handed, a higher-ranking Justice Department official, Kent Frizell, arrived. The government’s sense of the negotiations was that they had sent their underlings to negotiate with Indian underlings. In reality, their underlings were dealing with the real sovereigns of the Independent Oglala Nation—the people themselves, and principally the women. They, in their wisdom, said no to everything the feds proposed. The FBI, the marshals, the BIA—none of them could get to first base with the Oglala negotiators. The feds couldn’t answer the questions they raised and couldn’t deal with any of the demands. We had to educate the government about our treaty rights and about Indians. When we had seized the BIA building in Washington, we negotiated with the White House. Now we demanded to do so again. As far we were concerned, having our treaty rights meant all or nothing. We had to have them, because our lives weren’t worth much without them.
Eventually, the feds begged for someone different to negotiate with. We never replaced anyone; we just added people such as Carter Camp, one of AIM’s leaders in Kansas. Later, I joined the negotiations. In response, the Justice Department came back with higher-ranking people to deal with us. At the conclusion of each day’s negotiation, we held a meeting, attended by almost everyone except those on guard. Crow Dog, Gladys, Ellen, Carter, and I reported to the people what had gone on that day.
The feds promised nothing except varying degrees of leniency if we surrendered. I couldn’t imagine we would ever do that. Thinking I would die at Wounded Knee, I wanted to see my family one last time. Before phone service was cut off, I had called Twila and Betty and asked them to bring our kids. Twila didn’t. She had remarried, and I imagine her husband wasn’t too happy about letting her go into a war zone. Betty said she was coming. I didn’t know it then, but after driving from Arizona, she was turned away at several roadblocks and eventually made her way to the Rosebud. When I didn’t hear from her, I figured that I would never see my kids again.
Led by Oren Lyons, a delegation of about a dozen people from the Six Nations arrived on March 19. These people of the Iroquois Confederation are the only Indians to reject formally U.S. citizenship as inconsistent with sovereignty. They were permitted through the roadblocks as nonpartisan observers. Once inside, however, one old guy named Papaneau said, “Bullshit, I ain’t no observer, I know what side I’m on,” and grabbed a gun. The other delegates provided much useful advice as we began to set up and structure the Independent Oglala Nation.
The constant shooting was hard on everyone, including the Vietnam veterans. I liked to sit in the security building and listen to those guys bullshit and joke around. One night I got talking with one of them, an Indian from another reservation, about his home. When the shooting began again, he started to cry. He said, “Those fuckers are still firing at me, and look—this is what I gave to this fucking country!” He was in a wheelchair, swaddled in a blanket. When he lifted it, I saw that both his legs were gone.
On another night, one of the vets said, “Over in ’Nam, I went on lots of operations where we’d surround a village just like this one, down in a little bowl, and pour fire in. I never thought I’d be on the receiving end. Why’d you guys pick this place?” That was my chance to explain about the spirits and about yuwipi ceremonies and our purification lodge.
Most of our Vietnam vets did much more than sit around bunkers. They helped us carry the fight to the enemy, several times sneaking up on one of the APCs, which were tracked vehicles with little visibility when buttoned up. When it got cold out, the feds were too lazy or stupid or scared to protect the APCs with infantry. There was no chance that our shotguns and hunting rifles would pierce armor plate, but the sound of bullets clanging off the hull scared the hell out of everyone inside. We could have immobilized an APC anytime by jamming a big tree limb or rock between the wheels that drive the tracks. If we had wanted to kill the occupants, we might easily have tossed a Molotov cocktail inside or captured the guys and dragged them away. We could have done anything we wanted with those vehicles—and the feds kind of knew it. They didn’t get too cocky with them.
We also practiced the fine art of deception. The feds never knew how many men we had. While talks went on, Dennis sometimes ran a couple of “platoons” through a close-order drill within sight of the negotiating tipi. One moonlit night, he took a party of folks into an open area near the Denby Road junction. They spread out and dug dozens of small holes, carefully placing pieces of cardboard that resembled antitank mines, then “camouflaged” the ground around each one. To the end, the feds believed we had a minefield.
Compared to the feds, our firepower was pitiful. To discourage them from just driving in with their APCs, we planted and cultivated the impression that we had heavy weapons. We had one smuggled AK-47, the standard Soviet-bloc assault rifle of that era, perhaps brought in by a Vietnam vet, and never had more than fifty rounds of ammo for it. That weapon makes a distinctive sound on full automatic. On a couple of dark nights, one of our men dashed from bunker to bunker with it, ripping off a burst or two from each. Whenever we fired the AK, the feds’ guns would go silent. They had a lot of respect for it.
Somebody found a short length of belted .50-caliber rounds. It was mildewed and corroded, so we cleaned it up and polished the brass shell casings. We weighted two dark-green ammo cans with rocks and had twelve inches or so of the .50 calibers hanging out of each. Two men carrying these “blundered” into our daily press conference. “Hey, where do we put these?” said one. As photographers snapped dozens of pictures, I pretended to be pissed off and shooed the guy away. The media duly reported that the defenders of Wounded Knee had heavy machine guns, the kind that could turn an APC into Swiss cheese. A few nights later, at a time when we had almost no ammunition left except shotgun shells, our guys in the Denby and California bunkers fired off dozens of rounds as fast as they could—boom boom boom boom boom boom! On the radio we heard the Feds saying, “Yeah, they got that fifty opened up now.”
That worked so well that we tried it again, dummying up a length of stovepipe and assorted hardware to look like a bazooka or an RPG, the Soviet-made equivalent. We laid it in a corner of the security building, partly covered with a blanket, and sent a man to invite a reporter to see me up there. When he came in, I jumped up, made a show of sending a couple of guys to screen off the suspicious-looking gear in the corner and told the newsie to leave. Then I loudly chewed the defender’s butt for bringing him inside. Within hours the feds “knew” that we had acquired antitank guns.
Food became more important as time went on. Our human pack trains ran at capacity just bringing in ammunition and medical supplies. We would have gone hungry if not for dozens of cows that wandered in from white ranchers’ leased grazing lands. The news people, however, ate well. Couriers brought food and took film out. Almost every night before suppertime I dropped in on the crew of one of the network vans. We would shoot the bull, and lo and behold, they would invite me to eat with them. On Monday, I might join NBC correspondent Fred Briggs, producer Ted Elbert, and cameramen Randi Birch or Charlie Ray for a delicious concoction by soundman and former chef Aaron Holden. On Tuesday, I would be the guest of CBS producer Phil O’Connor and correspondent Jeff Williams. On Wednesday, I would share a meal with ABC correspondents Irv Chapman or Herbert Kaplow and producer Aram Boyajian. Then I would go back to NBC. I couldn’t be quite so obvious as to go back every four days, so I sometimes mooched food from the Community Relations Service guys—Justice Department employees who went back and forth through the roadblocks as part of the negotiations. They smuggled boxes of C-rations in to us.
One of our regular visitors was John Adams, a tall, very erect, white Methodist minister from the National Council of Churches. Adams had worked in the civil-rights movement, and had been on a first-name basis with Martin Luther King. His chief passion was trying to get rid of the death penalty. He is the only true Christian I ever met, including my grandmothers. I never met a finer human being. He was inside the Knee constantly, listening to people, taking messages back and forth, going around with a notepad to take down lists of things he could smuggle in to us. One night in the trading post, I watched him talk to Clyde for a long time, filling a page with notes. I wondered, what the hell is Clyde doing? Finally, John came over and said, “I’m going in now. Do you want me to bring you anything?”
“First, tell me what you were talking to Clyde about.”
“Oh, he gave me a list of all the things he needed,” said John. I glanced at it: lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, celery, olives—salad ingredients! I guess all Clyde really wanted out of Wounded Knee was a decent meal! My cowboy boots were worn out, so I asked John to bring me a new pair, and he did.
When Wounded Knee burst into the headlines, we attracted the attention of some of the best lawyers in America, including Mark Lane, William Kunstler, and Ken Tilsen. They dropped everything and came to Rapid City to offer support and advice from the moment of their arrival, on March 22. The three of them, and AIM’s young friend from Minneapolis, Larry Leventhal, along with Ramon Roubideaux, Doug Hall, and several other attorneys, formed the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee, commonly called “Wikledoc” (WKLD/OC). Three days later, WKLD/OC got Andrew Bogue, the federal judge for western South Dakota, to issue a court order to allow food and medicine to be brought in to Wounded Knee. The government appealed his order and got it overturned. WKLD/OC filed a writ of mandamus asking Bogue to order the government to allow humanitarian assistance for Wounded Knee. Although he had a reputation as an excellent jurist and, like all federal judges, held a lifetime appointment, Bogue turned his coat and refused to issue another writ. Political pressure had come down from Washington and from South Dakota’s reigning rednecks.
Then the feds told the media inside the Knee that they could no longer guarantee their safety. The press then left. That scared hell out of us. We were convinced that only the presence of all those network cameras had kept the FBI from wiping us out. White ranchers throughout the region were organizing to attack us; the FBI tolerated their death squads roaming our reservations. However, when they heard, on March 12, that a group called South Dakotans for Civil Liberties was threatening to get an aircraft to bomb Wounded Knee, they warned it off. Some of this gang’s members later joined such well-armed, highly organized, and well-financed white-supremacist organizations as the Order and Posse Comitatus. They try hard to appear as lunatic-fringe kooks, but they are some of the most dangerous people in America.
Exactly a month into the siege—the night after the press left—the feds initiated one of the fiercest firefights of the struggle. Fifty-caliber tracer rounds rained on Wounded Knee, skipping off the highway to ricochet high into the sky. The only casualty that night was a U.S. marshal named Lloyd Grim who was struck by a rifle bullet and seriously wounded. The feds, reinforced by BIA police from reservations around the country, clamped down hard on Pine Ridge. They raided our houses, arrested our supporters, and intensified their efforts to cut off our supplies. For some reason, Vernon Bellecourt was at Crow Dog’s Paradise telling everyone there to stay away from Wounded Knee. The situation became so critical that Dennis and I decided to smuggle ourselves out and go to the Rosebud, where we had more friends, to try to enlist support.
It was a hundred miles to Crow Dog’s Paradise, on the Rosebud. With four escorts, we set out after dark on March 26 for Manderson, about eight miles north by the road but half again that far through the hills. By dawn we had passed the last fed roadblock, but snow was on the ground and we had to cross open cornfields. We had no way of knowing who was watching from the woods. If we got caught in the open by goons or feds, we were all dead meat. One by one we ran across the field to the cover of some trees near a creek. Moving up the stream, we saw a house with wood smoke curling from its stovepipe. We had no idea whose home it was, so we squatted down to watch. After a time, the door opened and a teenage boy came out and stared right at us. Then he waved to us to come in. It looked like a trap, but with the creek at our back and little cover, we would get hit if we tried to run. We each took a big gulp of cold air, cocked our rifles, and went in.
The Great Mystery had guided us to Dave Flying Hawk’s place—the first stop on the “underground railroad” out of Wounded Knee, and the last going in. The house was full of people from the West Coast, all going in to Wounded Knee as soon as it got dark again. As poverty stricken as any people on the reservation, the Flying Hawks gave us a meal. They were Indians, and anyone who came to their door would get fed. They risked everything they had to help us; if they had been caught, the feds would have taken away their lease money, their welfare payments, their commodities—anything they had—and jailed the adults and put the kids in foster homes. The Flying Hawks and hundreds like them were willing nevertheless to take the risk because of the goons and the BIA police. Wilson’s terrorism had turned most of his people against him. Even those who minded their own business weren’t safe. Any Indian with long hair—even women—risked being removed from car or home, taken into the countryside, and beaten with clubs, boots, or gun butts. Some were shot. Many disappeared, never to be seen again. Homes and cars were firebombed. Even livestock was butchered.
The Flying Hawks put us in their car, but they had only enough gasoline to take us to the DeSersa place, on the other side of Manderson. Those were Black Elk Clan people, staunch AIM supporters whose sons were all inside the Knee. They arranged for a car to take Dennis and me to the Rosebud. Our four escorts then went back to the Knee. Dennis and I crowded into the backseat, but when we stopped for gas in Wanblee, near the eastern edge of Pine Ridge, several goons came up. Our long hair was tucked into stocking caps and we wore dark glasses, but our faces had been on television almost nightly for nearly a month. As goons peered into our car, I slowly edged my hand toward a .30-30 hidden under some clothes. Maybe goons didn’t watch television. Maybe they were drunk. Maybe it was our stocking caps. Or all three. Whatever the reason, after a quick glance, they lost all interest in us.