30
Waiting For Trial
Of the hundreds of people arrested in 1973 because of Wounded Knee, the government had decided that the ringleaders were Dennis Banks, Vernon Bellecourt, Clyde Bellecourt, Pedro Bissonnette, Leonard Crow Dog, Carter Camp, Stan Holder, and me. Our bonds were set at an astronomical $135,000 each, the equivalent of about $1 million in 1990s money. Somehow, WKLD/OC raised it. Even though the government had tricked the defenders of Wounded Knee into surrendering with lies and promises never intended to be kept, everyone who had been in the Knee—and even more who only claimed they had—was a hero in Indian country. For the first time in generations, we had stood up to the white man. A few hungry people with shotguns and hunting rifles had taken everything the U.S. government dished out for seventy-one days—and most of us had lived to tell about it.
As spring became summer on the northern Plains, Indian people renewed their bonds with their ancestors and Grandmother Earth, with singing and dancing and weekend wacipi social gatherings. Veterans of the Knee and AIM members from around the country were welcomed with even more warmth than usual. That summer, we roamed the Dakotas, camping together on reservations or wherever a wacipi was held. Our AIM camp was easy to find. We always flew the American flag upside down, to the consternation of law-enforcement agents and many Indians, particularly middle-aged veterans of World War II who didn’t seem to understand.
When I wasn’t dancing at wacipis, I partied. AIM and its supporters included a lot of cocky guys who often went in groups of five or ten to redneck cowboy joints to drink and shoot pool, daring somebody to start something. Sometimes they did. We weren’t looking for trouble, but we never ran from it. We also partied in private homes. One day a bunch of us were at Sidney Ear’s house, about halfway between Highway 18 and the Rosebud, when the long-simmering feud between the Bellecourts and the Camps boiled over. The antagonism went back to the time in Alliance, Nebraska, when several AIM guys had pointed guns at Vernon Bellecourt. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was because of Vernon’s big mouth and bellicose, I-give-the-orders attitude. That was bad enough, but it also was apparent that he was unwilling to do most of the things he commanded others to do. The best example of his courage is that while most AIM leaders were inside the Knee, Vernon took a trip to Italy, supporting us with a telegram congratulating us on the good coverage we were getting in the media!
At the house near Rosebud, Clyde went outside to argue with Craig Camp, Carter’s younger brother. When Carter followed to back him up, Craig pulled a gun. I was sitting at the doorway and happened to lean outside just then and see Carter off to one side, aiming his gun through a small tree. Without warning, he shot Clyde in the gut. Clyde doubled over, holding his stomach, and ran past me into the house, his eyes very big. He said nothing, but continued through the living room, hallway, kitchen, and then out the back door. I yelled, “He’s shot!” We ran to get him just as he collapsed.
Carter and his friends took off as we drove Clyde to an Indian Health Service hospital three or four miles down the road, in Rosebud. We took him to the emergency room. I told the doctor, “If he dies, you die.” “We can’t do anything with a gunshot wound here,” he replied, and called a Medevac helicopter to take Clyde to a hospital in Winner, South Dakota.
Winner was another virulently racist border town that had been part of the Rosebud reservation before the area was opened illegally to white homesteaders. We got back in our cars—about thirty of us, most packing side arms—and sped over to Winner. Later, the local police turned up with warrants for Vernon and me. Months after our arrest during the Custer courthouse police riot, a grand jury had handed down indictments on additional charges. I had eight felony counts against me for the courthouse fracas, and my bail had been upped to fifty thousand dollars.
We told the cops, “Wait until Clyde gets out of the operating room and we find out his condition. Then we’ll go with you.” Outgunned and not about to mess with us in a hospital, they agreed. A couple of hours later, Clyde was wheeled into a recovery room in stable condition. Vernon and I submitted to arrest, waited in the Winner jail until we were transported to Custer, and were released on bond raised by WKLD/OC.
In the meantime, one of our attorneys, Mark Lane, had convinced Carter Camp to turn himself in. I later learned that he had shot Clyde because he didn’t want Craig to shoot him and get in trouble with the law. At the time, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Now I see Carter’s brand of logic operating around the world—in Bosnia, Somalia, the West Bank, Northern Ireland. When a Sioux Falls grand jury opened an investigation into the shooting, of those present at the Ear house only Clyde and I were called to testify. Clyde had served twelve years in prison and would do nothing to put another Indian behind bars. Moreover, most people in AIM admired Carter, and his leadership had been important during the siege of Wounded Knee. When we met in Sioux Falls, Clyde told me, “I won’t testify against him.” I said, “You’re the one who got shot, so I’ll go along with you.”
Meanwhile, Dick Wilson’s reign of terror on Pine Ridge had continued. After media attention focused on his death-squad goons, Wilson began to call his bullies “Guardians Of the Oglala Nation,” to justify GOON as a descriptive acronym. By any name, they ran rampant, caravanning through outlying districts, carloads of brutal drunks armed to the teeth and itching to cause trouble. But the BIA police were even worse. People were beaten to death in the countryside. Others were taken to jail to be stomped or pounded on. Some just disappeared. To this day, none of them has been found and nobody has accounted for them.
Because of the situation on Pine Ridge, the sun dance was called off that year. Instead, in the second week of August, we held one at Crow Dog’s place on the Rosebud. People came from all over, including renowned medicine men from many other reservations, among them Fools Crow and John Fire Lame Deer. My brother Bill came; this was his first sun dance. Although the Pine Ridge event always had a rodeo, carnival, softball, drinking and partying, and half days of sun dancing, we went to Crow Dog’s place only to dance. We began at sunup and quit on the first day in early evening, a couple of hours before sundown—my first experience at dancing all day. As in previous years, our eyes and bodies followed the sun across the sky, as we prayed all the while. When we took a break, I sat while singers smoked sacred pipes and came to help us pray. After the pipes were returned to their places, we danced again.
When we stopped, Crow Dog told everybody to get into pickup trucks, and he drove us to the creek. We all went in, swimming and splashing. I had had nothing to eat or drink all day, and although I tried mightily, I couldn’t hold out with all that water around. Like everyone else, I drank from the creek. Soon another car came with oranges, juice, and lemonade. I was astonished. It was the sun dancers’ equivalent of a rabbi bringing ham sandwiches to synagogue on Yom Kippur. I had to keep reminding myself that Crow Dog was Hey oka and lived his life backwards. For the rest of the sun dance, although we danced until sundown, I ate nothing for four days and nights and drank only after quitting at the end of each day.
In previous years, almost everyone except Pete Catches had pierced on only one side. He had explained to me that piercing twice represents the female/male balance, something we need to recognize always. He was my sun-dance idol, so I followed his lead. When we queued to pierce on the fourth day, Crow Dog put me first in line. When he came with paint to circle where I wanted to be pierced, I fingered two places. Almost everyone did the same. From that moment on, it became customary for each dancer to pierce both sides.
I spent a lot of time that summer working on my legal defense with Mark Lane, Bill Kunstler, Ken Tilsen, Larry Leventhal, and the other lawyers in the WKLD/OC headquarters in Rapid City. One day Mark and other WKLD/OC people noticed that several men in business suits had moved into an apartment house next door. Mark went there with everybody else, threw open the door, and exposed them. The “suits” were FBI agents who had bugged the WKLD/OC offices. They were breaking the very laws they had sworn to uphold. Our lawyers went to Judge Bogue and got a restraining order to prohibit the FBI from installing bugs or tapping our phones.
With many federal complaints hanging over my head, my immediate concern was preparing for the Wounded Knee trial. The feds would try to convict Dennis and me of thirteen felonies each. Although I faced a dozen other felony counts in South Dakota and Nebraska with possible sentences of 330 years plus life, I hardly worried about them. Looking back on it now—I certainly didn’t realize it then—I was already thinking like an elder.
Starting with my years in Cleveland when Sarge Old Horn and I had discussed Indian spirituality, and later through conversations with the older people I met on reservations, my confidence in spiritual power had deepened steadily. During Wounded Knee, I had become “personal” with the Great Mystery, and had developed communication and felt very close to the spirit world. We Indians do not teach that there is only one god. We know that everything has power, including the most inanimate, inconsequential things. Stones have power. A blade of grass has power. Trees and clouds and all our relatives in the insect and animal world have power. We believe we must respect that power by acknowledging its presence. By honoring the power of the spirits in that way, it becomes our power as well. It protects us.
By the summer of 1974, I realized that acknowledging that wisdom allows me to know when I am right. As long as I don’t abuse the power of any living being, any inanimate object, the wind, Grandmother Earth, or the universe, don’t abuse any power but respect it, those powers—or spirits or gods, or God—will watch over me. I know prayer works—all prayer—and with that knowledge, I have no fear. With such realizations, my life became easy to live. I wasn’t worried about going to prison for our stands at Scottsbluff or Custer or even Wounded Knee. I knew the spirits were watching out for me and for what was right. I put my faith in the Great Mystery and in my lawyers and never doubted that they too were guided by the same force, whether they were aware of it or not.