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Sobriety
After my trial, I began to prepare for the sun dance at Green Grass. I wanted to make it very special, a wopila ceremony of gratitude and thanksgiving. Just before I left, word came that prosecutors in Sioux Falls had asked Judge Braithwaite to revoke my bond, and he was considering it. As a kid learning about Christianity, I had been taught to pray for myself, but Indian teachings are the opposite. We pray for everyone else. Nevertheless, I was so worried about Braithwaite’s ruling that I made a vow: If the Great Mystery would keep me out of prison, I would never pray for myself again.
For four days, faithfully fasting and dancing, I prayed for my freedom. Then, for the only time in my life, my chest was pierced on each side, and chokecherry slivers were attached to four buffalo skulls that I dragged around the sacred circle. They represented the four winds, the four directions, the four points of the universe, the four corners of the earth, the four ages each person goes through, and the four epochs of the earth. Those epochs are the times when human beings have walked the planet between cataclysmic changes—after the earth was formed in fire, after the ice age, after the flood, and after an age yet to come, when I believe the earth will become a desert. I pulled the skulls also for the sacred colors—black, red, yellow, and white—the pigments of the human races that mix together to become brown, the color of our Grandmother and of the fifth race. Most of all, I pulled the skulls to honor my children, the sacred pipe, and the rebirth of my people.
While I danced out the east gate of the sacred circle, I saw Bruce Ellison, one of my lawyers. As the ceremony ended and people shook hands and offered thanks, he told me that Judge Braithwaite had denied the prosecutor’s motion. I would remain free until all my appeals were exhausted. Another of my multitude of prayers had been answered. In gratitude, I renewed my vow to the Great Mystery. To this day, I have never again prayed for myself.
A few weeks after the sun dance, in September 1976, I surrendered myself to Custer County authorities and served the thirty days I had received after having pleaded guilty to assault the previous year. It wasn’t terribly unpleasant. I pretty much had the place to myself except for a couple of guys who came and went after a few days. I spent hours doing sit-ups and push-ups. For spiritual reasons, I fasted for four days, taking only water.
When they turned me loose, I headed for New York to help Jimmy Durham. We were about the only ones still actively working for the International Indian Treaty Council. It was then the only nongovernmental organization recognized by the United Nations that was dealing with the rights of indigenous peoples. Jimmy had been trying to get the United Nations to sponsor a worldwide conference on the treatment of Indian people in the Western Hemisphere. He had a hard time finding folks to travel outside the United States, so he usually went himself. That was a problem. He is a slender, light-skinned, blue-eyed Cherokee from a band that the United States refuses to recognize. He also insisted on wearing a long, shaggy beard that, with his other physical characteristics, gave him a bizarre resemblance to Abe Lincoln.
Although UN officials seemed very receptive to our plan for a conference, it was unprecedented because the international community had never paid any attention to Indians. We soon learned that dealing with UN bureaucrats was even more difficult than dealing with the BIA. It was easier to work with the UN missions of individual countries and with groups such as the Organization for African Unity and the Non-Aligned Movement.
The Soviets were especially sympathetic because they wanted anyone who dissented against the United States in their camp. Every country in the Western Hemisphere opposed our conference because its purpose was to focus world attention on the oppression, suppression, and repression of American Indians—the silent holocaust that had been going on for nearly five hundred years. We wanted a prestigious site, so we chose Geneva, where the United Nations has a headquarters. We decided on the autumn of 1977, when most General Assembly missions are in session. After we had lined up support from many nations, the United Nations agreed to be a cosponsor. The conference would be one way of telling the world how Indians were treated in America.
Indians in South Dakota, and especially on Pine Ridge, had been the subjects of unrelenting terror sponsored or tolerated by the federal government.
In 1976, AL Trimble, former BIA superintendent, resigned and ran against Dick Wilson, who was seeking a third term as Lakota chairman. Donations from white and breed ranchers whom he had showered with political favors poured in to Wilson, so he had one hell of a campaign chest. He even put out slick political literature—all bullshit—describing his plans for his next term. Because of my lawsuit after Wilson’s theft of the 1974 election, Trimble got government-appointed election monitors and easily won the office. That ended goon terror on Pine Ridge, but not government oppression.
Trimble’s election did bring federal funds into Pine Ridge, which temporarily improved the lives of many people. One of the few long-term successes was in education, although it took nearly a generation to see results. As people became active in their communities and became empowered, they began to take contracts away from the BIA and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. They returned control of Indian education to the community by establishing local school boards. In time, communities on Pine Ridge took charge of their own schooling; in most districts, the schools were contracted out to local control.
The other success was community-based policing. The Oglala Sioux tribe won the BIA police contract and installed a tribal force, a system still used today. Gerald Clifford, Gerald One Feather, and others put together the finest example of community control of law enforcement. Each district hires and fires its own police. Once the annual budget is set, each controls its own share. That structure strengthens the community, and therefore the family. Rather than seeking to arrest people, it works to resolve conflicts without removing them from the community. It was so efficient that the FBI’s crime statistics, which use arrests and convictions as indicators of “productivity,” declined, according to wire-service reports. The Justice Department began to worry—despite the huge federal law-enforcement presence, not enough Indians were being sentenced to prison.
I don’t think this new funding was a master stroke on the part of the government, a switch in tactics from terror to pacification. It was more likely an accidental product of Trimble’s ability to shake the money tree. Whatever the reason, as federal funds poured into Pine Ridge to create mostly make-work jobs, many AIMsters were hired as police, property and supply clerks, civic planners, and for other new positions in tribal government. As unemployment fell from 87 percent to a mere 60 percent, desperately poor people who had had nothing to lose became slaves to their new paychecks. Busy with new jobs and families and oblivious to their own continuing oppression, younger people began to feel “empowered.”
One of the issues we wanted to take before the international community was the government-sponsored terrorism that had gripped Pine Ridge for years. Before Wilson left office, his death squads and white vigilantes had been responsible for the murders of more than sixty AIM members and more than 250 other Indian people in and around Pine Ridge. Those killings have yet to be investigated, and the effects of those horrific years are still seen and felt around the reservation. People were so terrified that instead of recognizing the source of their calamity—the federal government, personified by the BIA and rubber-stamp tribal government—they blamed AIM.
When I returned to Pine Ridge in the autumn of 1976, the terror had just ended and federal money had begun to flow in. For most, that period on the reservation was a time of happy tranquility. With my trials behind me, I was no longer preoccupied with legal matters. Dace had been chosen as Wanblee district leader and had somehow arranged for a rent-free three-bedroom house. Tom Poor Bear and I had no place to live, so Dace invited us to live with him. Then Peggy and I got back together, and Hank and Sherry moved in with me. Dace and I traded philosophies and feelings. Once again we became close, and I realized how lucky I was to be his brother.
The white man’s racist term for Indians is redskins, so when referring to ourselves, people of my generation often call one another “skins.” Although I had virtually no income and lived practically from hand to mouth during most of the winter of 1976-1977,1 hung around with the skins—having fun, joking around, shooting pool. Every once in a while, I would test a cowboy bar or two to see how tough everybody was that day. My drinking increased again. Peggy didn’t like it, but she never badgered me about it, mainly because I was so much fun when I was a little gassed. I wasn’t blacking out or getting so drunk that I seemed out of control. I sobered up whenever I had AIM business. I told myself that because AIM took so much of my attention, the only time I could relax was when I drank. I really wanted to believe that.
When the dancing season arrived in 1977, I fasted occasionally and enjoyed going to ceremonies. Throughout the Dakotas, at least, our culture enjoyed a spiritual rebirth that is still evident today. Greg Zephier’s family restored the sun dance to the Yankton Reservation, another group returned it to Standing Rock, and even Sisseton began to organize one. Soon every Sioux reservation except Crow Creek and Lower Brule had at least one sun dance. Amid that renaissance of self-dignity and self-pride, Pine Ridge people began to organize. Indian ranchers started to get loans, some to expand their herds and others to resume ranching. It was a heady time. Although most of AIM’s newly employed members began to drift away, the nucleus remained strong. Along with other AIMsters, I led civil-rights demonstrations all around the Dakotas during much of 1976 and 1977.
In the spring of 1977, there was a racial disturbance against Indian people on the Sisseton-Wahpeton Reservation, which is Peggy’s home. We decided to caravan to Sisseton and confront white city officials. I was on bond while my appeal for the Sioux Falls conviction worked its way through the courts, so I couldn’t break the law for any reason. Therefore, I didn’t take part in the actual march on the town of Sisseton. The march ended at the courthouse, and I walked in with the local protest leaders to meet white officials. They agreed to everything we asked. When my presence in Sisseton made the news, prosecutors in Sioux Falls asked Judge Braithwaite to revoke my bail on the ground that I had violated his restrictions on civil disobedience. I wasn’t notified about that, nor was my attorney—it wasn’t legally required. It would be several weeks before the judge ruled. Meanwhile, I was blissfully unaware that my freedom was threatened.
By that time, the mid-1970s, I had noticed how much my drinking was affecting my personal life. When I finally stopped kidding myself that Betty and I were ever going to reconcile, something snapped inside Michele. Her face, wracked by disappointment and anger, is burned into my memory. The special relationship we had always enjoyed was over. Weeks later, after yet another night of Rapid City partying, Michele told me off, in the wonderfully direct manner of all children, explaining how much my boozing hurt her and Scott. Bursting into tears, she said she was ashamed and embarrassed and never wanted to see me drinking again. That cut me deeply.
Nonetheless, plans for the Geneva conference moved ahead, and I began to visit New York more frequently. One night Jimmy Durham and I met with a Soviet reporter at his apartment in the East Fifties. The feds were following us; looking out the window, we saw them fiddling with the reporter’s car. He made a call, and some Soviets came down to remove the bugs. To celebrate, we got into a drinking contest—straight shots of vodka. When I left, the reporter asked to be excused because he didn’t think he could make it to the front door. I passed out in the taxi. Jimmy and the driver had to carry me upstairs.
I gradually realized how much alcohol was affecting my work. In July 1977, Jimmy asked me to meet him in Geneva for some preliminary work on the September conference and to stop in London to talk with African journalists. My flight left from Washington, D.C. I flew there a day early and spent the evening in a saloon. When a white guy insulted an Indian woman, I got into a fight and tore a ligament in my knee. I ended up with my leg in a cast from crotch to toes. The next morning I flew off in a British Airways 747. Undeterred, I drank gin and played poker with a couple of Brits in the first-class lounge. I got drunk and lost about two hundred dollars. All I had left was a few coins and the phone number of the journalist I was to stay with. He was kind enough to come and get me.
He was the editor of Africa, then considered the Time magazine of Africa, and he lived in Mayfair, one of London’s most exclusive neighborhoods. He took me to his favorite pub, where except for him and a few of his pals, I saw no blacks. When he threw a party, these blacks all brought blonde women. In their magazines, those same men wrote inflammatory articles about Africa’s struggle against colonialism, but I could see they were sellouts. I was drinking, and when the conversation turned political, I condemned them for living in an expensive neighborhood, for hanging out with whites, and for consorting with white women. We nearly got into a fistfight. The next day I left for Geneva, but the editor refused to take me to the airport. I called Jimmy collect, and he wired me enough money to pay for a cab.
Everyone I met in Geneva treated me very well, including many wonderful white people from all over Europe. They were very critical of the United States, but comfortable about airing their views in front of me. I realized they didn’t consider me an “American.” I saw whites in a new light. I had never known any like these friendly, sophisticated people with their good senses of humor. They were interested in my views of the world, especially about the U.S. government. After meeting them, I made it my mission when talking with anyone not from my hemisphere to solicit their opinions about Americans. It was usually enlightening, but not so surprising to me now since the Vietnam War had only ended two years before.
When I returned to the States, I went to the sun dance at Green Grass, where my prayers were for the Geneva conference scheduled for September and, of course, for my people. Afterward, I returned to my summer lifestyle of dancing and partying. By then, I was aware that drinking had begun to cloud my judgment. For the first time, I was drinking on the reservation, even in my own community—I was still living with Dace at Wanblee. I had begun to have blackouts, hours that I couldn’t remember afterward. During one of those episodes in late July, I got into a fight with my cousin Warren Means, a man I had held in awe and admiration since childhood. All I remember is regaining consciousness while on my way to borrow a shotgun to try to kill him. Once again, I began to think about quitting booze.
When I woke up at about noon on August 9, after having partied the weekend away during a sun dance, people were passed out all over our house. Ramone Bear Runner and I wanted to keep partying, so we got into his car and headed out. We stopped to see Ted. He had been sober since the previous New Year’s Day. When he saw that I had been drinking, he was a little annoyed with me, so I stayed just long enough to thank him for his prayers. We went by the Longhorn in Scenic for a six-pack, then headed toward Rapid City looking for a party.
When we passed Peggy, driving her car, I signaled her to pull over. We talked on the roadside and I told her how much I loved her. I even proposed to her. She said, “I won’t marry you as long as you drink.” I thought, if Ted could quit drinking, so could I. I said, “Okay, I quit.” I opened our remaining two cans of beer and poured their contents into the gutter. To my astonishment, Peggy believed me and agreed to marry me.
She was a woman who had faith in my word. I fell even more deeply in love with her on the spot.
Peggy and I were married in mid-August in the traditional manner by Rick Two Dogs, at his inipi in Porcupine. In September, I took Peggy and my daughter Sherry, who was about to enter the twelfth grade, to Geneva for the conference. Others in the AIM contingent included Clyde Bellecourt and Phillip Deere.
One of the first issues to be resolved was what we would call ourselves. The Canadians and the Six Nations people did not want to be known as Indians. The Canadians, who represented Indians and Inuits, preferred natives—the term the Canadian government uses. The original inhabitants of northern and western Alaska, the Yupik and Inupiat peoples, are commonly called Eskimos. They also refer to themselves as natives. The debate went on for two days. The Canadians were adamant, but AIM sided with the Central and South Americans, who preferred Indians.
The convincing argument came from a short, wiry Panamanian, a fiery speaker. Even those who spoke no Spanish could feel his energy. He said, “Columbus did not set out to find India but a country known to Europeans as Hindustan. Look at the maps he had in 1492 and it’s obvious! He wrote of the people he encountered in the New World as ‘una gente en dio,’ literally, ‘a people in with God’ …who were ‘so peace-loving and generous as if to a fault. Therefore, they would make excellent slaves.’ We were enslaved as ‘Indians,’ we’ll gain our freedom as Indians, and then we can call ourselves any damn thing we please!” When he had finished, everyone agreed that all indigenous peoples of our hemisphere would be known as Indians until we could regain our freedom.
Later we met in the hotel basement to agree on an agenda for the opening meeting. In all North America, there are fewer than two million Indians, but there are more than one hundred million in South and Central America, which to us includes Mexico. Naturally, the South Americans wanted to speak first at the historic conference. The Central Americans argued that they should go first. They cited the depredations of Hernan Cortes, the murder of Montezuma. They mentioned their ancestors’ rich body of astronomic knowledge, their advanced engineering principles demonstrated by the construction of pyramids, their understanding of mathematics that included use of the zero—and all the rest of their heritage.
The Six Nations delegates didn’t see things that way. In the 1920s, the Six Nations had sent a delegate to the League of Nations in Geneva to ask for international recognition of their sovereignty. They have endured for more than eight centuries as their own league of nations; the U.S. Constitution was patterned after the code of their confederacy. They wanted to have the first speaker at our conference. It seemed to me and the other AIMsters that it was arrogant for any North American to want to go first, but we were an organization, not a nation, so we kept that to ourselves and didn’t take sides. The discussion became very heated. Finally, Leon Shenandoah, dressed like the other “Sixers” in a traditional Iroquois outfit, issued a threat. If a Six Nations person wasn’t the first speaker, they would all boycott the conference. After that was translated into Spanish for the Central and South Americans, the room fell silent. Anxiety and bad feelings seemed to ooze from the walls.
Phillip Deere hadn’t said a thing during two hours of arguing and shouting. He got to his feet then and said, “Down home, whenever we’re going to have a ceremony or a meeting, we light a fire. It’s a sacred fire, and we have to light it in the traditional way. We gather a little brush and twigs and begin to strike the flints together. Sometimes the first spark lights the fire. Other times, it takes a lot of sparks. Finally one will catch and the fire will be lit. We’ve come here to light another kind of fire. There will be many sparks tomorrow, but we don’t know which will ignite the flame.”
He sat down, and we all looked at one another. When Phillip’s words were translated, all of the Spanish speakers agreed that since the “Sixers” wanted the first spot so badly, their spokesperson, Oren Lyons, could go first. The Canadians would be next. I would speak sometime after the middle of the program. When it came time to select the last speaker, Phillip Deere, who had never asked for the honor, was the unanimous choice.
Clyde suggested that we start the conference with a bang. “We’re not just going to wander into that hall,” he said. “We’re going to march on that building, all as one, singing our sacred songs. We’re going up there proud of who we are.” We started from across town, our elders leading the way—Phillip, carrying the pipe, Leon and Audrey Shenandoah from the Six Nations, David Monongye, a Hopi who had seen more than one hundred winters, and several elders from South and Central America. Right behind them came the drum. We sang the AIM song. As they always did, Indian people flocked to it, filled with pride and spirituality, infused with courage and the feeling of sovereignty, 120 marchers representing the aspirations of a hundred million oppressed but resolute souls.
Geneva has never seen anything like it, before or since. When we approached the Palace of Nations, every window was filled with people. Those who worked in nearby buildings deserted their offices and ran into the streets to see us. UN security people opened the double doors, and we marched up the stairs with the drum, singing all the way to a second-floor conference room where world leaders have met for more than a century. The world press—except for Western Hemisphere media, which boycotted the entire event—had never seen anything like us Indians, and they played it up.
Our conference lasted four days and was attended by representatives of more than 130 international organizations and nations, including about thirty-five member states of the UN General Assembly. The central issue, of course, was the land, and after that, the treaties, mostly in North America.
Beyond the fact that Indians from throughout the Americas got together to talk for the first time, the most significant achievement of our conference was recognition by the international community that from then on, we had to be dealt with. From that meeting came plans for a conference to include representatives of every indigenous people in the world, and out of that, the UN’s Working Group on Indigenous Peoples was created. And all of that was the fruit of the first meeting of the International Indian Treaty Council at Mobridge, South Dakota, in 1974.
Our presence in Geneva was reported in front-page stories throughout Europe. Several governments clamored for our presence, and tours were arranged for the delegates to visit other countries. With my family, I took a few days to enjoy an abbreviated tour sponsored by the governments of Eastern European socialist nations, including official visits to Bulgaria, Hungary, and East Germany.
Before we left Geneva, concern was expressed about what might happen to the Indian delegates from Central and South America when they returned to their homes. There was a very real possibility that they or their families would be jailed, killed, or simply disappear, especially in Guatemala, Panama, Bolivia, and Colombia, where governments don’t think twice about killing Indians. Delegates from nations that were UN members persuaded the General Assembly to pass a resolution in New York to monitor South and Central American delegates and their families for at least two years, so that if anything happened to them, the whole world would know.
As it turned out, only one Indian was sent to jail after the conference—me. I got word that because I had been present at the Sisseton civil-rights demonstration earlier in the year, Judge Richard Braithwaite had voided my bond. I had about fifteen days to report to the South Dakota State Penitentiary, at Sioux Falls, to begin serving my four-year sentence.
When I returned via New York, I flew straight to Sioux Falls. With my new wife, daughter, and lawyers, I went immediately to the South Dakota State Penitentiary on the bluffs overlooking the falls and the city named for them. Surrendering myself outside the massive brownstone walls, I was immediately handcuffed, then led inside to what guards call “orientation” and cons call the “fish tank”—a place to hold new prisoners until they adjust to confinement.
A Colombian Indian friend had promised in Geneva that if I went to prison, he would have all the missionaries in his homeland killed. I sent him no message about my imprisonment, so I suppose many a missionary down there in 1977 owes me his or her life. The morning after I went behind the walls, my lawyers got me back out on a writ of habeas corpus. I went to the federal court and appeared before Judge Nichol. The State of South Dakota argued that I had broken restrictions on my bond by participating in civil disobedience, but my lawyers pointed out that all I had done was attend a meeting with the Sisseton city fathers and law-enforcement officials. Nichol said, “What’s wrong with that judge? You can’t throw a man in prison for exercising his right of free speech. This is lunacy!” My bond was continued pending my appeal, and I returned to prison just long enough to collect a few belongings. Indian convicts—there are many in that pen—shouted as I was released, “Nobody can get Russell Means! You’ll never get him in here! You’ll never kill him!” They were still shouting when I drove away.