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Yellow Thunder Camp
On New Year’s Eve, I attended another of Two Dogs’s yuwipis. The spirits said that in the next year, 1981, something would have to be done about the Black Hills—and that we Lakota would have to do it. After that, during my daily exercise run, I added to my dawn thank-you prayers a request for some sign to guide me. What exactly did we have to do? Then one day I struck up a conversation with a white lawyer who worked for the Black Hills Alliance. I don’t remember much about it except that he said, “There’s no law against camping in the Black Hills.” The proverbial light bulb went on. Suddenly I knew what to do—just set up a camp and reclaim the Black Hills. Possession is nine-tenths of the white man’s law.
I suddenly got very excited, and started to tell everybody I knew in Rapid City, Pine Ridge, and in AIM about this idea. I said we wouldn’t have to worry about what Governor Bill Janklow might do; if we camped on federal land, it would be out of his hands. I explained, “We’ll go in unarmed with the sacred pipe so everyone will know that we’re peaceful,” and other Indians would join us.
My ideas were met with great skepticism. Most Lakota people, having survived four years of Pine Ridge terror, did not want to risk their lives for the Black Hills, which seemed far from their homes. Even Rick Two Dogs counseled against going in. But my brother Bill and I were determined to tap the power of the sacred pipe. We would return with it to our holy land with whatever supporters we could muster.
I was still on parole and couldn’t participate in anything that might involve lawbreaking, so Bill took over. Because four is our most sacred number—and Martin Luther King Jr., a champion of spirituality and nonviolence, had been assassinated on the fourth day of the fourth month—we chose the anniversary of his death, April 4, to return to the Black Hills. We made announcements on KILI Radio and put up posters around the reservation saying that in the morning, we would form a caravan to Victoria Lake, a few miles outside Rapid City. It is one of only two federally owned sites in the Black Hills with year-round water, a lake about the size of a beaver pond, surrounded by eight hundred acres of U.S. Forest Service land. Its adjacent parcels are owned by the state or by individuals.
Some fifty-one people, about half of them Indians, showed up for the caravan. The whites were led by a great guy, a peace-loving Quaker named Nick Meinhart. When they arrived at about 10:00 a.m., some friendly Forest Service rangers stopped by to advise them to get a fire permit. Bill immediately drove to their station and submitted the paperwork; once signed, it was good for six months. I bet the rangers who suggested it were fired or transferred to some remote corner of Alaska, because once we had that permit, we couldn’t be forced to leave.
Meanwhile, I was driving around Rapid City with Peggy, periodically calling the Black Hills Alliance office to see if everything was peaceful in the hills. When I learned that there were no problems, I called my parole officer and asked to move to the campsite. He said, “Sure, as long as no laws have been broken.” As I drove into the hills at about 4:00 p.m., I told Peggy, “We ought to name this place in honor of the Yellow Thunder family, because after Raymond Yellow Thunder was murdered in Gordon, the Lakota stood up as a people for the first time in this century.”
Just as we arrived, it started to snow. Bill and the others came running to greet us and to say that they had set up an inipi lodge and held a purification ceremony, during which they had chosen a name for the site—Yellow Thunder Camp. It was an uncanny moment. My brother also mentioned that since that morning, the campers had experienced the gentle rain of spring, the baking heat of summer, the sleet of autumn, and now the wind and snow of winter—all four seasons in a single day. Everyone in camp was sure that was a sign that our return to our sacred Paha Sapa was a holy act.
ABOVE: Yellow Thunder Camp in the Black Hills.
It also proved to be the beginning of the finest and most important time of my life. I suddenly felt a sense of love for the land, and I lived there for the next two years, leaving only to conduct BHA or AIM or treaty council business. For more than eight consecutive months, I spent every night in camp, commuting daily to the BHA offices in Rapid City. We set up tents and a communal kitchen. After a few days, when they saw it was safe, Indian people started to trickle in. Some left after only a short while but others stayed for years, so it is hard to say exactly how many were in camp at any one time. This return to our holy land was major news, reported around the world. With visitors arriving from everywhere, we planned to make our settlement permanent, which meant defining its nature and purpose. After much talk, we decided that Yellow Thunder Camp would become a spiritual youth camp, a live-in school where orphans and so-called troublemakers could learn to live as free people. Instead of teachers and classrooms—a sixth-century Roman Catholic invention that rips people from their families and community to isolate them by age group and turn them into robots—we agreed that the whole community would participate in teaching. Our classroom would be the breast of our sacred Grandmother.
Some hippies from Washington state offered to make us canvas Lakota-style tipis with linings at cut-rate prices—they even sent them on credit. The problem was, we had no one who knew how to put them up. A bearded mountain man I knew was a tipi maker who, with his Japanese wife, lived year-round in one at eleven thousand feet in the Colorado Rockies. He donated a tipi in exchange for enough gasoline money to haul it to us. When he showed us how to erect it, we joked about our ancestors spinning in their graves at the notion of Indians having to learn from a white man how to put up their tipis.
Tipi is a Lakota word that means a safe, secure home. It represents a woman’s womb; she comforts you, keeps you warm, and protects you from the dangers outside. The lodge poles represent men—look at how many it takes to support a woman in the right way! Those men come together at their apex and are joined to form an intricate circle. When they are tied together in unity, only the wind that travels in a circle can dislodge them. The door is round, low to the ground, and small. White anthros and histos have opined that that is to make it difficult for enemies to get in, but the real reason is that it symbolizes the entrance to a woman. The location also ensures that all who enter come in a humble way.
Other poles go up outside to what white men call flaps. Those represent the woman’s arms. At night, they are crossed outside to let them enfold us, keeping us warm and comfortable. In the morning, we open her arms and the door at the bottom, and clean air comes in while old, stale air goes out—just like a woman in her time of purification. Thus a tipi-dwelling family gets an education about women and men standing in unity, a constant reminder to all about how to conduct themselves in fife. All Indians dwellings face east, for spiritual reasons and out of common sense. Especially in summer, the heat of the day comes in the afternoon, when shade is at the front door.
As modern architects confirm, the tipi, by design, is the finest mobile home ever invented. Structurally, it is an inverted cone. When heat rises, it has no place to go except back down, so a tipi is easy to keep warm. The outer skin sits about two inches off the earth; the inside lining reaches to the ground. Air enters from the outside, serving as insulation as it is drawn up between lining and skin. It also carries smoke and stale air out the top. Moving the flaps controls the volume of air drawn in—they act like stove dampers.
We learned all that and more from a truly special man named Shorty Blacksmith. A smallish breed who suffered from a very bad self-image, like most skins of our generation, Shorty was dirt-poor and drank too much, but he had a wealth of information. His knowledge of the Lakota language alone ought to have brought him a doctorate in linguistics at any university. People in Yellow Thunder Camp listened to him. For one of the few times in his life, he became an important man, full of ancient stories and remembrances, but nevertheless cursing himself because he hadn’t paid what he felt was enough attention to his elders when he was growing up. Compared with everyone else in camp, however, he was an inexhaustible fund of traditional wisdom.
Since we had no telephone in camp, people from the Black Hills Alliance came out on the morning of June 2 to tell me some bad news. A couple of days earlier, Father James O’Connor, a Jesuit at Saint Isaac Jogues in Rapid City, had died of a heart attack. His fellow priest, Father Richard Pates, had been shot in the buttocks by robbers who had made off with the priests’ wallets and the parish television set. My nineteen-year-old son, Hank, and his pal Freeman Mesteth had just been arrested for the crimes.
By the time I had rushed into Rapid City, the press was hot on the story and the Black Hills Alliance phones were ringing off the hook. When I finally got to see Hank, he said he had confessed to police. He, Freeman, and Brian Phelps, Peggy’s fifteen-year-old brother, after having drunk steadily for two days, had gone to the rectory to rob it. Brian, fortunately, had passed out in the backseat of the car and played no part in the incident. Freeman, who carried and used a .22 pistol, had confessed also.
Because the victim was a Catholic priest, I had a tough time finding anyone local to represent Hank. Although he was assigned a lawyer from the Public Defender’s office, I called around the country to get help. Bill Kunstler volunteered his services pro bono, and the National Jury Project sent people from New York City to help during jury selection. As his confession detailed, Hank had been unarmed and so drunk that he had no clear idea what he was doing during the robbery—an obvious case of diminished capacity. At his arraignment, he pleaded not guilty.
By that time, Yellow Thunder Camp was a hot issue in the region, and anything connected to AIM was usually good for a few headlines. I knew that in such a superheated atmosphere my son would be the target of all the hatred the courts, prosecutors, media, and public had long hoarded for me.
That is exactly what happened. Of course Hank and Freeman deserved punishment; if someone dies during a robbery, it’s a serious matter. Aside from a few juvenile arrests, however, it was Hank’s first offense. Nevertheless, the media vilified my son. The state attorney’s office, after threatening both young men with the death penalty, allowed each to plead guilty to a list of lesser charges—first-degree manslaughter, armed robbery, and two counts of aggravated assault. Before Hank was sentenced, Father Pates told the court that he had forgiven Hank for all that had happened, and hoped he would have the chance to change his life for the better.
I, too, forgave Hank. It’s much harder to forgive myself for all the years I wasn’t around for him, for the other years when I could find no way to show him how much I loved him, and for all the times when my drinking provided him with the wrong example to follow. When he went to prison, it felt like a piece of my heart had been chewed off. Judge Merton Tice Jr. slapped Hank and Freeman with maximum sentences that ran to three figures. Hank eventually made parole and straightened himself out, but Ken Tilsen is still trying to get Freeman out of Minnesota’s Stillwater Prison, where he was transferred several years ago.
Despite this tragedy, I had made a commitment to Yellow Thunder Camp. I couldn’t let Hank’s troubles distract me. At a meeting with the Black Hills Alliance board of directors, those of us from the camp said, “Now that we’ve gotten a moratorium on strip-mining and chased the big corporations away, the ranchers have what they wanted. We feel the focal point of this organization, the priority for all funding, should now become Yellow Thunder Camp.” In an insulting and condescending manner, the white directors replied, “Maybe we’ll consider taking you on as a program.”
I blew up. I said, “You think repossession of our holy land is a fucking program? You will consider it?” All the Indians returned to camp. The yearly election of the board was coming up, so my brother Bill said, “Let’s organize ourselves as the Buffalo Party and go in there and take over.” That’s what we did. On election day, we left a couple of people to watch the camp while everyone else went down to vote all but one of the incumbents off the board. We reelected Marv Kammer, a white rancher who had supported us and Madonna’s group, Women of All Red Nations. All four new board members were Indians.
When the new board began to reorganize the alliance office, the whites we had worked with for two years departed en masse. It really surprised me. I had learned another lesson in the white man’s language to whites, alliance meant they would work with Indians when they were in control, but if we asserted any semblance of independence, there was no more cooperation. Looking back, I realized that in my language, Black Hills Alliance translates as “Lakota Khe Sapa,” literally, a relationship, like the traditional Lakota Nation itself, of blood and common interests devoted to one issue—our sacred Black Hills. Our feeling was always that the organization was ultimately about Indian people returning to our holy land—a message that the whites had missed. Two days after the election, whites abandoned the alliance office. My priority was Yellow Thunder Camp, so we turned over day-to-day management of the alliance to an Ojibwa guy.
I spent much of the summer of 1981 raising money. Willie Nelson gave a benefit concert and also donated $10,000 from his own pocket. Because the International Treaty Council had worked with the Baath Socialist Party of Iraq, my brother and I knew a great guy, an Iraqi living in New Jersey. Through his efforts, the Baath donated $10,000 to Yellow Thunder Camp. With that, the concert money, and Nelson’s donation, we bought a geodesic dome to use as our cookhouse and community meeting hall. A white architect from Boulder, Colorado, designed it for us. An older fellow named Vern agreed to build it. He was a gruff, bearded, hippie-like engineer who had given up on white civilization to become a mountain-dwelling hermit and experiment with alternative-energy devices. At about that time, a team from the Farm, a Tennessee hippie commune established in the early 1960s, arrived to help us with communications. They put up a tower for a radio antenna, built a radio shack, and installed a two-way link with the affiance office.
I’ve never told anyone this, but when as a young man I learned that Crazy Horse had said he would return from the spirit world as thunder, I knew I was coming back as lightning. While I was part of Yellow Thunder Camp, lightning started to follow me around. The first time was at a treaty gathering. A storm began to build over the mountains during the meeting. As we left, we could see it coming, angry flashes muffled by black clouds—one hell of a hailstorm. As we drove away, we watched it roll through camp, and we barely made the ten miles to the blacktop before it hit us. Since that day, whenever I go someplace where a significant message is required, the thunder spirits deliver it. It’s always good—the wakinyun are good spirits who brings the cleansing and refreshing rain.
My parole term ended in August and I was again a free man. As late summer gave way to fall and the dome rose amid the tipis in our leafy U-shaped valley, the camp was a peaceful, happy place. We built a solar-heated shower on the big rocks that had dammed the creek and created the lake. We started Lakota language lessons, and, with George Tall, I taught political classes under the trees or on the meadow. We were “cash poor,” but there was always plenty to eat. Our goats gave milk and our chickens provided eggs. Our creek and pond offered excellent fishing, and our gardens produced so many vegetables that we began to sun-dry them for winter. George was a master hunter who stealthily staked out watering points and waited patiently with a .22 rifle. He never used more than one bullet to bring down a deer.
He and our other hunters were so successful that after a time many people, tired of venison, clamored for hamburgers.
That summer, I discovered an unhurried life that all indigenous people once shared. Without telephones or clocks, we learned that when you are free, there is no time. I sat endlessly among the trees, watching and contemplating, trying to understand the messages of life by observing it. I began to grasp the beauty and grace of being in the present, of living in harmony with everything in the natural world. The white man calls this the idyllic lifestyle of “primitives,” but I discovered that I had enrolled in the university of the universe. Our relatives, the wild creatures who share this earth with us, never stop teaching if we are prepared to learn from them. At night, I watched the fireflies playing, rolling themselves into little balls of pulsing fire that cascaded down the mountainside, then exploding into a million tiny lights as the swarm dispersed.
In those early months before we kept dogs in camp, deer strolled among our tipis unafraid. Wild turkeys fluttered in to check us out, and raccoons boldly explored our dwellings. Even eagles swooped into the lower branches of trees to study us. I was amazed to find that our two-legged kin, the birds, would talk to me. That is true of all creatures, but birds, such as the hawks and owl that had visited during my vision quest, are the friendliest. If I sat quietly, they came, at first just to look me over. Soon they abruptly departed, returning to watch some more. Then they left again, only to come back a little later. Usually, on their third visit, I spoke to them and they answer.
When an Indian says that animals talk to him, he means it—but not in the sense of “Hey, Russ, what do you know?” Birds and insects and other animals speak in many ways. In nature, everything that lives communicates with everything else. Some make noises that tell others of their approach. Others use colors to announce who they are. At first, I didn’t know those things. Through day after day of observation, I realized that the birds were going through a routine with me, giving me opportunities to respond. Once I began to communicate, I acknowledged them as they had acknowledged me, and I announced myself as they did. I became a mockingbird, mimicking their songs. After establishing communication, they began to show me things in various ways, but always simply so I could understand. They told me when the wind was about to rise or when the weather was ready to change, when someone or something was coming. They showed me easily overlooked miracles such as how to play and have fun with my own kind—how to enjoy life.
There among the birds and trees, it came to me that except for other people, the only living things that the white man takes the time to try to communicate with are his dog or cat. Unfortunately, he doesn’t watch or listen to them. He never tries to draw understanding from them. True communication is an exchange of information, but the white man doesn’t understand how to commune with nature.
As we went back to being full-time Indians at Yellow Thunder Camp, we taught ourselves the three Ls—listen, look, and learn. We realized that the three Rs of the white man’s education have nothing to do with fife. You can write the best book in creation or come up with elegant equations to solve some mathematical mystery, but that is mere knowledge. It doesn’t teach you how to get along with anything or anyone. Indigenous people around the world teach only the three Ls. Instead of believing that the universe depends on what we think, we teach that we must use our hearts to achieve harmony with our fellow creatures.
The white man looks upon the world as being filled with predators and prey and thinks that is the reason for the colors and sounds peculiar to different animals. I once debated that in a Pierre saloon with a Methodist preacher, the father of David Soul. We got into a discussion about the character of a square foot of earth. Considering the variety of insects and microscopic life forms, he said, “It’s a vicious world. It’s all about death and violence.”
I said, “I look upon that same world as sharing and sacrificing. Some sacrifice that others may live. Watching the hunter and the hunted, you will discover that nature has a way of compensating those whose fate is to become food. At the moment when it’s no longer possible for them to escape, they go into shock and no longer feel fear or pain.” Since continuous sacrificing and sharing are the natural processes of life, all life is positive—insight learned by communicating with all our relatives in nature. At Yellow Thunder Camp, I began to realize that there are two cultures on earth, one industrial and the other indigenous: One is about death, the other about life.
The wonder-filled quality of my life caused me to consider what Black Elk had said, that maybe one root of the sacred tree of fife still lives, and if we nurture it, perhaps the tree will bloom again. As I recognized that Yellow Thunder Camp was that struggling root, I became more determined than ever to nurture it.
When we established Yellow Thunder Camp, we were often visited by rattlesnakes. Once, after returning from the alliance office in Rapid City, one of the younger men came running up to say he had found a rattlesnake by the cliff. I said, “What did you do with it?”
“I didn’t kill it. I took it over the ridge and let it go.”
“Don’t do that anymore,” I said. “We are the invaders. This is their home. Next time you see a rattlesnake, apologize to it, walk around it, leave it alone.” We all started to do that, and soon the rattlesnakes left—not in twos and threes, but all at once. Little miracles like that happened all the time, glad reminders of why we had chosen to live there.
Peggy, however, was not as eager to settle in Yellow Thunder Camp. She had a teaching job on Pine Ridge that would have required a daily round-trip commute of about 250 miles. She could have quit her job, of course, but she preferred to live in Kyle and bring our daughter, Tatuye Topa Najinwin, to see me on weekends. As the months went by, I could feel Peggy pulling away from me. Our love, which had seemed invulnerable, began to disintegrate as she came to regard Yellow Thunder Camp as a rival for my affections. It was soon obvious that she saw my devotion to that holy land and my preference for traditional living as a threat to my commitment to her. She never liked living there, and complained that I neglected her and Tatuye. It made me very sad, because I had been down that path before. Twila had felt threatened by my involvement with the social scene at the Irish Pup, and Betty by my dedication to the Cleveland American Indian Center. I wished I had married a woman who truly loved whatever I did, who understood that although some men merely have jobs, I have a calling. Since I had joined AIM to serve my people, my work is much more than a vocation—it not only consumes my time and energy, it defines my identity.
Among the activist liberal causes of white America in the early 1980s, Yellow Thunder Camp became a cause célèbre that attracted all sorts of Indian and white visitors, especially Europeans. The whites ranged from hippies and well-meaning supporters to searchers and scholars. Some sought to view our culture without taking even a moment to learn what we are truly about. A visiting San Francisco anthropologist said, “I see you have division of labor by sex and age—and the entire camp is ruled by the male.” When she started to go on, I told her, “You don’t understand a thing. In four hours, you’ve determined what we are and how we are and why we are. Get the hell out of here.” Once again, I was reminded why I can’t stand anthros and archies and socios—they make snap judgments based on superficial observations.
We also had many Buddhist visitors. One Japanese monk came to live with us. He neither spoke nor understood English, and we never knew his name. He was always called “the Buddhist monk.” We gave him a tiny, one-person house trailer down by the creek, the best accommodations we had, although I always felt that he really wanted to stay in a tipi. Like true Indians, Buddhists rise very early to pray with the morning star. As he climbed the hill each morning to pray, he banged a drum in rhythm with alternate steps. Without quite realizing it, all the Indian men got into a little contest with him. We would all try to be standing outside our tipis saying our prayers before we heard the first beat of his drum.
I pulled the early security shift, so my partner and I were always up before anyone else. I liked to stroll through the encampment. One morning as I went by the cook shack, I saw the monk in his saffron robe inside. A couple bags of rice and beans had broken open to spill on the dirt floor. As I watched, silent and invisible, the monk picked up one grain of rice at a time and dropped it into his little cup. Then he filled a second cup with spilled beans. I watched him do that four or five days in a row, each time taking from the floor just enough for his meal. It came to me that he was showing us how we ought to live as Indians, in a humble way without wasting anything. Embarrassed, I called the camp together, all but the monk. I told them that we should pick up the spilled food, each grain and each bean, to show respect for what Grandmother Earth has given us. I told them what I had seen the monk do, and the lesson I had taken from it.
Although we attracted legions of liberal supporters from around the world, the continued presence of eighty or so Indians living peacefully in the Black Hills also reawakened the frontier mentality and inflamed white racism. The Rapid City Journal quoted one elderly woman who warned that property values in the western half of the state had plummeted because the Indians were “restless.” She also said her mother had come to South Dakota in a covered wagon and was attacked by Indians—and now she was in the same danger! Even after it became obvious that we had no intention of leaving our little camp, white people reacted as though the entire Sioux Nation, dispersed through five states and two Canadian provinces, was poised to attack.
Since the previous April, a few days after we set up camp, the Forest Service, which controls the issue of permits for use of public land in forests, had fought to drive us out of Yellow Thunder Camp. Equipped with enough rule books and regulations to choke a nation, the officials began to demand more and more paperwork before they would grant a renewal. After years of costly, taxpayer-supported public-relations campaigns, the average urban American views the Forest Service as conservationists and environmentalists. The truth is exactly the opposite. The Forest Service is probably the largest road-building corporation in America, and its primary concern is economic exploitation of taxpayer-owned lands for the benefit of a few large corporations. Whether the issue is water rights, endangered species, timber-cutting policies, or something else, it always advocates whatever enriches the loggers, paper companies, and mining corporations.
Once we understood that we were in a paper war, we went on the offensive. With Ward Churchill and a Boulder-based architect, we developed a proposal to establish Yellow Thunder Camp as a spiritual youth camp. Vine Deloria Jr. wrote the government in support of our proposal, calling it one of the finest ideas ever conceived for the use of public land in the Black Hills.
There was ample precedent for our kind of usage. Since the 1920s, Christian churches had maintained schools and camps in the Black Hills. There were Boy Scout camps in the national forest, as well as ski resorts, golf courses, and retreats for corporate executives. Every South Dakota college and university with a forestry program was using federal land. According to uncontroverted testimony in our subsequent federal lawsuit, every Indian application to the Forest Service to use Black Hills land had been turned down—and every non-Indian one approved. We really wanted to help our youths, so we decided to try the white man’s paper route. The local rangers, who had welcomed us initially, recommended approval and sent it to Forest Supervisor James Mathers. He lived in Custer, which carefully nurtured the legacy of its namesake and hadn’t forgotten or forgiven AIM’s demonstrations at its courthouse. In contravention of Forest Service rules and congressional guidance, he arrogantly decided that our six-month fire permit would expire after five months. He told us that if we didn’t leave by then, we would be removed. He said he would consider our proposal only after we had left.
That pleased Governor Bill Janklow, who told reporters, “It’s about time the Forest Service showed some balls.” He also told the press, “The Sioux are not going to invade our Black Hills and get away with it. If that was state land, I’d have them off of there in hours. I’d call in the National Guard.”
I called a press conference at Yellow Thunder Camp, at which I challenged Janklow and Attorney General Mark Meirhenry personally to lead the force they wanted to eject us from our holy land. I would lead the defenders. I said, “Let’s do this mano-a-mano. I’ll take you both on—one at a time or together, however you want it, and if I win, we stay in the Black Hills. If you win, we’ll leave.” Janklow replied, “That kind of challenge does not deserve a response.”
In August, we received an ultimatum—leave, or take our chances with the National Guard. We set up a system to monitor the guard’s headquarters and its logistical center near the Sioux San, as Rapid City’s IHS hospital is called. AIMsters from Pine Ridge came up to reinforce Yellow Thunder Camp, and we called a meeting to discuss our options. I went around the circle to ask each person what he or she felt we ought to do. Mark, a white ally, said, “We can’t respond to violence with violence—we came up here because this is a spiritual camp.” He went on with a long, rambling, circuitous talk about nonviolence being the way to go. I sat there thinking about what Malcolm X had said—“If you want us to be nonviolent, why do you kill us?” or words to that effect. One by one, the Indians spoke. They made no flowery speeches, but they all said, “Let’s fight.”
I spoke last, explaining to the white people that we were not the ones committing violence, but we believe in self-defense. This is our home, where our ancestors are buried. This is our future. This is our holy land, and we had had enough and were going to fight—again.
Preparing for an assault, we built a variety of booby traps. There was only one possible helicopter landing zone nearby. We planted tipi poles to slice off rotor blades. We prepared forest foot trails, fitting them with spikes in pits camouflaged by leaves and grass. Infantrymen would take many foot injuries on their way in. We had some good weapons and a lot of walkie-talkies. We knew the guardsmen could monitor our radios, so we made sure they knew they were dealing with veteran fighters. We wanted them to know that even if they wiped us out, they would pay a heavy price. We were prepared to fight to the death, so we sent our women and children and the pacifists out. Mark, the nonviolence advocate, stayed, to his credit.
Expecting an attack at night or at dawn, we sent patrols out after sundown. We anxiously awaited battle. Since we weren’t burdened with women or children, we looked forward to luring the white soldiers into the forest for a running fight that would allow us to use our intimate knowledge of the terrain. The guardsmen never came. We had called Janklow’s bluff. Instead of sending tanks, choppers, APCs, and troops, he sent a cop of some kind to the alliance office and served us with a federal lawsuit. I really had wanted to crack a few racist heads, so it was a disappointment, but we comforted ourselves with the thought that it was a spiritual victory.