CHAPTER 8

Cankpe Opi Wakpala

I knew when I brought my body here,

it might become food for the

worms and magpies.

I threw my body away before

I came here.

—Young man from Eagle Butte

I do not consider myself a radical or revolutionary. It is white people who put such labels on us. All we ever wanted was to be left alone, to live our lives as we see fit. To govern ourselves in reality and not just on paper. To have our rights respected. If that is revolutionary, then I sure fit that description. Actually, I have a great yearning to lead a normal, peaceful life—normal in the Sioux sense. I could have accepted our flimsy shack, our smelly outhouse, and our poverty—but only on my terms. Yes, I would have accepted poverty, dignified, uninterfered-with poverty, but not the drunken, degrading, and humiliating poverty we had to endure. But normality was a long time in coming. Even now I don’t have the peace I crave.

When my husband was in a maximum-security prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, I spent many months in New York with white friends in order to be near him. For the first time I lived a life which white Americans consider “normal.” I have to admit that I developed a certain taste for it. It was a new, comfortable, exciting life for a young Indian hobo girl like me. I became quite a New Yorker. I took my little boy Pedro down to the Village to Pancho’s, buying wonderful-tasting nachos for him and virgin coladas for myself. I liked to go window-shopping. Everything was so much cheaper than on the reservation where the trading posts have no competition and charge what they please. Everything is more expensive if you are poor. I went down to Greene’s; on 38th Street in the millinery district and bought beads at one-sixth the price Indian craftworkers are charged by the white dealer in Rosebud. They had many more beads to choose from, the kinds of beads I had not seen for years, indistinguishable from the old, nineteenth-century ones, like tiny, sweaty green and yellow beads, and cut-glass beads of the type Kiowas use in beading peyote staffs and gourds. I learned to like spicy Szechuan and Hunan food, learned to accept and talk with white friends, and lost some of my shyness to the extent of making public speeches on behalf of my imprisoned husband. I luxuriated in bathtubs with hot and cold running water and admitted that modern flush toilets were suiting me a lot better than our Leaning Tower of Pisa privies, even though they were products of white American technology which I usually condemned. Once, in a fit of total irresponsibility, I blew $99.99 on an imitation Persian rug on special sale at Macy’s. I took this thing home and spread it on the floor of our shack, feeling smugly middle-class. The rug didn’t last long, what with the dogs, the kids, and many people dropping in constantly with their problems. Once even a horse forced its way in through the unlocked door and relieved itself on this proud possession of mine. This rug was a symbol of the good little housewife I could have been. It is the government which made me into a militant. If you approach them hat in hand as a “responsible, respectable” apple, red outside, white inside, you get nowhere. If you approach them as a militant you get nowhere either, except giving them an excuse to waste you, but at least you don’t feel so shitty. Wounded Knee was not the brainchild of wild, foaming-at-the-mouth militants, but of patient and totally unpolitical, traditional Sioux, mostly old Sioux ladies.

The trouble started with Dicky Wilson, or rather it started long ago with the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. At that time a government lawyer decided to do something for “Lo, the poor Indian,” and wrote a constitution for all the tribes. Indians were to have their own little governments patterned after that of the Great White Father in Washington. Every Indian nation was to have an elected tribal president and council. Poor benighted Mr. Lo was to have the blessings of democracy bestowed upon him by all-wise white benefactors. The people who thought it all up probably really meant to do well by us. Sometimes I think that the do-gooders do us more harm than the General Custer types. There were two things very wrong with this sudden gift of democracy. The most important was that the Reorganization Act destroyed the old, traditional form of Indian self-government. The Sioux always had their ancient council of chiefs; other tribes were guided by their clan mothers or, as among the Pueblos, by their caciques and kikmongwis, who were priests. All traditional Indian government was founded on religion. The Reorganization Act brought into being a class of half- and quarter-blood politicians whose allegiance was mainly to Washington. The full-blood traditionals never took to these puppet regimes, looking upon them as the work of white men, installed for white men’s advantage. They would have nothing to do with them and often refused to take part in tribal elections. As a result, in many tribes, the chairmen were voted into power by a small minority of half-breed Uncle Tomahawks who did not represent the grass-roots people but only the educated, well-off, landless part-Indians. A great number of tribes were split by the Reorganization Act into “cooperating friendlies” and “recalcitrant hostiles.” The first usually occupied a tribe’s administrative center, the latter the outlying backwoods settlements. This rift created in 1934 has lasted in many places to this day.

The second thing wrong with the whole scheme was that the tribal governments, such as they were, had very little real power. Power remained always in the hands of the white superintendent and the white BIA bureaucrats. It was the superintendent who held the purse strings and gave out what few jobs there were. He had the support of Washington. In a conflict between the tribal president and the superintendent, it was always the white superintendent who came out on top. It was the same with the tribal courts, which were allowed to handle only minor offenses—wife-beating, speeding, drunk and disorderly, and such stuff. The so-called ten major crimes, which included everything but simple misdemeanors, were handled by federal courts outside the reservation before white juries. There were some good tribal chairmen, but many of them were corrupt. The typical bad tribal chairman practiced nepotism, filling up all available positions with his relatives. His brother became the chief of police, his nephews tribal policemen, his brothers-in-law tribal judges, his uncle head of the election board. You get the idea. Once such a guy had settled in, it was impossible to get rid of him.

Dicky Wilson at Pine Ridge was about the worst tribal president of this type. Pine Ridge is our neighbor reservation. Together with our own, Rosebud, it forms a very big chunk of land, some two, three million acres. Both are Sioux reservations. The people speak the same language, have the same rituals and customs, and intermarry all the time. Most Rosebud people have Pine Ridge relatives. Pine Ridge Sioux are Oglalas—Red Cloud’s and Crazy Horse’s people. In the early 1960s, Wilson and his wife had to leave the reservation after being accused of conflict-of-interest abuses while he was a plumber for the Pine Ridge housing authority. A few years later he came back and was accused, together with another man, of illegally converting tribal funds. When he became tribal president he abolished freedom of speech and assembly on the reservation. He distributed John Birch Society literature and was showing John Birch Society-made hate films. He misused tribal moneys. He took tribal ballot boxes into his basement and there “counted” the votes. Worst of all, he maintained his rule with the help of his private army, known and feared under the name of the goons. Opponents of his regime had their houses firebombed, their cars and windows riddled with bullets. People were beaten and shot. Pine Ridge experienced a rash of violent deaths, unexplained and uninvestigated. People were afraid to leave their homes. A small girl had her eye shot out. Most of the victims were people who had stood up against Wilson or had otherwise offended him. He had people stomped and beaten in his presence. Things got so out of hand that even the long-suffering back-country full-bloods, known for their capacity to endure in silence, began to grumble. The old treaty chiefs, medicine men, tribal interpreters, and traditionalists finally formed an organization known as OSCRO, Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization. Its head was Pedro Bissonette, a close friend who was later killed under mysterious circumstances by Wilson’s goons.

While a sort of undeclared civil war raged on the Pine Ridge Reservation, AIM had come in force to nearby Rapid City, which some Indians called the “most racist town in the United States.” The AIM people were demonstrating against prevailing housing conditions in Indian slums, against discrimination and police brutality. While fights between Indians and whites broke out in Rapid City streets and bars, a Sioux by the name of Wesley Bad Heart Bull was stabbed to death by a white man in front of a saloon in Buffalo Gap, a small hamlet not far from Rapid City. The case was tried in Custer, situated deep inside the Paha Sapa—our sacred Black Hills—and upon Custer converged the AIM people as well as many Sioux from Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Cheyenne River, with the AIM and OSCRO people mingling together. Among the AIM leaders was Russel Means, himself a Pine Ridge Sioux, born and enrolled in the Oglala tribe. His family’s home was at Porcupine, some ten miles from Wounded Knee. Wilson had promised to “personally cut off Russel Means’s braids if he ever set foot on the reservation.” He forbade Means to speak at Pine Ridge. Russel went there anyway and Wilson had him beaten up. Russel wound up in the hospital with a hairline skull fracture, but was soon released. In that explosive situation, OSCRO asked AIM for help against the goons. Thus the stage was set.

For me, Wounded Knee started in Rapid City. This is John Wayne country. Everybody tries to look like the guy in the Marlboro ads. At that time I was not yet Crow Dog’s woman. I had been in love with a young boy who was not cut out to be a husband, much less a father. He had disappeared from my life, but he left me pregnant. I was in my eighth month and very big. My smallness only emphasized my enormous belly. It seemed as if the whole Sioux Nation, all the Seven Campfires, had come to Rapid City to demonstrate against the racism for which the city had become notorious. My brother was there, and Barb. So naturally I was there, too. We all stayed at the Mother Butler Seminary, a hangout for Indian activists. One night I was trying to sleep when a girl called Toony came in, all excited. She was a good friend of mine. She told me, “This whole goddam town is going to blow up any minute!” All business, she put down her bag, pulled out a knife, and stuck it in her boot. Her cowboy boots were tipped with metal. She was showing them off: “These are my special shitkickers. I’m putting on war paint.”

I asked, “What’s going on? Can I come?” “No,” she said, “not you. No way. Not in your condition.”

Outside, Russel and Dennis were drilling some guys in nonviolent tactics. They would blow a whistle and everybody would run into the street. Another whistle and they all would run back into Mother Butler’s. Most of the guys took it as a big joke. Indians are not very good at being drilled—even by their own leaders.

The bars in Rapid City were known to be tough on Indians. The unspoken rule was “Indians enter at their own risk.” Groups of skins were forming to sensitize the saloons. Nobody wanted me around, but I went along anyhow. We trooped from bar to bar, and wherever we went we caused a riot. One redneck told me, “We’re goin’ to make good Injuns out of you!” I kicked him in the shin and he hit me hard in the chest. I charged blindly and we both wound up on the floor. It was sure no way for a lady in my interesting condition to behave. A kind of insane rage seemed to possess, not only me, but everybody. Rapid City had been a bad scene for us ever since the town was founded on land stolen from us after Custer had found gold in the Black Hills. There was not one single Sioux from Rosebud, Pine Ridge, Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, or Oak Creek who did not bear the scars of humiliations, undeserved arrests, or beatings received in this town whose main sport has always been Indian-baiting. The resentment that had been smoldering for eighty years finally boiled over in one wild night. The police went berserk, going on a rampage with their night-sticks, busting the head of anybody who looked Indian. They arrested skins at random, stuffing them into a big, old Greyhound bus, carting about two hundred of us off to the small, cramped, and decrepit Pennington County Jail. Those of us who had not been arrested snake-danced around the jail, drumming and singing war songs.

It was then that Dennis Banks told us that Wesley Bad Heart Bull had been stabbed to death by a white man and that the trial was about to start at Custer, inside the Black Hills, forty-five miles from Rapid City. Custer! The name itself was a provocation. Custer, a town built on a spot which our legends told us was the home of the sacred thunderbirds, desecrated by tourist traps such as a phony Indian village with a big sign: SEE HOW THEY LIVE!

A couple hundred of us formed up a thirty-car caravan to drive to Custer. It was early February 1973 and it was cold, below freezing. It was snowing heavily. When we arrived the first thing I saw was a huge sign: WELCOME TO CUSTER—THE TOWN WITH THE GUNSMOKE FLAVOR, and another billboard: SEE THE PAGEANT, HOW THE WEST WAS WON! Soon the smoke flavor would be stronger. We had come not to make a riot, but to see justice done. In South Dakota the killing of an Indian was usually treated as a mere misdemeanor and went unpunished, but if an Indian killed a white man he was condemned to death and was lucky to have it bargained down to a life sentence. We were fed up with this kind of judicial double standard.

We gathered before the courthouse. At first everything was dignified, even jolly. A delegation of four or five of our spokesmen (or should I say “spokespersons"? But they were all men; we were not in the spokesperson stage yet) entered the courthouse. A short while later the district attorney came out on the court steps with a smile in order to address us. As I remember, it went like this: “My Indian ffrrrriends. I promise you, justice will be done. Depend on it. The man who killed Wesley Bad Heart Bull will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law—for second-degree manslaughter.”

At the words “second-degree manslaughter” a deep growl went up. They were like a knife stuck into our bellies. It meant another Indian-killer would go free. Dennis, Russel, and Crow Dog argued with the DA, telling him not to specify the charge, but to let the jury decide whether it was murder or manslaughter. The DA refused. After that things were neither dignified nor jolly. The state highway patrolmen tried to keep the Sioux out of the courthouse. A scuffle broke out. The troopers had been waiting for this—with visored helmets, guns, and long riot sticks. They clubbed down the mother of the murdered Indian, Sarah Bad Heart Bull, and choked her by pressing a riot stick against her throat. Our delegation inside the courthouse was also attacked. I saw Russel being dragged out, sitting on the pavement, handcuffed, dazed, and bleeding, telling the police, “We’re fighting for our lives. You are only fighting for your paychecks.” Crow Dog was jumping out of a broken first-floor courthouse window. Dennis jumped out after him with a big grin: “I’m following my spiritual leader.”

Then all hell broke loose. The police used tear gas, smoke bombs, and fire hoses to drive us away from the courthouse. A few older men and women were still trying to reason with them: “All this isn’t necessary. We just want to be heard.” But it was no good. The troopers and Indians began fighting for possession of the main street in front of the courthouse. A young Indian girl had her clothes torn off in the struggle. I saw two helmeted pigs with huge sticks dragging her almost naked through the snow. She was bleeding. A man in front of Barb was clubbed senseless, lying like a heap of old rags in the middle of the road. One of the pigs yelled at us, “You damn Indians have raised enough cain around here and we’re goin’ to kick your ass. We’re not goin’ to give you a chance to wreck this place. We’re goin’ to crack your goddam heads first.”

Then the Sioux let out a big war whoop and charged. They started trashing a police car parked in the street. In their frustration they jumped on it, kicked it, beat it with their fists. Somebody lit a match and threw it into the gas tank. It wouldn’t light. Somebody else poured gas around it and tried to set it on fire. His matches wouldn’t light. The snow had made everything wet. The guys then tried to tip the squad car over, rocking it back and forth. It did not budge. Everybody vented their fury upon it, but the thing seemed invulnerable. Barb was laughing: “All these Indians and they can’t total one lousy pig car!”

People were scampering in and out of stores, ripping everything out, breaking windows. Two young men came running with a trash can full of gasoline. They ran up the steps of the courthouse, doused the door with gas, and poured some of it inside through a broken window. Some other boys were racing up from the gas station with burning flares, the kind one sets out on the road if one has to fix a flat at night. They chucked the flares at the entrance door where the gas had formed a puddle, but they missed. The flares were hissing harmlessly on the steps. More flares. A sheriff who looked as if he had come out of a Grade B western movie aimed his rifle at one of our men: “If you throw that flare I’ll kill you, so help me!” The sisters were screaming, “Do it, do it, do it! AIM, AIM, AIM, make every aim count!” I was screaming, too. One of the girls had a candle, another a kerosene lamp. Young men were making molotov cocktails and throwing them. The troopers were yelling back, “We’ll kill any man who throws a flare!”

Suddenly a great roar went up, “Aaaaaahhhhhhh!"—the old bear sound the Sioux make when they are killing mad. The gasoline had caught fire. A fire truck came careering around the corner. While firemen and police tried to keep the courthouse from burning down, we set fire to the Chamber of Commerce—an imitation pioneer log cabin. It went up in flames, making a huge fire with sparks flying in all direction. The sign WELCOME TO CUSTER—THE TOWN WITH THE GUNSMOKE FLAVOR was burning brightly. All the women made the spine-tingling brave-heart cry. Out of nowhere a gasoline truck appeared and stopped right in front of the burning Chamber of Commerce. The driver was completely freaked out. He couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. He was sitting in his cab, bug-eyed and petrified with fear, not knowing what to do. He just kept staring open-mouthed at the flames. We waved him on, but he just sat there. One of our boys stuck his head inside the cab and yelled at him, “Get your ass out of here. What do you want to do, blow us all up?” He was so scared we almost felt sorry for him. At the same time we had to laugh, it was so ludicrous. Finally he woke up and got the hell out of there as fast as his truck would go.

The fighting lasted from morning until midafternoon, luckily without shooting, just rocks, fists, and clubs. Many Indians were arrested and some were later tried. Sarah Bad Heart Bull was indicted on several counts of rioting and arson, and faced a possible maximum sentence of forty years. Her son’s murderer was acquitted without doing any time at all, while Sarah actually spent a few weeks in jail for having made a nuisance of herself over her son’s death. Barb was arrested and told she was facing ten years, but nothing came of it and she was let go. I was not arrested at all. I left Custer in a car which had an old bumper sticker on its rear fender: CUSTER HAD IT COMING! It made me laugh. That same night, back in Rapid City, we could see ourselves on TV. It had been quite a day.

We had little time to catch our breath. Already the OSCRO people at Pine Ridge were sending out urgent calls for us to help them. Wilson’s goons were on the rampage, maiming and killing people. The Oglala elders thought that we all had been wasting our time and energies in Rapid City and Custer when the knife was at our throats at home. And so, finally and inevitably, our caravan started rolling toward Pine Ridge. Wilson was expecting us. His heavily armed goons had been reinforced by a number of rednecks with Remingtons and Winchesters on gun racks behind their driver’s seats, eager to bag themselves an Injun. The marshals and FBI had come too, with some thirty armored cars equipped with machine guns and rocket launchers. These were called APCs, Armored Personnel Carriers. The tribal office had been sandbagged and a machine gun installed on its roof. The Indians called it “Fort Wilson.” Our movements were kept under observation and reported several times a day. Still we came on.

To tell the truth, I had not joined the caravan with the notion that I would perform what some people later called “that great symbolic act.” I did not even know that we would wind up at Wounded Knee. Nobody did. I went because everybody went, because I was young and it was my lifestyle to go along. It would not have occurred to me not to go. At this time the community hall at Calico, five miles north of Pine Ridge, was the meeting place of OSCRO and all those who opposed Wilson’s regime. Now they were being joined by AIM. People had had a powwow there for a few days, dancing and singing, though Wilson had forbidden it.

The scene upon our arrival was peaceful enough. Kids were playing frisbee. Elders were drinking coffee out of paper cups. An old man was telling me, “What are we to do? If you are with AIM you’re a no-good renegade. If you are with Dickie Wilson you’re a goddam goon. If you are with the government, you’re no Indian at all.” All the old chiefs with the historic great names were there and all the medicine men, people like Fools Crow, Wallace Black Elk, Crow Dog, Chips, and Pete Catches. Only one important traditional man was missing who was too old and sick to attend. Even some tribal judges were there. One of them said to the AIM and OSCRO guys, commenting on what had happened at Custer, “In my job I really have to be against any destruction of private property, but privately I enjoyed what you did. You should have burned that whole goddam town down.” Contrary to what some of the media said later, the over-whelming majority of those present were Sioux, born and bred on the reservation. Russel Means said a few words which I still remember, though I can’t quote them exactly. The drift of his speech was: “If I have to die, I don’t want to die in some barroom brawl, or in a stupid car accident, but want my death to have some meaning. Maybe the time has come when we need some Indian martyrs.” One old man said something to the effect that he had lived all his life in Pine Ridge in darkness. That the whites and men like Wilson had thrown a blanket over the whole reservation and that he hoped we would be the ones to yank this blanket off and let some sunshine in.

It began to dawn upon me that what was about to happen, and what I personally would be involved in, would be unlike anything I had witnessed before. I think everybody who was there felt the same way—an excitement that was choking our throats. But there was still no definite plan for what to do. We had all assumed that we would go to Pine Ridge town, the administrative center of the reservation, the seat of Wilson’s and the government’s power. We had always thought that the fate of the Oglalas would be settled there. But as the talks progressed it became clear that nobody wanted us to storm Pine Ridge, garrisoned as it was by the goons, the marshals, and the FBI. We did not want to be slaughtered. There had been too many massacred Indians already in our history. But if not Pine Ridge, then what? As I remember, it was the older women like Ellen Moves Camp and Gladys Bissonette who first pronounced the magic words “Wounded Knee,” who said, “Go ahead and make your stand at Wounded Knee. If you men won’t do it, you can stay here and talk for all eternity and we women will do it.”

When I heard the words “Wounded Knee” I became very, very serious. Wounded Knee—Cankpe Opi in our language—has a special meaning for our people. There is the long ditch into which the frozen bodies of almost three hundred of our people, mostly women and children, were thrown like so much cordwood. And the bodies are still there in their mass grave, unmarked except for a cement border. Next to the ditch, on a hill, stands the white-painted Catholic church, gleaming in the sunlight, the monument of an alien faith imposed upon the landscape. And below it flows Cankpe Opi Wakpala, the creek along which the women and children were hunted down like animals by Custer’s old Seventh, out to avenge themselves for their defeat by butchering the helpless ones. That happened long ago, but no Sioux ever forgot it.

Wounded Knee is part of our family’s history. Leonard’s great-grandfather, the first Crow Dog, had been one of the leaders of the Ghost Dancers. He and his group had held out in the icy ravines of the Badlands all winter, but when the soldiers came in force to kill all the Ghost Dancers he had surrendered his band to avoid having his people killed. Old accounts describe how Crow Dog simply sat down between the rows of soldiers on one side, and the Indians on the other, all ready and eager to start shooting. He had covered himself with a blanket and was just sitting there. Nobody knew what to make of it. The leaders on both sides were so puzzled that they just did not get around to opening fire. They went to Crow Dog, lifted the blanket, and asked him what he meant to do. He told them that sitting there with the blanket over him was the only thing he could think of to make all the hotheads, white and red, curious enough to forget fighting. Then he persuaded his people to lay down their arms. Thus he saved his people just a few miles away from where Big Foot and his band were massacred. And old Uncle Dick Fool Bull, a relative of both the Crow Dogs and my own family, often described to me how he himself heard the rifle and cannon shots that mowed our people down when he was a little boy camping only two miles away. He had seen the bodies, too, and described to me how he had found the body of a dead baby girl with an American flag beaded on her tiny bonnet.

Before we set out for Wounded Knee, Leonard and Wallace Black Elk prayed for all of us with their pipe. I counted some fifty cars full of people. We went right through Pine Ridge. The half-bloods and goons, the marshals and the government snipers on their rooftop, were watching us, expecting us to stop and start a confrontation, but our caravan drove right by them, leaving them wondering. From Pine Ridge it was only eighteen miles more to our destination. Leonard was in the first car and I was way in the back.

Finally, on February 27, 1973, we stood on the hill where the fate of the old Sioux Nation, Sitting Bull’s and Crazy Horse’s nation, had been decided, and where we, ourselves, came face to face with our fate. We stood silently, some of us wrapped in our blankets, separated by our personal thoughts and feelings, and yet united, shivering a little with excitement and the chill of a fading winter. You could almost hear our heartbeats.

It was not cold on this next-to-last day of February—not for a South Dakota February anyway. Most of us had not even bothered to wear gloves. I could feel a light wind stirring my hair, blowing it gently about my face. There were a few snowflakes in the air. We all felt the presence of the spirits of those lying close by in the long ditch, wondering whether we were about to join them, wondering when the marshals would arrive. We knew that we would not have to wait long for them to make their appearance.

The young men tied eagle feathers to their braids, no longer unemployed kids, juvenile delinquents, or winos, but warriors. I thought of our old warrior societies—the Kit Foxes, the Strong Hearts, the Badgers, the Dog Soldiers. The Kit Foxes—the Tokalas—used to wear long sashes. In the midst of battle, a Tokala would sometimes dismount and pin the end of his sash to the earth. By this he signified his determination to stay and fight on his chosen spot until he was dead, or until a friend rode up and unpinned him, or until victory. Young or old, men or women, we had all become Kit Foxes, and Wounded Knee had become the spot upon which we had pinned ourselves. Soon we would be encircled and there could be no retreat. I could not think of anybody or anything that would “unpin” us. Somewhere, out on the prairie surrounding us, the forces of the government were gathering, the forces of the greatest power on earth. Then and there I decided that I would have my baby at Wounded Knee, no matter what.

Suddenly the spell was broken. Everybody got busy. The men were digging trenches and making bunkers, putting up low walls of cinder blocks, establishing a last-resort defense perimeter around the Sacred Heart Church. Those few who had weapons were checking them, mostly small-bore .22s and old hunting rifles. We had only one automatic weapon, an AK-47 that one Oklahoma boy had brought back from Vietnam as a souvenir. Altogether we had twenty-six firearms—not much compared to what the other side would bring up against us. None of us had any illusions that we could take over Wounded Knee unopposed. Our message to the government was: “Come and discuss our demands or kill us!” Somebody called someone on the outside from a telephone inside the trading post. I could hear him yelling proudly again and again, “We hold the Knee!”