: please read the following handouts. copy below; some photos are missing, but this is unimportant. As you read, underline significant points, including the thesis (controlling idea) of each paragraph. I will be collecting these on Friday as a homework grade. We will work with this text on then, as well.
"The Bloody Wake of Alcatraz: Political Repression of the American Indian Movement during the 1970's" by Ward Churchill, "That Day at Ogalala" by Leonard Peltier"
As pairs, you are working on a corroboration table as a stepping stone in writing an in-class essay tomorrow.. You are taking excerpts from the the three early colonial texts we have read-
and looking at the purposes of the colonies, how the English treated the indiginous population and how the native peoples reacted to the English. You will then find componalities and differences. All of your conclusions will be drawn specifically from the text.
The Bloody Wake of
Alcatraz: Political Repression of
the American Indian
Movement during the 1970s
By Ward Churchill
From the
beginning of European contact in the late 15th century, American Indians have
resisted the
theft of their land and their rights to sovereignty. The U.S. government
continues to
illegally
appropriate land and violate the legal rights of Indigenous Peoples. Formed in
1968,
the American
Indian Movement (AIM) was one of the most successful efforts to defy federal
authority, and
thereby suffered the most tragic consequences. The essay below provides a brief
introduction to
the background and legacy of AIM. It is excerpted from a longer chapter “The
Bloody Wake of
Alcatraz” in American
Indian Activism: Alcatraz to the Longest Walk (The
University of
Illinois Press, 1997). It is ideally read in conjunction with the subsequent
article
by Leonard
Peltier about the FBI siege at the Oglala Reservatation.
The reality is a
continuum which connects Indian flesh sizzling over Puritan
fires and
Vietnamese flesh roasting under American napalm. The reality is
the compulsion
of a sick society to rid itself of men like Nat Turner and
Crazy Horse,
George Jackson, and Richard Oakes, whose defiance
uncovers the
hypocrisy of a declaration affirming everyone’s right to liberty
and life. The
reality is an overwhelming greed which began with the theft of
a continent and
continues with the merciless looting of every country on the
face of the
earth which lacks the strength to defend itself.
—Richard Lundstrom
In combination with the fishing rights struggles of
the Puyallup, Nisqually, Muckleshoot,
and other nations in the Pacific Northwest from 1965
to 1970, the 1969–71 occupation of
Alcatraz Island by the San Francisco area Indians of
All Tribes coalition ushered in a
decade-long period of uncompromising and intensely
confrontational American Indian
political activism. Unprecedented in modern U.S.
history, the phenomenon represented by
Alcatraz also marked the inception of a process of
official repression of indigenous
activists without parallel in its virulence and
lethal effects.
The nature of the post-Alcatraz federal response to
organized agitation for native
rights was such that by 1979 researchers were
describing it as a manifestation of the U.S.
government’s “continuing Indian Wars.” For its part
(in internal documents intended to be
secret), the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI)—the primary instrument by which the
government’s policy of anti-Indian repression was
implemented—concurred with such
assessments, abandoning its customary
counterintelligence warfare. The result, as the
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights officially conceded
at the time, was the imposition of a
condition of official terrorism upon certain of the
less compliant sectors of indigenous
society in the United States.
In retrospect, it is apparent that the locus of both
activism and repression in Indian
Country throughout the 1970s centered squarely on
one group, the American Indian
Movement (AIM). Moreover, the crux of AIM activism
during the 1970s, and thus of the
FBI’s campaign to “neutralize” it, can be found in a
single locality: the Pine Ridge (Oglala
Lakota) Reservation in South Dakota. The purpose of
this essay, then, is to provide an
overview of the federal counterinsurgency program
against AIM on and around Pine
Ridge, using it as a lens through which to explore
the broader motives and outcomes
attending it. Finally, conclusions will be drawn as
to the program’s implications, not only
with respect to American Indians, but concerning
non-indigenous Americans as well.
Background
AIM was founded in 1968 in Minneapolis by a group of
urban Anishinabe
(Chippewa), including Dennis Banks, Mary Jane
Wilson, Pat Ballanger, Clyde
Bellecourt, Eddie Benton Benai, and George Mitchell.
Modeled loosely after the
Black Panther Party for Self-Defense established by
Huey P. Newton and Bobby
Seale in Oakland, California, two years previously,
the group took as its first tasks
the protection of the city’s sizeable native
community from a pattern of rampant
police abuse and the creation of programs for jobs,
housing, and education. Within
three years, the organization had grown to include
chapters in several other cities
and had begun to shift its focus from civil rights
issues to an agenda more specifically
attuned to the conditions afflicting native North
America.
What AIM discerned as the basis of these conditions
was not so much a matter
of socioeconomic discrimination against Indians as
it was their internal colonization
by the United States. This perception accrued from
the fact that, by 1871, when
federal treaty-making with native peoples was
permanently suspended, the rights of
indigenous nations to distinct, self-governing territories
had been recognized by the
United States more than 370 times through treaties
duly ratified by its Senate. Yet,
during the intervening century, more than 90 percent
of treaty-reserved native land
had been expropriated by the federal government, in
defiance of both its own
constitution and international custom and
convention. One consequence of this was
creation of the urban diaspora from which AIM itself
had emerged; by 1970, about
half of all Indians in the United States had been
pushed off their land altogether.
Within the residual archipelago of reservations—an
aggregation of about 50
million acres, or roughly 2.5 percent of the 48
contiguous states—indigenous forms
of governance had been thoroughly usurped through
the imposition of U.S. jurisdiction
under the federal government’s self-assigned
prerogative of exercising “plenary
[full and absolute] power over Indian affairs.”
Correspondingly, Indian control over
what had turned out to be rather vast mineral
resources within reservation boundaries—
an estimated two-thirds of all U.S. “domestic”
uranium deposits, one quarter
of the low sulfur coal, 20 percent of the oil and
natural gas, and so on—was essentially
nonexistent.
It followed that royalty rates set by the U.S.
Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), in
its exercise of federal “trust” prerogatives
vis-à-vis corporate extraction of Indian
mineral assets, amounted to only a fraction of what
the same corporations would
have paid had they undertaken the same mining
operations in nonreservation localities.
The same principle of underpayment to Indians, with
resulting “super-profit”
accrual to non-Indian business entities, prevailed
with regard to other areas of
economic activity handled by the Indian bureau, from
the leasing of reservation
grazing land to various ranching interests, to the
harvesting of reservation timber by
corporations such as Weyerhaeuser and Boise-Cascade.
Small wonder that, by the
late 1960s, Indian radicals such as Robert K. Thomas
had begun to refer to the BIA
as “the Colonial Office of the United States.”
In human terms, the consequence was that, overall,
American Indians—who, on
the basis of known resources, comprised what should
have been the single wealthiest
populations group in North America—constituted by
far the most impoverished
sector of U.S. society. According to the federal
government’s own data, Indians
suffered, by a decisive margin, the highest rate of
unemployment in the country, a
matter correlated to their receiving by far the
lowest annual and lifetime incomes of
any group in the nation. It also corresponded well
with virtually every other statistical
indicator of extreme poverty: a truly catastrophic
rate of infant mortality and the
highest rates of death from malnutrition, exposure,
plague disease, teen suicide, and
accidents related to alcohol abuse. The average life
expectancy of a reservationPutting
the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching
www.civilrightsteaching.org
based Indian male in 1970 was less than 45 years;
reservation-based Indian females could
expect to live less than three years longer than
their male counterparts; urban Indians of
either gender were living only about five years
longer, on average, than their relatives on
the reservations.
AIM’s response to its growing apprehension of this squalid
panorama was to initiate a
campaign consciously intended to bring about the
decolonization of native North America:
“Only by reestablishing our rights as sovereign
nations, including our right to control our
own territories and resources, and our right to
genuine self-governance,” as Dennis Banks
put it in 1971, “can we hope to successfully address
the conditions currently experienced
by our people.”
Extrapolating largely from the example of Alcatraz,
the movement undertook a
multifaceted political strategy combining a variety
of tactics. On the one hand, it engaged
in activities designed primarily to focus media
attention, and thus the attention of the
general public, on Indian rights issues, especially
those pertaining to treaty rights. On the
other hand, it pursued the sort of direct
confrontation meant to affirm those rights in
practice. It also began systematically to reassert
native cultural and spiritual traditions.
Eventually, it added a component wherein the full
range of indigenous rights to
decolonization and self-determination were pursued
through the United Nations venue of
international law, custom, and convention.
In mounting this comprehensive effort, AIM made of
itself a bona fide national
liberation movement, at least for a while. Its
members consisted of “the shock troops of
Indian sovereignty,” to quote non-AIM Oglala Lakota
activist Birgil Kills Straight. They
essentially reframed the paradigm by which
U.S.-Indian relations are understood in the
late 20th century. They also suffered the worst
physical repression at the hands of the
United States of any “domestic” group since the 1890
massacre of Big Foot’s
Minneconjou by the 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee.
Prelude
AIM’s seizure of the public consciousness may in
many ways be said to have begun in
1969 when Dennis Banks recruited a young Oglala
named Russell Means to join the
movement. Instinctively imbued with what one critic
described as a “bizarre knack for
staging demonstrations that attracted the sort of
press coverage Indians had been looking
for,” Means was instrumental in AIM’s achieving
several of its earliest and most important
media coups: painting Plymouth Rock red before
capturing the Mayflower replica on
Thanksgiving Day 1970, for example, and staging a
“Fourth of July Countercelebration”
by occupying the Mount Rushmore National Monument in
1971.
Perhaps more important, Means proved to be the
bridge that allowed the movement to
establish its credibility on a reservation for the
first time. In part, this was because when
he joined AIM he brought along virtually an entire
generation of his family—brothers Ted,
Bill, and Dale; cousin Madonna Gilbert; and
others—each of whom possessed a web of
friends and acquaintances on the Pine Ridge
Reservation. It was therefore natural that
AIM was called upon to “set things right” concerning
the torture-murder of a middle-aged
Oglala in the off-reservation town of Gordon,
Nebraska, in late February 1972. As Bill
Means would later recall, “When Raymond Yellow
Thunder was killed, his relatives went
first to the BIA, then to the FBI, and to the local
police, but they got no response. Severt
Young Bear [Yellow Thunder’s nephew and a friend of
Ted Means] then…asked AIM to
come help clear up the case.” Shortly, Russell Means
led a caravan of some 1,300
Indians into the small town, announcing from the
steps of the courthouse, “We’ve come
here today to put Gordon on the map…and if justice
is not immediately forthcoming,
we’re going to take Gordon off the map.” The
killers, brothers named Melvin and Leslie
Hare, were quickly arrested, and a police officer
who had covered up for them was
suspended. The Hares soon became the
first whites in Nebraska history sent to
prison for killing an Indian, and “AIM’s
reputation soared among reservation
Indians. What tribal leaders had dared not
do to protect their people, AIM had done.”
By fall, things had progressed to the
point that AIM could collaborate with
several other native rights organizations to
stage the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan,
bringing more than 2,000 Indians from
reservations and urban areas across the
country to Washington, D.C., on the eve
of the 1972 presidential election. The idea
was to present the incumbent chief
executive, Richard M. Nixon, with a 20-
point program redefining the nature of U.S.-Indian
relations. The publicity attending
the critical timing and location of the action, as
well as the large number of Indians
involved, were calculated to force serious responses
from the administration to each
point.
Interior Department officials who had earlier
pledged logistical support to
caravan participants once they arrived at the
capital reneged on their promises,
apparently in the belief that this would cause the
group to meekly disperse. Instead,
angry Indians promptly took over the BIA
headquarters building on November 2,
evicted its staff, and held it for several days.
Russell Means, in fine form, captured
the front page of the nation’s newspapers and the six
o’clock news by conducting a
press conference in front of the building, while
adorned with a makeshift “war club”
and a “shield” fashioned from a portrait of Nixon
himself.
Desperate to end what had become a major media
embarrassment, the Nixon
administration agreed to reply formally to the
20-point program within a month and
to provide $66,000 in transportation money
immediately, in exchange for a peaceful
end to the occupation. The AIM members honored their
part of the bargain, leaving
the BIA building on November 9. But, explaining that
“Indians have every right to
know the details of what’s being done to us and to
our property,” they took with
them a vast number of “confidential” files
concerning BIA leasing practices, operation
of the Indian Health Service (IHS), and so forth.
The originals were returned as
rapidly as they could be photocopied, a process that
required nearly two years to
complete.
Technically speaking, the government also honored
its end of the deal, providing
official—and exclusively negative—responses to the
20 points within the specified
timeframe. At the same time, however, it initiated a
campaign utilizing federally
subsidized Indian “leaders” in an effort to
discredit AIM members as
“irresponsible…renegades, terrorists, and
self-styled revolutionaries.” There is also a
strong indication that it was at this point that the
Federal Bureau of Investigation
was instructed to launch a secret program of its
own, one in which AIM’s capacity
to engage in further political activities of the
kind and effectiveness displayed in
Washington was to be, in the vernacular of FBI
counterintelligence specialists,
“neutralized.”
Even as this was going on, AIM’s focus had shifted
back to the Pine Ridge
area. At issue was the January 23, 1973, murder of a
young Oglala named Wesley
Bad Heart Bull by a white man, Darold Schmitz, in
the off-reservation village of
Buffalo Gap, South Dakota. As in the Yellow Thunder
case, local authorities had
In memory of the
occupation of
Alcatraz, Native
Americans
regularly
return to the
Island.
Walkers arriving
for a
ceremony on
Alcatraz
before the Long
Walk
for Survival
from
Sacramento to
Washington D.C.
in
1980.
© 2003 Ilka
Hartmann
Putting the Movement Back into Civil
Rights Teaching www.civilrightsteaching.org
made no move to press appropriate charges against
the killer. At the request of the
victim’s mother, Sarah, Russell Means called for a
demonstration at the Custer County
Courthouse, in whose jurisdiction the crime lay.
Terming western South Dakota “the
Mississippi of the North,” Dennis Banks
simultaneously announced a longer-term effort to
force abandonment “of the anti-Indian attitudes
which result in Indian-killing being treated
as a sort of local sport.”
The Custer demonstration on February 6 followed a
very different course from that
of the protest in Gordon a year earlier. An
anonymous call had been placed to the main
regional newspaper, the Rapid City Journal,
on the evening of February 5. The caller,
saying he was “with AIM,” asked that a notice
canceling the action “because of bad
weather” be prominently displayed in the paper the
following morning. Consequently,
relatively few Indians turned out for the protest.
Those who did were met by an amalgamated
force of police, sheriff’s deputies, state troopers,
and FBI personnel when they
arrived in Custer.
For a while, there was a tense standoff. Then a
sheriff’s deputy manhandled Sarah
Bad Heart Bull when she attempted to enter the
courthouse. In the melee that followed,
the courthouse was set ablaze—reportedly by a police
tear gas canister—and the local
Chamber of Commerce building was burned to the
ground. Banks, Means, and other AIM
members, along with Mrs. Bad Heart Bull, were
arrested and charged with riot. Banks
was eventually convicted and sentenced to three
years of imprisonment and became a
fugitive; Sarah Bad Heart Bull served five months of
a one-to-five-year sentence. Her
son’s killer never spent one day in jail.
Wounded Knee
Meanwhile, on Pine Ridge, tensions were running
extraordinarily high. The point of
contention was an escalating conflict between the
tribal administration headed by Richard
“Dickie” Wilson, installed on the reservation with
federal support in 1972, and a large body
of reservation traditionals who objected to Wilson’s
nepotism and other abuses of his
position. Initially, Wilson’s opponents had sought
redress of their grievances through the
BIA. The BIA responded by providing a $62,000 grant
to Wilson for purposes of establishing
a Tribal Ranger Group—a paramilitary entity
reporting exclusively to Wilson, which
soon began calling itself Guardians of the Oglala
Nation (GOONs)—with which to
physically intimidate the opposition. The reason
underlying this federal largess appears to
have been the government’s desire that Wilson sign
an instrument transferring title of a
portion of the reservation known as the Sheep
Mountain Gunnery Range—secretly known
to be rich in uranium and molybdenum—to the U.S.
Forest Service.
In any event, forming the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights
Organization (OSCRO), the
traditionals next attempted to obtain relief through
the Justice Department and the FBI.
When this, too, failed to bring results, they set
out to impeach Wilson, obtaining signatures
of more eligible voters on their petitions than had
cast ballots for him in the first place. The
BIA countered by naming Wilson himself to chair the
impeachment proceedings, and the
Justice Department dispatched a 65-member Special
Operations Group (SOG, a large
SWAT unit) of U.S. marshals to ensure that “order”
was maintained during the travesty.
Then, on the eve of the hearing, Wilson ordered the
arrest and jailing of several members
of the tribal council he felt might vote for his
removal. Predictably, when the impeachment
tally was taken on February 23, 1973, the incumbent
was retained in office. Immediately
thereafter, he announced a reservation-wide ban on
political meetings.
Defying the ban, the traditionals convened a
round-the-clock emergency meeting at
the Calico Hall, near the village of Oglala, in an
effort to determine their next move. On
February 26, the Oglala elders sent a messenger to
the newly established AIM headquarters
in nearby Rapid City to request that Russell Means
meet with them. One of the
elders, Ellen Moves Camp, later said, “We decided we
needed the American Indian
Movement in here…. All of our older people from the
reservation helped make that
decision…. This is what we needed, a little more
push. Most of the reservation believes in AIM, and
we’re proud to have them with us.” Means arrived
on the morning of February 27, then drove on to the
village of Pine Ridge, seat of the reservation
government,
to try to negotiate some sort of resolution with
Wilson. For his trouble, he was physically assaulted
by GOONs in the parking lot of the tribal
administration
building. By then, Dennis Banks and a number
of other AIM members had arrived at the Calico
Hall. During subsequent meetings, the elders decided
that they needed to draw public attention to the
situation on the reservation. For this purpose, a
200-
person AIM contingent was sent to the symbolic site
of Wounded Knee to prepare for an early morning
press conference; a much smaller group was sent
back to Rapid City to notify the media and guide
reporters to Wounded Knee at the
appropriate time.
The intended press conference never occurred
because, by dawn, Wilson’s
GOONs had established roadblocks on all four routes
leading into (or out of) the tiny
hamlet. During the morning, these positions were reinforced
by uniformed police,
then by elements of the marshals’ SOG unit, and then
by FBI “observers.” As this
was going on, the AIM members in Wounded Knee began
the process of arming
themselves.... By afternoon, General Alexander Haig,
military liaison to the Nixon
White House, had dispatched two special warfare
experts—Colonel Volney Warner
of the 82d Airborne Division and Colonel Jack Potter
of the 6th Army—to the
scene. In his book Blood of the Land, Rex
Weyler writes:
Documents later subpoenaed from the Pentagon
revealed Colonel Potter
directed the employment of 17 APCs [tank-like
armored personnel
carriers], 130,000 rounds of M-16 ammunition, 41,000
rounds of M-40 high
explosive [for the M-79 grenade launchers he also
provided], as well as
helicopters, Phantom jets, and personnel. Military
officers, supply sergeants,
maintenance technicians, chemical officers, and
medical teams [were
provided on-site]. Three hundred miles to the south,
at Fort Carson,
Colorado, the Army had billeted a fully uniformed
assault unit on 24-hour
alert.
Over the next 71 days, the AIM perimeter at Wounded
Knee was placed under
siege. The ground cover was burned away for roughly
a quarter-mile around the
AIM position as part of the federal attempt to
staunch the flow of supplies—food,
medicine, and ammunition—backpacked in to the
Wounded Knee defenders at night;
at one point, such material was airdropped by a
group of supporting pilots. More
than 500,000 rounds of military ammunition were
fired into AIM’s jerry-rigged
“bunkers” by federal forces, killing two Indians—an
Apache named Frank
Clearwater and Buddy Lamont, an Oglala—and wounding
several others. As many
as 13 more people may have been killed by roving
GOON patrols, their bodies
secretly buried in remote locations around the
reservation while they were trying to
carry supplies through federal lines.
At first, the authorities sought to justify what was
happening by claiming that
AIM had “occupied” Wounded Knee and that the
movement had taken several
hostages in the process. When the latter allegation
was proven to be false, a press
ban was imposed, and official spokespersons argued
that the use of massive force
was needed to “quell insurrection.” Much was made of
two federal casualties
Kathleen Cleaver
speaking at “No
Extradition For
Dennis Banks
Rally.”
San Francisco,
1976.
Right: Lee
Brightman.
© 2003 Ilka
Hartmann
supposed to have been seriously injured by AIM
gunfire. In the end, it was Dickie Wilson
who perhaps summarized the situation most candidly
when he informed reporters that the
purpose of the entire exercise was to see to it that
“AIM dies at Wounded Knee.”
Despite Wilson’s sentiments—and those of FBI senior
counterintelligence specialist
Richard G. Held, expressed in a secret report
prepared at the request of his superiors
early in the siege—an end to the standoff was
finally negotiated for May 7, 1973. AIM’s
major condition, entered in behalf of the Pine Ridge
traditionals and agreed to by government
representatives, was that a federal commission would
meet with the chiefs to review
U.S. compliance with the terms of the 1868 Fort
Laramie Treaty with the Lakota, Cheyenne,
and Arapaho nations. The idea was to generate policy
recommendations as to how
the United States might bring itself in line with
its treaty obligations. A White House
delegation did, in fact, meet with the elders at the
home of Chief Frank Fools Crow, near
the reservation town of Manderson, on May 17. The
delegates’ mission, however, was to
stonewall all efforts at meaningful discussion. They
promised a follow-up meeting on May
30 but never returned.
On other fronts, the authorities were demonstrating
a similar vigor. Before the first
meeting at Fools Crow’s house, the FBI had made 562 arrests
of those who had been
involved in defending Wounded Knee. Russell Means
was in jail awaiting release on
$150,000 bond; OSCRO leader Pedro Bissonette was
held against $152,000; AIM leaders
Stan Holder and Leonard Crow Dog were held against
$32,000 and $35,000, respectively.
Scores of others were being held pending the posting
of lesser sums. By the fall of 1973,
agents had amassed some 316,000 separate
investigative file classifications on those who
had been inside Wounded Knee.
This allowed federal prosecutors to obtain 185
indictments over the next several
months (Means alone was charged with 37 felonies and
three misdemeanors). In 1974,
AIM and the traditionals used the 1868 treaty as a
basis on which to challenge in federal
court the U.S. government’s jurisdiction over Pine
Ridge; however, the trials of the
“Wounded Knee leadership” went forward. Even after
the FBI’s and the prosecution’s
willingness to subvert the judicial process became
so blatantly obvious that U.S. District
Judge Fred Nichol was compelled to dismiss all
charges against Banks and Means, cases
were still pressed against Crow Dog, Holder, Carter
Camp, Madonna Gilbert, Lorelei
DeCora, and Phyllis Young.
The whole charade resulted in a meager 15
convictions, all on such paltry offenses as
trespass and “interference with postal inspectors in
performance of their lawful duties.”
Still, in the interim, the virtual entirety of AIM’s
leadership was tied up in a seemingly
endless series of arrests, incarcerations, hearings,
and trials. Similarly, the great bulk of the
movement’s fundraising and organizing capacity was
diverted into posting bonds and
mounting legal defenses for those indicted.
On balance, the record suggests a distinct
probability that the post-Wounded Knee
prosecutions were never seriously intended to result
in convictions at all. Instead, they
were designed mainly to serve the time-honored—and
utterly illegal—expedient of
“disrupting, misdirecting, destabilizing, or
otherwise neutralizing” a politically objectionable
group. There is the official concurrence with this
view: As army counterinsurgency
specialist Volney Warner framed matters at the time,
“AIM’s best leaders and most
militant members are under indictment, in jail or
warrants are out for their arrest….
[Under these conditions] the government can win,
even if nobody goes to [prison]...
A Legacy
It may be, as John Trudell has said, that “AIM died
years ago. It’s just that some people
don’t know it yet.” Certainly, the evidence
indicates that it is no longer a viable organization.
And yet there is another level to this reality, one
that has more to do with the spirit of
Copyright © 1997 by Ward Churchill
www.civilrightsteaching.org
resistance than with tangible form. Whatever else
may be said about what AIM was
(or is), it must be acknowledged that, as Russell
Means contends:
Before AIM, Indians were dispirited, defeated, and
culturally dissolving.
People were ashamed to be Indian. You didn’t see the
young people
wearing brands or chokers or ribbon shirts in those
days. Hell, I didn’t wear
’em. People didn’t Sun Dance, they didn’t sweat,
they were losing their
languages. Then there was that spark at Alcatraz,
and we took off. Man,
we took a ride across this country. We put Indians
and Indian rights smack
dab in the middle of the public consciousness for
the first time since the socalled
Indian Wars. And, of course, we paid a heavy price
for that. Some of
us are still paying it. But now you see braids on
our young people. There
are dozens of Sun Dances every summer. You hear our
languages spoken
again in places they had almost died out. Most
important, you find young
Indians all over the place who understand that they
don’t have to accept
whatever sort of bullshit the dominant society wants
to hand them, that they
have an obligation to stand up on their hind legs
and fight for their future
generations, the way our ancestors did. Now, I don’t
know about you, but I
call that pride in being Indian. And I think that’s
a very positive change.
And I think—no, I know—AIM had a lot to do with
bringing that change
about. We laid the groundwork for the next stage in
regaining our
sovereignty and self-determination as nations, and
I’m proud to have been a
part of that.
To the degree that this is true—and much of it seems
very accurate—AIM may
be said to have succeeded in fulfilling its original
agenda. The impulse of Alcatraz
was carried forward into dimensions its participants
could not yet envision. That
legacy even now is being refashioned and extended by
a new generation, as it will
be by the next, and the next. The continuity of
native North America’s traditional
resistance to domination was reasserted by AIM in no
uncertain terms.
There are other aspects of the AIM legacy, to be
sure. Perhaps the most crucial
should be placed under the heading of “Lessons
Learned.” The experience of the
American Indian Movement, especially in the
mid-1970s, provides what amounts to
a textbook exposition of the nature of the society
we now inhabit, the lengths to
which its government will go to maintain the kinds
of domination AIM fought to cast
off, and the techniques it uses in doing so. These
lessons teach what to expect, and,
if properly understood, how to overcome many of the
methodologies of repression.
The lessons are applicable not simply to American
Indians but to anyone whose lot
in life is to be oppressed within the American
conception of business as usual.
Ultimately, the gift bestowed by AIM is, in part, an
apprehension of the fact
that the Third World is not something “out there.”
It is everywhere, including behind
the façade of liberal democracy that masks the
substance of the United States. It
exists on every reservation in the nation, in the
teeming ghettos of Brownsville,
Detroit, and Compton, in the barrios and
migrant fields and sharecropping farms of
the Deep South. It persists in the desolation of the
Appalachian coal regions. It is
there in the burgeoning prison industry of America,
warehousing by far the largest
incarcerated population on the planet.
The Third World exists in the nation’s
ever-proliferating, militarized police
apparatus. And it is there in the piles of corpses
of those—not just AIM members,
but Black Panthers, Brown Berets, Puerto Rican independentistas,
labor organizers,
civil rights workers, and many others—who tried to
say “no” and make it stick.
It is there in the fate of Malcolm X and Fred
Hampton, Mark Clark and Ché Payne,
Geronimo ji Jaga Pratt and Alejandina Torres, Susan
Rosenberg and Martin Luther
Putting the Movement Back into Civil
Rights Teaching www.civilrightsteaching.org
Ward Churchill
(Creek and enrolled
Keetoowah Band
Cherokee) is a
longtime Native
rights activist,
acclaimed public
speaker, and awardwinning
writer. A
member of the
Governing Council
of the Colorado
chapter of the
American Indian
Movement, he also
serves as professor
of ethnic studies and
coordinator of
American Indian
studies at the
University of
Colorado. He is a
past national
spokesperson for
the Leonard Peltier
Defense Committee
and has served as a
delegate to the
U.N. Working
Group on Indigenous
Populations
and is an advocate/
prosecutor of the
First Nations
International
Tribunal for the
Chiefs of Ontario.
Churchill’s numerous
books include
Agents of Repression
and The
COINTELPRO
Papers.
In the quiet
before the
pow wow, Russell
Mean braids his
son’s
hair. Omaha
Annual
Pow Wow, Macy,
Nebraska, 1992.
© 2003 Ilka
Hartmann
King, George Jackson and Ray Luc Lavasseur, Tim
Blunk and Reyes Tijerina, Mutulu
Shaku and Marilyn Buck, and many others.
To win, it is said, one must know one’s enemy.
Winning the sorts of struggles these
people engaged in is unequivocally necessary if we
are to effect a constructive change in
the conditions they faced and we continue to face.
In this, there are still many lessons to
be drawn from the crucible of AIM experience. These
must be learned by all of us. They
must be learned well. And soon.
Copyright © 1997 by Ward
Churchill. Excerpted and reprinted with permission from Ward Churchill, “The
Bloody Wake of Alcatraz,” American
Indian Activism: Alcatraz to the Longest Walk, ed. Troy Johnson,
Joanne Nagel, and Duane Champagne (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 1997).
Letter from
Leonard Peltier on Anniversary of Incident at Oglala
Special
to the Native News Network in Native Challenges. June 2012
COLEMAN
FEDERAL PENTITENARY – Leonard Peltier has been
incarcerated as the result of a shootout incident between American Indian
Movement members and Federal police agents in Oglala 37 years ago. To
commemorate this event yesterday, he issued the following letter to be
distributed to a select group of media. The Native News Network publishes it
here today:
Greetings
My Relatives,
Leonard Peltier
First
of all before I get into talking about anything, I want to tell you how much I
deeply appreciate your remembering all the people who stood for what's right at
the Oglala Confrontation. And I deeply want to thank you for remembering me and
the chance to express myself to you. Each time that I am asked about putting
together a comment for any kind of event I always think to myself what if I
never got to say another thing. As you get older, that could very easily be a
reality. So I try to give a lot of thought to what I say to you and to others
and especially to any young people who might be listening to my words. And I
want to be quite honest the words I have to say are the teachings of our people
our elders our medicine people and things I’ve learned in life the hard way.
And things I’ve learned in a good way. If speaking to you in some way makes
your life better or prevents you from going to prison or being hurt or losing
your land or your culture or helps in regaining the things our people have lost
then I feel it will be worthwhile.
I hope
and pray that none of the young people will ever end up in any prison
situation. And especially end up in prison for trying to do what is right and
defending what is right. In this prison setting the days go by oh so slowly and
the months and years as I look back at them all kind of fold into one; because
every day is so much the same. There are very few highlights and you hear of
people having nightmares in their dreams but in here the nightmare is in your
waking moments. And in your sleep you are free for a while.
I want
to say how much I appreciate and respect our people for not selling or giving
up the Black Hills in South Dakota. And how much I want to encourage all our
people to remain strong and do everything they can to regain our culture. If we
are ever to be a strong people again, that we once were, it will be because we
have taken responsibility to regain our strength. This government will never
return anything meaningful that is still of some money value to them. This is
not my opinion it is reality and obvious to anyone who pays attention. We must
do everything we can to regain strength of self-discipline. We must do
everything we can to fully take responsibility for our future. Our ancestors
before us fought and died and suffered for us. Each person here today is a
result of someone who in the face of death and imprisonment stood and said,
"The future of my children and my children's children and generations to
come, is worth living and dying for." We should never let those sacrifices
be in vain. The Creator of all things does not want our death; the Creator of
all things wants our life; wants us to live for ourselves and for our children,
and to protect the earth and nature for our future generations. That is who we
are.
If you
feel or have come to believe that you have a calling to do a certain thing for
your people, if you prayed about it in ceremony and you feel this is a true
thing in your life, then you should educate yourself with ever part of that calling.
Don't wait for it to come to you. Go find that knowledge. Knowledge is strength
– knowledge is power – knowledge is survival – knowledge and truth comes from
the Creator and belongs to everyone. Don't worry about who said what or who
said it first or who said it last; figure out how you can use it to better the
life or yourself and our people. The movement of our people that has existed
ever since Columbus landed in the Caribbean belongs to all our people. It needs
no sanction from anyone. It belongs to no man or no woman. It truly belongs to
our people because it is the spirit of our people saying, "We want to
regain what we lost and protect what we have for ourselves and our future
generations."
Another
issue I want talk about for a moment, is the issue of alcohol and drugs, I know
from personal experience that it's hard to avoid those things when you grow up
around them. I can tell you for a fact that alcohol and drugs will not bring
you the life that you want. This world has a lot of beauty in it a lot of joys
and challenges and it has challenges that hurt, but meet those challenges and
know the beauty of this earth and this life. You need to be clear minded.
Traditionally our people observed nature and got their inspiration from nature
and if there is some place in nature where the wolf polluted his brain or the
elk or the eagle or any other creature, I'm not aware of it. We need every
ounce of good thinking that we have and can get to protect our lives and our
children and our culture.
And I
want to tell you for a fact that boredom is a part of life, no matter where you
are, and if you get up and go find something to do when all around you are
getting drunk or using drugs, after a while you will get better at finding
things to do. And your life will be far better. And getting depressed is a part
of life, but you don't learn how to deal with it by putting in into your body
that weren't meant to be there. That's why the creator gave us our medicines
and our ceremonies and each other, so that we could with a clear mind, enjoy
life, and protect life and rescue life where it was endangered. If there is
someone hearing this that has thought about taking their own life, I would
encourage you to rather than throw your life away, give your life to your people.
Let your life stand for something. Don't let the sacrifices of our ancestors be
for nothing.
Also I
want to say, that you can do all the right things day after day, year in and
year out and still bad things can happen. But if you have a clear mind, and
have developed your own self-discipline in knowing who you are, you can take
these bad things as challenges and use them to make yourself stronger and your
people stronger and prevent them from happening to yourself or to others that
you care about. And I want to say again, especially for the young people, that
one of the most important things you can learn that most of our ceremonies are
based on is developing your personal self-discipline. And learning to take
responsibility for yourself and your future and taking care of your health, is
the greatest gift you have on this earth at this time. And the most important
thing that would enhance all your lives in making it stronger and better is to
develop personal relationship with the Creator. Don't let it be based on some
other person's approach to spirituality but find the things that work for you.
Our
teachings have always shown us how to find our own vision through prayer and
fasting and sacrifice. These things help bring forth the elements of our spirit
and make us stronger and help us face the challenges of life. I hope that in
hearing my words some of you if not all, will be inspired in a good way. My
greatest hope is that you will think about these things and apply them to your
life as you find the truth of them. And sometimes I know we have to return to
what we said, maybe have someone speak it to us again or read it again, but
whatever happens I sincerely pray and hope that all our lives will be better
and for the better and not just for our people but for all people. Because our
way is not just another way of life, it is THE way of life. It is life seeking
life, it is life protecting life, it is living in such a way that all things
are reborn every Spring.
I'll
close for now, thank you for your time, thank you for listening, remember the
sacrifices of those who lived and died for you. Remember Joe Stuntz, and all
the others who gave their lives, as I know you do, I would love to be with you
now, today, and know that in my heart I am, in my heart I stand next to you.
May the Creator bless you always in all ways.
Your
relative,
Leonard
Peltier
