The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

In the 1950s, the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), led by Ponca tribesman Clyde Warrior, sprang up. Warrior was popular among his people in Oklahoma and had a reputation as an extraordinary powwow dancer. His goal was to aggressively attack Indigenous peoples’ negative public image. Instead of meeting in hotels as the NCAI did, the NIYC met on reservations and concluding every meeting “with drumming and singing, often led by Warrior himself” (291). By the mid-1960s, the group led protests in the Pacific Northwest over treaty and fishing rights, called “fish-ins.”

Warrior wrote an essay in an NIYC newsletter entitled “Which One Are You? Five Types of Indians,” in which he described what he considered to be five types of Indigenous people. They were the “slob or hood,” who lived up to the worst stereotypes; the “joker,” who tried to prove to Whites how likeable and innocuous they were through self-deprecation; the “sell-out,” who worked to show Whites how much they had assimilated; the “pseudo-Indian,” who had no connection to their identity; and the “angry nationalist,” who rejected American society and sought connections with other tribes. Warrior identified as an angry nationalist and believed that this identity was best suited for setting goals for Indigenous communities.

By 1970, Indigenous people were no longer living on the margins, but they were on the bottom of the social and economic ladder. Their life expectancy was between 50 and 65 and infant mortality rates were high, as were rates of suicide and liver disease. Indigenous people were also three times more likely than Whites to be murdered. Many Indigenous people committed violence “in the form of assault, domestic abuse, rape, child abuse, drinking, drugs, and suicide” (292). To combat this culture of death, Indigenous peoples began to turn inward, rediscovering their religions and traditions to sustain themselves.

When looking for a way to combat oppression, Indigenous people looked to the Black Panthers as models of resistance. The early founders of the American Indian Movement (AIM) were mostly Ojibwe people who organized in a South Minneapolis neighborhood. The early AIM leaders included Dennis Banks, Vernon Bellecourt, George Mitchell, and Harold Powless, who was of Oneida descent. Their early agenda focused on “economic independence and freedom from police brutality” (297). To combat the latter, they formed patrols, modeled on those of the Black Panthers, which followed the police and documented instances of unnecessary force.

Starting in the late 1960s, AIM staged events that were guaranteed to generate publicity. In November 1969, students and AIM activists took over Alcatraz Island. Activists, including Russell Means and his father, Walter, had sailed out to the island five years before, seeking to claim it on behalf of the nation’s first peoples, but the stunt failed. The second occupation generated the attention they had hoped for, but the action itself was complicated and messy. Negotiations with California state leaders soured. Worse, there was fighting between the group’s leaders. In the end, Alcatraz remained a part of California’s national park system.

The failed occupation on Alcatraz, however, did spark further activism. In 1970, AIM occupied a naval air station in Minneapolis to protest deficits in Indigenous education. The same year, AIM took over a dam in Wisconsin to get reparations for the Lac Court Oreilles Reservation, which had suffered from illegal flooding. The following year, AIM took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) office in Washington, DC, to protest the office’s paternalistic and unfair policies.

In 1972, AIM staged its largest protest. Robert Burnette, chairman of the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, announced that a caravan would travel from reservation to reservation nationwide to draw attention to the plight of Indigenous people on reservations. The procession was called the “Trail of Broken Treaties.” The caravan arrived in the nation’s capital on November 1, 1972. Two days later, protesters entered the BIA and stayed in the auditorium. When confronted, they refused to leave and demanded to meet with one of Nixon’s representatives. The police began to congregate outside. The protestors became worried and barricaded the doors to the building. They then posted a sign out front that read “Native American Embassy.” On Saturday, a judge issued warrants for the arrest of the protestors. In response, the activists released a 20-point memo that included provisions to restore treaty-making authority, establishment of a treaty commission, judicial recognition of the tribes’ right to interpret treaties, and the abolition of the BIA. They also demanded religious freedom, cultural autonomy, and rights to health care, housing, education, and employment.

Some of AIM’s demands were realistic, including the restructuring of the BIA, but others, such as giving 110 million acres back to the Indigenous, were beyond the realm of possibility. When AIM demanded a meeting with President Nixon, he refused. When another court order was issued for the arrest of AIM protestors, they erupted into a frenzy of violence, causing two million dollars’ worth of damage at the BIA. CIA agent Frank Carlucci engaged the AIM leaders in negotiations that resulted in the caravan returning home in exchange for $66,650. According to rumor, some of the money went toward further activism, while some of it paid for AIM leaders to return home in comfort. In any case, the occupation ended “with little accomplished” (306).

In the winter of 1972, Raymond Yellow Thunder, an Oglala Sioux, was murdered in Gordon, Nebraska, by a group of White men who stripped him naked, beat him, forced him to do some tribal dances at the American Legion Club, and exposed him to the winter frost. Yellow Thunder was “a grandson of the famous Lakota war chief and progressive reformer American Horse” and grew up on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He was poor but worked hard. He spent his weekends drinking in town, which is how he encountered his four murderers. Yellow Thunder “died of a subdural hematoma caused by blunt-force trauma” (315). Yellow Thunder’s nephew, Severt Young Bear, enlisted the help of AIM in Omaha. By the end of the week, over 1,400 Indigenous people had arrived in Gordon. Their protest resulted in the suspension of a police officer notorious for his ill treatment of Indigenous people and Yellow Thunder’s attackers being charged with manslaughter. In the end, Yellow Thunder’s murderers got reduced time and were paroled.

A year later, Wesley Bad Heart Bull was stabbed to death near Pine Ridge Reservation. His attacker, Darld Schmitz, was charged with second-degree manslaughter. AIM leadership, including Dennis Banks and Russell Means, arrived and requested stiffer charges, to no avail. A riot broke out, and around 30 Indigenous people were charged with rioting and arson. Schmitz was acquitted by an all-White jury.

Meanwhile, Pine Ridge Reservation was under the control of a man named Dick Wilson—a leader who had been accused of nepotism and mismanagement. He was rumored to have embezzled funds for public projects and maintained a private security team to intimidate his enemies. He ceased to consult with the tribal council and met only with a four-member council. He also sold “cheap grazing leases on tribal land to white interests” and opened up large swaths of the reservation to mining interests (319). Wilson’s security force was assisted and advised by President Nixon’s Special Operations Group—an illegal CIA intelligence outfit. Resident of Pine Ridge referred to them as goons, and the security agents appropriated the name, thereby becoming GOONS, or Guardians of the Oglala Nation.

AIM members soon arrived at Pine Ridge. In response, the GOONS militarized. AIM later went to Wounded Knee and held a ceremony for those who died in 1890 during an Army-led massacre. Meanwhile, AIM militants “attacked the village and […] took over the trading post and the lonely, picturesque Sacred Heart Catholic Church” (321). They also looted a store. Law enforcement blocked the road. The protestors stayed at Pine Ridge for 71 days and immediately began to exchange gunfire with law enforcement. The occupiers also held non-Indigenous hostages from Wounded Knee. Russell Means asserted that he wasn’t afraid to die. If he did, he asserted, the hostages would also die. There was one major problem with the stand-off, however: The protestors lacked food.

After 10 days, there was a ceasefire. When roadblocks were lifted, more protestors flooded into Wounded Knee, bringing firearms and other supplies. The leaders then declared Wounded Knee the “Independent Oglala Nation” and said that it would now only negotiate with the US secretary of state. Instead, Harlington Wood Jr., the assistant attorney general who had negotiated with protestors at Alcatraz, arrived to negotiate. He talked with AIM leaders for days and took their demands to the US government. The talks were a failure. After Wood departed, an intense gunfight started.

Next, the federal government sent in Kent Frizzell. Frizzell cut off the village’s sources of water and power “in an attempt to starve out the protestors” (324). This was for naught: Indigenous people hiked over the hills with backpacks full of supplies. On March 24, Leo Wilcox, an ally of Dick Wilson, was found burned to death in his car. In April, the federal government took the BIA and Interior Department out of negotiations, a move Russell Means and other leaders viewed as a shift toward more direct nation-to-nation relations. However, the Justice Department expected Means to turn himself in.

Means appeared in Washington, DC, for a meeting at which the government would hear the tribes’ grievances. After he arrived, federal officials told him to “order the evacuation of Wounded Knee” (326). Means refused until after negotiations were complete. He then went on a public speaking tour and never returned to Wounded Knee. At the protest, firefights continued, leading rank-and-file protesters to discontinue the stand-off. Dennis Banks and Russell Means “were charged with conspiracy and assault” but were released due to a technicality (326).

AIM earned a reputation for violence. Ray Robinson, an African American activist who had marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Washington in 1963, disappeared from Wounded Knee a week after his arrival. It is believed that he was murdered by Dennis Banks and other AIM leaders.

AIM was never a well-organized group, but it managed to make changes in Indigenous communities. In 1972, the group opened Red School House in Saint Paul, Minnesota—a school that would cater to Indigenous “culture, ceremony, and life” (328). Similar schools were opened soon thereafter, resulting in 16 Indigenous-run schools by 1975. In 1973, Indigenous community members in Minneapolis and AIM leaders started Little Earth housing project “to provide homes for low-income urban Indians along with on-site day care and health care and Indian-centric cultural programming” (329). To date, Little Earth is the sole HUD-funded Section 8 assistance housing project in the country that gives preference to Indigenous people. Five years later, AIM leaders looked to provide education to Indigenous prisoners. They led classes and ceremonies at Minnesota Correctional Facility—Stillwater and St. Cloud. Finally, AIM created the American Indian Opportunities Industrialization Center in Minneapolis, which, within four decades, has trained over 20,000 Indigenous people for entry-level positions in “clerical, construction, plumbing, and other occupations” (330).

On January 8, 1964, in his State of the Union address, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty. In his address, he mentioned the rampant poverty on reservations. It was the first time that any president had mentioned Indigenous people as fellow citizens and not as enemies within. Eight months after the address, the Economic Opportunity Act became law. Programs included Job Corps and the federal work-study program for low-income college students. The Office of Economic Opportunity also opened to work with poor people directly. This office allowed Indigenous peoples to find support without having to go through the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

When the Nixon Administration took power in 1968, the new president restructured the OEO by “[limiting] the direct involvement of the people it served” (332). In 1981, President Ronald Reagan completely dismantled the organization, which “was the beginning of the end of the top-down control that had been exercised on Indian people” since the beginning of contact with Europeans in North America (332).

In 1972, the federal government passed the Indian Education Act, which “mandated that local educational agencies” with over 10 Indigenous students were required to “develop curricular materials and support services to meet the needs of that population” (333). Its purpose was to deal with chronically low high-school graduation rates and low college attendance among tribes. The legislation was broad and also addressed nutrition and the needs for eyeglasses and dental care.

Tribes had already begun to establish their own educational institutions. The Navajo set up Navajo Community College in 1968. The school received accreditation in 1976. Officials wondered if they ought to provide standard Western education or tailor its curriculum to the needs of Diné peoples. Research showed that “culture-based bilingual programs greatly increased students’ performance and competence in all subjects” (334). In 2013, Montana became the first state to open an accredited tribal college. Fourteen years earlier, the state passed the Indian Education for All Act, which required that all Montanans, from preschool to high school, learn Indigenous history and culture.

Transformations in White people’s attitudes toward Indigenous culture were spurred by the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978. Before the law was passed, it had been illegal for Indigenous people to practice their religions. In signing the law, President Jimmy Carter asserted that the United States would preserve the right of Indigenous tribes to exercise their traditions. Ceremonies that had been conducted underground were soon practiced in the open. More importantly, younger Indigenous people and those who lived in the cities had a chance to rediscover lost traditions.

The 1978 law opened the door to other forms of legislation that helped preserve Indigenous culture. In 1990, the federal government passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which allowed for the return of Indigenous remains held in museums and other institutions that received federal funds. The act also outlawed the trafficking of Indigenous remains.

The recovery of Indigenous traditions also spilled over into other aspects of life. Some members of Indigenous communities started businesses, tapping into their tribes’ hunter-gatherer traditions. Treuer offers an anecdote about a fellow Ojibwe man named Bobby, also from Leech Lake Reservation, who started a leeching business. Like his ancestors, he profits off the bounty of the Minnesota landscape, which has 10 million acres of wetlands.

By the mid-1970s, AIM had largely lost power and influence as a force for political activism. Murders at Pine Ridge Reservation were rampant. There were also cases of rape. In 1975, members of AIM exchanged gunfire with FBI agents, and one Indigenous person and two agents died.

In 1976, a South Dakota rancher found a body in a ditch near his fence line. It was that of Anna Mae Aquash, “a young Mi’kmaq loner from Canada” who had left her two daughters in Boston with her sister to join AIM in the American West (353). When Aquash arrived, leader Dennis Banks ordered her and other women present to do kitchen duty. Aquash balked, saying that she came to fight, not to do dishes. Soon after her arrival, she and Banks started an affair. Rumors broke out among AIM members that Aquash was an FBI informant. AIM was rightfully nervous about COINTELPRO—the counterintelligence program that had dismantled the Black Panthers—but there was no evidence that Aquash was a double agent. Some women within AIM resented her, however, believing that her romance with Banks would hurt the movement.

In November 1975, members of AIM were on the run in the West, hiding out from the authorities to avoid consequences after the Jumping Bull shootout. Aquash, Banks, and other AIM leaders were driving through Oregon when they were stopped by the police. There was a shootout. Banks escaped, but Aquash and fellow AIMster Darlene Nichols were arrested.

After she was released, Aquash went to Denver to meet Banks at a safe house. Still in love with Banks, she waited a week for him to arrive, but he never did. A week later, Aquash got into a car with three other AIM members and was never heard from again. Her murderer has never been brought to justice.