Lakota Woman (14 page)

CHAPTER 9

The Siege

Coming to Wounded Knee was just the most natural thing in the world to do.

—
Chief Frank Fools Crow

I am not afraid to die.

If I die at Wounded Knee,

I will go where Crazy Horse

and Sitting Bull

and our grandfathers are.

—
Crow Dog

T
he three main centers around which the seventy-one-days-long siege of Wounded Knee revolved were the Sacred Heart Church, the Gildersleeve Trading Post, and the museum. The most important for us was the store, which was really a little empire by itself. It consisted of an Indian arts and crafts and artifact store, a Western curio shoppe, a supermarket, a cafeteria which had on its menu the worst frozen, factory-made pizzas I ever tasted, a filling station, and private quarters for the manager’s family—a jumble of additions piled upon additions. The circular museum was part of the trading post, but a separate building a little ways off. Gildersleeve had always tried to exploit the site of our greatest tragedy, making it into a tourist attraction. For seventy-five miles around he had put up billboards:
SEE THE WOUNDED KNEE MASSACRE SITE, VISIT THE MASS GRAVE. POSTCARDS, CURIOS, DON’T MISS IT!
Some of the postcards advertised showed our slaughtered men and women frozen stiff in grotesque attitudes. Others showed grinning soldiers posing with the corpses. We had always resented Gildersleeve and his empire built dollar by dollar out of our poverty.

I spent my first night in the church under the eyes of Holy Mary and some plaster-cast saints. Some of the young people had pushed the pews aside, brought out a drum, and begun to dance in Indian fashion. The elderly priest could not understand what was happening. Somebody told him, “You’re a prisoner of war.” He started to tremble. “Naw,” one of the men told him, “we just want you to go over there, in back, in case there should be some shooting. We don’t want you to get hurt.” He was led away in a daze. He was mumbling that our dance and drum had desecrated his church. One woman told him that he had got it wrong, that his church was a desecration of the grave of our slaughtered people who had not been Christians. In the ravines coyotes were howling.

In the morning everybody was milling around. Stan Holder was named head of security, Bod Free chief of engineers to keep the electricity running and so forth. Crow Dog was the spiritual leader. The rifles were counted. Somebody was measuring the amount of gasoline left in the tanks of the filling station. Some of us women went down to the store to take inventory of the groceries and tinned goods. On the way we met a whole safari bringing up foodstuffs from the cafeteria to give breakfast to the crowd in the church and the warriors in the bunkers. A car full of goons appeared on the horizon. Some men fired upon it and it took off in a hurry. I could see an FBI car coming up the road, but it stayed at a respectful distance. We were being watched.

Dennis Banks had told us, “Don’t take anything from the store.” He could have saved himself the trouble. The place was already pretty well stripped. A young man seemed happy with a 30–30 rifle he had “liberated.” Already groups of Indians had staked out their territory, making themselves at home in cubbyholes, putting up partitions—Sioux here, Oklahoma boys over there, AIM guys next door. Tables and beds were being made out of odd pieces of lumber. Some people put up Indian posters. A boy was painting slogans on the wall. One sign read:
!!!REWARD!!! BRAIDS OF RUSSEL MEANS. ONE BRAID
—$50.00.
TWO BRAIDS
—$300.00.
WITH MEANS’ HEAD
—$1,000.00.
COLLECT AT TRIBAL OFFICE
. This was a reference to Wilson’s promise to personally cut off Russel Means’s braids—a promise he did not keep. Another sign promised two packages of Bull Durham for Wilson’s entire body—pickled.

Shortly after I ate lunch—baked beans out of a can warmed over a sterno—airplanes were flying low over the hamlet. Some had photographers in them. By late afternoon three hundred marshals and FBI agents had formed a loose ring around us, their armored vehicles blocking the few roads in and out of Wounded Knee. In answer we were establishing roadblocks of our own. Already we had our first casualty. A young boy, unfamiliar with firearms, shot one of his fingers off.

Wounded Knee lasted seventy-one long days. These days were not all passed performing heroic deeds or putting up media shows for the reporters. Most of the time was spent in boredom, just trying to keep warm and finding something to eat. Wounded Knee was a place one got scared in occasionally, a place in which people made love, got married Indian style, gave birth, and died. The oldest occupants were over eighty, the youngest under eight. It was a heyoka place, a place of sacred clowns who laughed while they wept. A young warrior standing up in the middle of a fire-fight to pose for the press; Russel Means telling the photographers, “Be sure to get my good side.”

We organized ourselves. The biggest room in the store became the community hall. A white man’s home, the only house with heat and tap water, became the hospital, and women were running it. The museum became the security office. We all took turns doing the cooking, sewing shirts, and making sleeping bags for the men in bunkers. We embroidered the words “Wounded Knee” on rainbow-colored strips of cloth. Everybody got one of those as a badge of honor, “to show your grandchildren sometime,” as Dennis said. We shared. We did things for each other. At one time a white volunteer nurse berated us for doing the slave work while the men got all the glory. We were betraying the cause of womankind, was the way she put it. We told her that her kind of women’s lib was a white, middle-class thing, and that at this critical stage we had other priorities. Once our men had gotten their rights and their balls back, we might start arguing with them about who should do the dishes. But not before.

Actually, our women played a major part at Wounded Knee. We had two or three pistol-packing mamas swaggering around with six-shooters dangling at their hips, taking their turns on the firing line, swapping lead with the feds. The Indian nurses bringing in the wounded under a hail of fire were braver than many warriors. The men also did their share of the dirty work. Bob Free, our first chief of engineers, had a crew which built twelve fortified bunkers, made an apartment house out of the trading post, dug latrines and constructed wooden privies, kept the juice going, repaired cars, operated the forklift and an earth-moving bulldozer. The men also formed a sanitary squad, picking up garbage and digging trenches to bury all that crap. One day Bob laid down the law: “Okay, that’s it. The only electricity we keep is for the freezers to store the meat, for the gas pumps and three lights. That’s all!” And he enforced it.

For a while I stayed at the trading post. But it was too much for me. Too many people and too little privacy. I figured that I would have my baby within two weeks. I moved into a trailer house at the edge of Wounded Knee. By then daily exchanges of fire had become commonplace. The bullets were flying as I got bigger and bigger. One day the government declared a cease-fire so that the women and children could leave. One of the AIM leaders came up to me: “You’re leaving. You’re pregnant, so you’ve got to go.” I told him, “No, I won’t. If I’m going to die, I’m going to die here. All that means anything to me is right here. I have nothing to live for out there.”

“It doesn’t matter whether you want to or not, you’ve got to go. All the women and children are going.”

But we were not going. I stayed, all the older women stayed, most of the young mothers with children stayed, the sweethearts of the warriors stayed. Only a handful took advantage of the cease-fire and left. The deadline passed. The firing started again. Heavy MGs, automatic rifles, tripwire flares, single shots from the government sniper experts. Some of our men burned the wooden bridge over the creek so the feds couldn’t sneak up on us across it. Somebody said, “Now we’ve burned our bridge behind us.”

One morning I got up early to bring coffee to the security in their bunkers and the feds opened up on me. A young Apache boy named Carlos rushed up, pushed me down, and covered me with his body. I am short, but he was even smaller than me. Some of the shots barely missed us. When the shooting eased up he dragged me into the bunker. He got after me: “Are you crazy? You should stay indoors. You have no business out there.” I laughed at him: “I’m about to be a mother and you’re just a kid. You want to tell me what to do?” But I was touched. I was not really that much older than he. All the men were overprotective, worrying about me. We were down to dry beans and a little flour. No coffee, no sugar, no cigarettes. The head of the marshals had announced publicly, “We’re gonna change their diets!”

Dennis was keeping an eye on our dwindling supplies. For Easter Sunday he had been saving some ham and potatoes. So we had something close to a feast in the second, smaller church on the other side of Wounded Knee. I walked down there with some feed on my back in a heavy knapsack. Stan Holder came up to me: “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you know better?” Some friends joined in: “Get that backpack off you! We’re responsible if you hurt yourself.”

I told them, “You get off my back! You’re not responsible for me. The only person responsible for me is myself.” I continued doing my chores, cooking, bringing coffee to the bunkers. Pedro Bissonette was always teasing me whenever we met, pointing at my belly: “That little warrior in there is hungry. Here is a little something for him,” forcing me to accept a morsel of food that I knew came from his own meager ration. Or he would come up and ask whether I wanted to play basketball. That always got a big laugh because I was so huge. We actually laughed and kidded each other a lot. It helped us to last as long as we did.

When the food situation got out of hand we sent out a party of young hunters to bring in some “slow elk,” that is, some of the white ranchers’ cattle which were grazing in the vicinity. “Get a young, juicy cow,” Dennis had told them. Instead they brought in a tough old bull. That poor old bull didn’t want to die. They had to shoot him about twenty times before he finally lay down and gave up the ghost. Then it turned out that our young men did not know how to butcher. Some hunters! They were all city kids from St. Paul, Denver, or Rapid City. One of the white reporters had to show them how to do it. The women pounded and pounded that meat. They boiled it for hours. It remained as hard as stone. It was like chewing on a rope when I tried my teeth on it. After that Dennis put up a large poster. It showed the rear end of a bull with huge balls and underneath the words:
THIS IS A BULL
. Next to it was drawn a cow’s ass with the udder and the legend:
THIS IS
A COW
. And above the whole thing, very big:
COW—SI, BULL—NO!

The three hundred feds, the goons, and the BIA police were never able to seal us off completely. As Pedro Bissonette put it, “The land was on our side.” The whole landscape was a jumble of hills, gullies, ravines, dry washes, sagebrush, and clumps of cottonwood trees. The marshals got lost in there. They also had no stomach for nighttime, hand-to-hand, guerilla-style fighting. They were technological, long-range killers. So there was a lot of sneaking through the perimeter, a lot of coming and going. Indians from Denver, New Mexico, and L.A. trickled in, a dozen or half-dozen at a time. A group of Iroquois from New York joined us for a while. Most of them were guided in by some of our local Sioux who knew every bush and every little hillock around us and who could find their way blindfolded. Usually people started walking in from the Porcupine area about eight or nine miles away. Some carried heavy packs of food. The government had their APCs out and illuminated the nights with their flares. They also kept the whole area under steady fire, shooting blindly. A continuous stream of red-glowing tracer bullets crisscrossed the whole prairie around us. It never stopped the brothers and sisters from coming. Among the groups walking in were some North-west Coast people, Pullayups and Nisquallies, led by Sid Mills who had fought so long for native fishing rights in Washington State. These were among our toughest fighters.

One time Sid and two or three other guys went out to bring in some food. They walked and walked the whole night and never made their contact. When dawn came they discovered that they were barely a few hundred yards away from the Sacred Heart Church. The whole night they had been walking around in circles, never getting more than a stone’s throw away. Dennis conducted an honoring ceremony for them. Instead of an eagle feather Sid got a compass. He earned his eagle feather anyway.

Another time a young Indian in our little Datsun chased one of the government’s huge armored cars. He was banging on the armor with a stick, “counting coup.” The APC did not know what to do and lumbered off, the little Datsun harassing it all the way to the roadblock.

Some young Oklahoma boys brought off a big coup by raiding a government bunker, stealing all their supplies—coffee, eggs, cigarettes, K-rations, bread, and sausages. The marshals must have been drunk or sleeping. On another occasion some of our guys made a big show of burying a number of large, empty film containers left behind by a TV crew. Immediately you could hear the alarm spreading on the feds’ shortwave: “Those Indians are planting Teller mines!” All the APCs took off in a hurry and we had scored another coup. So the siege had its humorous aspect, too.

All the time we were in communication with the other side, bantering back and forth, calling each other names, doing a lot of teasing. Then suddenly we heard the voice of the chief marshal: “The fun and games are over!” The ring around us was tightened. Elements of the 82nd Airborne were brought in, waiting their turn at nearby Hot Springs—just in case. A ‘copter called
Snoopy
suddenly had a sniper in it taking potshots at us. Heavy 50-caliber MGs opened fire on our perimeter. Our telephone lines to the outside world were cut, all except the one connecting Wounded Knee with the marshals’ headquarters. Special kill-and-destroy teams were being flown in, with attack dogs and infrared gun scopes which enabled the government sharpshooters to see us in the dark. Trip-wire flares saturated the whole area around us. If we touched the wire a flare would go up, bathing the whole landscape in a strange, ghostlike light. Press was no longer admitted. One of the last reporters to leave asked Russel, “Do you think you’ll still be around tomorrow morning?” Russ Means answered, “That’s up to the government.”