Lakota Woman (15 page)

Our reinforcements and supplies dwindled down to a trickle. Beyond our perimeter, the scene was right out of a cheap World War I movie. The feds were building themselves regular sandbag positions with stoves and all the comforts of home. They had radios and even TVs to entertain themselves. We could hear the rock ‘n’ roll music drifting in from their bunkers. They wore light blue Day-Glo man-from-Mars jumpsuits or camouflage outfits. Their positions were surrounded by ever-growing mounds of empty shells and beer cans. Their armored cars were fitted out with high-powered strobe searchlights and M-79 grenade launchers.

We had little to put up against this sort of war technology. Ammo was as short as food. During a typical firefight the feds would be pouring in upon us some five to ten thousand rounds while we would answer them with maybe twenty-five or thirty shots. Whatever ammo we could scrape together was piled up on the altar of the Sacred Heart Church. The men came out of their bunkers from time to time to fill their pockets with bullets. The trouble was that they had a hard time finding the right kind of ammo to fit their oddball weapons, some of them real antiques that should have been in a museum. In spite of all their sophisticated weaponry I had the feeling that the feds were in a strange way afraid of us. While we were relaxed, as Indians usually are, they were nervous and trigger-happy. One night when we played Indian music—grass dance songs and powwow stuff—the marshals thought these were our death songs and got all worked up, expecting a banzai charge. One day Dennis found an old stovepipe and attached a thing to it that looked like a gunsight. We set it up and started a rumor that we had acquired a rocket launcher. This, too, upset the feds. We always had the moral edge, but they had the hardware.

Again I come back to the old Cheyenne saying: “A nation is not lost as long as the hearts of its women are not on the ground.” As the siege went on our women became stronger. One bunker was held by a married couple. When the husband was hit by several bullets, the wife insisted on holding the position alone. Women “manning” a bunker got into a two-way radio argument with some marshals. The girls finally took up a megaphone, shouting across no-man’s-land so that everybody could hear: “If you SOBs don’t shut up, we’ll call in the men!” One girl got hit in the white church. A bullet ricocheted and grazed her hand. It was just a flesh wound. She went on as if nothing had happened. During a firefight there was one young woman in particular who held off seven marshals while some of the men got behind shelter. All she had was an old pistol. She used that to scare them off. That was Gray Fox’s wife. She was really good with a gun. I guess some of the men did not like her because of that. Especially, I think, those who scrambled to safety while she covered them.

One of the good things that happened to me at Wounded Knee was getting to know Annie Mae Aquash, a Micmac Indian from Nova Scotia who became my close friend. She was a remarkable woman, strong-hearted and strong-minded, who had a great influence upon my thinking and outlook on life. I first noticed her when an argument arose among some of the women. One group, as I remember, called themselves the “Pie Patrol.” Why, I do not know. There were no pies and they did not do much patrolling; as far as I could see. They were loud-mouth city women, very media conscious, hugging the limelight. They were bossy, too, trying to order us around. They were always posing for photographers and TV crews, getting all the credit and glory while we did the shit work, scrubbing dishes or making sleeping bags out of old jackets.

Annie Mae gave these women a piece of her mind and I took her side. So we hit it off right away and became instant buddies. Annie Mae taught me a lot. She could make something out of nothing. She made nice meals with seemingly no provisions except dried beans and yellow peas. After I gave birth she made a tiny Wounded Knee patch for little Pedro. She was older than I and already a mother, divorced from a husband whose heart was not big enough for her. Annie Mae found among us Sioux an Indian culture her own tribe had lost. She was always saying, “If I’m going to die, I’m going to die. I have to die sometime. It might as well be here where I’d die for a reason.” She had a premonition that her militancy would bring her a violent death, and in this she was right. She had heard the call of the owl. When we left Wounded Knee at the end of the siege she handed me a .38 and a knife, just in case we should run into the goons instead of surrendering to the feds. If we met Wilson’s gang we might have to fight for our lives, she told me.

My brother was with us at Wounded Knee. He walked out one night to get food and ammunition and got busted. He had all his weapons taken from him, but the police had no proof against him and soon he was back at the Knee starting a new cycle of comings and goings. He brought me presents, things only a brother would risk his life to give to a sister—a little coffee, cigarettes, candy bars, and stuff like that, cheap, everyday articles but precious to one besieged, pregnant lady. At that time snipers with nonbarking attack dogs were harassing us. The feds could not see our men at night, but the dogs would smell them. It was a Vietnam vet, one of our few white brothers at the Knee, who told us how to fix those mutts. The thing to do was to have some pepper in your pocket and to urinate in one place and stomp and rub your feet in it. Walking off, one could start a good, hot urine trail for the dog to follow and then, after a few hundred yards, put a big pile of pepper on one’s tracks. When the dog got a noseful of that he was useless for the rest of the week. Oddities among our warriors were two brothers, Charles and Robert. They were great-grandsons of General George Armstrong Custer, whom we Sioux, together with our Cheyenne brothers, wiped out at the Little Big Horn in 1876. When Custer surprised a peaceful Cheyenne village on the Washita, killing most of the men, one of his prisoners was a young girl, Maotsi, called Monaseetah by the whites. She caught the general’s eye. She was told to be “nice” to him, otherwise he would be hard on her people—and she had seen just how hard he could be. When Maotsi got pregnant Custer kicked her out. He had no further interest in her or her offspring. A son was born who survived the famous death march of the Cheyennes and later married a Sioux woman, moving in with his wife’s tribe into which he was adopted.

Thus it happened that the great-grandsons of Yellow Hair, Custer, were counting coup on the Blue Coats of 1973. For them Wounded Knee was a grudge fight. Some of the reporters who did not like us called Wounded Knee a “guerilla theater.” A theater is make-believe, but the siege was very real, and so were the wounds and deaths. The Knee sure was dramatic, however, both in the many things that happened there and in the people who participated.

Politicians, celebrities, and civil rights leaders came to Wounded Knee early in the siege when the feds were still letting VIP visitors and reporters through the roadblocks. Our South Dakota senators Abourezk and McGovern were among them. Abourezk was supportive, which ruined his chances to run for a second term. McGovern was not. He is a great liberal anywhere but in South Dakota, because being friendly with activist Indians would cost him his reelection. At one time he seriously proposed storming Wounded Knee, which must have pleased his white constituents. He came up to me while I was doing dishes and held out his hand. He had a sour face. He said, “Hello, I’m George McGovern.” I just looked at him and said, “So what,” turned around, and went on scrubbing dishes.

Under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 the Sioux had been recognized as an independent nation. The government had unilaterally abrogated this treaty without asking the Indians who were a party to it. On March 12, 1973, a big day, Wounded Knee declared itself a sovereign territory of the independent Oglala Nation. Anybody of goodwill, Indian or white, could become a citizen. Whatever one might say about AIM, it was never racist. As Crow Dog expressed it: “We don’t want to fight the white man, but only the white man’s system.”

Periodic meetings were held between our spokesmen and various government negotiators to arrive at a peaceful settlement. These usually took place inside a tipi in no-man’s-land. Always an altar was set up and the pipe smoked before the discussions started. Some government people could not relate to this. One of them said, “Imagine having to sit on the earth around a buffalo skull in order to talk to those people.” The talks always came around to which came first, the chicken or the egg.
The government negotiators said: “Disarm and surrender, then we’ll consider your grievances.” Always we replied: “Let’s talk about our grievances first, then we’ll disarm and come out.” Crow Dog proposed a compromise. Instead of surrendering our arms outright, we would stack them all inside the tipi while the negotiations went on. The tipi entrance would be barred by the sacred pipe, then nobody would touch these weapons. The government people rejected this proposal. They had no faith in the pipe. As a matter of fact, there was little that was sacred to them. They had no strong beliefs of their own, except a faith in naked power, numbers and paragraphs. And so the siege continued.

Some of the most memorable events at the Knee were the two air-drops. The first airlift dropped four hundred pounds of food into the perimeter—powdered milk and Similac for the children, dried beans, flour, rice, coffee, tea, sugar, baking soda, and cigarettes, as well as bandages, antibiotics, and vitamins. The single plane came in very low. It almost got caught on a telephone wire, but managed to duck under it and come in for a hard landing on the road close to the trading post. As soon as it touched down, everybody ran up and unloaded it. To me it seemed as if it was done in a minute or less. It all happened so fast that the plane took off before the feds had a chance to react. The airlift came as a complete surprise to them. We saw them running about, gesticulating, shaking their fists at the sky. The pilot and copilot were both Vietnam vets. The copilot had been one of our medics for almost a month and he could show the pilot the way by picking out landmarks. He was white with a tiny bit of Mohawk in him. He had made a Sioux-style flesh offering before going on this mission.

The second air-drop was carried out by three planes, Piper Cherokees, which was sure a good name for planes flying in support of Indians. Each plane carried four parachutes; each chute had two heavy duffel bags of food attached to it. Altogether the planes dumped one ton of supplies. They came in at first light on April 17. The men who flew these small machines were very brave. They flew very low through night and bad weather, expecting at any moment to be intercepted by government jets. One of the chutes did not open. I watched it hit the ground. It was full of flour, so when it hit there was a big white cloud and some overexcited people screamed that we were being bombed. The whole drop lasted about five minutes and then the planes vanished. The day of this air-drop was the day Clearwater was killed.

Two of our men were killed at Wounded Knee and many were seriously wounded. On the other side no one was killed and only one marshal badly wounded. For all I know he might have been caught in the feds’ own crossfire. The marshals reacted very, quickly to the second airlift. A helicopter flew over in no time and from it a sniper opened fire on a few of our people still busy carrying food to the trading post. Our men shot at the copter and that started a firefight which lasted almost two hours. Frank Clearwater had arrived the day before with his pregnant wife Morning Star. She was Apache and he was Cherokee. He was resting on a bed inside the church when a bullet crashed through the wall and smashed into his head. When it became known that one of our brothers had been badly hurt we used the two-way radio to ask the marshals for a cease-fire. They promised to hold their fire and two of our men and some nurses went up the hill to get him. They were waving a white flag. The nurses wore arm bands and had a red cross painted on their helmets, but they were immediately shot at by the marshals and pinned down for two hours until it was dark and the firing ceased. Three brothers from a nearby bunker finally managed to get Clearwater on a blanket and carry him down. They came under fire all the way. Clearwater was brought up to the roadblock and, after some negotiations, the feds made a helicopter available which flew him to Rapid City where he died a few days later without ever having regained consciousness. His wife was kept overnight in jail. She wanted him buried at Wounded Knee, for which he had given his life, but Wilson and the government would not allow it “because he was not a Pine Ridge Sioux.” In the end Crow Dog buried him on his own land in the Indian manner, with the pipe and Grandfather Peyote.

On April 27, Buddy Lamont, a thirty-one-year-old Oglala Sioux, an ex-marine Vietnam vet and only son, was shot through the heart and died instantly during a heavy firefight. Buddy was shot in an abandoned house next to the community center. I guess a sniper in one of the fed bunkers had pinned him down. He lost patience and ran out of the building, drawing more fire, possibly so he could shoot back, and just when he was coming out of the building he was hit. Again the medics were shot at. Again the relatives coming out with his body were arrested and wound up in Pine Ridge jail. Buddy received his honorable discharge from the Marine Corps just about the time a government bullet killed him. He is buried on the hill by the ditch, joining the ghosts of all the other Sioux killed at Wounded Knee. His headstone says: “Two thousand came to Wounded Knee in 1973.
One stayed
.”