Lakota Woman (8 page)

But it was not finished. In no time the whole motel was lit up with searchlights as about half a dozen squad cars pulled up in front of it with their red lights flashing and sirens howling. Out of each car stepped two troopers with riot guns, helmets, and plastic shields, positioning themselves at both sides of each car. Already the loudspeaker was blaring: “This is the sheriff speaking. You Indians in there, you are wanted for assault and battery. We know you’re in there. Come on out with your hands on your heads or we’ll come in shooting!” Barb and the others peeked out from behind their window shades. Seeing the muzzles of all those riot guns and sawed-off shotguns pointing at them, they had little desire to come out. South Dakota police are notoriously trigger-happy when dealing with Indians, especially AIM people. One of the Means brothers went to the telephone and called up a white friend of ours who was in an upstairs room with one of the lawyers, helping with the trials. He told him to get his ass down to their room double quick, to bring the lawyer, and please, not to ask any foolish questions, just to hurry up.

It was two o’clock in the morning and very cold. Somehow it is always exceedingly hot or very, very cold in South Dakota. So, looking down from my room on the second floor I saw the two of them shivering, none too happy walking between the motel wall and the row of squad cars and troopers pointing their guns. Then I saw two pairs of hands reaching for them out of Room 108 and yanking them inside. I did not know at the time what it was all about. Barbara told me later that the two of them started negotiating by phone with the sheriff saying, “Our Indian friends and clients have been assaulted by a bunch of vicious, white, drunken, would-be rapists, but they are willing to withdraw these charges if your cowboys withdraw theirs.”

While they were arguing back and forth on the phone, the others had a little problem with Coke, who had consumed a few beers and was singing his death song: “It’s a good day to die! Let me out of here! I want to die a warrior’s death. Let me count coup on them pigs! Hoka-hay!” They had to hold him back, literally sitting on him in order to keep him from going outside and getting himself killed. In the end both sides agreed to withdraw charges and call it quits to prevent a massacre. The squad cars drove off and all was quiet again, but it had been a near thing. There is always the danger for us that one little incident will set off a major confrontation.

Looking back upon my roving days, it is hard to say whether they were good or bad, or whether I accomplished or learned anything by being endlessly, restlessly on the move. If nothing else, my roaming gave me a larger outlook and made me more Indian, made me realize what being an Indian within a white world meant. My aimlessness ended when I encountered AIM.

CHAPTER 6

We AIM Not to Please

They call us the New Indians.

Hell, we are the Old Indians,

the landlords of this continent,

coming to collect the rent.

—
Dennis Banks

T
he American Indian Movement hit our reservation like a tornado, like a new wind blowing out of nowhere, a drumbeat from far off getting louder and louder. It was almost like the Ghost Dance fever that had hit the tribes in 1890, old uncle Dick Fool Bull said, spreading like a prairie fire. It even was like the old Ghost Dance song Uncle Dick was humming:

Maka sitomniya teca ukiye

Oyate ukiye, oyate ukiye . . .

A new world is coming,

A nation is coming,

The eagle brought the message.

I could feel this new thing, almost hear it, smell it, touch it. Meeting up with AIM for the first time loosened a sort of earthquake inside me. Old Black Elk in recounting his life often used the expression “As I look down from the high hill of my great old age...” Well, as I am looking from the hill of my old age—I am thirty-seven now but feel as if I have lived for a long time—I can see things in perspective, not subjectively, no, but in perspective. Old Black Elk had a good way of saying it. You really look back upon ten years gone past as from a hill—you have a sort of bird’s-eye view. I recognize now that movements get used up and the leaders get burned out quickly. Some of our men and women got themselves killed and thereby avoided reaching the dangerous age of thirty and becoming “elder statesmen.” Some leaders turned into college professors, founded alternative schools, or even took jobs as tribal officials. A few live on in the past, refusing to recognize that the dreams of the past must give way to the dreams of the future. I, that wild, rebellious teenager of ten years ago, am nursing a baby, changing diapers, and making breakfast for my somewhat extended family. And yet it was great while it lasted and I still feel that old excitement merely talking about it. Some people loved AIM, some hated it, but nobody ignored it.

I loved it. My first encounter with AIM was at a powwow held in 1971 at Crow Dog’s place after the Sun Dance. Pointing at Leonard Crow Dog, I asked a young woman, “Who is that man?”

“That’s Crow Dog,” she said. I was looking at his long, shining braids. Wearing one’s hair long at the time was still something of a novelty on the res. I asked, “Is that his real hair?”

“Yes, that’s his real hair.”

I noticed that almost all of the young men wore their hair long, some with eagle feathers tied to it. They all had on ribbon shirts. They had a new look about them, not that hangdog reservation look I was used to. They moved in a different way, too, confident and swaggering, the girls as well as the boys. Belonging to many tribes, they had come in a dilapidated truck covered with slogans and paintings. They had traveled to the Sun Dance all the way from California, where they had taken part in the occupation of Alcatraz Island.

One man, a Chippewa, stood up and made a speech. I had never heard anybody talk like that. He spoke about genocide and sovereignty, about tribal leaders selling out and kissing ass—white man’s ass. He talked about giving up the necktie for the choker, the briefcase for the bedroll, the missionary’s church for the sacred pipe. He talked about not celebrating Thanksgiving, because that would be celebrating one’s own destruction. He said that white people, after stealing our land and massacring us for three hundred years, could not come to us now saying, “Celebrate Thanksgiving with us, drop in for a slice of turkey.” He had himself wrapped up in an upside-down American flag, telling us that every star in this flag represented a state stolen from Indians.

Then Leonard Crow Dog spoke, saying that we had talked to the white man for generations with our lips, but that he had no ears to hear, no eyes to see, no heart to feel. Crow Dog said that now we must speak with our bodies and that he was not afraid to die for his people. It was a very emotional speech. Some people wept. An old man turned to me and said, “These are the words I always wanted to speak, but had kept shut up within me.”

I asked one of the young men, “What kind of Indians are you?” “We are AIM,” he told me, “American Indian Movement. We’re going to change things.”

AIM was born in 1968. Its fathers were mostly men doing time in Minnesota prisons, Ojibways. It got its start in the slums of St. Paul taking care of Indian ghetto problems. It was an Indian woman who gave it its name. She told me, “At first we called ourselves ‘Concerned Indian Americans’ until somebody discovered that the initials spelled CIA. That didn’t sound so good. Then I spoke up: ‘You guys all aim to do this, or you aim to do that. Why don’t you call yourselves AIM, American Indian Movement?’ And that was that.”

In the beginning AIM was mainly confined to St. Paul and Minneapolis. The early AIM people were mostly ghetto Indians, often from tribes which had lost much of their language, traditions, and ceremonies. It was when they came to us on the Sioux reservations that they began to learn about the old ways. We had to learn from them, too. We Sioux had lived very isolated behind what some people called the “Buckskin Curtain.” AIM opened a window for us through which the wind of the 1960s and early ‘70s could blow, and it was no gentle breeze but a hurricane that whirled us around. It was after the traditional reservation Indians and the ghetto kids had gotten together that AIM became a force nationwide. It was flint striking flint, lighting a spark which grew into a flame at which we could warm ourselves after a long, long winter.

After I joined AIM I stopped drinking. Others put away their roach clips and airplane glue bottles. There were a lot of things wrong with AIM. We did not see these things, or did not want to see them. At the time these things were unimportant. What was important was getting it on. We kids became AIM’s spearheads and the Sioux set the style. The AIM uniform was Sioux all the way, the black “angry hats” with the feathers stuck in the hatband, the bone chokers, the medicine pouches worn on our breasts, the Levi’s jackets on which we embroidered our battle honors—Alcatraz, Trail of Broken Treaties, Wounded Knee. Some dudes wore a third, extra-thin braid as a scalp lock. We made up our own songs—forty-niners, honoring songs, songs for a warrior behind bars in the slammer. The AIM song was made up by a fourteen-year-old Sioux boy. The Ojibways say it was made up by one of their own kids, but we know better.

We all had a good mouth, were good speakers and wrote a lot of poetry, though we were all dropouts who could not spell. We took some of our rhetoric from the blacks, who had started their movements before we did. Like them we were minorities, poor and discriminated against, but there were differences. I think it significant that in many Indian languages a black is called a “black white man.” The blacks want what the whites have, which is understandable. They want
in
.
We Indians want
out
!
That is the main difference.

At first we hated all whites because we knew only one kind—the John Wayne kind. It took time before we met whites to whom we could relate and whose friendships we could accept. One of our young men met a pretty girl. She said she was Indian and looked it. She told him, “Sleep with me.” In bed, in the middle of the night, he somehow found out that she was Puerto Rican. He got so mad that she was not a real skin that he beat up on her. He wanted to have to do only with Indian girls and felt tricked. He had run away from a real bad foster home, seeking refuge among his own kind. Later he felt ashamed for what he had done and apologized. Eventually we were joined by a number of Chicano brothers and sisters and learned to love and respect them, but it took time. We lived in a strange, narrow world of our own, suspicious of all outsiders. Later, we found ourselves making speeches on campuses, in churches, and on street corners talking to prominent supporters such as Marlon Brando, Dick Gregory, Rip Torn, Jane Fonda, and Angela Davis. It was a long-drawn-out process of learning and experiencing, this widening of our horizons.

We formed relationships among ourselves and with outsiders. We had girls who would go to bed with any warrior who had done something brave. Other girls loved one boy only. Usually a boy would say to a girl, “Be my old lady,” and she might answer, “Ohan, you are my old man.” They would go find a medicine man to feather and cedar them, to smoke the pipe with them, to put a red blanket around their shoulders. That made them man and wife Indian style. Then they slept under the same blanket. The white law did not recognize such a marriage, but we would respect it. It might last only a few days. Either of them could have a run-in with the law and wind up in jail or be blown away by the goons. We did not exactly lead stable lives, but some of these marriages lasted for years. Short or long, it was good while it lasted. The girl had somebody to protect and take care of her; the boy had a wincincala to cook his beans or sew him a ribbon shirt. They inspired each other to the point where they would put their bodies on the line together. It gave them something precious to remember all their lives. One seventeen-year-old boy had a twenty-two-year-old girl-friend. He called her “grandma.” He had a T-shirt made for her with the word
GRANDMA
on it, and one for himself with the legend
I LOVE GRANDMA
. He was heartbroken when she left him for an “older man.” Some of the AIM leaders attracted quite a number of “wives.” We called them “wives of the month.”

I got into one of these marriages myself. It lasted just long enough for me to get pregnant. Birth control went against our beliefs. We felt that there were not enough Indians left to suit us. The more future warriors we brought into the world, the better. My older sister Barbara got pregnant too. She went to the BIA hospital where the doctors told her she needed a cesarean. When she came to, the doctors informed her that they had taken her womb out. In their opinion, at that time, there were already too many little red bastards for the taxpayers to take care of. No use to mollycoddle those happy-go-lucky, irresponsible, oversexed AIM women. Barb’s child lived for two hours. With better care, it might have made it. For a number of years BIA doctors performed thousands of forced sterilizations on Indian and Chicano women without their knowledge or consent. For this reason I was happy at the thought of having a baby, not only for myself but for Barbara, too. I was determined not to have my child in a white hospital.

In the meantime I had nine months to move around, still going from confrontation to confrontation. Wherever anthros were digging up human remains from Indian sites, we were there threatening to dig up white graves to display white men’s skulls and bones in glass cases. Wherever there was an Indian political trial, we showed up before the courthouse with our drums. Wherever we saw a bar with a sign
NO INDIANS ALLOWED,
we sensitized the owners, sometimes quite forcefully. Somehow we always found old jalopies to travel in, painted all over with Red Power slogans, and always found native people to take us in, treating us to meat soup, fry bread, and thick, black coffee. We existed entirely without money, yet we ate, traveled, and usually found a roof over our heads.

Something strange happened then. The traditional old, full-blood medicine men joined in with us kids. Not the middle-aged adults. They were of a lost generation which had given up all hope, necktie-wearers waiting for the Great White Father to do for them. It was the real old folks who had spirit and wisdom to give us. The grandfathers and grandmothers who still remembered a time when Indians were Indians, whose own grandparents or even parents had fought Custer gun in hand, people who for us were living links with a great past. They had a lot of strength and power, enough to give some of it to us. They still knew all the old legends and the right way to put on a ritual, and we were eager to learn from them. Soon they had us young girls making flesh offerings or piercing our wrists at the Sun Dance, while young warriors again put the skewers through their breast and found out the hard way where they came from. Even those who had grown up in cities, who had never been on a horse or heard an owl hoot, were suddenly getting it together. I am not bragging, but I am proud that we Lakotas started this.

The old grandmothers especially made a deep impression upon me. Women like Lizzy Fast Horse, a great-grandmother, who scrambled up all the way to the top of Mount Rushmore, standing right on the top of those gigantic bald pates, reclaiming the Black Hills for their rightful owners. Lizzy who was dragged down the mountain by the troopers, handcuffed to her nine-year-old great-granddaughter until their wrists were cut, their blood falling in drops on the snow. It is really true, the old Cheyenne saying: “A nation is not dead until the hearts of its women are on the ground.” Well, the hearts of our old full-blood women were not on the ground. They were way up high and they could still encourage us with their trilling, spine-tingling brave-heart cry which always made the hairs on my back stand up and my flesh break out in goose pimples whenever I heard it, no matter how often.

We did freak out the honkies. We were feared throughout the Dakotas. I could never figure out why this should have been so. We were always the victims. We never maimed or killed. It was we who died or got crippled. Aside from ripping off a few trading posts, we were not really bad. We were loud-mouthed, made a lot of noise, and got on some people’s nerves. We made Mr. White Man realize that there were other Indians besides the poor human wrecks who posed for him for a quarter—but that should not have made them kill us or hide from us under their beds. “The AIMs is coming, the AIMs is coming” was the cry that went up whenever a couple of fourteen-year-old skins in Uncle Joe hats showed up. The ranchers and the police spread the most fantastic rumors about us. The media said that we were about to stage bank robberies, storm prisons, set fire to the state capitol, blow up Mount Rushmore, and assassinate the governor. The least we were accused of was that we were planning to paint the noses of the giant Mount Rushmore heads red. Worst of all we were scaring the tourists away. The concessionaires at Rushmore and in all the Black Hills tourist traps were losing money. It was only right to kill us for that.