Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) (19 page)

So I put on a yuwipi ceremony that night. The spirits entered the ceremony and told me that we should go unarmed, that our spiritual power would be greater than any guns. They also told me to use sacred gopher dust, the kind that made Crazy Horse bulletproof. So in the morning I sprinkled gopher dust over our leaders—Dennis Banks, Russell Means, Ron Petite, Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt. I cedared them. I fanned them off with my eagle wing. We smoked the pipe. And before we started out we organized an AIM chapter at Porcupine. We got one hundred seventy-two new members. We called the Justice Department and the governor of Nebraska to let them know we were coming. Besides having some one hundred fifty cars starting from Porcupine alone, we got hold of a Greyhound charter bus, which joined the caravan. That bus was crammed full to overflowing. And so we went to Gordon.

We went to that town not just for Raymond Yellow Thunder, but for all Native Americans in this country. We went there as one big family. We went there with the drum. I told the people, “The thunder power is in that drum, the wind of the eagle wing. The drum represents the sacred hoop.” And we went there with a new song. It was made up by a fourteen-year-old boy. Some say he was an Ojibway, others say he was a Lakota. This song spoke in all the Indian languages. Soon every Indian knew it and they were singing it in every tribe. And like the ghost dancers of 1890,
we came with American flags flying upside down as a sign of distress and a cry for justice.

Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and I were the first to enter Gordon. The sheriff’s deputies, the state troopers, and the FBI were waiting for us. They had riot guns, but they didn’t make a move. They were as meek as lambs. They were scared of us. The whole town was scared. We hardly saw any people on the streets. The stores were closed and locked. As we marched up Broadway, a handful of Indians and whites were there to support us. A half a dozen rednecks threw beer cans and firecrackers at us and then ran like hell. Russell, Dennis, and I led the march to City Hall. Yellow Thunder’s relatives walked behind us.

We took over City Hall. Dennis Banks set up shop in the mayor’s office. We had microphones and loudspeakers and held rallies. We made our demands. We made the mayor, the state attorney, and other officials come to us and negotiate. We had Raymond Yellow Thunder’s body dug up to document the cruelties done to him. We forced them to bring the Hare brothers up on murder charges. (They were later convicted and put in jail. They did not stay there long enough, but a short time was better than no time.) We forced them to charge the Hare brothers for his death. We also forced the mayor to dismiss Gordon’s chief of police. There were at that time cops in Gordon who harassed young Indian women; their victims were too scared and embarrassed to complain. We got a promise that Indian teenagers would no longer be thrown in with adult prisoners for a misdemeanor. We set up a special phone chain so that whenever an Indian was mistreated or discriminated against, word would get around fast so that action could be taken. We sensitized the white community and let them know that from now on they would be held responsible for what they did. Finally we set up an AIM chapter in Gordon. We had been in that city for about a week. It was a great victory.

They brought Raymond Yellow Thunder’s body back to Porcupine, where he had been raised among his Oglala people.
His relatives asked me to bury him. So I filled the pipe. I put the staff right in front of the sacred ground. We smoked the pipe. We used sacred gopher dust, we used red face paint, we used spiritual power. Before we gave Raymond back to Mother Earth we faced toward the west, the north, the east, and the south. I lifted the pipe up toward the sky and then pointed it down toward the earth. When the body was going down into the ground we sang the AIM song. One of our elders chanted a special song in honor of Yellow Thunder, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Big Foot, and all of our great chiefs of long ago who had been killed by the white man. We prayed, using ancient, sacred words.

I explained why I buried Raymond Yellow Thunder six feet underground. I said, “I’d rather put our dead brother on a funeral scaffold or a sacred tree for the wind and the eagle to take care of him, but then some anthropologists could come and take his body for whatever purpose. I have to bury him deep where they can’t steal his body. It will go back to the earth, but his soul will stay with us forever.” I put an eagle plume with him to be the flower of the bloom of the universe, of the earth and the sky. One man asked me why I didn’t bless the body with water. I told him that the first thunder, the first rain to hit the earth, would bless his body. Then he asked why I didn’t put a cross on Yellow Thunder’s grave. I said, “Our cross is equal, of the same length everywhere. It stands for the sacred four directions. But the white man’s cross is a cross of injustice and inequality. That’s why the bottom part is long and the top is short. This cross represents the suppression of Indian religion.” So I buried our brother in a ceremonial way.

We had made a big first step in getting justice for Raymond Yellow Thunder. We could build on this foundation. AIM and the Lakota people together had won this victory. It was the beginning of a new Indian nation.

The years from 1960 to 1975 were the years when things happened, when Indians began to wear their hair long again and throw away their neckties.

In 1960 the American Indian Youth Council was founded by Vine Deloria, a Lakota, and Clyde Warrior, Mel Thorn, Shirley Witt, and Herb Blatchford. This was a forerunner of AIM and a big step for Native American rights. In 1964 began the war for Indian fishing rights at Frank’s Landing, in Washington State. The leaders there were Sid Milss and, later, Hank Adams, who both joined the struggle at Wounded Knee in 1973. They were holding fish-ins and there was a lot of violence on the part of the state troopers.

Things were happening all over. In 1967 Bob Burnette, a friend of mine and twice chairman of our tribe, took twenty-one Rosebud men and women to New York in order to break through the Buckskin Curtain and join Dr. Martin Luther King’s peace march. Bob was what the
whites called a moderate Indian leader, but he broke a lot of ground for us. My dad, Chief Lame Deer, and I were part of this group. Henry and Lame Deer stood on the platform next to Dr. King. Later we all had dinner at Richard Erdoes’s place. That’s how I met the friend who is helping me write this book. Later we went to Harlem to meet up with some of the Black Power leaders. Lame Deer joked and told Stokely Carmichael, “Indian kills his enemy, white man skins his friend. What do you do?” Stokely laughed and said, “We eat them.” This march was a breakthrough. Our tribe got on the map.

In 1969 some three hundred Native Americans, calling themselves Indian of All Tribes, took over Alcatraz Island. Their leader was Richard Oaks, a Mohawk, who was later murdered by a white racist.

In 1970, on the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims, a group of AIM members led by Russell Means boarded the
Mayflower II
and hoisted an AIM flag on her mast. They later buried Plymouth Rock under a truckload of sand. Russ told the press that Indians were “an endangered species.” Throughout these years we staged rallies, confrontations, marches, and protests.

Everywhere Indians were waking up to the danger of becoming extinct as the result of the government’s “termination policy.” Under this plan Native Americans would give up their reservations and release the government from all obligations to the tribes. In return every Indian would get a few thousand dollars and from then on be on his own, free to become a tax-paying soda jerk or garbage collector. For the money they could buy themselves a new car or washing machine. When these had turned into junk, the Indian would be left with no land, no money, and no federal protection. We would simply die out like the dinosaur or the dodo bird. We had to fight that.

Everywhere our old hunting and fishing rights were being taken away from us. Tribal people who lived by hunting and fishing
were told to take out licenses like white sportsmen—”good for ten trout or one deer.” Under such laws our people would have starved to death. So this became part of the struggle too.

And our people were remembering our brothers who had been murdered—Norman Little Brave, Richard Oaks, Raymond Yellow Thunder, and Timothy Iron Bear unjustly executed in the electric chair in 1949. We also remembered the kids who hanged themselves in jail or who died drunk out of despair.

The time was right for the next big step. In August 1972, during the sun dance at Crow Dog’s Paradise, Bob Burnette started talking to the people. He announced that the broken treaties would no longer be ignored. All the tribes had to march like a human wave, like Martin Luther King’s people did. He began organizing what he called the Trail of Broken Treaties. The marches on Gordon and Alcatraz and the fish-ins had been ignored by the media. Most white people had never heard of them. Bob promised that the Trail of Broken Treaties would be known to the whole world. It would open the eyes and the ears of America. Bob went to New York to organize the march in the East, while Reuben Snake, a Winnebago from Nebraska, did the same in the West and Midwest. Both are dead now, but what they did will not be forgotten. About a dozen Native American organizations promised to participate. Caravans would start out from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Rapid City, and Denver. They would stop at sacred sites where Indians had been massacred, such as Wounded Knee and Sand Creek, where ceremonies would be held and prayers said. This was to be a spiritual march. Each caravan would be led by a medicine man. Drums would be beaten day and night to remind America of the three hundred treaties that had been broken by the government. Some caravans would meet in Minneapolis, where the main group of AIM members would join them. There the name of the march was to be changed to
Trail of Broken Treaties and Pan-American Native Quest for Justice.

Twenty points or demands would be presented to the government.
Bob Burnette told the people, “We must be on our best behavior. No drugs or alcohol will be permitted. And no rough stuff. Anybody who violates these rules will be expelled. The old, the sick, the children, the poorest and weakest who cannot march, will be with us in our thoughts. This must be the greatest moment in our history.” The Indians would come in friendship, hoping to be welcomed in friendship. Tribal leaders would visit the senators and congressmen from their states. There would be cultural events—fry bread for the senators, Indian fancy dancing for the public.

But it did not quite work out that way. The Trail of Broken Treaties arrived in Washington, D.C., on November 2, 1972. I was there not only as AIM’s spiritual leader but also as our tribe’s medicine man. We were tired and hungry. We had been promised food and places to stay, but the only food was provided in a hurry by a black community organization. Without them there would have been nothing. We were herded into the basement of a huge abandoned church. There was no heat, but there were rats.

From the start the government insulted us. I was supposed to hold a spiritual ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery at the grave of Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian who was the hero of Iwo Jima, where he had won the Congressional Medal of Honor for raising the American flag over Mount Suribachi. Ira Hayes had been without a job, poor and forgotten, when he had drowned in a ditch, having gotten drunk to forget his misery. I was told that I would not be allowed to remember him with a ceremony because this would be a “political activity,” which could not be permitted at Arlington. We were also told that President Nixon would not meet with us. Louis Bruce, the commissioner of Indian Affairs, who himself was a Native American, was ordered under no circumstances to help us in any way, and especially not to help us with funds. That was of course one of our chief complaints—that the head of the BIA had no power to act on behalf of the Indian people, because the BIA was a part of the Department of the Interior, and the secretary of the Interior and his deputies were
cracking the whip over the Bureau of Indian Affairs. One of our twenty demands was to take BIA out from under Interior and make it a department by itself, with its head a member of the cabinet. The deputy secretary of the Interior, Harrison Loesch, had promised to support us in every way and then had gone back on his word.

The Indians marched to the Bureau of Indian Affairs Building and there the moderate leaders lost it. There was a lot of anger, especially among the young people, and the AIM leaders took over the leadership of the Trail of Broken Treaties. Dennis Banks, Russell Means, and Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt became the spokesmen of the Trail. The marchers drifted into the building and flopped down wherever there was a sofa, an easy chair, or a carpet to lie on. The people filled up all the rooms and offices to get some rest. They sat on the marble staircase. They leaned against the walls. There was a cafeteria in the basement and the women started making coffee. Nobody, not even the AIM leaders, had planned to take over the building. It just happened, because the government broke its word to provide accommodations. Bob Burnette became a surplus leader. He supported the takeover once it had happened, but the leadership had slipped out of his hands. This was sad, because the Trail had been his idea, but events just stampeded over him.

Soon the police arrived, surrounded the building, and threatened to storm it if we did not leave. Nobody left. Some armed gangs came into the building and started cracking heads with their nightsticks. They didn’t stay long. Some left in such a hurry that they left their nightsticks behind. More caravans arrived and joined us. There were about a thousand Indians inside the building. Somebody set up a big drum in the auditorium and began singing the AIM song. I performed a ceremony and blessed the crowd with sage. Because the police threatened to attack us, some young men painted their faces for war. They started to arm themselves. They found fishing rods and rebars and made spears out of them. They broke off table and chair legs and made them
into clubs. They fastened knives, letter openers, and scissors to them and made the chair legs into tomahawks. They found some bows and arrows in the gift shop and some of the warriors took them. Some Vietnam vets made Molotov cocktails out of light bulbs, breaking off the screw-in parts and filling the bulbs up with gasoline. They tore up some rags and used them as wicks. Some young kids piled up two dozen typewriters on the roof, ready to hurl them on the heads of anybody who wanted to mess with us. Some riot squad guys busted windows and tried to sneak into the building. They were discovered and kicked out. In the meantime, negotiations went on at the nearby Department of the Interior. Loesch told us that the department was not in the housing business and that our occupation was unlawful. In the end we were told that we could stay until the next morning. Thus started a pattern—negotiations going hand in hand with threats.

On Friday, November 3, a marshal appeared with a court order for us: GET OUT OR ELSE! He was scared. He waved a white handkerchief and cried, “I come in peace!” We told him, “Come and get us!” Every day we got a court order to get out by six
P.M.
or force would be used. We left them in no doubt that we would defend ourselves even if we had to die for it.

We had some support. Louis Bruce stayed one night in the building, though he knew that he would be fired for it. LaDonna Harris, a Kiowa-Comanche and wife of Senator Fred Harris, also stayed overnight. Some black leaders, including Stokely Carmichael, came to lend support. The Reverend McIntyre, with a group of followers, paraded out in front of the building, singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Nobody knew what they had come for. We set up a tipi on the lawn in front of the building and formed a line of security behind it.

We settled in for a long siege. All the Lakota were on the second floor. I took over one office for the Crow Dog family and relatives. We stacked up chairs and tables against the walls so that we could sleep on the floor. Even so the room was crammed. Room 219 housed the Rosebud delegation. Down the hall were the
Iroquois, under the Onondaga chief Oren Lyons. Every tribe found some spot to stay, because this was a very big building. Every day these various groups talked over what complaints to present to the government. Once a day hundreds of us assembled in the huge auditorium to listen to what the leaders had to say.

Every day, sometimes twice, the police piled up in front of the building and threatened to storm it. And every time they backed down in the end. This was election week. The town was full of press and foreign correspondents. A heap of dead Indians would not have looked good on TV.

Negotiations went on and on. We had our twenty demands. They had chiefly to do with the government’s recognizing the old, broken treaties, particularly the 1869 Treaty of Fort Laramie, giving back to the tribes a hundred million acres stolen from us, letting us address a joint session of Congress, repealing the Menominee and Klamath termination acts, abolishing the BIA, protecting Indian religion, and recognizing tribal sovereignty. For making our demands, the secretary of the Interior called us a “splinter group of radical blackmailers.”

Hank Adams, one of the fishing rights leaders, did a lot of negotiating for us. He had the ability to be tough without letting his anger show. He was always calm and in control. Our women also were strong speakers. One of our best speakers was an elderly lady named Martha Grass. She shook her fist in the deputy secretary of the Interior’s face. In one speech she said, “If I don’t get what I’m asking for, this building will have to come down. Why should they have these beautiful offices and sit behind these shiny desks and be comfortable and not do a damn thing for us? I work for a living. I have to earn it. Why don’t we make them earn theirs? We got nothing in this Department of the Interior but crooks and liars. Up here they’ll steal you blind. They sure as hell did. They stole the whole country. They stole the air, the grass, whatever they could get their hands on. We have to get back what we can the best way we know. We are the grassroots people. We are tired of all this!”

We occupied the building for a week. In the end the government agreed to “seriously consider” our twenty-point proposal and promised that we would have an answer soon. They distributed some sixty thousand dollars among us, for gas money and bus fare home. It was a bribe to get rid of us. We left the building with a truckload of documents proving the government’s wrongdoings as far as Native Americans were concerned.

After a few months we got the answer to our demands. The government called them “impracticable.” But we did not go away empty-handed. One thousand, five hundred Native Americans had traveled the Trail of Broken Treaties, representing some two hundred tribes. It was the greatest gathering of Indians in the nation’s capital. AIM had made its mark on the white man’s mind. We were a different kind of Indian now. We had won a victory.