Lakota Woman (13 page)

At the words “second-degree manslaughter” a deep growl went up. They were like a knife stuck into our bellies. It meant another Indian-killer would go free. Dennis, Russel, and Crow Dog argued with the DA, telling him not to specify the charge, but to let the jury decide whether it was murder or manslaughter. The DA refused. After that things were neither dignified nor jolly. The state highway patrolmen tried to keep the Sioux out of the courthouse. A scuffle broke out. The troopers had been waiting for this—with visored helmets, guns, and long riot sticks. They clubbed down the mother of the murdered Indian, Sarah Bad Heart Bull, and choked her by pressing a riot stick against her throat. Our delegation inside the courthouse was also attacked. I saw Russel being dragged out, sitting on the pavement, handcuffed, dazed, and bleeding, telling the police, “We’re fighting for our lives. You are only fighting for your paychecks.” Crow Dog was jumping out of a broken first-floor courthouse window. Dennis jumped out after him with a big grin: “I’m following my spiritual leader.”

Then all hell broke loose. The police used tear gas, smoke bombs, and fire hoses to drive us away from the courthouse. A few older men and women were still trying to reason with them: “All this isn’t necessary. We just want to be heard.” But it was no good. The troopers and Indians began fighting for possession of the main street in front of the courthouse. A young Indian girl had her clothes torn off in the struggle. I saw two helmeted pigs with huge sticks dragging her almost naked through the snow. She was bleeding. A man in front of Barb was clubbed senseless, lying like a heap of old rags in the middle of the road. One of the pigs yelled at us, “You damn Indians have raised enough cain around here and we’re goin’ to kick your ass. We’re not goin’ to give you a chance to wreck this place. We’re goin’ to crack your goddam heads first.”

Then the Sioux let out a big war whoop and charged. They started trashing a police car parked in the street. In their frustration they jumped on it, kicked it, beat it with their fists. Somebody lit a match and threw it into the gas tank. It wouldn’t light. Somebody else poured gas around it and tried to set it on fire. His matches wouldn’t light. The snow had made everything wet. The guys then tried to tip the squad car over, rocking it back and forth. It did not budge. Everybody vented their fury upon it, but the thing seemed invulnerable. Barb was laughing: “All these Indians and they can’t total one lousy pig car!”

People were scampering in and out of stores, ripping everything out, breaking windows. Two young men came running with a trash can full of gasoline. They ran up the steps of the courthouse, doused the door with gas, and poured some of it inside through a broken window. Some other boys were racing up from the gas station with burning flares, the kind one sets out on the road if one has to fix a flat at night. They chucked the flares at the entrance door where the gas had formed a puddle, but they missed. The flares were hissing harmlessly on the steps. More flares. A sheriff who looked as if he had come out of a Grade B western movie aimed his rifle at one of our men: “If you throw that flare I’ll kill you, so help me!” The sisters were screaming, “Do it, do it, do it! AIM, AIM, AIM, make every aim count!” I was screaming, too. One of the girls had a candle, another a kerosene lamp. Young men were making molotov cocktails and throwing them. The troopers were yelling back, “We’ll kill any man who throws a flare!”

Suddenly a great roar went up, “
Aaaaaahhhhhhh!
"—the old bear sound the Sioux make when they are killing mad. The gasoline had caught fire. A fire truck came careering around the corner. While firemen and police tried to keep the courthouse from burning down, we set fire to the Chamber of Commerce—an imitation pioneer log cabin. It went up in flames, making a huge fire with sparks flying in all direction. The sign
WELCOME TO CUSTER
—
THE TOWN WITH THE GUNSMOKE FLAVOR
was burning brightly. All the women made the spine-tingling brave-heart cry. Out of nowhere a gasoline truck appeared and stopped right in front of the burning Chamber of Commerce. The driver was completely freaked out. He couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. He was sitting in his cab, bug-eyed and petrified with fear, not knowing what to do. He just kept staring open-mouthed at the flames. We waved him on, but he just sat there. One of our boys stuck his head inside the cab and yelled at him, “Get your ass out of here. What do you want to do, blow us all up?” He was so scared we almost felt sorry for him. At the same time we had to laugh, it was so ludicrous. Finally he woke up and got the hell out of there as fast as his truck would go.

The fighting lasted from morning until midafternoon, luckily without shooting, just rocks, fists, and clubs. Many Indians were arrested and some were later tried. Sarah Bad Heart Bull was indicted on several counts of rioting and arson, and faced a possible maximum sentence of forty years. Her son’s murderer was acquitted without doing any time at all, while Sarah actually spent a few weeks in jail for having made a nuisance of herself over her son’s death. Barb was arrested and told she was facing ten years, but nothing came of it and she was let go. I was not arrested at all. I left Custer in a car which had an old bumper sticker on its rear fender:
CUSTER HAD IT COMING!
It made me laugh. That same night, back in Rapid City, we could see ourselves on TV. It had been quite a day.

We had little time to catch our breath. Already the OSCRO people at Pine Ridge were sending out urgent calls for us to help them. Wilson’s goons were on the rampage, maiming and killing people. The Oglala elders thought that we all had been wasting our time and energies in Rapid City and Custer when the knife was at our throats at home. And so, finally and inevitably, our caravan started rolling toward Pine Ridge. Wilson was expecting us. His heavily armed goons had been reinforced by a number of rednecks with Remingtons and Winchesters on gun racks behind their driver’s seats, eager to bag themselves an Injun. The marshals and FBI had come too, with some thirty armored cars equipped with machine guns and rocket launchers. These were called APCs, Armored Personnel Carriers. The tribal office had been sandbagged and a machine gun installed on its roof. The Indians called it “Fort Wilson.” Our movements were kept under observation and reported several times a day. Still we came on.

To tell the truth, I had not joined the caravan with the notion that I would perform what some people later called “that great symbolic act.” I did not even know that we would wind up at Wounded Knee. Nobody did. I went because everybody went, because I was young and it was my lifestyle to go along. It would not have occurred to me not to go. At this time the community hall at Calico, five miles north of Pine Ridge, was the meeting place of OSCRO and all those who opposed Wilson’s regime. Now they were being joined by AIM. People had had a powwow there for a few days, dancing and singing, though Wilson had forbidden it.

The scene upon our arrival was peaceful enough. Kids were playing frisbee. Elders were drinking coffee out of paper cups. An old man was telling me, “What are we to do? If you are with AIM you’re a no-good renegade. If you are with Dickie Wilson you’re a goddam goon. If you are with the government, you’re no Indian at all.” All the old chiefs with the historic great names were there and all the medicine men, people like Fools Crow, Wallace Black Elk, Crow Dog, Chips, and Pete Catches. Only one important traditional man was missing who was too old and sick to attend. Even some tribal judges were there. One of them said to the AIM and OSCRO guys, commenting on what had happened at Custer, “In my job I really have to be against any destruction of private property, but privately I enjoyed what you did. You should have burned that whole goddam town down.” Contrary to what some of the media said later, the over-whelming majority of those present were Sioux, born and bred on the reservation. Russel Means said a few words which I still remember, though I can’t quote them exactly. The drift of his speech was: “If I have to die, I don’t want to die in some barroom brawl, or in a stupid car accident, but want my death to have some meaning. Maybe the time has come when we need some Indian martyrs.” One old man said something to the effect that he had lived all his life in Pine Ridge in darkness. That the whites and men like Wilson had thrown a blanket over the whole reservation and that he hoped we would be the ones to yank this blanket off and let some sunshine in.

It began to dawn upon me that what was about to happen, and what I personally would be involved in, would be unlike anything I had witnessed before. I think everybody who was there felt the same way—an excitement that was choking our throats. But there was still no definite plan for what to do. We had all assumed that we would go to Pine Ridge town, the administrative center of the reservation, the seat of Wilson’s and the government’s power. We had always thought that the fate of the Oglalas would be settled there. But as the talks progressed it became clear that nobody wanted us to storm Pine Ridge, garrisoned as it was by the goons, the marshals, and the FBI. We did not want to be slaughtered. There had been too many massacred Indians already in our history. But if not Pine Ridge, then what? As I remember, it was the older women like Ellen Moves Camp and Gladys Bissonette who first pronounced the magic words “Wounded Knee,” who said, “Go ahead and make your stand at Wounded Knee. If you men won’t do it, you can stay here and talk for all eternity and we women will do it.”

When I heard the words “Wounded Knee” I became very, very serious. Wounded Knee—Cankpe Opi in our language—has a special meaning for our people. There is the long ditch into which the frozen bodies of almost three hundred of our people, mostly women and children, were thrown like so much cordwood. And the bodies are still there in their mass grave, unmarked except for a cement border. Next to the ditch, on a hill, stands the white-painted Catholic church, gleaming in the sunlight, the monument of an alien faith imposed upon the landscape. And below it flows Cankpe Opi Wakpala, the creek along which the women and children were hunted down like animals by Custer’s old Seventh, out to avenge themselves for their defeat by butchering the helpless ones. That happened long ago, but no Sioux ever forgot it.

Wounded Knee is part of our family’s history. Leonard’s great-grandfather, the first Crow Dog, had been one of the leaders of the Ghost Dancers. He and his group had held out in the icy ravines of the Badlands all winter, but when the soldiers came in force to kill all the Ghost Dancers he had surrendered his band to avoid having his people killed. Old accounts describe how Crow Dog simply sat down between the rows of soldiers on one side, and the Indians on the other, all ready and eager to start shooting. He had covered himself with a blanket and was just sitting there. Nobody knew what to make of it. The leaders on both sides were so puzzled that they just did not get around to opening fire. They went to Crow Dog, lifted the blanket, and asked him what he meant to do. He told them that sitting there with the blanket over him was the only thing he could think of to make all the hotheads, white and red, curious enough to forget fighting. Then he persuaded his people to lay down their arms. Thus he saved his people just a few miles away from where Big Foot and his band were massacred. And old Uncle Dick Fool Bull, a relative of both the Crow Dogs and my own family, often described to me how he himself heard the rifle and cannon shots that mowed our people down when he was a little boy camping only two miles away. He had seen the bodies, too, and described to me how he had found the body of a dead baby girl with an American flag beaded on her tiny bonnet.

Before we set out for Wounded Knee, Leonard and Wallace Black Elk prayed for all of us with their pipe. I counted some fifty cars full of people. We went right through Pine Ridge. The half-bloods and goons, the marshals and the government snipers on their rooftop, were watching us, expecting us to stop and start a confrontation, but our caravan drove right by them, leaving them wondering. From Pine Ridge it was only eighteen miles more to our destination. Leonard was in the first car and I was way in the back.

Finally, on February 27, 1973, we stood on the hill where the fate of the old Sioux Nation, Sitting Bull’s and Crazy Horse’s nation, had been decided, and where we, ourselves, came face to face with our fate. We stood silently, some of us wrapped in our blankets, separated by our personal thoughts and feelings, and yet united, shivering a little with excitement and the chill of a fading winter. You could almost hear our heartbeats.

It was not cold on this next-to-last day of February—not for a South Dakota February anyway. Most of us had not even bothered to wear gloves. I could feel a light wind stirring my hair, blowing it gently about my face. There were a few snowflakes in the air. We all felt the presence of the spirits of those lying close by in the long ditch, wondering whether we were about to join them, wondering when the marshals would arrive. We knew that we would not have to wait long for them to make their appearance.

The young men tied eagle feathers to their braids, no longer unemployed kids, juvenile delinquents, or winos, but warriors. I thought of our old warrior societies—the Kit Foxes, the Strong Hearts, the Badgers, the Dog Soldiers. The Kit Foxes—the Tokalas—used to wear long sashes. In the midst of battle, a Tokala would sometimes dismount and pin the end of his sash to the earth. By this he signified his determination to stay and fight on his chosen spot until he was dead, or until a friend rode up and unpinned him, or until victory. Young or old, men or women, we had all become Kit Foxes, and Wounded Knee had become the spot upon which we had pinned ourselves. Soon we would be encircled and there could be no retreat. I could not think of anybody or anything that would “unpin” us. Somewhere, out on the prairie surrounding us, the forces of the government were gathering, the forces of the greatest power on earth. Then and there I decided that I would have my baby at Wounded Knee, no matter what.

Suddenly the spell was broken. Everybody got busy. The men were digging trenches and making bunkers, putting up low walls of cinder blocks, establishing a last-resort defense perimeter around the Sacred Heart Church. Those few who had weapons were checking them, mostly small-bore .22s and old hunting rifles. We had only one automatic weapon, an AK-47 that one Oklahoma boy had brought back from Vietnam as a souvenir. Altogether we had twenty-six firearms—not much compared to what the other side would bring up against us. None of us had any illusions that we could take over Wounded Knee unopposed. Our message to the government was: “Come and discuss our demands or kill us!” Somebody called someone on the outside from a telephone inside the trading post. I could hear him yelling proudly again and again, “
We hold the Knee!
”