Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) (22 page)

Inside the church was an altar with a plaster cast Jesus, Virgin Mary, and Saint Joseph. Vases with paper flowers stood at each end. Some of our people slept in that church, so there was drumming, singing, and dancing—a spiritual dance. The priest came running. He seemed dazed and in shock. He asked us why we were doing “a heathen dance, a defilement” in a sacred place. A woman asked him what his church was doing here in
our
sacred place. “It was sacred long before you came. Those people who died here, whose bodies were thrown on top of one another, they weren’t Catholics. They believed in the Great Spirit, the pipe, and the ghost dance. They weren’t baptized. And you built a church over them and put a cross here. You made this a place to make money from the tourists who come to see where all those Indians were killed.”

It did not take long for the feds and the goons to arrive. We could feel them surrounding us. They were setting up roadblocks. A pickup full of goons drove up, and they fired some shots at us. A few of our young guys shot back. Some shot out some street lights to make us less visible. The war had started.

At sunup the next morning, February 27, we were already surrounded by two hundred fifty marshals and the FBI, with the goons hovering around the edges like jackals. Planes were flying overhead to keep tabs on us. Some of our men fired at them to keep them at a distance. We could see APCs moving back and forth on the ridge about a mile off. Some reporters sneaked in through the federal lines. Carter Camp told me later that if it hadn’t been for the presence of the press, the government would have moved in and slaughtered us as they did in 1890.

An FBI big shot, Joseph Trimbach, came up under a white flag to “negotiate.” He wanted to negotiate our surrender. We wanted to negotiate issues. He told us that he wasn’t there to bargain. He was authorized to offer only one thing: safe-conduct to BIA headquarters in Pine Ridge for further talks. Otherwise the feds would take Wounded Knee by storm. I refused. Russell gave him a choice: Either negotiate with us for meaningful results or kill us right here. So there was a stand-off. We put up a tipi in no-man’s-land between the church and the feds’ roadblock, to have talks on neutral ground.

There were some white people living in the village, and we didn’t quite know what to do with them. The feds called them hostages, but they really were nothing of that kind. Some did not want to leave. Those who wanted to go did so, and the feds picked them up at the roadblock.

It became clear that we were in for a long war. We put up our own roadblock, placing a row of old burned-out cars across the road. Then we built bunkers. Bob Free started a big yellow digging machine with a large front scoop, a sort of bulldozer. He and his crew dug twelve bunkers, made an apartment house out of the trading post, dug latrines, put up wooden privies, kept the
juice going, repaired cars, and operated the forklift. When the juice got weak he made a rule that the only electricity we would use was for the freezers to store meat, to keep the pumps going, and to keep the three most important lights burning. And that was enforced. He also had a sanitary squad picking up garbage, digging trenches, and burying the trash in them. When gas was low, journalists, doctors, and lawyers coming in cars, whenever the feds allowed them through, often let us syphon off some of their gas.

After a while Bob Free had a confrontation with some of our leaders. He told them, “Things have gone to your head. Your noses are stuck up in the air. You want only to talk to the media. You guys better get your act together. Spend some hours a day with the people doing bunker duty. Spend an hour, now and then, digging slit trenches. Collect garbage. We’re all Indians here. There’s nothing here like a higher-class Indian for the media and a lower-class Indian doing the work.” And with that, Bob resigned.

They couldn’t persuade him to change his mind. So they elected me chief engineer as well as their medicine man. Russell Means just told me to take over. I continued with the bunkers. I made them four feet deep and put logs and sandbags on top of them. The women made the bags out of old jackets and things like that. I taught them to make zipguns and small bombs out of battery acid. I learned these things a long time before from a cousin who was talented that way. I used Coke bottles and light bulbs for bombs. What I did was to put fifteen hundred of those on one fuse all the way around, connected to a battery, so when you touched two wires together they would make a spark and set them off. That was part of our defense system. We had a few hundred pounds of coal, and I had some of the boys pound that up for charcoal, and we used that with battery acid for our bombs. Dennis Banks and I took forty people to dig up the ground and pretend we were planting mines. We also put up a stovepipe and
spread the word that we had a trench mortar. That kept the feds at a distance.

We had a dozen bunkers. There was the Red Cloud Bunker toward Pine Ridge, the Black Elk Bunker near the Sacred Heart Church, the Little Bighorn Bunker on the Big Foot Trail by the creek, the Sitting Bull Bunker on the Denby road, the Coyote Bunker manned by Navajo, the Crow’s Nest Bunker near the clinic opposite the trading post. The northernmost bunker was the Hawkeye, the southernmost the Little California Bunker. We also set up the Last Stand roadblock up on Manderson road, near the tribal housing project. Carter Camp and Sid Mills distributed the men in the bunkers so that every two hours we changed the guard and another team took over. We had men out patrolling on shifts too. Sweat lodge fires were going most of the time. Wallace Black Elk took care of them. Every evening the guys on security purified themselves in the sweat lodge, taking turns. Sometimes they had sweats during the wee hours of the night.

The feds had their own bunkers. The main one was Red Arrow on the Denby road, which served as their headquarters. They had the whole area crisscrossed with trip wires. When somebody tried to sneak in and stumbled on one of those wires a flare went up, turning night into day. They also had sharpshooters out there with infrared sniper scopes, and attack dogs. Even so, they never could seal the area off. People got in and out with supplies all the time. Sometimes parties were guided in by Severt Young Bear or Oscar Bear Runner. They knew the land and could tell where they were going by the moon and the stars. People walked ten or fifteen miles from the drop-off points with their heavy packs. Some walked in their socks through the snow, making as little noise as possible. They knew all the little gullies and washes to come in unseen. The feds called this AIM’s Ho Chi Minh Trail. It was these backpackers who kept us alive.

Our clinic was just a two-room, one-story building. One room was supposed to be the surgery room, and I was the surgeon.
The clinic was run by Lorelei Decora, who is now a nurse at the Rosebud tribal hospital. Madonna Gilbert was her main assistant. Both were Lakota women. Every week a team of one or two white doctors or medics came into Wounded Knee to help. This was arranged by the National Council of Churches. The doctors were closely searched before the feds let them in. They were run through a nationwide computer check on their credentials. The FBI rummaged through their things piece by piece and messed them up. These MDs had to go through a real hassle until they were allowed inside the perimeter. A volunteer team usually stayed for a week and then was relieved by another. Dr. Pat Kelly had heard on the radio that doctors were needed at the Knee, and so he came out of Seattle with a team, and also medicines and food. Kelly told me, “I am a veteran from Nam, and the things I’ve seen here, the tracers, the flares, the government burning off all the cover down to the last shrub to be able to watch for people coming in, the APCs—it’s identical to what I experienced in Vietnam. Every night it’s like an incredible flashback to Da Nang.”

During firefights, with thousands of rounds coming in, the medics made up first aid kits and waited, ready to go in, to help the wounded and bring them out. They also made stretchers. The medics and nurses worried about Indians walking around in the open, ignoring the bullets zipping by them. They worried about folks living in flimsy trailers and shacks, with slugs coming in through the walls. They worried about women standing in line to go to the toilets, joking while the bullets flew around them. It usually took the nurses and doctors three days to adjust to the situation. After that they no longer bothered with ducking and running for shelter, and went about their business like the rest of us.

Taking care of sanitary conditions was also the work of the medical team. They used lime to fill in pits where waste had been dumped to prevent disease. Carla Blakey, a Saulteaux Indian from Canada, turned an old garage into a four-way women’s toilet. There were always four or five women standing
in line there, and after every firefight the medics came running, yelling, “Everybody all right? Anybody need tranquilizers?” Carla said to me, “Imagine a place where you gotta have tranquilizers to go to the can!”

I doctored people with Indian herbs. They are from the earth and we are from the earth. They work better than the white man’s wonder drugs. Operating was up to me. For this I used my pocket knife, my prayers, and taopi tawote, wound medicine. I also used an herb that numbs the flesh so that you don’t feel anything. One of the men I operated on was Rocky Madrid, a Chicano medic. There had been a firefight, and Rocky and Owen Luck, who had been a helicopter medic in Vietnam, started to run to the front with their first aid kits to see if anybody needed help. Suddenly there were tracers zinging around them. Rocky was hit in the stomach by a tumbling bullet that ricocheted. It was a miracle he didn’t get his guts blown out and could walk himself to the hospital. The bullet was stuck in the muscle. I dug it out with my knife. Chuck Downing, a white doctor, sewed up the wound. Rocky didn’t feel a thing. I fanned him off with sage and three days later he was walking around as good as new. Rocky Madrid was senselessly shot. When he was hit there were enough flares overhead that you could have read a newspaper by the light they gave off, and he wore a large red cross on a white armband. The feds were machine-gunning the whole area, they just opened up and sprayed everything. On the day of the airlift they fired on a man carrying a large white flag walking alongside a wounded Indian being carried on a stretcher.

I fixed up one wounded warrior, Milo Goings, who was shot in the knee. To take the bullet out I used a piercing knife, but first I used porcupine quills and a medicine, red wood, to make it numb. I put the red wood there, and after it had its effect, I took the bullet out. Then I used deer sinew to sew it up. One kid was wounded with an M-16 bullet in the wrist, just under the thumb. So I made a cut and pulled the bullet out with tweezers. Then I used the same medicine on it. I didn’t sew him up. I just wrapped
the hand up, and in about two weeks he could use it again. Two Shoes got shot just under the ball of the foot, so I did the same thing, numbed him, cut it open, took the bullet out, and used that wound medicine. These medicines are powerful. To stop bleeding I use fine gopher dust. It stops the blood every time.

Almost right from the beginning, there was serious fighting. There were a lot of automatic weapons, and every sixth shot was a tracer bullet. It looked like long strings of lightning bugs. Things became serious as we settled in for a long standoff.

It was crazy the way the government treated us. One day there was a firefight; the next day we were negotiating. Sometimes there was negotiating and shooting at the same time. One day the roadblocks were up, the next they were down. The feds would shoot somebody and then fly him out in a helicopter to the hospital in Rapid City. The FBI armed the goons and worked closely with them, but the marshals would have nothing to do with “those murderous drunken bums.” The feds would curse us over the radio and the next moment chat and joke with us. Our bunkers were communicating with Red Arrow all the time. Witko wasichu, crazy white men, was all we could say. We could not figure them out.

The media were as fast getting into Wounded Knee as the feds. At first the FBI refused to let the press in, but some fifteen reporters made it past the perimeter anyhow. Later the press was admitted sometimes and refused entrance on other days. Here again it was hard to figure out what the government’s policy was. Some of the media were against us. They wrote that Wounded Knee was a
“guerrilla theater offering blood and pageantry.” One reporter called us a “bunch of publicity seeking militants,” another called what we were doing a “cannily orchestrated news event.” Most of the journalists were friendly and rooted for us, because we gave them something to write about. The press used us and we used the press. As Carter Camp put it, “As long as we are good Boy Scouts behaving ourselves, nobody gives a shit. But as soon as we’re waving guns, the media come running. If it takes waving guns to get our grievances before the public, then that’s what we have to do.” Wounded Knee was reported by TV, radio, and newspapers all over the world. All of the AIM leaders “had a good mouth.” They were powerful speakers who could draw wonderful word pictures.

On March 1, Senators James Abourezk and George McGovern came to talk to us. Because Abourezk was sympathetic to us, his son’s house at Wanblee, on the Pine Ridge reservation, was firebombed. McGovern was not pro-AIM. He said he had not much time for us, he had to get back to Rapid to change into a clean shirt. Russell said, “He’s worried about his shirt. We’re worried about seeing another sun rise.” We had a lot of church support. John Adams, a Methodist, Paul Boe, a Lutheran, and Father Garvey, of South Dakota, did much to help us. A team of lawyers formed the Wounded Knee Legal Defense-Offense Committee, WKLDOC for short. We pronounced it “Wickledock.” The committee consisted of Bill Kunstler, from New York; Beverly Axelrod, who had defended Eldridge Cleaver; Ken Tilsen, from Minneapolis; Mark Lane, who had his own ideas about the Kennedy assassination; and Ramon Roubideaux, a local Lakota attorney. Later Bruce Ellison joined the team. They had a lot of paralegal help.

On March 3, the government sent in Colonel Volney Warner, chief of staff of the 82nd Airborne, to see whether the regular army would be needed to make an end of us. Warner turned out to be good for us. He changed the FBI order from “shoot to kill” to “shoot to wound,” and then to “do not shoot at all.” He reported that the Indians weren’t going to harm anyone. He
thought that it was unlawful to use the army in a local domestic conflict. He told the marshals, “You guys are good only for handing out subpoenas. You aren’t worth shit as fighting men.” He said he would be only too glad to let the Airborne loose upon the goons. In the end the FBI, the marshals, and the goons hated Warner more than they hated us. Without Warner I could not have written this book. I would be dead.

On March 6, the feds’ spokesman, Erickson, told us to come out and surrender, or else. He tried to scare us by ordering us to send all women and children out of Wounded Knee before darkness fell on March 8. But he didn’t impress us. Dennis asked the women whether they wanted to leave. Not one of them did. Carter Camp told the feds, “I know we can’t whip the whole United States, but we’ll sell our lives as dear as we can.” We ran up an AIM flag on the church steeple. I painted the faces of our warriors with sacred red paint. Some of the people remembered Crazy Horse’s old war cry, “It’s a good day to die!” Then the government backed down and negotiations started all over again. They led to nothing.

On the morning of March 11, four postal inspectors, guided by two ranchers, drove into the village “to inspect the post office in the trading post.” That’s what they said. They were government agents armed with handguns and handcuffs. They carried fancy badges like the FBI. They were stopped and disarmed by our security. They were, of course, not interested in finding out how the mail service functioned during the siege. They had come to spy. Security brought them to the museum and put their pistols, handcuffs, and badges on a table. I served them coffee and scrambled eggs and gave them a half-hour lecture on Indian history and why we had taken over the place. Then I had them escorted back to the federal lines. For this I was later tried and convicted as an accessory preventing federal officers from performing their assignments.

March 11 was also the day on which we proclaimed the Independent Oglala Nation under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie
that the government had broken. We declared Wounded Knee a liberated country and offered Oglala citizenship to everybody who was there with us. Dennis said, “This is no longer a perimeter, it’s a border.” We issued visas to members of the press. Russell Means declared, “If any foreign country, especially the United States, tries to enter the village, it will be considered an act of war and treated accordingly. Spies entering the village will be treated as spies anywhere.” The Six Nations of the Iroquois at once recognized the Independent Oglala Nation and sent a delegation to support us, led by Chief Oren Lyons of the Onondaga. So we established what Dennis called a provisional government. One of our women said, “I’m weeping with joy that we are a nation again, a tiny nation in a small space, but it’s a beginning. We don’t need a tribal council, we don’t need the BIA, we don’t need the Reorganization Act of 1934. We’re standing on the Treaty of Fort Laramie.”

In the meantime we tried to establish a routine of daily living. The women were cooking as long as there was food. They made blankets out of old skirts. They made mittens out of old sweaters, with trigger fingers on them. They made socks out of sleeves and headgear with holes for eyes, nose, and mouth. This was for the guys in the bunkers. The women would go down to the bunkers to see if the men needed coffee, blankets, or ammo. Every time a flare went up, the guys would yell, “Hit the floor!” but no one bothered. The women were really strong. During one firefight, one woman held off several marshals with an old six-shooter while everybody else got away. She was real good with a gun.

For the first three weeks we had enough food. After that it was rice and beans, and then not even that. At first we ate a lot of fry bread, and that was okay, but the women ran out of shortening, flour, and baking powder. When we ran out of coffee, sugar, and cigarettes, things got real bad. Without coffee and cigarettes even the greatest warrior can’t get it together anymore. It’s a question of how long you can stand up on an empty stomach.

One white rancher donated a steer to us. That wasn’t enough to last more than three hundred hungry people seventy-one days. So we took to liberating cattle. We called them slow elk. Dennis Banks sent a few young guys out to bring back a fat cow. They brought back an ancient skinny bull. It took eleven bullets to kill the poor beast. None of those great warriors knew how to butcher it. One of the white journalists had to do it.

The occupation was based on Indian religion. The sweat lodges were going twenty-four hours a day and we had yuwipi ceremonies almost every night and even a few peyote meetings. When things got really bad, men and women made flesh offerings. The leaders went so far as to pierce their chests as in the sun dance, thinking that their pain could help the people through spiritual power. Our medicine was strong. As an Indian you don’t divide life into little boxes: A—politics, B—education, C—religion, and so on. It is all one, it is life. You break it up, white man’s style, and it becomes just a jigsaw puzzle without meaning. I put on the ghost dance for four days and I felt that the bodies in their mass grave were dancing with us. Whenever negotiations went on inside the no-man’s-land tipi, Wallace Black Elk or I was there with the sacred pipe and our eagle bone whistle, smoking in a circle, cedaring the government negotiators as well as our own people. The feds were impressed, I think, but did not know what to make of it. We were not on the same wavelength.

Then the situation became ugly. Even when there was a ceasefire, Dick Wilson maintained that he and his people weren’t bound by any concessions the government made. He was angry at the government for being too easy on us. He was angry at the marshals for not blowing us away. He was angry at us for being Indians. He issued proclamations that read, in part, “What is happening at Wounded Knee is all part of a long-range plan of the Communist party. Disrupt the normal function of society. Demand the resignation of key officials. Demand the resignation of the head of state. To combat this we are organizing an all-out volunteer army of patriots. We need able-bodied men over 18
years of age. We are requesting General Chesty Puller, United States Marine Corps, to take command.”

He continued, “Fellow patriots, we need you. Come in and sign up. We will organize and train you, and when the federal government has yielded, conceded, and appeased, we will march into Wounded Knee and kill tokas, wasichus, hasapas, and spiolas. They want to be martyrs? We will make it another Little Bighorn.” In short, he called on his goons to kill all non-Sioux Indians, whites, blacks, and Hispanics.

On April 5, we signed an agreement with Kent Frizzel, the government negotiator. The White House big shots would not come to the Knee to talk with us, but we would send a delegation to Washington to meet with them there. So we smoked the pipe together. I told Frizzel, “Many hundred years ago the white man and Indians smoked the pipe. Now, today, we smoke the pipe again. Before we smoke, I will blow the eagle bone whistle that has been given to the Indian people. At this time, Great Spirit, there are many, many things that we ask for. Many, many days we’ve been here at Wounded Knee, at this sacred altar, the sacred circle. At this time, Grandfather, I ask you to take care of my Indian people, my red man.”

The agreement called for both sides to disarm. On the same day we would lay down our arms, the feds would withdraw the APCs and the marshals, and the FBI would go home. In the meantime our delegation took off for Washington. It consisted of Russell Means, Chief Tom Bad Cob, our Sioux lawyer, Ramon Roubideaux, Judy Bridwell, and myself. The talks in Washington came to nothing. Nixon would not see us, and talks with his underlings were just hot air.

On April 11, while I was in Washington, Mary Ellen Moore gave birth under fire to a little boy. The people took it as a good sign. They held the newborn baby up for all to see. The people wept and sang the AIM song. Dennis Banks said, “We’ve been reinforced by a little warrior.” A few days later I managed to sneak back into Wounded Knee.

In the beginning, the feds had let some food and medical supplies through, but as the ring tightened, they tried to starve us out. They got a court order that made it illegal to bring supplies to us. Supporters on the outside organized an airlift. The first, which took place early in April, delivered four hundred pounds of food into Wounded Knee: rice, dried beans, powdered milk, oatmeal, yeast, flour, baking soda, bandages, antibiotics, vitamins, some clothing, and, most welcome, coffee and cigarettes. The machine was a single-engine plane piloted by a Vietnam vet. The co-pilot and navigator was also a Nam vet. It was all over in no time. We knew the plane was coming, so we rushed up and unloaded the plane in minutes. It took off bobbing and weaving to throw the feds off their aim and to prevent them from reading the numbers painted on the underside.

The big airdrop happened on April 17. It was made up of three planes, each carrying four parachutes with duffel bags full of supplies tied together. The cargo doors had been taken off for quick action. Each plane had a “kicker” who kicked out the bundles with the chutes on them. The planes flew in at first light. They knew that this time the feds would be waiting for them, so they did the mission when most of them would be sleeping.

Although the drop was successful, this turned out to be one of our saddest days. As the food was being distributed, Eddy Whitewater was walking back to his house with his little children when, suddenly, a helicopter was hovering above them. A sniper in the copter started shooting at them. So the guys in the bunkers began shooting back to protect the people moving on the ground and to keep the copter at a distance. That started the biggest firefight up to then. Frank Clearwater, a Cherokee brother from North Carolina, was resting inside the church, getting a little sleep after having walked all night with his pregnant wife, Morning Star, to join us. A bullet came crashing through the wall and hit him in the back of his head. Clearwater did not have any weapons and did not plan to use any. The medics were notified that he was badly wounded, but could not get to him for an hour
because of the heavy fire. Finally three women just ran up the hill, zigzagging through the line of fire, and dashed into the church. They put him on a blanket and got him down to the clinic at a dead run, with the bullets flicking up dust at their feet. Even though they had Red Cross armbands and were waving a white flag, they were fired on all the way down. It took hours before the shooting died down enough for Clearwater to be carried to the roadblock, from where the feds took him in a copter to the hospital in Rapid City. His wife went to the roadblock to be with him in Rapid but was arrested and put in jail.

Clearwater died on April 25. The Independent Oglala Nation offered a plot of land inside the perimeter, but Wilson would not let his body into Pine Ridge because Clearwater was not an Oglala. (Of course, there are many whites buried all over the reservation.) Clearwater was part Cherokee and part Apache, he was a Native American. He had every right to be buried at the place where he had given his life for his people. We mourned for him for four days inside the Knee and I made a tape to be smuggled out to be played at his funeral.