Russell Means and Clyde Belcourt
By Steve Karnowski
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Wounded Knee was held for 71-days
MINNEAPOLIS (AP)- Tensions that had been smoldering on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota flared up 50 years ago Monday, when activists from the American Indian Movement took over the town of Wounded Knee.
In the view of the protesters, Oglala Sioux tribal chairman Dick Wilson was in cahoots with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other federal authorities, and used threats of violence to intimidate his critics. But the 71-day occupation quickly morphed into an outpouring of anger with the federal government over decades of broken treaties, the theft of ancestral lands, forced assimilation and other injustices dating back centuries.
The Wounded Knee Memorial, which marks the site of the massacre of hundreds of Lakota people by U.S. soldiers in 1890, is seen on Feb. 10, 2023, in Wounded Knee, S.D. A ceremony marking the 50 years since the occupation of Wounded Knee by American Indian Movement activists will be held at the site on Feb. 27, 2023, after four days of events leading up to the anniversary. (Kalle Benallie/Indian Country Today via AP)
Two Native Americans died in the fighting, and a U.S. marshal was left paralyzed.
Wounded Knee had already been seared into history as the site of an 1890 massacre by U.S. Army cavalry troops in one of the last major military operations against Native Americans on the northern plains. Accounts vary, but the massacre left around 300 Lakota dead, including children, women and older people. Congress apologized in 1990.
Ahead of the 50th anniversary of the occupation, The Associated Press reached out to people who were at Wounded Knee or involved from a distance to hear their stories.
DWAIN CAMP
Dwain Camp, a member of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, was in California when his younger brother, Carter, called to say he and other leaders of the American Indian Movement took a group of activists into Wounded Knee.
“He was telling me they were in a hell of a fight,” Camp, now 85, recalled. “I heard the gunfire and that was all I needed. I went up there and stayed for the duration of the standoff.”
Their brother, Craig, a Vietnam veteran, also joined them. Camp said the rifles and shotguns the occupiers took from the trading post in town were no match for the weapons and armored vehicles the feds had.
“We were going to make it very expensive should they go ahead and roll in,” Camp said. “It didn’t come to that, thank goodness.”
Camp remembers the occupation with pride as “a very vital time”
that changed his life. He said he experienced “the freest feeling that I could ever imagine.” He met AIM leaders who became famous, including Dennis Banks,Clyde Bellecourt and Russell Means. It was also a spiritual awakening for many occupiers and visitors, he said, with sweat lodge ceremonies providing a chance for prayer and learning about their traditions.
And it helped change the way Native Americans across the country saw themselves, Camp said.
“The Native people of this land after Wounded Knee, they had like a surge of new pride in being Native people,” he said.
Camp said the takeover was a catalyst for policy changes that had been “unimaginable” before, including the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, the Indian Child Welfare Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, to name a few. And it provided a focus for his own activism.
“After we left Wounded Knee, it became paramount that protecting Mother Earth was our foremost issue,” he said. “Since that period of time, we’ve learned that we’ve got to teach our kids our true history.”
Camp sees the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline _ which drew thousands of Indigenous people and supporters to the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota in 2016 and 2017, as a continuation of the resurgence fueled by Wounded Knee.
“We’re not the subjugated and disenfranchised people that we were,” he said. “Wounded Knee was an important beginning of that.
And because we’re a resilient people, it’s something we take a lot of pride in.”
Camp said he wished he could return to Pine Ridge for the 50th anniversary observances, but traveling isn’t easy at his age.
Instead, he plans to get together with his surviving brother, Craig, who lives near him in Ponca. They’ll burn some of the sacred sage that family members bring back every year from South Dakota.
–
MADONNA THUNDER HAWK
Madonna Thunder Hawk remembers the firefights.
Madonna Thunder Hawk remembers the firefights.
As a medic during the occupation of Wounded Knee in early 1973, Thunder Hawk was stationed nightly in a frontline bunker in the combat zone between Native American activists and U.S. government agents in South Dakota.
“I would crawl out there every night, and we’d just be out there in case anybody got hit,” said Thunder Hawk, of the Oohenumpa band of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, one of four women assigned to the bunkers.
Memories of the Wounded Knee occupation — one in a string of protests from 1969 to 1973 that pushed the American Indian Movement to the forefront of Native activism — still run deep within people like Thunder Hawk who were there.
Thunder Hawk, now 83, is careful about what she says today about AIM and the occupation, but she can’t forget that tribal elders in 1973 had been raised by grandparents who still remembered the 1890 slaughter of hundreds of Lakota people at Wounded Knee by U.S. soldiers.
“That’s how close we are to our history,” she told ICT recently. “So anything that goes on, anything we do, even today with the land-back issue, all of that is just a continuation. It’s nothing new.”
JIM HUGGINS
FBI Special Agent Jim Huggins was on the other side of the roadblocks. He was one of several agents from the Denver FBI office who went to Wounded Knee to back up their colleagues.
“It was a dangerous situation,” recalled Huggins, 83, who’s retired and lives in Frankfort, Kentucky. “The people that took over the town of Wounded Knee were a group of militants, mostly out of Minneapolis. … They were dedicated members of the American Indian Movement and were very anti-FBI.”
Huggins said there was often an exchange of gunfire between the two sides.
“Every time you were out on the roadblocks, you could anticipate a shot coming your way,” he said. “You could hear them whizz by pretty close sometimes. … It seemed like every night just after sunset a few shots would ring our in our direction.”
Unlike Camp, Huggins doesn’t think much good came out of the occupation.
“I think it was totally unnecessary on their part,” he said.
“I base that on interviewing several Native Americans who lived for years on the reservation. They were totally against the takeover.”
And Huggins believes the ongoing tensions between AIM and authorities led to the killings of two FBI agents in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation two years later, one of whom was a good friend of his. AIM activist Leonard Peltier maintains he was wrongly convicted in their deaths, but successive presidents have denied requests for clemency.
_-
PHIL HOGEN
Phil Hogen was chief of staff to new U.S. Rep. James Abdnor, whose district included the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, when the occupation began just a few weeks after they moved to Washington.
“We were sort of on the front page of the Washington Post for 71 days while this was going on,” Hogen recalled. He said Abdnor “did not look kindly on that disruption. He was all for resolving differences.” But he said they worked hard to try to find a resolution, consulting with the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Hogen, 77, who lives off the reservation in Black Hawk, South Dakota, now has mixed, but mostly negative, views on the occupation.
“It was regrettable in many respects,” he said. “That is, the disruption of government, the confrontation, the loss of lives. I don’t know that all of those wounds have yet healed. But at the end of the day there was a greater awareness of American Indian/Native American concerns and injustices they had been exposed to.”
As a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Hogen said he could identify with some of their concerns.
“But it didn’t start out from my perspective as a national confrontation, rather a national confrontation looking for a place to happen,” he said. Tribal leader Wilson “sometimes ruled with an iron hand, but sometimes on Pine Ridge that was necessary.”
Hogen went on to serve as U.S. attorney for South Dakota under President Ronald Reagan.
If any lasting good came out of the occupation of Wounded Knee, Hogen said, it was that it “reminded the whole country about what a tragedy the original massacre was, and how those concerns or wounds were probably never appropriately addressed. It probably steered some resources toward solving some of those problems. … But it left a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of people, so it cut both ways.”
Hogen said it’s also unfortunate that relatively little has been done with the massacre site, which was mostly private land until last fall.
“It’s the site of a national tragedy, and its regrettable that it isn’t better memorialized there than it is,” he said.
_-
JIM MONE
Jim Mone sits with his photos taken during Wounded Knee (AP)
Jim Mone had been a photographer with The Associated Press in Minneapolis for about 3 1/2 months when he was sent to cover the takeover. He packed a couple hundred pounds of equipment, including photo transmitters, a complete darkroom and a bulk pack of black-and-white film, and got on a flight to Rapid City, South Dakota.
The closest available motel room was in the town of Martin, about
30 miles (48 kilometers) east of Wounded Knee. He set up his darkroom in the bathroom and mixed his chemicals. His editor soon arrived and said, “Let’s go to Wounded Knee.”
But that wasn’t easy. The FBI and AIM had erected roadblocks. So they took backroads to get as close as they could, ditching their car about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) away, and started walking. Soon they came upon surprised AIM members who let them keep going.
“They were courteous enough to tell us how much farther we had to go,” said Mone, 79, of of the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington.
Entering Wounded Knee, they saw a ransacked church where activists and journalists had gathered, and men with rifles. But Mone said he developed good relations with AIM leaders in the seven weeks he was there.
“They knew they needed the media, so I don’t think any media people got hurt,” he said. “You could get inches away from them, and photograph them. They treated us quite well and respectfully.”
The most worrying moments, he said, included firefights when he could see tracer bullets overhead, and a when a jet buzzed the town just a few hundred feet overhead.
To get an edge on his competition, Mone said, he practically crawled into a packed tipi where AIM activists and federal authorities smoked a peace pipe to mark the deal to end the occupation. He developed his film using equipment in his trunk before driving back to his motel, where he used a bulky transmitter connected to his room phone to send in the key picture, which Mone said was used by The New York Times the next day.
Mone said the atmosphere as the deal was signed was courteous, tense and businesslike all at once, and he believed that the fact the final negotiations were conducted in a tipi was “a sign of respect to the Native Americans.”
—
Other feelings linger, too, over the tensions that emerged in Lakota communities after Wounded Knee and the virtual destruction of the small community. Many still don’t want to talk about it.
But the legacy of activism lives on among those who have followed in their footsteps, including the new generations of Native people who turned out at Standing Rock beginning in 2016 for the pipeline protests.
“For me, it’s important to acknowledge the generation before us — to acknowledge their risk,” said Nick Tilsen, founder of NDN Collective and a leader in the Standing Rock protests, whose parents were AIM activists. “It’s important for us to honor them. It’s important for us to thank them.”
Akim D. Reinhardt, who wrote the book, “Ruling Pine Ridge: Oglala Lakota Politics from the IRA to Wounded Knee,” said the AIM protests had powerful social and cultural impacts.
“Collectively, they helped establish a sense of the permanence of Red Power in much the way that Black Power had for African Americans, a permanent legacy,” said Reinhardt, a history professor at Towson University in Towson, Maryland.
“It was the cultural legacy that racism isn’t OK and people don’t need to be quiet and accept it anymore,” he said. “That it’s OK to be proud of who you are.”
A series of events in South Dakota in recent days recognized the 50th anniversary of the occupation, including powwows, a documentary film showing and a special honor for the women of Wounded Knee.
Other feelings linger, too, over the tensions that emerged in Lakota communities after Wounded Knee and the virtual destruction of the small community. Many still don’t want to talk about it.
But the legacy of activism lives on among those who have followed in their footsteps, including the new generations of Native people who turned out at Standing Rock beginning in 2016 for the pipeline protests.
“For me, it’s important to acknowledge the generation before us — to acknowledge their risk,” said Nick Tilsen, founder of NDN Collective and a leader in the Standing Rock protests, whose parents were AIM activists. “It’s important for us to honor them. It’s important for us to thank them.”
Akim D. Reinhardt, who wrote the book, “Ruling Pine Ridge: Oglala Lakota Politics from the IRA to Wounded Knee,” said the AIM protests had powerful social and cultural impacts.
“Collectively, they helped establish a sense of the permanence of Red Power in much the way that Black Power had for African Americans, a permanent legacy,” said Reinhardt, a history professor at Towson University in Towson, Maryland.
“It was the cultural legacy that racism isn’t OK and people don’t need to be quiet and accept it anymore,” he said. “That it’s OK to be proud of who you are.”
A series of events in South Dakota in recent days recognized the 50th anniversary of the occupation, including powwows, a documentary film showing and a special honor for the women of Wounded Knee.
___
‘’THUNDERBOLT’ OF PROTEST
The occupation began on the night of Feb. 27, 1973, when a group of warriors led by Oklahoma AIM leader Carter Camp, who was Ponca, moved into the small town of Wounded Knee. The group took over the trading post and established a base of operations along with AIM leaders Russell Means, of the Oglala Sioux Tribe; Dennis Banks, who was Ojibwe; and Clyde Bellecourt, of the White Earth Nation.
Within days, hundreds of activists had joined them for what became a 71-day standoff with the U.S. government and other law enforcement.
It was the fourth protest in as many years for AIM. The organization formed in the late 1960s and drew international attention with the occupation of Alcatraz in the San Francisco Bay from 1969-1971. In 1972, the Trail of Broken Treaties brought a cross-country caravan of hundreds of Indigenous activists to Washington, D.C., where they occupied the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters for six days.
Then, on Feb. 6, 1973, AIM members and others gathered at the courthouse in Custer County, South Dakota, to protest the killing of Wesley Bad Heart Bull, who was Oglala Lakota, and the lenient sentences given to some perpetrators of violence against Native Americans. When they were denied access into the courthouse, the protest turned violent, with the burning of the local chamber of commerce and other buildings.
Three weeks later, AIM leaders took over Wounded Knee.
“It had been waiting to happen for generations,” said Kevin McKiernan, who covered the Wounded Knee occupation as a journalist in his late 20s and who later directed the 2019 documentary film, “From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock.”
“If you look at it as a storm, the storm had been building through abuse, land theft, genocide, religious intoleration, for generations and generations,” he said. “The storm built up, and built up and built up. The American Indian Movement was simply the thunderbolt.”
The takeover at Wounded Knee grew out of a dispute with Oglala Sioux tribal leader Richard Wilson but also put a spotlight on demands that the U.S. government uphold its treaty obligations to the Lakota people.
By March 8, the occupation leaders had declared the Wounded Knee territory to be the Independent Oglala Nation, granting citizenship papers to those who wanted them and demanding recognition as a sovereign nation.
The standoff was often violent, and supplies became scarce within the occupied territory as the U.S. government worked to cut off support for those behind the lines. Discussions were ongoing throughout much of the occupation, with several government officials working with AIM leaders to try and resolve the issues.
The siege finally ended on May 8 with an agreement to disarm and to further discuss the treaty obligations. By then, at least three people had been killed and more than a dozen wounded, according to reports.
Two Native men died. Frank Clearwater, identified as Cherokee and Apache, was shot on April 17, 1973, and died eight days later. Lawrence “Buddy” Lamont, who was Oglala Lakota, was shot and killed on April 26, 1973.
Another man, Black activist Ray Robinson, who had been working with the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization, went missing during the siege. The FBI confirmed in 2014 that he had died at Wounded Knee, but his body was never recovered. A U.S. marshal who was shot and paralyzed died many years later.
Camp was later convicted of abducting and beating four postal inspectors during the occupation and served three years in federal prison. Banks and Means were indicted on charges related to the events, but their cases were dismissed by a federal court for prosecutorial misconduct.
Today, the Wounded Knee National Historic Landmark identifies the site of the 1890 massacre, most of which is now under joint ownership of the Oglala Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes.
The tribes agreed in 2022 to purchase 40 acres that included the area where most of the carnage took place in 1890, the ravine where victims fled and the area where the trading post was located.
The purchase, from a descendant of the original owners of the trading post, included a covenant requiring the land to be preserved as a sacred site and memorial without commercial development.
And though internal tensions emerged in the AIM organization in the years after the Wounded Knee occupation, AIM continues to operate throughout the U.S. in tribal communities and urban areas.
In recent years, members participated in the Standing Rock protests and have persisted in pushing for the release from prison of former AIM leader Leonard Peltier, who was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder despite inconsistencies in the evidence in the deaths of two FBI agents during a shootout in 1975 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
___
A NEW GENERATION
Oglala Sioux Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out, stands outside the Andrew W. Bogue Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Rapid City, S.D. on Feb. 8, 2023. Some of his family members strongly supported the AIM, including his mother and father. He said it’s important to fight for his people, who survived genocide. “That’s why I support AIM, not only on a family level,” he said. “I have a lot of pride in who I am as a Lakota. … Times (have) changed. Now I’m using my leadership to help our people rise, to give them a voice. And I believe that’s important for Indian Country.” (Kalle Benallie/Indian Country Today via AP)
Tilsen, now president and chief executive of NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led organization centered around building Indigenous power, traces the roots of his activism to Wounded Knee.
His parents, JoAnn Tall and Mark Tilsen, met at Wounded Knee, and he praises the women of the movement who sustained the traditional matriarchal system during the occupation.
“I grew up in the American Indian Movement,” said Tilsen, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. “It wasn’t a question about what you were fighting for. You were raised up in it. In fact, if you didn’t fight, you weren’t going to live.”
Tilsen credits AIM and others for most of the rights Native Americans have today, including the ability to operate casinos and tribal colleges, enter into contracts with the federal government to oversee schools and other services, and religious freedom.
He said the movement showed the world that tribes were sovereign nations and their treaties were being violated. And when AIM and spiritual leaders such as Henry Crow Dog, Leonard Crow Dog and Matthew King joined the fight, it became intergenerational.
“It became a spiritual revolution,” he said. “It also became a fight that was about human rights. It became a fight that was about where Indigenous people aren’t just within the political system of America, but within the broader context of the system; of the world.”
Tilsen appreciates that his parents were willing to participate in an armed revolution to achieve one of their dreams of establishing KILI radio station, known as the “Voice of the Lakota Nation,” which began operating in 1983 as the first Indigenous-owned radio station in the United States.
The Dakota Access Pipeline protest in 2016 became a defining moment for him and his brother. They had wondered, he said, what would be their Wounded Knee?
“What made it so powerful and what made it different was that you actually had grassroots organizers and revolutionaries and official tribal governments coming together, too,” Tilsen said. “I think that Standing Rock in particular actually reached way further than Wounded Knee because of how the issue was framed around ‘water is life.’”
Alex Fire Thunder, deputy director of the Lakota Language Consortium, said the occupation of Wounded Knee and other activism helped revitalize Indigenous languages and cultures. His mother was too young to have participated in the occupation but he said she remembered visits from AIM members in the community.
“The whole point of AIM, the American Indian Movement, was to bring back a sense of pride in our culture,” Fire Thunder, Oglala Lakota, told ICT.
___
FUTURE GENERATIONS
For Thunder Hawk, the issues became her lifelong work rather than momentary activism.
She joined AIM in 1968 and participated in the occupation at Alcatraz, the BIA headquarters, the Custer County Courthouse and Wounded Knee, as well as the Standing Rock pipeline protest in 2016.
She said work being done today by a new generation is a continuation of the work her ancestors did.
“That’s why we were successful in Indian Country, because we were a movement of families,” she said. “It wasn’t just an age group, a bunch of young people carrying on.”
She hopes her legacy will live on, that her great-great-grandchildren will see not just a photo of her but know what she sounded like and the person she seemed to be.
It’s something that she can’t have when she looks at a photo of her paternal great-grandparents.
“Hopefully that’s what my descendants will see, you know?” she said. “And with the technology nowadays, they can press a button, maybe, and it’ll come up.”
Frank Star Comes Out, the current president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, also believes it’s time for the previous generation’s work to be recognized.
Some of his family members strongly supported AIM, including his mother and father. He said it’s important to fight for his people, who survived genocide.
“That’s why I support AIM, not only on a family level,” he said. “I have a lot of pride in who I am as a Lakota. … Times (have) changed. Now I’m using my leadership to help our people rise, to give them a voice. And I believe that’s important for Indian Country.”
___
ICT producer Stewart Huntington, based in Colorado, contributed to this report.
By KALLE BENALLIE, ICT
