When about 200 militant Indians took over the tiny settlement of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, for seventy-one days between late February and early May 1973, they proclaimed it a free nation.
When 300 federal agents surrounded the occupied town, they designated the situation a terrorist takeover. Everyone agreed that the American Indian Movement (AIM), especially Dennis Banks and Russell Means, led the occupiers.
How responsible Banks and Means were for what happened was the theme of their trial a year later. But the story begins earlier.The full story, naturally, had begun a century before with the conflict between the westward moving settlers and the plains Indians. But the immediate story began in St. Paul, Minnesota, in October 1972, during the presidential campaign when AIM organized the Trail of Broken Treaties, a march to the Washington headquarters of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The marchers had carefully prepared a list of twenty grievances based on broken treaties. As the group was leaving the BIA building, guards pushed some of the Indians. This scuffle escalated into a seizure of the building by AIM and a week-long occupation that was terminated when the administration agreed to respond to the twenty points. The “response” came in January, but it was in the form of a press release citing Nixon administration accomplishments and promising to make even more advances in the second term. The AIM leaders were outraged.1
Another portion of the immediate background involved the killing of two Indians and what many others saw as insensitivity by local officials toward the killings. In both instances AIM led protests. In February 1972, Raymond Yellow Thunder, a young Sioux, had been seized, stripped naked from the waist down, and shoved onto a dance floor in Gordon, Nebraska. He was found dead in a used car lot. Five persons, all white, were charged, not with murder, but with manslaughter.2 AIM led 300 Sioux to Wounded Knee where the trading post was sacked. A second killing of a Sioux, twenty-year-old Bad Heart Bull, in January 1973, in Buffalo Gap, South Dakota, and the charging of a white suspect with second-degree manslaughter instead of first-degree murder, prompted AIM to hold a protest meeting.
Riots broke out during which the Chamber of Commerce building in Custer, South Dakota, was burned to the ground and the courthouse was set afire, the National Guard called in, twenty people injured, and forty arrested.3During the week before the Wounded Knee occupation, public attention on the Pine Ridge Reservation was drawn to impeachment hearings concerning the tribal chairman, Richard Wilson. Gladys Bissonette, one of his accusers, a 56-year-old leader of the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization, charged Wilson with building a “goon squad” of toughs to “terrorize and intimidate the Indians and harass them and beat them,” using the goons and the BIA to protect bootleggers. At the impeachment hearing, as Bissonette saw it, Wilson dominated the acting chairman, Vincent Thunderbolt, and intimidated witnesses. The hearing broke up when three council members walked out and the goons and the BIA police rushed in.4
As at a meeting of the Third Estate, the 400–500 members of the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization left the tribal government hall and walked to a community building, the Calico Hall. Gladys Bissonette spoke to the crowd: “I told the Indian people that there was nowhere we could turn for help; we could not go to our tribal chairman; we could not go to the BIA superintendent; we couldn’t even call into Washington, D.C., anymore for any help; the corruption was too great and all our power was in Dick Wilson’s hands, so we had to do something.”5 By a show of hands they voted to call in AIM.
On the next night, February 26, nine elderly chiefs and head men made their way to Calico Hall to decide whether AIM should be invited in. At this second meeting, also a gathering of 500, the chiefs and head men withdrew to a basement room for their decision. When they returned upstairs after an hour, Chief Fools Crow announced that they had come to the decision that AIM should be asked to give its support. Russell Means, who was an Oglala Sioux and was at the Calico Hall meeting, “did not have a choice,” according to Bissonette, “he had no alternative but to listen to the chiefs. We went back to our chiefs because no one listened to us.”6
A third meeting, this one even larger, about 600 participants, was held the next day. Means introduced Dennis Banks, who was a Chippewa from Minnesota, and Chief Fools Crow welcomed him, urging him to stay and help. After a pow-wow, Vern Long of the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization suggested that a larger meeting place was needed, perhaps the Porcupine community hall. The journey from Pine Ridge to Porcupine, about fifteen miles, would take the caravan of cars through Wounded Knee.