Post by Okwes on Jun 6, 2007 17:07:45 GMT -5
Remember Wounded Knee ~ February 28th 1973!
But deadly violence tarnished movement
WOUNDED KNEE - A caravan of cars and pickups winds its way south among the prairie hills at dusk toward the village of Pine Ridge.
A frothy wave of righteous activism - whipped up at a two-day meeting called by the American Indian Movement and Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization - propels the approximately 200 men, women and children in the procession.
In the village, U.S. marshals peer warily into the gathering darkness from fortified positions on the roof of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building.
They are mindful of a series of AIM takeovers beginning in 1969 at Alcatraz Island in California and a riot just weeks before at the Custer County Courthouse. The marshals assume they will have to defend the BIA building on the Pine Ridge Reservation from the Indians coming toward them.
But the vehicles turn off, pass through town and head east to Wounded Knee, a scattering of houses and mobile homes, a store, small museum, Catholic church, and a graveyard. There is a spiritual connection to this place. This is where the U.S. Cavalry killed more than 250 Sioux in 1890, a massacre that marked the close of the Lakota's free-roaming life.
In the caravan ride the destinies of Indian leaders such as Russell Means, Dennis Banks, Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt. Amid the tired vehicles is a cultural and spiritual rebirth. But also lurks the destruction of a community, the death of two men and crippling of a third, and years of bitter division and violence for the Lakota and AIM.
It is Feb. 28, 1973.
What started as a loosely conceived protest 30 years ago turned into a 71-day standoff with federal authorities at Wounded Knee.
The world glimpsed what it was like to be an Indian, to face bleak poverty, an almost casual racism, and the frustrating powerlessness of being wards of federal bureaucracy. What has been done with the knowledge? Thirty years later, does the siege at Wounded Knee reach beyond the memories and anecdotes of those who took part?
Yes, says Winona LaDuke, an activist, author and Green Party vice-presidential candidate from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota.
The occupation was as significant as Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of an Alabama bus and igniting the Civil Rights Movement, says LaDuke. "In our memory of why we have anything, we must remember Rosa Parks. In our memory as to why we, as native people, have anything, we must remember Wounded Knee," she says.
But to some observers the occupation and the violence it represents hinder real progress between whites and Indians in South Dakota. In some ways, it is best tucked away as a historical footnote to remember but not celebrate, they say.
The occupiers originally presented a list of 20 demands that boiled down to five topics ranging from examination of the hundreds of broken treaties between the United States and the tribes to reform of government on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
The siege grew into an international media event that ended May 8 after a series of negotiations and intervention of the White House and Lakota elders.
People on both sides of the Wounded Knee bunkers in 1973 agree the occupation was a complexity of soul-lifting highs and crushing lows. It was by turns boring and intense, enlightening and bewildering, tragic and funny. But always it was fluid, vital, dynamic.
The occupation defined the lives of many involved and was a watershed
Madonna Thunder Hawk visits the monument marking the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, reflecting on the American Indian Movement-led occupation of the village 30 years ago. Thunder Hawk, who served as a medic in the compound, says: "We made our stand. I knew modern day Indian history had been made... and I didn't want it to end."
event in Indian history. It cemented the name of Wounded Knee as a contemporary symbol of Native American grievances with the government and its management of reservation land by the BIA.
"We don't have a gene pool anyplace else. This is where we are from," says Madonna Thunder Hawk, who spent the 71 days inside the Wounded Knee encampment serving as a medic. "I always feel I am here identifiably as an indigenous native person of this land. As long as we have a land base, the struggle goes on.
"I am totally amazed at what we did without any plans, without any big strategy," she says of Wounded Knee, "and I think that is what indigenous struggles are around the world. When you are struggling for your land, it is automatic."
Grabbing the World's Attention
The Wounded Knee occupation was a layered event.
At one level, it was simply an effort by traditional Oglalas to enlist AIM's help in solving what traditional people felt was an unequal distribution of federal resources on Pine Ridge. They alleged burglaries, house burnings, drive-by shootings and murders by supporters of Oglala Sioux President dick Wilson.
AIM leaders also saw it as a forum to dramatize the plight of all Indians.
"It called attention to issues, not only here, but issues all across the country," Banks says.
During the months of the standoff, it seems everyone with an axe to grind against WHAT THEY WANTED
Those who led the uprising at Wounded Knee issued many demands as conditions for ending the 71-day siege. The demands changed as circumstances changed, but here is a general list and the results:
. Creation of a presidential treaty commission to review abuses of the nearly 375 treaties established between the United States and Indian tribes, especially the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty that established a Sioux homeland that included the Black Hills.
Result: No commission was established. A recognition of tribal sovereignty has been heightened and its limits have been tested by three decades of litigation in South Dakota and elsewhere.
. Direct negotiations between the American Indian Movement and a White House representative as a condition of the Wounded Knee occupants surrendering their arms and submitting to arrest.
Result: Did not occur.
. Removal from office of the Oglala Tribal Council at Pine Ridgeand the Bureau of Indian Affairs superintendent.
Result: Did not occur.
. Recognition of traditional Oglala government by the United States.
Result: Did not occur.
. A federal investigation of Oglala Tribal President dick Wilson and his supporters, called the GOON squad. Kent Frizzell, as chief government negotiator, brought a representative of the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division to Wounded Knee to record more than 1,000 civil rights complaints from standoff participants.
Result: There is no record of prosecutions resulting from those complaints.
- Compiled by Peter Harriman
the government - such as Angela Davis of the Black Panthers - and everyone trying to hitch a ride on Lakota traditions - such as actor Marlon Brando - linked to the movement to enrich their own lives.
Means says he didn't think he would live through the occupation. Such fatalism also hung over Clyde Bellecourt.
"At that point, we had made a decision," he says. "We were willing to give our lives right there for what we believed in."
The Wounded Knee occupation was a desperate attempt to grab the world's attention, they say.
"We were pushed to the limit of cultural survival. This was a statement we had a right to live as Indians," Means says.
And South Dakotans had a ringside seat.
Gov. Mike Rounds was a high school senior in Pierre at the time.
"I think people were very disturbed by the violence involved," he remembers.
In a philosophy class at South Dakota State University a few years later, Rounds was introduced to the classic narrative text about the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, "Black Elk Speaks." That added a level to his understanding of the 1973 event.
"I got to thinking that what happened at Wounded Knee was one more symptom of what we have suffered through in our state," he says.
Rounds carefully frames a thought that, while hurtful history should not be forgotten, both Indian and white South Dakotans should make a conscious decision to put away Wounded Knee in their contemporary dealings with each other.
"For me, I try to start over rather than talk about areas that are so sensitive or where we had people die because of the animosity in our races," Rounds says.
"I try to talk about where we go today, what we do today to get past the issues of hard feelings and rejection that have occurred in the past, both on the part of the white and Native American populations."
AIM Forms In Minnesota
In the beginning, AIM was a mainstream effort to improve the lot of Indians, envisioned by the larger world as residents of a homogenous, urban society where a red minority was just a different shade of white.
Banks and Clyde Bellecourt founded AIM in 1968 in Minneapolis to advocate for Indians against alleged abuses by police and courts.
In North Minneapolis "you could set your clock when the cops would come down Franklin Avenue with their paddy wagon to Bud's Bar. With their nightsticks, they'd force everyone out the back of the bar into the wagon," Banks says. He was arrested more than 30 times.
Soon after AIM's founding, Means traveled to Minnesota from Cleveland, where he was working as an accountant in the federally funded Council of Economic Opportunity, to meet the heads of the new group. He recalls Banks was wearing his hair short and parted to the side, Clyde Bellecourt had an even shorter haircut, and Means acknowledges he was wearing "my mod clothes at the time, my ascot ties, loafers."
While the AIM leaders were beginning to reclaim their cultural history, at Pine Ridge, dick Wilson, a plumbing contractor, already knew how to be an Indian. As tribal president, he was trying to bridge that culture to the white world, says his daughter, Saunie Wilson.
She says her father's reputation suffers in accounts of Wounded Knee. He is customarily cast as an oppressor of traditional Oglalas and a meddler who thwarted an early settlement to the standoff.
What is not portrayed, she says, is "the way he cared for the people, the positive change he brought.
"He was real instrumental in trying to establish Oglala Lakota College. He knew we couldn't be comfortable in colleges in the outside world," she says. "We needed something pertaining to who we were as an Indian culture."
dick Wilson died in 1990.
His daughter was a college student in New Mexico in 1973. She moved back to South Dakota after the Wounded Knee occupation and lived on the Pine Ridge Reservation during the subsequent years of bloodshed, made infamous by the shooting deaths of Wounded Knee participants Anna Mae Aquash and Pedro Bissonette, FBI agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, and the arrest and murder conviction of Leonard Peltier.
Women Elders Were 'Warriors'
Accounts of Wounded Knee usually feature the men who took part. Oglala women elders were as important, Means says.
"Without Gladys Bissonette (Pedro Bissonette's aunt)and Ellen Moves Camp, this never would have happened. They are bigger heroes than Banks, myself, or anyone else in AIM," he says.
Clyde Bellecourt agrees.
At the two-day meeting at the Calico community hall leading up to the occupation, AIM compiled nearly 1,500 grievances against the BIA and the tribe.
As the meeting dragged, he says, Gladys Bissonette stood up, exasperated. "Haven't you heard enough?" she asked AIM leaders. "Go back to Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Los Angeles or Portland. We are going to stand here and be warriors."
"I was stunned by that confrontation with an elderly woman, wrinkles all over her face," Bellecourt says.
Oglala elders chose Wounded Knee instead of Pine Ridge for the occupation, says Means, because the spirits of the 1890 massacre victims would protect the occupiers.
Clyde Bellecourt says the decision was reached by elders and AIM leaders at a meeting the previous week at Cedar Pass.
"There was discussion of taking over the BIA," he says. "I thought that was foolish. We had already done that a few weeks before" in Washington, D.C.
The world had heard of the place because of the Dee Brown book, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," he says. "I threw out the idea of occupying land already belonging to us that had already been exploited."
Saunie Wilson believes Banks called her father from the BIA building in Washington, D.C. - which they took over in November - and said "we're coming to Pine Ridge to celebrate."
"He said, 'The hell you are.' That's what started this thing," she says.
Gun Battles Take Heavy Toll
For all the talk of camaraderie, the siege was also marked by the death of two occupiers and the paralysis of a federal agent.
Frank Clearwater was mortally wounded by a stray bullet in a firefight April 17.
After another vicious firefight April 27 - where marshals estimate they fired 6,550 rounds and occupiers 2,875 - Lawrence "Buddy" La Monte was killed. He was buried at Wounded Knee on May 6, two days before the occupation ended.
No federal agents were killed, but on March 26, Lloyd Grimm, a U.S. marshal from Nebraska, was paralyzed for life by a gunshot wound.
In the occupiers' camp, nothing changed after the deaths, Means says during a recent trip to the Wounded Knee Cemetery on a raw, blustery winter day.
On the hilltop where the cemetery looks out over the ruined village and the ground of the occupation, Means pauses from recounting the events of 1973 to spend a few moments kneeling at La Monte's grave.
"That was the cost of doing business," he says. "That's why we were here. Nobody was scared or ran off."
Means still owns a house and land at Porcupine, near Wounded Knee.
"There isn't a time I drive through here when I don't think about it," he says. "The passage of 30 years has saddened me. Our people have saddened me.
"We won. We won, and our people don't even celebrate the victory here. There were 600 arrests arising from Wounded Knee. There was not one conviction, not one plea on the original charge."
Occupation Story Is Seldom Told
Winners write history.
But little scholarly work and only slightly more popular history has been written about Wounded Knee.
"I find that appalling, to the point of genocide," Means says.
"We need filmmakers, writers, journalists," Vernon Bellecourt says, "because our history is not being told here. We need to tell it."
A logical choice to do so would seem to be Sherman Alexie.
AIM members and supporters march into Wounded Knee cemetery Feb. 28 during a celebration marking the anniversary of the 1973 occupation of the village of Wounded Knee. Some leaders call the standoff a watershed event in Indian-white relations but are disappointed so little has been written on the topic in history books. "I find that appalling to the point of genocide," AIM's Russell Means said recently.
The 36-year-old author, whose credits include "Reservation Blues" and "Smoke Signals," grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington.
He is a prominent interpreter of the contemporary Indian experience, who does not flinch from sardonic examination of issues such as racism, sexism, drug and alcohol abuse, and suicide.
But deadly violence tarnished movement
WOUNDED KNEE - A caravan of cars and pickups winds its way south among the prairie hills at dusk toward the village of Pine Ridge.
A frothy wave of righteous activism - whipped up at a two-day meeting called by the American Indian Movement and Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization - propels the approximately 200 men, women and children in the procession.
In the village, U.S. marshals peer warily into the gathering darkness from fortified positions on the roof of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building.
They are mindful of a series of AIM takeovers beginning in 1969 at Alcatraz Island in California and a riot just weeks before at the Custer County Courthouse. The marshals assume they will have to defend the BIA building on the Pine Ridge Reservation from the Indians coming toward them.
But the vehicles turn off, pass through town and head east to Wounded Knee, a scattering of houses and mobile homes, a store, small museum, Catholic church, and a graveyard. There is a spiritual connection to this place. This is where the U.S. Cavalry killed more than 250 Sioux in 1890, a massacre that marked the close of the Lakota's free-roaming life.
In the caravan ride the destinies of Indian leaders such as Russell Means, Dennis Banks, Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt. Amid the tired vehicles is a cultural and spiritual rebirth. But also lurks the destruction of a community, the death of two men and crippling of a third, and years of bitter division and violence for the Lakota and AIM.
It is Feb. 28, 1973.
What started as a loosely conceived protest 30 years ago turned into a 71-day standoff with federal authorities at Wounded Knee.
The world glimpsed what it was like to be an Indian, to face bleak poverty, an almost casual racism, and the frustrating powerlessness of being wards of federal bureaucracy. What has been done with the knowledge? Thirty years later, does the siege at Wounded Knee reach beyond the memories and anecdotes of those who took part?
Yes, says Winona LaDuke, an activist, author and Green Party vice-presidential candidate from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota.
The occupation was as significant as Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of an Alabama bus and igniting the Civil Rights Movement, says LaDuke. "In our memory of why we have anything, we must remember Rosa Parks. In our memory as to why we, as native people, have anything, we must remember Wounded Knee," she says.
But to some observers the occupation and the violence it represents hinder real progress between whites and Indians in South Dakota. In some ways, it is best tucked away as a historical footnote to remember but not celebrate, they say.
The occupiers originally presented a list of 20 demands that boiled down to five topics ranging from examination of the hundreds of broken treaties between the United States and the tribes to reform of government on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
The siege grew into an international media event that ended May 8 after a series of negotiations and intervention of the White House and Lakota elders.
People on both sides of the Wounded Knee bunkers in 1973 agree the occupation was a complexity of soul-lifting highs and crushing lows. It was by turns boring and intense, enlightening and bewildering, tragic and funny. But always it was fluid, vital, dynamic.
The occupation defined the lives of many involved and was a watershed
Madonna Thunder Hawk visits the monument marking the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, reflecting on the American Indian Movement-led occupation of the village 30 years ago. Thunder Hawk, who served as a medic in the compound, says: "We made our stand. I knew modern day Indian history had been made... and I didn't want it to end."
event in Indian history. It cemented the name of Wounded Knee as a contemporary symbol of Native American grievances with the government and its management of reservation land by the BIA.
"We don't have a gene pool anyplace else. This is where we are from," says Madonna Thunder Hawk, who spent the 71 days inside the Wounded Knee encampment serving as a medic. "I always feel I am here identifiably as an indigenous native person of this land. As long as we have a land base, the struggle goes on.
"I am totally amazed at what we did without any plans, without any big strategy," she says of Wounded Knee, "and I think that is what indigenous struggles are around the world. When you are struggling for your land, it is automatic."
Grabbing the World's Attention
The Wounded Knee occupation was a layered event.
At one level, it was simply an effort by traditional Oglalas to enlist AIM's help in solving what traditional people felt was an unequal distribution of federal resources on Pine Ridge. They alleged burglaries, house burnings, drive-by shootings and murders by supporters of Oglala Sioux President dick Wilson.
AIM leaders also saw it as a forum to dramatize the plight of all Indians.
"It called attention to issues, not only here, but issues all across the country," Banks says.
During the months of the standoff, it seems everyone with an axe to grind against WHAT THEY WANTED
Those who led the uprising at Wounded Knee issued many demands as conditions for ending the 71-day siege. The demands changed as circumstances changed, but here is a general list and the results:
. Creation of a presidential treaty commission to review abuses of the nearly 375 treaties established between the United States and Indian tribes, especially the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty that established a Sioux homeland that included the Black Hills.
Result: No commission was established. A recognition of tribal sovereignty has been heightened and its limits have been tested by three decades of litigation in South Dakota and elsewhere.
. Direct negotiations between the American Indian Movement and a White House representative as a condition of the Wounded Knee occupants surrendering their arms and submitting to arrest.
Result: Did not occur.
. Removal from office of the Oglala Tribal Council at Pine Ridgeand the Bureau of Indian Affairs superintendent.
Result: Did not occur.
. Recognition of traditional Oglala government by the United States.
Result: Did not occur.
. A federal investigation of Oglala Tribal President dick Wilson and his supporters, called the GOON squad. Kent Frizzell, as chief government negotiator, brought a representative of the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division to Wounded Knee to record more than 1,000 civil rights complaints from standoff participants.
Result: There is no record of prosecutions resulting from those complaints.
- Compiled by Peter Harriman
the government - such as Angela Davis of the Black Panthers - and everyone trying to hitch a ride on Lakota traditions - such as actor Marlon Brando - linked to the movement to enrich their own lives.
Means says he didn't think he would live through the occupation. Such fatalism also hung over Clyde Bellecourt.
"At that point, we had made a decision," he says. "We were willing to give our lives right there for what we believed in."
The Wounded Knee occupation was a desperate attempt to grab the world's attention, they say.
"We were pushed to the limit of cultural survival. This was a statement we had a right to live as Indians," Means says.
And South Dakotans had a ringside seat.
Gov. Mike Rounds was a high school senior in Pierre at the time.
"I think people were very disturbed by the violence involved," he remembers.
In a philosophy class at South Dakota State University a few years later, Rounds was introduced to the classic narrative text about the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, "Black Elk Speaks." That added a level to his understanding of the 1973 event.
"I got to thinking that what happened at Wounded Knee was one more symptom of what we have suffered through in our state," he says.
Rounds carefully frames a thought that, while hurtful history should not be forgotten, both Indian and white South Dakotans should make a conscious decision to put away Wounded Knee in their contemporary dealings with each other.
"For me, I try to start over rather than talk about areas that are so sensitive or where we had people die because of the animosity in our races," Rounds says.
"I try to talk about where we go today, what we do today to get past the issues of hard feelings and rejection that have occurred in the past, both on the part of the white and Native American populations."
AIM Forms In Minnesota
In the beginning, AIM was a mainstream effort to improve the lot of Indians, envisioned by the larger world as residents of a homogenous, urban society where a red minority was just a different shade of white.
Banks and Clyde Bellecourt founded AIM in 1968 in Minneapolis to advocate for Indians against alleged abuses by police and courts.
In North Minneapolis "you could set your clock when the cops would come down Franklin Avenue with their paddy wagon to Bud's Bar. With their nightsticks, they'd force everyone out the back of the bar into the wagon," Banks says. He was arrested more than 30 times.
Soon after AIM's founding, Means traveled to Minnesota from Cleveland, where he was working as an accountant in the federally funded Council of Economic Opportunity, to meet the heads of the new group. He recalls Banks was wearing his hair short and parted to the side, Clyde Bellecourt had an even shorter haircut, and Means acknowledges he was wearing "my mod clothes at the time, my ascot ties, loafers."
While the AIM leaders were beginning to reclaim their cultural history, at Pine Ridge, dick Wilson, a plumbing contractor, already knew how to be an Indian. As tribal president, he was trying to bridge that culture to the white world, says his daughter, Saunie Wilson.
She says her father's reputation suffers in accounts of Wounded Knee. He is customarily cast as an oppressor of traditional Oglalas and a meddler who thwarted an early settlement to the standoff.
What is not portrayed, she says, is "the way he cared for the people, the positive change he brought.
"He was real instrumental in trying to establish Oglala Lakota College. He knew we couldn't be comfortable in colleges in the outside world," she says. "We needed something pertaining to who we were as an Indian culture."
dick Wilson died in 1990.
His daughter was a college student in New Mexico in 1973. She moved back to South Dakota after the Wounded Knee occupation and lived on the Pine Ridge Reservation during the subsequent years of bloodshed, made infamous by the shooting deaths of Wounded Knee participants Anna Mae Aquash and Pedro Bissonette, FBI agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, and the arrest and murder conviction of Leonard Peltier.
Women Elders Were 'Warriors'
Accounts of Wounded Knee usually feature the men who took part. Oglala women elders were as important, Means says.
"Without Gladys Bissonette (Pedro Bissonette's aunt)and Ellen Moves Camp, this never would have happened. They are bigger heroes than Banks, myself, or anyone else in AIM," he says.
Clyde Bellecourt agrees.
At the two-day meeting at the Calico community hall leading up to the occupation, AIM compiled nearly 1,500 grievances against the BIA and the tribe.
As the meeting dragged, he says, Gladys Bissonette stood up, exasperated. "Haven't you heard enough?" she asked AIM leaders. "Go back to Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Los Angeles or Portland. We are going to stand here and be warriors."
"I was stunned by that confrontation with an elderly woman, wrinkles all over her face," Bellecourt says.
Oglala elders chose Wounded Knee instead of Pine Ridge for the occupation, says Means, because the spirits of the 1890 massacre victims would protect the occupiers.
Clyde Bellecourt says the decision was reached by elders and AIM leaders at a meeting the previous week at Cedar Pass.
"There was discussion of taking over the BIA," he says. "I thought that was foolish. We had already done that a few weeks before" in Washington, D.C.
The world had heard of the place because of the Dee Brown book, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," he says. "I threw out the idea of occupying land already belonging to us that had already been exploited."
Saunie Wilson believes Banks called her father from the BIA building in Washington, D.C. - which they took over in November - and said "we're coming to Pine Ridge to celebrate."
"He said, 'The hell you are.' That's what started this thing," she says.
Gun Battles Take Heavy Toll
For all the talk of camaraderie, the siege was also marked by the death of two occupiers and the paralysis of a federal agent.
Frank Clearwater was mortally wounded by a stray bullet in a firefight April 17.
After another vicious firefight April 27 - where marshals estimate they fired 6,550 rounds and occupiers 2,875 - Lawrence "Buddy" La Monte was killed. He was buried at Wounded Knee on May 6, two days before the occupation ended.
No federal agents were killed, but on March 26, Lloyd Grimm, a U.S. marshal from Nebraska, was paralyzed for life by a gunshot wound.
In the occupiers' camp, nothing changed after the deaths, Means says during a recent trip to the Wounded Knee Cemetery on a raw, blustery winter day.
On the hilltop where the cemetery looks out over the ruined village and the ground of the occupation, Means pauses from recounting the events of 1973 to spend a few moments kneeling at La Monte's grave.
"That was the cost of doing business," he says. "That's why we were here. Nobody was scared or ran off."
Means still owns a house and land at Porcupine, near Wounded Knee.
"There isn't a time I drive through here when I don't think about it," he says. "The passage of 30 years has saddened me. Our people have saddened me.
"We won. We won, and our people don't even celebrate the victory here. There were 600 arrests arising from Wounded Knee. There was not one conviction, not one plea on the original charge."
Occupation Story Is Seldom Told
Winners write history.
But little scholarly work and only slightly more popular history has been written about Wounded Knee.
"I find that appalling, to the point of genocide," Means says.
"We need filmmakers, writers, journalists," Vernon Bellecourt says, "because our history is not being told here. We need to tell it."
A logical choice to do so would seem to be Sherman Alexie.
AIM members and supporters march into Wounded Knee cemetery Feb. 28 during a celebration marking the anniversary of the 1973 occupation of the village of Wounded Knee. Some leaders call the standoff a watershed event in Indian-white relations but are disappointed so little has been written on the topic in history books. "I find that appalling to the point of genocide," AIM's Russell Means said recently.
The 36-year-old author, whose credits include "Reservation Blues" and "Smoke Signals," grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington.
He is a prominent interpreter of the contemporary Indian experience, who does not flinch from sardonic examination of issues such as racism, sexism, drug and alcohol abuse, and suicide.