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Winds of change blew with cyclone force across the UnitedStates
and across Indian country in the late 1960s and early 1970s.This
was the era when the most famous and infamous Red Power war-riors,
the American Indian Movement (AIM), had its heyday. Theseputatively
“new” Indians challenged five hundred years of colonialdomination
by fighting for a return to full sovereign status for
Nativenations, restoration of lands guaranteed by treaty, just
compensation forthe minerals exploited from reservations, and a
renaissance of Nativecultures. But it is important to say at the
outset that, despite its name,AIM was not the Indian movement, but
rather only one organizationamong many groups that formed a larger
movement. Many other im-portant Indian resistance groups preceded
AIM by many years, ran par-allel to AIM, and continued after AIM’s
rise and fall. AIM was far fromuniversally loved in Indian country.
To some they were true warriorsoffering a much-needed wake-up call.
To others they were arrogant,disrespectful of tradition, and much
too oriented toward white America.Their enemies admitted that AIM
had a flair for getting the attention ofthe mass media, and that
attention is the subject of this essay. Specifi-cally, I want to
examine how Hollywood has framed the AmericanIndian Movement in a
series of fiction films.
As I consider the strengths and weaknesses of movies about
AIMproduced in Hollywood, I will be drawing information about the
groupfrom various written sources, including primary documents,
memoirs,
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Old Cowboys, New IndiansHollywood Frames the American Indian
T. V. R e e d
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and histories, and from two documentary films, all of which
offer gen-erally better information than the fiction films. Indeed,
I would not rec-ommend any of the films as the best sources of
information aboutIndian radicalism. For that I would direct readers
especially to the pri-mary accounts given in Akwesasne Notes
(newsletter) and to the sec-ondary analysis given in the first
full-length history of the Red Powerera, Paul Chaat Smith and
Robert Warrior’s book Like a Hurricane.1 Butthe films are the most
widely circulated texts about AIM, the onesreaching the widest
audience of Indians and non-Indians. Thus it is im-portant to
examine what they have to say to folks who may not haveaccess to
other information on the Red Power era, especially youngpeople who
were not alive during the peak years of Indian radicalism inthe
sixties and seventies. My focus will be on three fiction films
thatdeal to one degree or another with the AIM, and I’ll talk about
each ofthem in order of release: Powwow Highway (1989),
Thunderheart (1992),and Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee
(1994).2 In addition to assessingand comparing each film’s
strengths and weaknesses as a representationof the nature and aims
of Indian radicalism, I will be asking some gen-eral questions
about the possibilities and limits of insurgent groups try-ing to
get messages across through mainstream media.
While there is a small but thriving independent Native
Americandocumentary and fiction film community, no breakthrough to
the main-stream has occurred such as that achieved to one degree or
another byAfrican-American, Latino, and Asian-American filmmakers.3
Racismand extremely high production costs have so far kept
Hollywood-stylefilms largely beyond the control of the economically
poorest popula-tion in North America. This means that the filmed
stories about AIMdo not emerge directly out of the movement’s
culture or even out of theNative community. AIM activists were
involved to one degree or an-other in each of the three narrative
films I’ll discuss, but in none didthey have anything approaching
full control of the final cinematicproduct. Given this fact, what
occurred were various attempts by AIMmembers to influence a
movie-making process in the hands of mostlysympathetic but
culturally and politically limited white outsiders whowere at best
translating movement ideas and values, sometimes well,more often
poorly. And these outsiders, mostly from that mythical landcalled
Hollywood, were attempting this translation within a
mediumsaturated with a history of racial stereotyping totally at
odds with thegoals of the Indian movement. The AIM activists were
trying to gettheir message out to a wider public whose political
unconscious is, likethat of the filmmakers, deeply shaped by the
“cowboy and Indian” con-ventions of the Hollywood western. To
further complicate this wholepicture, I want to suggest that the
real AIM activists and their real-lifeopponents to a certain extent
were acting out their own internalizedHollywood scripts from the
beginning of the movement. And as we’ll
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see, from the start, for better and for worse, AIM was engaged
in a battleover control of its mass-mediated image.
I N G I N D I A N S I N N E W D I R E C T I O N S
Before AIM was founded in Minneapolis in July 1968, with early
leader-ship provided by Anishinaabe organizers like Dennis Banks,
ClydeBellecourt, and Mary Wilson, the leaders considered another
name forthe group. They were originally going to call themselves
ConcernedIndians of America. And while the acronym CIA certainly
would havebeen a resonant one, the choice of “American Indian
Movement” says agood deal about the genius and the presumptuousness
of the group.Many observers and writers, including, most recently,
Robert Warriorand Paul Chaat Smith, stress the sense of drama and
the orientationtoward the mass media that was both AIM’s strength
and its weakness.Warrior and Smith summarize the dramatic flair
already apparent inAIM’s self-naming:
[The name was] [p]erfect because it suggested action,purpose,
and forward motion. Perfect because it was big,transcending the
lesser world of committees and associa-tions and congresses and
councils. Organizations hadrecording secretaries and annual
dinners. Movementschanged history. The initials—A-I-M—underscored
allof that, creating an active verb rich in power and imagery.You
aimed at a target. You could aim for victory, for free-dom, for
justice. You could also, defiantly, never aim toplease. Written
vertically and stylized a bit, the acronymbecame an arrow.
(127)
Though they don’t say it here, it is clear from the rest of the
book thatSmith and Warrior also recognized that the name was more
than alittle bit arrogant. Imagine what would have happened if the
BlackPanther Party had tried to name itself the Black Power
Movement, or ifthe Brown Berets had called themselves the Chicano
Movement. AIM’sbold naming and equally bold actions certainly got
it the attention itwanted, but in the process it did a disservice
to those Indian resistorswho came before it and those alongside
whom it struggled in the 1960sand 1970s.
After initially focusing on providing various daily-life
services toMinneapolis Indians and in working against widespread
brutality againstIndians by policing the police in a style inspired
by the Black Panther’scampaign against police brutality, AIM
extended its work to actionsin white-dominated towns like Custer,
South Dakota, that borderednearby reservations. In such towns
Indians were routinely beaten, and
A I M
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sometimes killed, by local racist ranchers (an encounter with
“real”cowboys that set a tone for later encounters). AIM
successfully inter-vened in several of these disputes, forcing
local law enforcement to workthe cases and serving notice that
Indians would not take such abuse anymore. It was largely these
actions that first built up an AIM followingon the reservations.
But it was AIM’s penchant for dramatic mediaevents staged at sites
of traditional, nationalist white power that spreadthe word of
their brash style. For example, at Plymouth Rock, Massa-chusetts,
AIM held an action challenging the Thanksgiving myth, of-fering
evidence that white settlers were in fact giving thanks for a
re-cent triumph in massacring New England Indians. A similar action
wasstaged at Mount Rushmore, symbol of white desecration of the
sacredBlack Hills. Such well-publicized actions sparked AIM
chapters allover the country, some totally unknown to the central
leadership.
AIM also played an important role, along with numerous
otherIndian activist groups, in the Trail of Broken Treaties car
caravan thatcrossed the country from west to east in 1972. The
caravan pickedup various tribal contingents along the way and
stopped at key sitesrepresenting the continuing impact of two
hundred years of treatiesbroken by the U.S. government. The Trail
of Broken Treaties ended inWashington, D.C., with an unplanned
occupation of the Bureau ofIndian Affairs office. AIM members and
others, with help from FBIprovocateurs, sacked BIA headquarters,
destroying and stealing docu-ments and other government property.
The trashing split the Indiancommunity deeply, greatly increased
the fame of AIM, and upped theante of FBI surveillance and
counterattacks against them. Whatever itslimits as an action, the
BIA trashing had great symbolic power to manyyoung Indians who had
felt themselves being trashed by Washingtonbureaucrats their whole
lives. And to a nation whose most popular cur-rently circulating
image of Native Americans was Indian actor “IronEyes” Cody weeping
in a television commercial against littering, theimage of young
Indian warriors littering the BIA building with the bu-reaucratic
detritus of two hundred years of broken promises was
surelystartling.
But all this was soon overshadowed by AIM’s most (in)famousand
dramatic action, the two-and-a-half-month armed standoff with
lawenforcement during the Indian occupation of the village of
WoundedKnee, South Dakota, in spring 1973. This AIM-led siege is
the eventmost often referred to in all three films, and it amply
illustrates mypoint about the entwining of cinematic images and
real life AIM ac-tions. The occupation started after AIM was
invited by elders onto theOglala reservation to help them in
ousting allegedly corrupt triballeader Richard “Dickie” Wilson. The
village of Wounded Knee was aresonant stage for the action, given
its proximity to the site of the lastgreat massacre of Indians by
the U.S. Cavalry, the site where three
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hundred undefended men, women, and children were slaughtered
in1890.4 Ostensibly, the second battle at Wounded Knee, which, in
aneerie echo of the first, involved about three hundred Indian
resistors,was about wresting tribal governance away from
U.S.-government-backed Oglala leader Wilson and returning it to a
sovereign OglalaNation. But beyond the local dispute, this was
clearly a symbolic battleto reassert the sovereignty of all Indian
nations once guaranteed bygovernment treaties.
While real bullets were exchanged, and two Indians died in
thecourse of the action, the war by guerrilla tactics was less
importantthan the war by guerrilla theater. There is more than a
little evidence tosuggest that the Wounded Knee occupation included
much “acting”and “staging” by participants from all sides. Robert
Warrior and PaulChaat Smith follow many others in observing that
the AIM actions atWounded Knee can be seen as “a daring brand of
political theater.”Warrior and Smith make clear that “the Knee”
was, among otherthings, a self-conscious attempt to stage a media
event that could dra-matize claims about broken treaties,
continuing economic exploitationof American Indian lands, and an
unrepresentative, puppet Indian gov-ernment on the Pine Ridge
Reservation. The FBI and other governmentforces were equally
theatrical in their actions, and generally more suc-cessful at
manipulating the media. For example, they banned the mediainitially
from any coverage, restricted media access throughout the
oc-cupation, and threatened to arrest progressive press
representativeswho offered sympathetic accounts from inside the AIM
compound.
Comments from the activists and journalists on the scene at
thebattle of Wounded Knee in 1973 also draw attention to the role
theHollywood imagination played in the action. Indeed, it would be
hardto imagine how this could not be the case to some extent, since
there areno groups more powerfully mythologized by U.S. popular
culture thancowboys and Indians. Journalistic accounts of AIM/FBI
encounters atWounded Knee reflect this mediation, and even if they
had not, it seemslikely that those accounts would have been
interpreted in part throughreception mechanisms shaped by years of
cinematic and televisual im-ages. AIM member John Trudell, for
example, has commented that “[if]FBI agents that grew up watching
John Wayne and cowboys and Indianscome out here and want to play
cowboys and Indians, then they gottasuffer the consequences, just
as we do.” In speaking like this, Trudell re-veals the extent to
which he and his compatriots were also playing outthe cowboy and
Indian script. And that script was further encouraged bythe
mainstream media. For example, one journalist on the scene
atWounded Knee recalls that correspondents “wrote good cowboy
andIndian stories because that was what they thought the public
wanted.”5
If the occupation of Wounded Knee was a staged production,then
AIM leader Russell Means was surely its star. One Time magazine
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reporter recalls that Means could sometimes be seen directing
camerasand staging events for the media’s benefit.6 Means’s career
subsequentto the Wounded Knee siege is also suggestive in regard to
the role heplayed during the occupation. During the last decade
Means has ap-peared in a number of movies, most recently as the
voice of Powhatanin Disney’s travesty of the Pocahontas story.
Indeed, Means’s career hasled one cultural critic to invent a new
term for his social role. AmericanIndian studies scholar James
Stripes refers to Means as an “actorvist,” aterm that might fit
John Trudell, national leader of AIM in the late1970s, equally well
since he appeared in two of the fiction films I’ll dis-cuss and was
interviewed in both of the documentaries as well.7
Certainly a case can be made that the role of leader of AIM in
theearly 1970s was one that trained Russell Means well for a career
in “real”acting. More than one historian of the American Indian
Movement hasspoken of Means’s flair for the dramatic. During the
American Indianoccupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in
1972, for example,Means let himself be caught on camera using a
confiscated oil paintingportrait of then president Richard Nixon as
a shield while engagingpolice on the steps of the building. Means’s
“shades and braids” imagewas enough to get him not only more than
the fifteen minutes of fameAndy Warhol suggested all Americans
would soon have, but his por-trait done by Warhol himself. More
than one detractor in Indian coun-try has used such facts to
portray Means as more image than substance,and he was sometimes
accused of “impersonating” an Indian even dur-ing his AIM heyday,
partly because he spent relatively little time onthe reservation
while growing up.
But implying that these AIM actorvists “sold out” to Hollywood
orwere never real activists is too easy. Both Means and Trudell
remainvocal critics of Indian oppression, and both have claimed
that they areusing, not being used by, the mass media. As Russell
Means frames it,“I haven’t abandoned the movement for Hollywood.
I’ve broughtHollywood to the movement.”8 I partly agree, though I’d
rephrase it tosay that Hollywood, for better and for worse, was in
the movement fromthe beginning. In this sense, the fiction films
about AIM are a logical ex-tension of a process already at work in
AIM actions themselves. Thus, Ilook at the films as embodying a
struggle between the cultural frames of-fered by movement activists
and the cultural frames of the Hollywoodfilm, and I want to suggest
that at times those frames overlapped and in-teracted, fused and
confused, in a variety of different ways.
Perhaps the most unambiguously positive thing I can say about
thefilms in which AIM is represented is that Kevin Costner (also
known as“Dances with Wolves”) was not involved in any of them. On
the other
P O W W O W H I G H W A Y
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hand, similarly inclined movie mogul Indian wannabes were
involved.Ted Turner (aka “Used to Dance with Jane Fonda”) was
behind one ofthe films, Robert Redford (aka “Sundanced with Paul
Newman”) wasinvolved in another, and George Harrison of the Beatles
clan of theLiverpudlian nation produced a third. Whatever
limitations these filmshave, they are an advance over the Dances
with Wolves version of noblesavagery in one important respect—the
AIM films attempt to portrayliving American Indians. Costner’s
film, while arguably a slight improve-ment over the traditional
Hollywood western, reinscribes a contempo-rary version of the noble
savage myth that pervades U.S. culture in theform of nostalgia for
what “the Indian” allegedly was. Whether this takesthe form of
pseudo–vision quests in the so-called Men’s Movement, orthe various
New Age white women and men, who, as Native activistAndy Smith puts
it, claim to have been Indians in a past life in order tomake a
great deal of money in their present life through selling
traves-ties of American Indian spirituality, or just liberal guilt
about what “thewhite man” did to the Indians in “the past,” the
sentiments seldom ex-tend in any significant way to concern about
the hideous injustices thatcontinue to be heaped upon Native
peoples in the United States today.In Hollywood, the only really
good Indian is still the dead Indian. TheAIM films, whatever their
flaws, are at least among the very few main-stream productions that
even attempt to make visible the generally“disappeared” lives of
Indians in contemporary America.
Powwow Highway, bankrolled by George Harrison, was an
inde-pendent film that managed to gain something of a mainstream
audi-ence, especially via television and video. As arguably the
first widelycirculated attempt to present something of the
contemporary lives ofAmerican Indians on celluloid, its relatively
low-budget and low-techfeel in some ways equip it better than the
other two glossier films toconvey the low-budget, low-tech lives of
most Indians today. At itsbest, Powwow Highway gives a complex
sense of some of the intricatestruggles between tradition and
modernity faced by descendants ofFirst Nations and captures a
certain casual resistance to white ways thatpeople in Indian
country identify as living on “Indian time.” At othermoments the
film seems little more than a buddy film, a kind of “On theRoad”
Indian-style. Indeed, when the highbrow TV network Bravoscreened
Powwow Highway, they characterized it as “an off-beat roadmovie,”
evoking visions of Jack Kerouac in braids, or worse still, Bingand
Bob on the road to Pine Ridge. The film is based on the novel ofthe
same title by David Seals who, as I will discuss later, came to
disso-ciate himself from the movie.9
The central protagonists are Philbert Bono, a seemingly
none-too-bright, gentle, three-hundred-pound Cheyenne who fancies
him-self a spiritual warrior and refers to his beat-up old car as
his “pony,” andPhilbert’s pal Buddy Red Bow. Buddy is a former AIM
activist, veteran
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of Vietnam and Wounded Knee, and a still angry fighter against
federal/corporate corruption and exploitation of the reservation.
Clearly thefriendship between the two male leads is weighted with
symbolicvalue. They embody a complicated play between Indian
spiritual tradi-tionalism and modern militancy that was part of
AIM’s history.
When Philbert attempts to get elder wisdom from his great
aunt,she laughs derisively at him and tells him she is sick of
young Indianslooking for some magic in the past. Undaunted Philbert
begins to cobbletogether bits of traditional “medicine,” filtered
through the distortedlens of white Indian fantasy. Much as Leslie
Silko shows in her Storytellerthat traditional rituals have always
changed to meet needs of the pres-ent, rather than being lodged in
an impossible-to-return-to past, PowwowHighway suggests that
contemporary Indian survival will blend respectfor the past with
wild improvisation, making do with the impure toolsof the present
(as when Philbert leaves a candy bar as an offering to
hisancestors).
We first meet Buddy in a powerful scene in which he challenges
aslick presentation to the Cheyenne tribal council by a sell-out
Indian“apple” (red on the outside, white on the inside) working for
a miningcorporation that hopes to further exploit the tribe’s
mineral wealth.Buddy eloquently rattles off statistics on Indian
poverty and comparesthe rosy promises of the corporation to
hundreds of nice-soundingtreaties signed and ignored by the U.S.
government for hundreds ofyears. He ends his speech by rejecting
the mineral rights colonialismbeing offered as a chance at the
American dream, noting that Indiancountry “isn’t America. This
here’s the Third World.”
When Buddy’s sister is busted for drugs in New Mexico on
whatturns out to be an FBI-directed frame-up used to get Buddy off
the “rez”in order to push through the uranium deal, he teams up
with Philbert,the only person he knows with a car. The plot
meanders as the twotravel none-too-directly from Montana to New
Mexico to help getBuddy’s sister out of jail. The evolving plot
includes a slight mellowingof Buddy’s anger in the face of
Philbert’s gentle but strong faith in hispartly improvised
spiritual tradition. In this the plot resembles the in-creasing
commitment to traditional spirituality that AIM underwent asit
evolved.
The most direct treatment of AIM occurs in the middle portionof
the film when Philbert, following the powwow highway rather thanthe
most efficient route to New Mexico, diverts his trusty Buick
pony“Protector” to Pine Ridge, South Dakota. There Buddy meets up
withsome of his old comrades from the Wounded Knee siege. When he
ar-rives, his friends tell Buddy of the terror still being waged
against AIMsympathizers on Pine Ridge; “a shooting every day” one
of them re-marks. This is hardly an exaggeration, given the fact
that close to sev-enty AIM members and sympathizers were murdered
or died under
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mysterious circumstances in the three-year period following
WoundedKnee. Most of these unsolved deaths have been attributed by
scholarsto AIM’s prime enemy, conservative tribal chairman Richard
Wilsonand his vigilante “goon squad,” actively or passively abetted
by the FBI.
In Powwow Highway, Buddy has a brief encounter with the leaderof
the goon squads who have been harassing his friends. He
publiclybacks the goon down at a powwow, with the aid of a knife
thrown as awarning by a war buddy suffering from post-traumatic
stress disorder.This is an important moment because an unusually
large number of AIMmembers were in fact Vietnam vets who had
concluded that they hadbeen fighting against the wrong government.
They turned their deepanger and their military skills to the
service of Indian war against theU.S. government and its tribal
puppets, and in so doing they broughtthe war in Vietnam home in
ways that deeply shaped Indian radicalism.
The morning after the powwow, Buddy and Philbert give a rideto a
couple of friends who’ve been under siege from the goons, drop-ping
them off in a suburban tract house. The subplot here involvesBuddy
claiming that they have sold out, and his friend replying thatBuddy
hasn’t been living under the constant threats he and his wifehave
been enduring. A kind of respectful standoff is achieved, in
whichBuddy’s ongoing militancy is given greater weight without
condemn-ing the difficult choice made by his friend. I read this as
a kind of rec-onciliation narrative working within the orbit of
AIM, where manysuch difficult choices were being made in the years
following the inter-nal struggles and savage repression by the FBI
and other authoritiesthat followed in the wake of Wounded Knee.
The remainder of Powwow Highway never discusses AIM directly,but
we do see the FBI’s involvement in framing Buddy’s sister as a
clearindication of the continuing collusion between the federal
governmentand corporations in exploiting mineral rights on Indian
lands, one ofthe key themes of AIM’s position.
The climactic event of the film suggests a complicated play
ofmedia frames. Philbert, with the aid of powerful medicine he
gathersalong the powwow highway, springs Buddy’s sister from jail
Old Weststyle by pulling out the bars of her cell with his Buick
pony’s horse-power. Philbert’s inspiration for this Indian
liberation moment camewhile watching an old western on TV. The
scene suggests that Indianresistance will require a combination of
turning white mass-media cul-ture against itself, Philbert’s
traditional tribal magic, and Buddy’s AIM-inspired militancy.
The final scene of the movie, immediately following the jail
break,also helps to undermine the “buddy movie” quality somewhat.
We seePhilbert, his pony aflame at the end of a car chase with the
police,walking down the road alongside Buddy, Buddy’s sister and
her twokids, and a white girlfriend who had helped with the escape.
In the
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background is the pragmatic Cheyenne tribal chairman whose faith
inthe more ideologically aggressive Buddy had led him to assist the
warparty from a distance. The ending is a utopian one, suggesting
thatforces separating AIM-style militancy from existing tribal
governments,Indians from whites, men from women, can be easily
transcended. Itseems at best only a magical resolution, a fantasy
projection rooted asmuch in New Age white imaginations as in
serious Indian resistance.
While the film has its moments, reading reviews from
Euro-American critics suggests that much of the subversive
potential of thefilm is recontained for a white audience because
the AIM material isgiven too little context, and either the
harmless buddy film or a feel-good-about-Indians, New Age,
spiritual reading predominates. Turningto Native reactions, reviews
and personal accounts suggest that PowwowHighway was received with
mixed feelings in Indian country. On the onehand, it seems to have
been received with a certain amount of apprecia-tion that living,
breathing rez Indians were portrayed on screen at all.On the other
hand, there was a sense of disappointment that a ratherwhite-washed
and superficial portrait emerges. Several reactions, in-cluding
that of author Seals, discuss the way in which the film
sanitizesthe book, making the Indians too good, as if merely
switching black hatsfor white could undo the limits of the cowboy
and Indian formula. Thenovel’s Indians are far more ambiguously
depicted, with real human flaws(Buddy’s sister, for example, is not
just a victim of an FBI frame-up butreally is dealing drugs).
Seals’s response includes having the film appearbriefly as a
spectral character in his novelistic sequel to Powwow Highway,Sweet
Medicine, in order to underscore the movie’s differences from
hisnovel. Clearly, Powwow Highway broke some new ground in
Hollywoodcinema, but ultimately it veers away from tough
questions.
The second of our films, Thunderheart, was directed by British
filmmakerMichael Apted. In the same year he made Thunderheart,
1992, Aptedalso directed one of the documentaries about AIM,
Incident at Oglala, aneffort paid for by the aforementioned
“Sundance” Redford. Like Incidentat Oglala, which deals with the
case of Leonard Peltier’s alleged in-volvement in the murder of two
FBI agents in 1976, Thunderheart ’sfictional story is a thinly
veiled effort to deal with the period of AIMactivity after its
apogee at Wounded Knee had passed. The film openswith the following
words on the screen: “This film was inspired byevents that took
place on several Indian reservations during the 1970s.”This would
seem to be at once a claim for realism and a disclaimer,probably
aimed at Justice Department lawyers. “Inspired by,” after all,would
seem to leave enough room to claim poetic license in the eventthat
the FBI should take exception to being portrayed in the film as
T H U N D E R H E A R T
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conspiring to commit murder, obstruct justice, and collude with
pri-vate corporations to steal uranium-rich Indian lands. But as
added in-surance, the director also changes the name of AIM in the
film to ARM,the Aboriginal Rights Movement. It also changes the
name of the FBIin the film but in quite a different way.
The FBI’s name changes are made by a character in the filmnamed
Crow Foot, a local Oglala cop whose skills make him a kind ofcross
between a Hollywood Indian scout and Sherlock Holmes. Playedwith
brilliant humor by Graham Greene, Crow Foot makes a seriesof
revisionist readings on the most famous initials in American
lawenforcement—from the Federal Bureau of Intimidation to the
FederalBureau of Interpretation (here stressing the fictive
dimension of interpre-tation), until finally another Indian points
out that on the rez FBI standsfor Full Blooded Indian. This
progression from intimidator to inter-preter to Indian also marks
the progress of the central character in thefilm, an FBI agent
played by Val Kilmer. Kilmer’s character is namedRay Levoi, a naive
young agent who has an American Indian heritagethat he has deeply
and successfully buried, at least until he arrives onthe
reservation. He is sent there as a token Indian to help
legitimatethe FBI’s attempt to round up an AIM/ARM member they
claim mur-dered another Indian. The ARM activist is played by AIM
actorvistJohn Trudell.
The rather predictable plot revolves around the gradual
re-Indianization of Kilmer’s FBI character as he is at once seduced
by thepowers of ARM’s tribal elder medicine man, played by Ted Thin
Elk,and appalled to find evidence of an FBI plot to frame the ARM
activistand abet the sale of uranium-rich lands. Thunderheart, like
PowwowHighway before it, rightly draws attention to the deadly
effects, botheconomically and through water contamination, that
illegal miningpractices have brought to Pine Ridge and other
reservations.
One key scene in the film momentarily shatters the
Hollywoodframe that dominates this film more than the other two. It
occurs whenTrudell, playing James Looks Twice, is arrested by
Kilmer and his hard-nosed FBI boss played with aptly laconic
flatness by Sam Shepard.Kilmer’s character refers to Trudell as a
militant, to which he replies,“I’m not a militant, I’m a warrior.”
Shepard’s character retorts, “Yeah,and I’m John Wayne.” Trudell
follows up with a quick speech as fol-lows: “[I’m p]art of a
five-hundred-year resistance. Deep voices thathave to be heard. You
can kill us but you can’t break our spirit.” Thesewords closely
echo ones Trudell has made in his AIM speeches, and itprobably
matters little to this analysis whether he gave them to or gotthem
from the movie script (though I think it likely was the former).The
effect is a momentary crack in the film’s melodrama.
As in Powwow Highway, there is a strong theme of connection
be-tween tradition, spirituality, and warriorhood. In the real-life
history of
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AIM, such a connection was often the goal, though not one
alwaysachieved. But accounts of the involvement of Sioux elders in
the deci-sion to make a stand with AIM at Wounded Knee suggest that
that eventmay in fact have done much to solidify a bond between the
mostly urbanIndians of AIM and spiritual traditionalists that is
one of the most impor-tant legacies of the AIM era (even though
AIM’s often vague pan-Indianism paid too little attention to
particular tribal cultural histories).
But no account I know of says anything about a turncoat FBIagent
playing a role in any of this. And that is surely among the
mostdisappointing elements of Thunderheart. Just as the film
Mississippi Burningundercuts its important retelling of the history
of Freedom Summer bymaking the FBI, which did so much to try to
destroy the Civil Rightsmovement, a hero in the film, Thunderheart
’s use of this turncoat FBIagent turns it at points into a
ridiculous Mississippi Burning Goes West. Butat least in this case
the Indian FBI agent is used as a device to expose theFBI, not to
make the bureau the unsung hero of another movement itdid so much
to try to destroy.
In Thunderheart the device may in fact work to some extent to
lurein the unsympathetic audience member who might initially
identifywith the FBI position, given its prominence in hegemonic
Americanismgenerally and its reported role in saving the world from
wild militantIndian criminals like AIM. But the cost of the device
is to underminethe film in many other ways and turn it in some
absurd Hollywood di-rections. Kilmer’s character is revealed to be
a descendent of Thunder-heart, a medicine man killed at the
original massacre at Wounded Kneein 1890. A kind of blood
essentialism perversely combines with a pa-ternalistic suggestion
that only a hero from the outside, trained in thewhite world, can
rescue the Indian nations.
This plot line severely undermines the political pull of the
filmand particularly undermines the movement dimension. Too little
senseof even symbolic collectivity is suggested around ARM in the
movie,and what sense of Indian community there is in the film is
underminedby an incongruous ending in which Kilmer’s character
heads out downthe road as if this were just one in a series of
adventures. In a seriousconfusion of the cowboy and Indian plot,
the movie ends with the FBIIndian “riding” off into the sunset
alone, cowboy style. The film thusends on a rather hazy, nostalgic
moment that locks Indian activism in amore recent past as surely as
Dances with Wolves locks Indian cultures inthe nineteenth
century.
The third and final film I want to examine is Lakota Woman:
Siege atWounded Knee, a Ted Turner–Jane Fonda coproduction
originally shownon television and then released to video stores.
The film is based on a
L A K O T A W O M A N : S I E G E A T W O U N D E D K N E E
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controversial (auto)biography of AIM activist Mary Crow Dog “as
toldto” Richard Erdoes.10 The book is controversial for a number of
rea-sons, including the question of who “really” wrote it, its
sympathetictreatment of AIM, and its long-time failure to find a
publisher. This lat-ter point is of interest because the reason
given for the initial failure inthe late 1970s for the book to find
a publisher was in effect that Indianswere no longer fashionable.
This raises the question of why they be-came “fashionable” once
again in the late 1980s and early 1990s whenall these films were
produced. One partial answer, which probably miti-gates the effects
of all the movies, is a pervasive capacity of Americanculture to
nostalgize any topic, even one as initially disturbing as theRed
Power movement. In this case one might speculate that this
generalnostalgia might have been augmented by the particular
nostalgia of Ms.Fonda, who had assisted in airlifting supplies to
the Wounded Knee en-campment during her more radical, but less
aerobically sound, youth.
In any event, the passage of time between the original events
andtheir filmic reenactment surely works to the advantage of the
cowboysin this story, since in the intervening years they viciously
suppressedthe American Indian Movement, using the goon squads when
neces-sary, disinformation campaigns at every opportunity, and the
court sys-tem continuously. The general strategy was to use
trumped-up chargesthat were later dropped after they had done their
damage of keepingkey figures tied up in legal battles and movement
coffers directed to-ward legal fees rather than organizing.
Sometimes the government hadgreater success in actually framing and
incarcerating individuals likeLeonard Peltier. Though 92 percent of
cases that made it to trial werewon by AIM, the costs in money,
time, jail time while awaiting trial,and movement energy were
devastating. While AIM continues to existto this day, the movement
never recovered from this assault.
With those limitations in mind, it is possible to say that
LakotaWoman is the most complete, and in most respects the best, of
the AIMfiction films done so far. Much of the credit must go to the
original ma-terial, since Mary Crow Dog was for a time at the very
heart of AIM,and she provided a lucid and compelling story for
Erdoes and later thefilmmakers to work with. Another key element is
the fact that the storyis told from the point of view of an Indian
woman. One of the least ad-mirable aspects of AIM, in my judgment,
is a tendency toward mas-culinist posturing that Mary Crow Dog does
a nice job of puncturingfrom time to time in both the book and the
film. I read that posturing asin part a product of the Hollywood
script in which warriorhood was al-ways just about armed
confrontation, rather than about building andprotecting community
by many means. Putting Mary Crow Dog at thecenter decenters the
cowboy and Indian dynamic considerably. It isalso important because
women have played and continue to play keyleadership roles in many
parts of Native cultures, and they certainly
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played crucial roles in AIM. The film gets right, for example,
the factthat traditional women of Pine Ridge played a particularly
strong rolein pushing to invite AIM to take up the occupation at
Wounded Knee.And when a male leader suggests in the film that women
leave theencampment, Mary and the other women present give a
resoundingresponse that could be summed up as hell, no. More
generally, a femalecenter is important because, as in most
movements of the era, womenin AIM did much of the real organizing
work while too often maleleaders took starring roles in the
spotlights. Those starring roles, how-ever, also meant that it was
disproportionately the men who endedup in jail. Eventually women in
AIM formed their own organization,WARN (Women of All Red Nations),
which supported the men of AIMbut recognized the need (and the
traditional right) of women to formseparate groups. WARN remains
today an important Native resistanceorganization.
The Mary Crow Dog figure in the film, played by Irene
Bedard(later to be the voice of Pocahontas in Disney’s animated
film), is alsoused to illustrate the ambivalence in AIM about the
use of violence.While the women in the film are portrayed as every
bit as militant asthe men, they don’t fetishize guns. On the one
hand, the promos forthe television presentation of the film seem to
play up Mary’s womanwarrior stance by picturing her peering through
the scope of a rifle.On the other hand, in the movie itself we
learn that when she peersthrough that scope and gets a government
soldier in her crosshairs, sheacknowledges his humanity and doesn’t
pull the trigger. That is for mean important moment because,
looking back on the radicalism of the1960s and 1970s, it is clear
that the FBI cowboys tried to provoke vio-lence as often as
possible in order to discredit movements. Dismissingmovements as
“violent” and “extremist” has long been a way for thegovernment to
avoid confronting the issues radical movements raise.In the case of
AIM, while the government wanted to avoid a secondWounded Knee
massacre, they were pleased whenever they helped thewarriors live
up to a violent, criminal “renegade” image they and themedia had
crafted for them. While AIM’s official stance was always oneof
violence only in self-defense, that proved a difficult distinction
tomake, as it had been for the Black Panthers, and was made more
diffi-cult by law enforcement infiltrators who joined AIM often for
the ex-press purpose of pushing for more violent actions.
Mary Crow Dog’s involvement with AIM becomes the center ofthe
film even more so than in the book, and the movie gives a far
moredetailed portrait of the spirit, ideas, and goals of AIM than
any otherfilm, including the two documentaries. The film is also
careful to makeclear at the beginning that it is only the story of
“Mary Brave Woman[as she was named after she gave birth inside the
encampment duringthe siege]—this is how she saw it.” While this
may, again, have been
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written partly as a legal disclaimer, it also plays the
important role ofmaking it clear that this is a partial portrait,
not a definitive one. Fol-lowing these opening printed words, the
film segues quickly to scenesof the Pine Ridge landscape, as Mary’s
voice-over tells us that this is thestory of how she “finds her
soul.” She says modestly that it is “only alittle story” compared
to that of Crazy Horse and other great warriors,but it is hers.
The film is good at giving a quick but textured sense of the
back-ground that led Mary and many Indians like her to join the
move-ment. An early scene contrasts her material poverty with a
sense of thestrength of family in Native communities. Mary
narrates, “We werepoor, but I didn’t know it, and we had love and
respect.” The story of thefirst Wounded Knee massacre is also told
as both a tribal and a familyaffair through Mary’s grandfather, who
had witnessed it. This sceneof military genocide is soon followed
by attempted cultural genocideas symbolized by Mary’s Indian braids
being cut off in a repressiveChristian boarding school that
systematically goes about trying toerase her cultural heritage, as
such schools have tried to do for manygenerations. We also get
glimpses of her teenage years that can perhapsmost aptly be
described as aimless. We get statistical information on thepoverty
and unemployment rates on the reservation that contextualizeswhat
in the other films is too often mere background (though both ofthe
other fiction films make remarks about the rez as part of “the
ThirdWorld”). Mary and her friends court and in one case meet death
indrunken car chase games. One of the documentary films, “The
Spirit ofCrazy Horse,” reads alcoholism as a resistance to the life
imposed onIndians by the dominant culture, and while that view is
not made ex-plicit in Lakota Woman, it is clear that Mary redirects
some of the recklessenergy and anger at what has become of her
people under white domi-nation into the more creative and active
response of working with AIM.
Her involvement is also portrayed fairly carefully as
developingin stages, rather than through some flash of conversion
as too oftenhappens in films about radicals. There is an amusing
scene in which shefirst learns about radical Indian activism from
an alterNative newspapergiven her by a young “hippie chick” clearly
thrilled to be talking to areal live Indian. Later she gets a more
direct lesson in the movementwhile in jail after one of her drunken
adventures, and she graduallydrifts into movement circles. A male
inmate gives her the gist of AIMphilosophy as follows: “We light
the spark, we’re gonna take it all back,and then we’re gonna set it
free.”
Bedard as Crow Dog offers voice-over narration that allows for
afair amount of discursive development of AIM views and
contextuali-zations that provide useful information for the
audience as the filmmoves rather quickly through most of the major
events in the evolu-tion of AIM. It begins with their intervention
into border town killings
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that first established AIM as a force in the Dakotas. The
uprisingaround the murder of Wesley Bad Heart Bull in Custer, South
Dakota,which solidified AIM’s reputation, is staged carefully. The
narrator tellsus that Bad Heart Bull’s mother was given three to
five years for al-legedly inciting the courthouse riot, while the
murderer was set free.
The Mount Rushmore action, where an AIM activist
humorouslyremarks that “We reclaim this piece of bad art in the
name of theLakota people,” is also touched upon. Crow Dog’s
narration adds thatwhile “we had no magic to restore the mountain,”
the FBI acted likethey believed we might and proceeded to brutalize
the protesters.Another scene raises the important issue of
archeological desecration,again with a touch of humor at the
expense of white presumptuous-ness. AIM activists approach a dig
overseen by a professor surroundedby graduate students and ask the
befuddled prof, “Where’s your grand-mother buried? We want to dig
her up and put her in our museum.”When the archeologist asks, “Who
are you people?” the activists reply,“We are walking scientific
specimens. We are quaint tourist attractions.We are living fossils.
We are your conscience, if you have one.”
When the film turns to the siege at Wounded Knee, which takesup
most of the second half, the effort to achieve accuracy is clear.
Weget scenes of speeches by Russell Means (played by Lawrence
Bayne)that give the spirit, if not always the specific content of
AIM ideology.We also get a sense of how the urban members of AIM
became ac-quainted with and influenced by traditional elders on the
reservations.The fact that some of the conservatives among the
traditionals op-posed AIM is also acknowledged, at least in
passing, and one asks aquestion frequently directed at AIM—will
these outside guys be herewhen the smoke clears? And in the meeting
in which the decision togo to Wounded Knee is made, it is
accurately women who take thestrongest stance.
Leonard Crow Dog, the young Lakota medicine man who be-came a
spiritual advisor to AIM and whom Mary marries after WoundedKnee,
has a central role in the latter part of the film. Lakota
spiritualityand its relation to AIM work is handled with some care
and without theheavy-handedness found in the New Ager’s rip-off
version. Whilesome have argued that any depiction of Native
spirituality is a sacri-lege, Lakota spiritual advisors were hired
to assure sensitive handlingof the ritual scenes, and humor was
used to fight against Hollywoodmedicine man stereotypes. For
example, one elder remarks that “fatherpeyote” will lead AIM back
“into the spirit world . . . where we’ll talkabout the great
mysteries of life, like where the sunglasses go when youlose them.”
(This is perhaps also a gentle slap at the “shades and braids”image
of the male AIMsters.)
The battle with the forces of Dickie Wilson (played with
nicelyicy power by August Schellenberg) is also trenchantly
portrayed. Direct
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quotes from Wilson’s press conferences, including his famous
threat tocut off Russell Means’s braids, give a sense of his
growing frustrationwith challenges to his paternalistic authority
at Pine Ridge. More seri-ously, Wilson’s campaign to wipe out AIM
is referred to appropriatelyas a “reign of terror,” and his
collusion with white vigilante cowboys inaddition to the federal
marshal cowboys is clearly represented. In onescene, in fact, we
overhear putative law enforcers relishing the fact thatfighting
Indians is giving them a chance to be “real” cowboys. And an-other
scene stresses that, as in the past, most of the firepower is on
theside of the cowboy cavalry. FBI training of Wilson’s goons to
use auto-matic weapons and details of the far greater firepower of
the cowboys,including two armored personnel carriers, is carefully
documented, asit was not by, for example, the original coverage in
the New York Times.
The presence and limited understanding of events provided bythe
media is also thematized. Mary notes that they “loved our
Indianuprising” but suggests their focus on the cowboy-Indian
dimensions ig-nored the subtantive issues and that they quickly
grew tired unless newdramas were produced (a fact that may account
for those events thereal Russell Means allegedly staged). When Mary
herself is asked byreporters to explain the meaning of the siege,
she at first tries to deferto the male spokesmen, but then offers
her own answer. She liststhe names of various tribes—Mohawk,
Nisqually, Ojibwe, Cheyenne,among many others—whose members had
come together at WoundedKnee. To illustrate what this means, she
holds up her hand, fingersspread, then brings the fingers together
into a tightly clenched fist. Butrather than digging deeper into
the meaning of her gesture, the mediajust asks her repeatedly to
reenact it. In another scene, the RussellMeans character chastises
the press for not doing the background worknecessary to understand
what the occupiers were fighting for. LaterDennis Banks and Means
address the issue of violence as raised by a re-porter. Banks says,
“The history of AIM is one of action, not violence.”When a
follow-up question asks about the guns in the AIM compound,Means
makes a plea of self-defense by reeling off the names of
Indiansmurdered in recent months, linking the deaths to a
centuries-old tradi-tion of Indian killing.
There are a number of other points I could detail in which
docu-mentary-style information about the Wounded Knee events and
itssurrounding context are given. And one could also point out a
numberof inaccuracies and distortions in details, most attributable
to poetic li-cense. But I want to close out my discussion of the
film with a couple ofremarks about a different dimension of the
film, its portrayal of theethos of the AIM encampment. One of the
most profound aspects ofcollective, social movement action, at
least from my experience, is thefeeling political theorist Hannah
Arendt referred to as “public hap-piness,” the sense of
exhilaration that comes when one throws one’s
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whole being into a principled cause. This feeling is seldom
captured infilm with its bias toward individualized storytelling.
But a sense of com-munity, so much a part of Native nations as well
as social movementcultures, is conveyed relatively well in the film
and summed up byMary’s remark that she never felt more free than
when inside theWounded Knee camp. That one can indeed feel most
“free” when in jailfor civil disobedience or when surrounded by
trigger-happy federalmarshals and FBI agents is a paradox of social
activism rarely portrayedin the mass media. The sense of the
encampment as a community, oneboth mundane and extraordinary, comes
through powerfully at points.While framed as one woman’s story, and
thus caught up to a certaindegree in Euro-American notions of
individuality, the film’s narrativemoves her toward collective
power and communal responsibility.
The film ends on a powerful note, one that attempts to fend
offthe nostalgic move that might lock Indian resistance in the
past.Standing in front of the mass grave monument to the 1890
masscre atWounded Knee, Mary looks directly into the camera and
details theways in which the government lied in its negotiated
settlement of theoccupation, notes the role played by the media in
the action, thencounts off some of the assassinations that followed
in the wake of theoccupation, and the names of members still in
jail. “Once we put downour guns and the television and newspaper
reporters went home, the arrests began. They could say anything
they wanted. Whatever we said was gone in a cold Pine Ridge wind.
Nearly everything is gonenow. The government tried to extinguish
all signs that Indians oncemade their stand here. It will do them
no good because the world saw,the world heard. Even though in time
Annie Mae Aquash and PedroBissonette were murdered by goons. Even
though once again the gov-ernment lied and betrayed us. Even though
some of our leaders are stillin jail. In the end it will do them no
good at all to try to hide it becauseit happened. Today it is still
not ours, but tomorrow it might be be-cause of that long moment
those short years ago at Wounded Kneewhere we reached out and
touched our history. I was there. I saw it. Ithappened to me.” Then
in Lakota and English she adds, “So that ourpeople may live,” as
two Indian children run across the screen. Theending offers a
refusal to have the past erased, and a call to bring thewarrior
legacy into the future.
The ending is a powerful one, but it also solidifies for me a
feelingthat the film has been too perfect, too neat. The
too-perfect Indian-maiden beauty of Bedard herself seems to tie
together a film with toofew rough edges, too much Hollywood
idealism. The Indian resistorsare a bit too good to be true; the
black hats on Dick Wilson’s Indiancowboys fit a bit too tightly.
There is little sense of the internal strifethat wracked AIM,
little sense that some of the leaders had less puremotives and less
admirable characters than they are given in the film.
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Incarceration and Vietnam had deeply wounded many AIM
members,some of whom were unstable, not to say just plain crazy.
And, as I sug-gested above, the “shades and braids” corps gave in
more than once to avanity that did not serve the movement. In
addition, the film says fartoo little about the failure of AIM to
follow through in the aftermath ofits symbolic victories. In their
efforts toward sympathy, the filmmakerswhitewash AIM, make it too
purely a victim. By robbing them of theirhuman imperfections, they
ironically rob them of much of their humanagency.
But looking at Lakota Woman from the angle of production
ratherthan product suggests a different ending to the story of
Indian resis-tance through film. One of the more admirable facts
about LakotaWoman and one that, along with its woman-centered
story, no doubtaccounts for many of its strengths, is that the
filmmakers went to somelengths to hire not only Indian actors for
the film, but also Indian crewmembers and Indian consultants to
assure a degree of accuracy on sev-eral levels. In addition to
Richard Moves Camp as consultant on Lakotaspirituality, the film
employed Mary Crow Dog herself as a consultant(on her own life
story) and other former AIM members to go over de-tails about the
occupation.
More important than the gestures toward authenticity, however,is
the gesture of hiring the crew members. For I agree with critic
JudyMerritt, novelist David Seals, and many in Indian country that
in the fu-ture Indian films should be made as much as possible by
Indian people.Merritt challenges the Ted Turners and the Robert
Redfords to put theirmoney where their mouths are by turning over
whole productions toIndian crews. Novelist Seals has said that he
will not authorize a sequelto Powwow Highway unless it is directed
by an Indian.11 And the Lakotapeople have recently worked to get
Ted Turner to stop production on aproposed film about the figure he
calls Crazy Horse and they know asTa’ Shunke Witko. This is not
racial essentialism or “blood quantum”theory at work; it is about
the need for a degree of cultural competencyHollywood has again and
again fallen short of, and it is a call once againfor the rights
AIM aimed at from the beginning—the right to self-determination and
self-representation for Native people everywhere.Cinematic
self-representation will, of course, be no panacea. It will
besubject to all the contradictions that trouble Indian communities
today.But it will be an important step in a larger process just as
surely asWounded Knee itself was a step in a struggle that
continues.
In the meantime, we have each of these films about AIM thathave
strengths as well as serious flaws. In this they mirror AIM
itself.And perhaps the deepest flaw in AIM was its own excessive
relianceupon the mass media that my presentation itself replicates.
AIM wasspectacularly successful, for brief moments, in drawing
attention toIndian issues through effective guerilla theater.
Actions like Wounded
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Knee awakened members of Native nations throughout the
UnitedStates and around the world. But the often vague, pan-Indian
politicsof AIM could not address the various differing, complicated
situationsof Indian nations. And AIM’s mass media approach can at
best mobi-lize, it cannot truly organize people or communities.
That takes face-to-face, painstaking work.
In the wake of the relative decline of the organization due
tointernal strife and FBI repression, much of the work of AIM
passed onto specific, local political, cultural, and spiritual
warriors in the manyIndian nations. Great successes in rekindling
Native pride, Native cul-tures, and Native rights have occurred in
the years since AIM’s heyday,despite ongoing economic exploitation.
This work has been less visible,less spectacular, than AIM’s
symbolic actions, but it has also gone fardeeper. It has understood
that the most profound changes will be na-tion based, will build
upon specific tribal traditions even as they openonto questions
facing Indians more generally. And from this deeperbase in various
particular Native nations, more substantive cross-nation, and even
worldwide, Native organizations have emerged tocontinue interlinked
struggles for land, sovereignty, and legal redress.At the same
time, Native art, poetry, and fiction has flourished, bring-ing
voices that both stir Indian hearts and minds and address
difficultquestions to the white world.
But even in this new context, AIM’s work is not done. In a
timewhen, as Warrior and Smith note, young Indians are growing up
withlittle knowledge of the AIM era, AIM’s stories, even these
flawed filmedversions, may prove useful. Who knows but that
encountered bychance on TV, or used by a teacher or organizer who
can point to thedistortions, one or another of the films might
spark some questions,might ignite new kinds of resistance efforts
as the next generation ofIndian and non-Indian activists examines
and learns from the successesand the failures of the AIM era.
N O T E S
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1 Paul Chaat Smith and RobertWarrior, Like a Hurricane: The
IndianMovement from Alcatraz to WoundedKnee (New York: New Press,
1996).See also Voices from Wounded Knee,1973: In the Words of the
Participants(Rooseveltown, N.Y.: AkwesasneNotes, 1974). No single
text hascome near the whole truth aboutAIM, but in addition to the
above-named texts, the following pro-vide a variety of perspectives
onIndian activism: Wounded Knee
Massacre: Hearings before the Committeeon the Judiciary, United
States Senate,Ninety-fourth Congress, Second Session,on S. 1147 and
S. 2900, February 5and 6, 1976 (Washington, D.C.:U.S. Government
Printing Office,1976); Rolland Dewing, WoundedKnee II (Chadron,
Neb.: GreatPlains Network and Pine HillsPress, 1995); Edward A.
Milligan(He Topa), Wounded Knee 1973,and the Fort Laramie Treaty of
1868(Bottineau, N.D.: Bottineau
-
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Courant Print, 1973); RobertBurnette and John Koster, TheRoad to
Wounded Knee (New York:Bantam Books, 1974); StanleyLyman, Wounded
Knee: A PersonalAccount (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press,
1991); RussellMeans, with Marvin J. Wolf,Where White Men Fear to
Tread: TheAutobiography of Russell Means (NewYork: St. Martin’s
Press, 1995);John William Sayer, Ghost Dancingthe Law: The Wounded
Knee Trials(Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1997); Johanna
Brand, TheLife and Death of Anna Mae Aquash(Toronto: J. Lorimer,
1978); WardChurchill and Jim Vander Wall,Agents of Repression: The
FBI’s SecretWars against the Black Panther Partyand the American
Indian Movement(Boston: South End Press, 1990);Peter Matthiessen,
In the Spirit ofCrazy Horse (New York: VikingPress, 1983); Mary
Crow Dog,as told to Richard Erdoes, LakotaWoman (New York: Grove
Weiden-feld, 1990); Mary Brave Bird, withRichard Erdoes, Ohitika
Woman(New York: Grove Press, 1993);Joane Nagel, American Indian
EthnicRenewal: Red Power and the Resurgenceof Identity and Culture
(New York:Oxford University Press, 1996);Troy Johnson, The
Occupation ofAlcatraz Island (Urbana: Universityof Illinois Press,
1996); LeonardPeltier, Prison Writings: My Life IsMy Sun Dance (New
York: St.Martin’s Press, 1999). Some ofthe key documents of the era
arecollected in Alvin Josephy et al.,eds., Red Power: The American
Indians’Fight for Freedom, 2d ed. (Lincoln:University of Nebraska
Press,1999). Four documentary filmshave also been made about AIMand
its context: Incident at Oglala:The Leonard Peltier Story, dir.
MichaelApted, Miramax, 1992; Warrior:The Life of Leonard Peltier,
dir. SuzieBaer, Cinnamon Productions,1991; “The Spirit of Crazy
Horse,”dir. James Locker, correspondentMilo Yellow Hair, Parallax
Pro-
ductions and Access Productions,in association with WGBH,
PBSFrontline, 1990.
2 Powwow Highway, dir. JoanelleNadine Romero and JonathanWacks,
Handmade Films/WarnerBros., 1989; Thunderheart, dir.Michael Apted,
Tristar Pictures,1992; Lakota Woman: Siege atWounded Knee, dir.
Frank Pierson,Turner Films, made for TV withvideo release,
1994.
3 It remains to be seen whether therelative success of the
independentfilm Smoke Signals (Miramax Films,1998), directed (Chris
Eyre),scripted (Sherman Alexie), andacted (Adam Beach, Evan
Adams,Irene Bedard, Gary Farmer, andTantoo Cardinal) by Indians,
willmark such a breakthrough.
4 Mario Gonzalez and ElizabethCook-Lynn, in The Politics
ofHallowed Ground: Wounded Knee andthe Struggle for Indian
Sovereignty(Urbana: University of IllinoisPress, 1999), place
WoundedKnee II in the context of the longstruggle to get the U.S.
govern-ment to acknowledge the injusticeof the Wounded Knee
massacre,and in the process they offer somepointed critiques of
AIM’s actions.
5 Cited in Michelle Deshong, “NewYork Times Coverage of
WoundedKnee, South Dakota” (master’sthesis, Washington State
Univer-sity, 1973).
6 “Trap at Wounded Knee,” Time(26 March 1973), 67.
7 See James Stripes, “A Strategyof Resistance: The ‘Actorvism’of
Russell Means from PlymouthRock to the Disney Studios,”Wicazo Sa
Review 14, no. 1 (spring1999): 87–101.
8 Russell Means, on the RussellMeans home page
(http://www.russellmeans.com).
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W9 David Seals, The Powwow Highway
(New York: Plume Books, [1979]1990).
10 Mary Crow Dog and RichardErdoes, Lakota Woman (New York:Grove
Weidenfeld, 1990).
11 Seals himself is apparently a con-troversial figure in some
parts ofIndian country. See Gonzalez andCook-Lynn, The Politics of
HallowedGround, 152–54.
N O T E S