Life During Peacetime

Things weren't suppose to end up like this.  

Failure, yes, we were ready for a thousand kinds of defeat. We even looked forward to it in dark, private moments, believing it would offer opportunities for last-minute redemptions to make up for dubious and misguided strategies, absurd tactics and blind faith. Obliteration no doubt had its drawbacks, but the endless wait for revolution to fail or succeed was hell.  

I showed up late for the party, as usual. I participated in the Sixties in the most authentic way possible, through television. Later, in the Seventies, when I was old enough to make disastrous choices about my own life, I shrewdly opted for a college at one time regarded as bravely experimental, but when I applied was in serious decline. The school had no grades. You passed or you failed, and since I had barely passed high school this sounded good to me. Also, classes were more or less optional, and you had to spend every other quarter working at some kind of job somewhere else to gain life experience. This was a wonderful system for self-directed, highly motivated coffee-achievers who as often as not had been to prep schools or high schools better than most prep schools.  

For some reason, I never quite fit in, and drifted off a year later to join the Struggle. In August of 1974, for a suburban Indian like myself, the Struggle could be found in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  

A year and a half earlier, the Oglalas of Pine Ridge had asked the American Indian Movement for help in their fight against a fascistic tribal chairman. The AIM people took over the village of Wounded Knee, and the U.S. sent FBI agents and federal marshals to support the hated tribal chairman. The siege lasted seven weeks. I was in high school then and had watched some of it on television. It ended badly, with little honor for either side. After the early moments of inspired brilliance and breathtaking heroism, AIM self-destructed even faster than Nixon's White House. The Justice Department looked inept during Wounded Knee, and was sick and tired of Indians and their teary lamentations, and so chose to indict everyone they could who participated in the rebellion. This number totaled more than five hundred. It was petty and vindictive, and meant to teach a hard lesson to the grandmothers and schoolkids and Vietnam vets and drunks and workingmen who took part in Wounded Knee. It wasn't necessary. It seemed like every AIM leader was in jail or on the run, and the movement was broke. The feds could have quietly dismissed all the charges, since their goal of destroying AIM had been achieved, yet for two years they insisted on bringing to trial every case no matter how weak. You can look this up: the U.S. government tried some Wounded Knee defendants on charges of cattle-rustling. The siege lasted two months, but the trials would go on for two years, sometimes taking place concurrently in several cities at once.  

Struggle HQ was in the Van Brunt building, a huge abandoned downtown brick apartment house on a main street in Sioux Falls. It was slated for demolition, and much of the place had already been stripped, but in the meantime the city had arranged for its use by the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee. You can see why. The Indian movement had by that time destroyed Alcatraz Prison, the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, the village of Wounded Knee, to name only the most famous campaigns, and the city fathers of Sioux Falls felt it was a clever move not only to provide housing for the rabble and thus avoid turning the city into another AIM statistic, but, in a really inspired touch, to furnish housing that was already pre-destroyed.  

On my first night, as the sheetrock dust settled and neon lights from the Rainbow Bar blinked into my room, I thought, yes, this is going to be interesting.  

For once I was right. The next day was filled mostly with paperwork and war stories. The paperwork was so that I could receive food stamps, and the war stories were not from Wounded Knee, but from a bloody riot at the Sioux Falls courthouse a few months earlier. The seventy-one day occupation was ancient history, rarely discussed. There were new rebellions, new arrests, and new defendants almost every week. The largest mass political trials in American history were underway, but nobody was paying any attention. A week after I arrived, Nixon resigned. A week after that, I attended a Sun Dance at Crow Dog's Paradise on the Rosebud Reservation. At night some of us would take to the phones, using rented WATS lines (where you paid for long distance by the month, not by the call. Having your own WATS lines was a sign of prestige for movement groups in those days) to phone up rich people thought to be sympathetic to AIM. They usually lived in California, and they usually said no. Sometimes, instead of calling prospective donors, we would call up our counterparts at the Attica Legal/Defense Offense Committee. That summer the mail brought communiqués from the Symbionese Liberation Army, who had first kidnapped and then converted Patricia Hearst. The SLA promised an early death to their enemies, who they unforgettably described as "fascist insects that prey upon the life of the People."  

It was a glorious mess, and a logistical nightmare. Mob lawyers donating their time and radicals who saw their legal practice as another way to defeat imperialism flew in for a few days, or a week or two, handled a case, and flew out. Legal workers were oppressed by the lawyers. White people ran everything, even though AIM was suppose to be in charge. Paranoia was rampant, and completely deserved because security was both a constant obsession and almost nonexistent. Drinking was banned, and practiced frequently. The defendants were sometimes old men and women from Pine Ridge who barely spoke English, and other times unlucky adventurers who were clueless about AIM, or fighting imperialism or defending Lakota sovereignty. We railed against the "media blackout" that kept the world from knowing the truth, never once imagining that perhaps the world was growing a bit bored of our harangues. Somehow, we even won most of the cases in the courtroom.  

I loved it. (next page)