HURRICANE REVIEW:

Transfiguration in the Homelands  by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn  Indian Country Today   Wounded Knee is to Indian Myth as the Louvre is to Art, I.M. Pei is to Architecture, Custer is to the U.S. Cavalry and French Vineyards are to good wine. The little Lakota village called Wounded Knee, located along a creek in the northern plains, was and still is the central place for a lot of Indian storytelling to either begin or end, depending on your sense of history. A new book, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, written by Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) and Robert Allen Warrior (Osage) doesn't begin at that place, but the historical fact that nearly four hundred Minneconjou Lakotas were slaughtered there in 1890 by the U.S. Cavalry haunts every page.  This book is subtitled "The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee," and it should be understood as a history which contextualizes American Indian Resistance during a brief period of modern time. The story, itself, begins with the "takeover" of Alcatraz Island in California on a cold November night in 1969 when small boats push off from the Sausalito shores, and it ends, or rather fades away into a maze of media negotiations between American Indian Movement leaders and the federal government in 1974.  Though this marvelous and affecting storytelling is narrowly confined to the period of militancy usually called the AIM era from 1969 to 1974, a huge history of genocide and injustice unfolds. It is an inspirational exploration of a period of time which caught the heart of Indian Country. It shows how terribly vulnerable and threatened and creative and courageous people with their backs to the wall can be. And it shows the dark side, the betrayals, the death, the jealousies and the final disintegration of a movement that came so close to empowerment. It is a compelling, heroic story.  Hurricane is a story book to be read aloud or on long nights when sleep won't come, a pan-tribal book about race and racial conflict, about blood descendants and faith and the urban landscape and federal Indian policy. About homelands and grief, and the 'hurricanes' of fleeting moments when a cause taken to its zenith changed Indian lives forever, a time when the long-simmering battles by Indians to overcome their oppression would be out in the open.  According to authors Smith and Warrior, the process by which contemporary, largely urbanized Indians developed a renewed national mythic sense concerning one of the unavenged crimes of human history, began with the takeover of Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay by Indians of All Tribes in 1969. The authors brilliantly chronicle the Bay Area activism and Clyde Warrior's National Indian Youth Council, Vine Deloria's leadership of the National Congress of Indians, the Poor People's Campaign, the rise of Native American Studies Centers and the Office of Economic Opportunity, the BIA takeover, the Trail of Broken Treaties, the Wounded Knee Occupation, the rise of the American Indian Movement and its stand on the Yellow Thunder murder. They conclude their story by saying that "Wounded Knee proved to be the final performance of AIM's daring brand of political theater," but suggest, too, that the entire decade of activism rendered Wounded Knee a symbol of sustained native resistance to European colonialism. They make us believe that Wounded Knee is not just a story of the Sioux, rather, it has, perhaps, become a central indigenous myth, the womb for all Indian resistance stories.  Books like this are important not because they solve problems, not because they are "right" or "true." On the contrary, they may be quite contentious. Knowledgeable readers will find much to argue about in this work. One of the major complaints of this book from Pine Ridge, the reservation where much of the activity took place, is that its non-Siouxan authors give the American Indian Movement and urban militants too much credit for change in Indian Country, and not enough to a sentiment expressed in a rather cryptic quote on page 123 by Vine Deloria who has argued that "reforms were a testament to the hard patient work of a generation." He could have said several generations. Lakota revolutions are not just the inspiration of a largely urban-based AIM, these critics say.  But because of the skill of Smith and Warrior as researchers and writers of cleverly turned out sentences filled with thought-provoking insights, all the essences of good storytelling, the answer questions concerning the confusion of the times. What really went on at Alcatraz and Wounded Knee? Who were the players and what must we think of them? What mistakes were made? How can we understand our actions and the actions of our fellow tribesmen and women in light of a particular time and history? Who are the antagonists and are they still in place awaiting optimistic moments? What are the dangers we face? What can the past tell us?  Though some may worry that Smith and Warrior have neglected the wider implications of a period alternately called "termination and relocation" and the "turbulent sixties and seventies,' in that they say very little about the legislation promulgated during the period of time which diminished freedom and economic development on Indian reservations, they confirm their reputations as superb investigators and shrewd scholars of Indian politics. This is a book for those who want to hear about the hundreds of first-hand accounts of what very probably happened in those turbulent days twenty-five years ago.  It is as near to the truth as we've gotten so far.   Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is professor emerita of Native American Studies, Eastern Washington State University and author of A Tribal Voice: Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays.

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