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By Root 507 0

that Hitler treated the Jews. But we refuse to think of ourselves as a nation that committed genocide. Our paratroopers jump out of airplanes yelling “Geronimo,” and the Pentagon names its helicopters “Navajo” and “Cherokee.” In this perverse fashion, we glorify the American Indian, but the minute he makes justifiable demands, he is ignored by a nation that prides itself on being a champion of human rights, the right of self-determination, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The cavalrymen and settlers who slaughtered the Indians weren’t inherently evil; they were responding to a culture that demonized them. But this does not excuse our country’s refusal to settle a debt that is long overdue. With the exception of the United States, virtually every colonial power that stole land from its indigenous peoples has at least started to give some of it back to its rightful owners—often kicking and screaming because the United States has goaded them into doing so. However, if you ask anybody in our government or a western rancher to give up even a square inch of land to Native Americans, he will look at you in bemusement. I’ve met a lot of these ranchers, and when the topic of the American Indians’ ancestral ownership of the land comes up, they’ll state: “I own this land because my grandfather established this ranch; my father lived here all his life; I’ve lived here all my life; and I intend for my children to live here on their own land.” If I point out that Indians were living on “their” land long before their grandfathers, they always find a way to rationalize it: “Well, maybe, but I didn’t take their land, so why blame me for it?” Or “You don’t seriously expect me to get off my land, do you? Maybe it was taken from the Indians, but we were the ones who settled it, who built it into something, and who planted the crops. We’ve earned this land.”

The rationalizations are unending. One of the strangest government policies is that largely because of the political influence of Jewish interests, our country has invested billions of dollars and many American lives to help Israel reclaim land that they say their ancestors occupied three thousand years ago. But if anyone tries to apply the same principle to the Native Americans, whose ancestors were here at least fifteen thousand years before the Europeans arrived, the reaction is that it is too late to turn the clock back now. It does no good to be logical about it; people do not respond to logic.

The history of the American Indian Movement—its successes and mistakes and the sordid story of how the FBI harassed and tried to suppress it—is too broad a topic for me to cover in this book, so I will only describe what I saw from the periphery. AIM comprised Indians from many different tribes who were generally more militant than those in other Indian groups seeking redress during the sixties and seventies for centuries of wrongs committed against their people. Many of the other groups had tried logic and conciliation, but got nowhere.

Dennis Banks, a Chippewa Indian, and Russell Means, a large, handsome Sioux who bears a stunning resemblance to Gall, one of the greatest Sioux warriors, are remarkable men. Both left their reservations, abandoning their roots and culture, to try to make a living on the outside; both got into trouble off the reservation and had to take humiliating jobs because it was all they could get. Like other American Indians who left their reservations, they faced a racism that perhaps is the most vicious of all: they encountered not only discrimination in jobs and housing but indifference. In mainstream American culture, they were considered nonentities, and people looked through them as if they didn’t exist. Dennis and Russell met in Minneapolis and discovered that they shared a mutual problem; though they had left their reservations, they were unable to turn their backs on their culture. They did an about-face and decided to reenter it, and with others they started AIM, which soon had chapters all over the country, to press the government to live up to its treaties