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By Root 488 0

and promises. The FBI, other federal agencies, ranchers and white vigilantes, who in some cases allied themselves with corrupt tribal officials chosen in rigged elections, launched a war on AIM that was a blend of modern McCarthyism and the kind of armed campaign that had nearly exterminated the American Indian a century before. With SWAT teams, helicopter gunships, armored personnel carriers and an often-biased white judicial apparatus, the government poured all its resources into suppressing AIM. It spent millions to investigate the deaths of whites who were killed during the conflict, but when Native Americans were murdered, the U.S. Justice Department, Bureau of Indian Affairs and local authorities usually ignored it, once again treating the Indians as if they were less than human.

In early 1973, when about two hundred AIM members took over the village of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, all they wanted the government to do was to allow free elections of tribal leaders, to investigate abuses within the Bureau of Indian Affairs and to review all Indian treaties. They occupied the village for seventy-one days before getting a conditional promise that their demands would be met—a promise that was only partly kept. If they had been any other group who held out that long—the Symbionese Liberation Army, black militants or an offbeat religious cult, for example—I believe they would have been attacked and killed. But Hollywood’s fascination with American Indians has had one beneficial effect: thanks to films, they are internationally famous, and I’m sure the government held its fire because it was aware that the world would find one more massacre of Indians abhorrent.

Russell Means asked me to come to Wounded Knee, and I got as far as Denver, where an AIM member was supposed to meet me, but he was suddenly diverted to deal with an emergency elsewhere. So it was too late for me to get inside the reservation, which had already been surrounded by federal agents and other people with guns. I pledged all my resources to defend the Indians indicted at Wounded Knee and did what I could to publicize the unscrupulous ways in which the FBI and others in the Justice Department were persecuting Indians in a travesty of the legal principles our country supposedly held dear. The pattern was always the same: arrest the Native American leaders on the thinnest evidence (or none at all), take them out of circulation, put them on trial and keep the trial running as long as possible. When the Indians were acquitted, they felt exalted by their victory, but in the interim they had accomplished nothing. It happened over and over. When charges against Russell Means and Dennis Banks were finally dismissed, Judge Fred Nichol said the government had “polluted” the legal system by infiltrating their defense team with informants and had knowingly presented false evidence to the court because the FBI was “determined to get the AIM movement and completely destroy it.” In the meantime, AIM had been deprived of two of its principal leaders for months.

In early 1975, Dennis Banks asked me to come to Gresham, Wisconsin, where a group of Menominee Indians had taken over an unused Alexian Brothers novitiate, claiming that it was on ground taken illegally from their tribe and demanding its return. When I arrived in Gresham, the novitiate was surrounded by helmeted National Guardsmen along with a ragtag army of local rednecks, rifles poking out the windows of their pickup trucks. Later I learned that some of the latter were in the Ku Klux Klan. I didn’t know how I was going to get into the compound, but Dennis arranged it with the knowledge of the National Guard and the federal marshals. I’ll never know why they let me in, though state officials said they hoped that I and Father James Groppi, a Catholic Maryknoll priest who was also admitted, might be able to end the dispute without bloodshed.

I was smuggled across the military perimeter late at night. Thirty or forty Menominees, two or three of whom had gunshot wounds, were holed