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By Root 464 0

up in the compound; they looked exhausted, but were determined not to surrender. Several wore a motto, “Deed or Death,” on their shirts or tattooed on their arms. I had no doubt that they were willing to die if their demands weren’t met. It was the dead of winter and very cold. The ground was covered with two to three feet of snow, and inside there were no lights, heat or water. The governor had ordered the electricity shut off, the heating system had failed, the pipes were frozen, the toilets wouldn’t work and the stench was terrible. Every so often, there were gunshots—some fired by the rednecks, others by Indians. There was no place to sleep, so I curled up on a windowsill and dozed until someone woke me and led me to a room where there was a lighted fireplace and where an Indian boy who had been shot in the leg was being treated by a doctor who was part Indian. Throughout the night National Guard helicopters circled above us, panning searchlights back and forth in search of stray Indians and, incidentally, give the drunken, trigger-happy rednecks easy targets. Young Indians who called themselves Dog Soldiers—the name of elite groups of warriors among the Plains Indians in the nineteenth century—draped sheets over themselves and ran in and out of the snow, occasionally firing at the rednecks. One night they put the wounded boy on a stretcher, covered him with a sheet and ran out, intending to take him someplace where he could get better medical treatment, but about forty minutes later they returned with the boy still on the stretcher. By standing still and camouflaging themselves with the sheets against the snow, they had avoided being spotted by the helicopters, but while they were stumbling through the snow, the Indian on point looked to his right and saw two squads of armed guardsmen. They turned and ran back with the stretcher; when they were safe inside, one said, “Now I know why they call us AIM; it means ‘Assholes In Movement.’ ” A few minutes later they took off again in another direction and eventually found medical help for the boy.

There were constant rumors that the governor had ordered the National Guard to retake the novitiate, which would certainly have meant bloodshed. But like all Indians I’ve ever met, those in the novitiate under attack joked no matter what the circumstances were, even when they were being fired on. We talked a great deal, and it was during such moments that I realized how much I related to their philosophy of life and how closely it paralleled my own. In terms of religion or philosophy, I suppose I am closer to what American Indians believe than to any conventional faith. Its essence is a sense of harmony and oneness, a belief that everything on earth—the environment, nature, people, trees, the land, the wind, animals—is interrelated, and that every manifestation of life has a purpose and place. Indians also believe that nothing is inherently bad; we are all in the same cycle of life, and there really is no death, only transformation. They follow what in many ways is a pure form of democracy: major decisions are made collectively by a consensus reached at councils, and chiefs are elected on merit; just because a young brave is the son of a chief, he doesn’t succeed his father unless he has earned it.

The shooting continued sporadically day and night while the Dog Soldiers ran into the building to reload, then back into the snow to return the fire of the rednecks, whooping and yelling. It didn’t seem real until a rifle bullet smashed into a chimney a few feet from my head on the afternoon of a sunny day. The temperature was up to about thirty-five degrees and I was tired of being penned inside, so I went up to the roof to enjoy a little sun. A second or two later, a brick exploded an arm’s length from me. For an instant, I wondered what that was; then I heard the rifle shot, remembered that bullets travel faster than sound, and ran for cover. It was only another bullet, like millions before it, fired indiscriminately in the hope of killing an unimportant Indian.

The next day I was