People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [316]
In the fall of 1970, a magazine called La Raza, one of the countless local publications coming out of the movements of those years to supply information ignored in the regular media, told about the Pit River Indians of northern California. Sixty Pit Indians occupied land they said belonged to them; they defied the Forest Services when ordered to leave. One of them, Darryl B. Wilson, later recalled: “As the flames danced orange making the trees come to life, and the cold creeped out of the darkness to challenge the speaking fire, and our breath came in small clouds, we spoke.” They asked the government by what treaty it claimed the land. It could point to none. They cited a federal statute (25 USCA 194) that where there was a land dispute between Indian and white “the burden of proof falls on the white man.”
They had built a quonset hut, and the marshals told them it was ugly and ruined the landscape. Wilson wrote later:
The whole world is rotting. The water is poisoned, the air polluted, the politics deformed, the land gutted, the forest pillaged, the shores ruined, the towns burned, the lives of the people destroyed . . . and the federals spent the best part of October trying to tell us the quonset hut was “ugly”!
To us it was beautiful. It was the beginning of our school. The meeting place. Home for our homeless. A sanctuary for those needing rest. Our church. Our headquarters. Our business office. Our symbol of approaching freedom. And it still stands.
It was also the center for the reviving of our stricken, diluted and separated culture. Our beginning. It was our sun rising on a clear spring day when the sky holds no clouds. It was a good and pure thing for the heart to look upon. That small place on earth. Our place.
But 150 marshals came, with machine guns, shotguns, rifles, pistols, riot sticks, Mace, dogs, chains, manacles. “The old people were frightened. The young questioned bravery. The small children were like a deer that has been shot by the thunder stick. Hearts beat fast as though a race was just run in the heat of summer.” The marshals began swinging their riot sticks, and blood started flowing. Wilson grabbed one marshal’s club, was thrown down, manacled, and while lying face down on the ground was struck behind the head several times. A sixty-six-year-old man was beaten into unconsciousness. A white reporter was arrested, his wife beaten. They were all thrown into trucks and taken away, charged with assaulting state and federal officers and cutting trees—but not with trespassing, which might have brought into question the ownership of the land. When the episode was all over, they were still defiant.
Indians who had been in the Vietnam war made connections. At the “Winter Soldier Investigations” in Detroit, where Vietnam veterans testified about their experiences, an Oklahoma Indian named Evan Haney told about his:
The same massacres happened to the Indians 100 years ago. Germ warfare was used then. They put smallpox in the Indians’ blankets. . . .
I got to know the Vietnamese people and I learned they were just like us. . . . What we are doing is destroying ourselves and the world.
I have grown up with racism all my life. When I was a child, watching cowboys and Indians on TV, I would root for the cavalry, not the Indians. It was that bad. I was that far toward my own destruction. . . .
Though 50 percent of the children at the country school I attended in Oklahoma were Indians, nothing in school, on television, or on the radio taught anything about Indian culture. There were no books on Indian history, not even in the library. . . .
But I knew something was wrong. I started reading and learning my own culture. . . .
I saw the Indian people at their happiest when they went to Alcatraz or to Washington to defend their fishing rights. They at last felt like human beings.
Indians began to do something about their “own destruction”—the annihilation of their culture. In 1969, at the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars, Indians spoke indignantly of either the ignoring or the insulting