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Sioux (Second Part)

(All information was obtained from Reader's Digest "Through Indian Eyes")

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There may never have been a single day when the might and majesty of Plains Indian culture was more brilliantly displayed than on Monday, September 8, 1851. The sunrise that morning illuminated the greatest assemblage of Plains Indians ever seen in one place: the Great Indian Treaty Council, convened at Ft Laramie in Wyoming Territory along the banks of the North Platte River.

Indian families had been streaming in for weeks-their numbers reached an estimated 10,000-with tepee poles and hide bundles strapped to travois pulled behind their horses. Contributing to the general noise and commotion were hundreds of dogs, some of which would serve as prized delicacies in the feasting ahead....First to arrive were the proud Cheyenne and Arapaho and large bands of Oglala and Brule Sioux, who pitched their tepees along the Platte's northern bank.

In the sea of tepees that stretched to the horizon, these conferees represented nine different Plains Indian nations. A contingent of some 270 white soldiers watched in awe from the wooden walls of Ft Laramie, a 17 year old trading center, as the assembled chiefs sat down to smoke the pipe of peace together and partake of nearly $100,000 worth of presents from the US government.

This unique convocation was the brain-child of Thomas "Broken Hand" Fitzpatrick, a longtime mountain man and fur trapper who had guided the explorer John C Fremont to California in the 1840's. Soon after that, Fitzpatrick had been named Indian Agent for the newly created Upper Platte and Arkansas Agency, and he was now dealing on behalf of the US government in treaty negotiations with the Plains Indians.

Finally the long round of feasts, pageantry, and speeches about peace-along with the tougher talk of setting territorial boundaries for each tribe-drew to a close on September 17. Old enemies stood together in line to inscribe their marks on a document stating that they pledged to respect one another's boundaries, refrain from harassing settlers on the Oregon Trail, and allow new roads and military posts to be built on their lands. In return for this, the US government would permit them to hunt and fish at will within their own territories. The tribes would also share a total of $50,000 worth of blankets, kettles, tobacco, and other goods disbursed by the government each year.
In 1853 Fitzpatrick arranged a similar gathering with southern Plains tribes at Ft Atkinson, on the Arkansas River near present-day Dodge City, KS. He met there with Comanche, Kiowa, and Plains Apache representatives, who had been leery of attending the Ft Laramie session-because, as one delegate put it, "We have too many horses and mules to risk among such notorious horse thieves as the Sioux and Crow." The agreement they reached called for the tribes to give up buffalo hunting and take up ranching and farming on lands that government would rent for them in the Leased District, an unsettled portion of Choctaw lands in Oklahoma that the tribe leased back to the government for the relocation of other Indians.

Some representatives, including the Sioux, were especially disgruntled at the notion of limiting their territories. "You have split my land and I don't like it. These lands once belonged to the Kiowa and the Crow, but we whipped these nations out of them and in this we did what the white men do when they want the lands of the Indians."-Oglala Sioux delegate.

Not surprisingly, the paperwork from Ft Laramie and Ft Atkinson had hardly made it back to Washington before the agreements began to unravel. From their domains in western Minnesota and the Dakotas, war-painted Sioux were pouring into Kansas territory to strike at their old enemies, the Pawnee. Before long, the Crow of south-central Montana were vehemently protesting Sioux aggression and finally, in 1868, were given protection by US troops on their own reservation.

In 1864 the Arikara in North Dakota had likewise demanded federal protection from Sioux attacks, bitterly pointing out that their chiefs who had taken part in the Ft Laramie accords were all dead now-cut down by Sioux arrows. The Hidatsa were even more virulent in their denunciations of the Sioux: "They will not keep the peace until they are severely punished. Either keep them a year without gifts or provisions, or cut off some camp, killing all, and the rest wil then listen."-Hidatsa leader.

By the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, funding for Fitzpatrick's promised annual rations to the tribes had been cut back substantially. At the same time, the government was building a network of forts on the Oregon and Santa Fe trails, as well as along southern routes from Kansas and Missouri to the Rio Grande. Everywhere the number of whites seemed to be multiplying; and whever they appeared, trouble seemed to follow.
In August 1862, four hungry young Santee Sioux men, hunters returning from another unsuccessful outing, stole some eggs from the homestead of a white farmer near the small community of Acton in the Minnesota River valley. For years, supplies pledged to the tribe by treaty in exchange for prime hunting lands had been systematically diverted-then sold to their rightful recipients by local merchants at exorbitant prices. The training and equipment that would make them self-sufficient farmers never materialized. Complaints of illegal liquor sales and outrages against Indian women by whites were ignored by authorities. The fall harvest of 1861 had been blighted by an infestation of cutworms, and the bitterly cold winter that followed left the Santee impoverished, half starved, and desperate.

Their 52-year-old chief, Little Crow, tried without success to get provisions from the local Indian agent of credit from local traders. "If they are hungry" said one storekeeper, "let them eat grass." The egg-stealing incident rapidly boiled up into a confrontation that left the farmer and four family members dead. With no more premeditation than a summer storm, the Sioux Uprising of 1862 had begun.

Tribal leaders hurriedly met with Little Crow, who agreed to lead them but harbored no illusions whatever about their chances. In the next four weeks the Sioux lashed out against settlers in surprise skirmishes and large scale battles up and down the Minnesota Valley. Hundreds of whites were killed and an estimated 30,000 others frantically sought refuge at Ft Ridgley. Little Crow, wounded in an attack on the fort, turned over his command to Chief Mankato. But then in the fierce battle of Wood Lake in late September, Mankato was killed by a cannonball-some said he refused to dodge it-and his warriors were routed by federal troops.

Some 1,700 captured Sioux were marched to Ft Snelling, where they were enclosed in a wooden stockade with scant food and little shelter against the approaching winter cold. Trials were held and more than 300 of the men were condemned to death. Back in Washington, President Lincoln was besieged by demands from his own military advisers-as well as an aroused national press-for quick executions. One lone voice of dissent was that of Henry Whipple, an Episcopal bishop and longtime advocate of the Sioux, who appealed to the president for clemency. Lincoln considered his plea and commuted the sentences of all but 39 of the prisoners, who were promptly separated from the rest to await their fate in Mankato, Minnesota.

As the sun rose on December 26,1862, the prisoners began chanting their death songs, which they continued to sing as the scaffold was nailed together and white cowls were rolled down over their faces. When the trapdoor dropped beneath their feet, it was the largest mass execution ever to take place in American history. Little Crow was not among the victims, but six months later, while picking berries on a farm, he was shot to death by the owner. The state of Minnesota rewarded his killer with $500.
After the tragic events of 1862, many Sioux decided they had seen enough bloodshed and worked to establish peaceable communities among their white neighbors. One group took refuge in Canada and sought help from the British, their former allies during the days of George III. Reluctantly, the Hudson's Bay Company provided land near Manitoba's Ft Garry for the impoverished exiles. Some Canadians feared a repeat of the violence in Minnesota, but the Sioux proved content to trap, hunt, and lead quiet lives as farmers and ranchers. They even remained neutral during the Metis Rebellion of 1869, an outburst with origins a century old.
Enraged at the Sand Creek slaughter of the peaceful encampment of Cheyenne and Arapaho (there by order of the post commander at Ft Lyon) in 1864, war chief of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux had in the meantime held a council near the Republican River. Even as the government was conducting its research into the Sand Creek massacre, their warriors descended on stagecoaches and ranches, tore down telegraph lines, and raided with impunity from Colorado into the Dakotas.

Yet the war parties could not stem the tide of freight caravans, stagecoaches, miners, and military reinforcements that was steadily filling up their countryside after the end of the Civil War. One especially keen observer was Red Cloud, a 44-year-old Oglala Sioux who had earned his chieftaincy on the strength of numerous honors won in battle. Red Cloud bitterly opposed the Bozeman Trail, which cut through the heart of the Sioux's Powder River hunting grounds and across treaty-protected lands, enabling miners to take a shortcut from the North Platte River in Wyoming to the goldfields of Montana.

In response to Indian attacks against travelers using the Bozeman, protective military posts were built along the trail. But Red Cloud, thanks largely to his military strategist Crazy Horse, consistently outmaneuvered the cavalry. Their greatest victory came on December 21, 1866, against Gen William J Fetterman (who had once boasted that "with 80 men I could ride through the Sioux Nation"). Staging a sham hit-and-run attack on Ft Phil Kearny in Wyoming Territory, they lured Fetterman and his troops out of the safety of the fort-and into a perfectly set ambush that left Fetterman and all 80 of his cavalrymen dead. In the face of this unexpectedly fierce resistance-and because a new railroad to the south would soon make the trail obsolete-the government reversed its position and offered to meet with Red Cloud to discuss a withdrawal from the "bloody Bozeman."
The last major round of peace treaties between the US government and the Plains INdians were held a year after Fetterman's debacle. The first meeting took place in the valley of Medicine Lodge creek in Kansas where Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho and Kiowa-Apache delegatons convened once again with white peace commissioners on the full moon of October 1867.

The second round of peace treaty negotiations with northern tribes took place at the following spring of 1868, once again at Ft Laramie. With the immediate aim of ending Red Cloud's hostilities, the government agreed to abandon its military garrisons along the Bozeman Trail-effectively shutting the route down to white traffic. (As humiliated officers and their men filed out of Ft Phil Kearny, a triumphant Red Cloud rode through its gates and proceeded to burn it to the ground.)

The new Ft Laramie treaty also designated the Powder River country of Montana and Wyoming, plus all of today's South Dakota west of the Missouri, as the Great Sioux Reservation. Within these lands lay the Black Hills, held sacred by many tribes, including the Sioux, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Crow.
But no treaty could assuage the deep, abiding hatred of white men that the Sand Creek Massacre had planted in the hearts of Cheyenne warriors like Medicine Water and Dull Knife, and Northern Arapaho fighters like Powder Face. Soon their tribesmen would join forces with the Sioux to outdo even the triumph over Fetterman and inflict the most stunning defeat on a white foe in all the years of the Indian wars in the West.

When Ulysses S Grant assumed the presidency in 1869, his new "peace policy" toward Indians sought to revise military and civilian roles on reservations. Military Indian agents, who had been notoriously prone to corruption, were to be replaced by emissaries from the Quaker Society of Friends and other religious organizations. Soldiers would be used only to pressure Indians onto reservations-and keep them there-while it would be the civilians' job to coax them into the "arts of civilization." In 1870 Congress reflected the seriousness of Grant's policy by allocating $100,000 for the education of Indian youth and related purposes.

Yet a wide chasm separated the reformist attitudes in the East from the mind-set of most Westerners on the subject of Indian rights. The Sioux in particular were learning that the Ft Laramie accord Red Cloud had signed in 1868 meant little to miners and settlers clamoring for access to their sacred Black Hills.

Although the land was protected by treaty, in July 1874, Gen William Tecumseh Sherman dispatched Custer to lead a survey expedition into these Sioux domains. A pack train accompanied by 1,200 troopers wound its way through this game-stocked preserve-complete with guides, a photographer, a wagon master, a howitzer and three Gatling guns, 110 wagons, 1,000 horse, and 300 cattle for meals along the way.

Once word leaded out that Custer's illegal 1,205-mile survey of the Black Hills had verified rumors of "gold from the grassroots down," mining in the area increased noticeably the following summer. In 1876, two years after the expedition, 6,000 newcomers had taken up residence in Custer City, SD, and gold strikes in Deadwood Gulch predictably lured thousands more. Streams were clogged by sluice boxes, and timbering operations were already moving into the virgin forests of the Black Hills.

Not surprisingly, the Sioux were incensed that their sanctuary had been invaded in so flagrant a violation of the 1868 treaty. Calls for resistance and revenge filled the air. When Senate negotiators came to Sioux territory in September 1875 to try to work out a lease agreement to the Black Hills, a warrior clad in battle attire led a chant: "Black Hills is my land and I love it-And whoever interferes will hear this gun."-Little Big Man, Oglala Sioux

When President Grant was told of the Indians' intransigence, he let it be known that from then on, government troops would not stop miners from invading the Black Hills. Moreover, the off-reservation Sioux who were roaming the Yellowstone and Powder River valleys in Montana would henceforth be considered threats to the general public.

In March 1876, Gen George Crook marshaled his troops for a campaign against the last remaining Plains Indian rebels. That month some troops struck a Cheyenne village, erroneously thinking it was Crazy Horse's camp. They came away with 600 Indian ponies, only to lose them to Cheyennes the same day. Meanwhile, the Cheyenne and Sioux were slipping away from their reservation, where food supplies had grown more and more scarce, to join renegade bands along Rosebud Creek. Practically under the government's nose, thousands made camp on the Rosebud's banks in what proved to be the calm before the storm.
On a ranch near the Northern Cheyenne town of Lame Deer in southern Montana stands a sandstone outcrop covered with incised designs. Across from these rocks on the other side of Rosebud Creek, tradition has it, the Sioux staged their annual Sun Dance. Seated near the rocks in June 1876, the great Hunkpapa Sioux chief Sitting Bull, then 42, sacrificed 100 pieces of skin, 50 from each arm, to bolster his prayers for a victory over the encroaching whites and their blue-coated soldiers. It was then that Sitting Bull fell into a trance and envisioned "dead soldiers without ears falling upside down into camp." They had no ears because the white man did not listen to what had been told him.

For his part, Gen Philip Sheridan, who headed military operations that summer, proposed to confront the Indian hostiles-composed of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho-from three directions. His three army columns, amounting to about 2,500 men, would include Gen Alfred Terry and Col George A Custer coming in from the east, Gen George Crook entering from the south, and Gen John Gibbon striking from the west.

Coming upon the Indian camp at Rosebud Creek on June 17, Crook abruptly discovered that their numbers had been disastrously underestimated. For six hours his troops faced waves of attacks by well-armed warriors before he ordered a retreat. Meanwhile, other tribal groups were filtering into the area they knew as the Greasy Grass (and whites called the Little Bighorn River). More than 7,000 people in all camped in six great tepee circles, including 1,800 warriors hungry for more of the success they had tasted at Rosebud Creek.

Out of touch with Crook, Custer led a detachment of the 7th Calvary toward the Little Bighorn. Unaware that he was approaching the largest fighting force ever assembled on the Plains, Custer made an impusive and fatal decision. Dividing his troops-about 210 men-into three attacking groups, he positioned them on a ridge above the camp.

A warrior named Wooden Leg remembered being awakened by the crackof gunfire. Stripping for the fight and leaping onto his favorite war pony, he and his friend Little Bird took off after a fleeing soldier.

"We were lashing him with our pony whips. It seemed not brave to shoot him. He pointed back his revolver, though, and sent a bullet into Little Bird's thigh. As I was getting possession of his weapon, he fell to the ground. I do not know what became of him."-Wooden Leg, Cheyenne

In the course of an hour, Custer and every one of his men perished;only a horse named Comanche, belonging to one of Custer's captains, was left alive. The victors promptly withdrew, most heading up the Little Bighorn Valley-where they held a great celebration below the mouth of Lodge Grass Creek.

It was a moment worth savoring. Not since the infamous defeat known to angry whites as St Clair's Shame, inflicted by the Shawnee 85 years earlier in Ohio, had the US Army suffered so costly a humiliation at native hands.

And it did not take the army long to respond. In September 1876 a camp of Sioux trailing back to their reservations was attacked by troops at Slim Buttes in Dakota Territory and lost their leader, American Horse, in a hail of gunfire. At the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux reservations, veterans of the Little Bighorn and other hostiles were imprisoned. Witnessing his people's disintegration, Sitting Bull (who had not taken part in the battle) and a small group of followers fled to Canada in 1877. His appeals for aid to the Canadian government met with no success, and his people had trouble obtaining even minimal supplies. Faced with the prospect of starving in a foreign country, Sitting Bull and 187 others finally surrendered in July 1881 at Ft Buford in North Dakota.
For bringing his demoralized band of exiles back from Canada in July 1881, Sitting Bull had been promised a pardon for his role in the Battle of Little Bighorn five years earlier. Instead, he was summarily arrested and locked up at Ft Randall on the Missouri River in South Dakota. From there the Hunkpapa Sioux warrior could only watch as his tribe's lands were nibbled away by the US government.

The next year, in exchange for 25,000 cows and 1,000 bulls, other Sioux chiefs were asked to sign a paper they could not read; it surrendered 14,000 square miles, about half the reservation lands guaranteed in the 1868 Ft Laramie Treaty. Suspecting the worst, a chief named Yellow Hair scooped up a handful of dirt and thrust it at the federal agent. "We have given up nearly all of our land," he said; "you had better take the balance now."

In August 1883 a commission led by Senator Henry L Dawes of Massachusetts came to Hunkpapa Sioux Agency at Standing Rock to investigate charges of an illegal land seizure. Sitting Bull, only recently released from captivity, attended the conference but was at first ignored by the commissioners. When they finally asked for his opinion, he accused them of acting like "men who have been drinking wiskey" and led the chiefs in a walkout. Although professing loyalty to Sitting Bull, the other leaders were worried and persuaded him to apologize the next day. "The Great Father told me not to step aside from the white man's path, and I told him I would not, and I am doing my best travel in that path," he told the commissioners.

They were not mollified. "The government feeds and clothes and educates your children now," one of them said, "and desires to teach you to become farmers, and to civilize you, and make you as white men."

The Bureau of Indian Affairs agent at Standing Rock, James McLaughlin, tried working with other Hunkpapa and Blackfeet Sioux chiefs. But Sitting Bull remained their favored leader-and, ironically, became a celebrity in the white world. At the driving of the last spike to link the Northern Pacific Railroad's transcontinental track in the summer of 1883, Sitting Bull was asked to deliver a speech drafted for him by a bilingual army officer. Ignoring the text, the renowned chief rose to announce in Sioux that he hated all white people. "You are thieves and liars," he told his uncomprehending audience. "You have taken away our lands and made us outcasts." The embarrassed officer read a few platitudinous sentences from the prepared speech in English, and the listeners sprang to their feet with applause for Sitting Bull.

The next year he made a government-sponsored tour of 15 cities and was so enthusiastically received that Buffalo Bill Cody asked him to join his Wild West Show in 1885. Sitting Bull agreed, but he declined Cody's subsequent offer of a trip to Europe: "I am needed here. There is more talk of taking our lands."

Indeed, the government tried in 1888 to carve up the Great Sioux Reservation (then comprising about half the present state of South Dakota, plus parts of Wyoming and Nebraska) into six smaller Indian reserves and purchase the remaining 9 million acres for 50 cents an acre. The Indians balked. A year later Gen George Crook was sent to Sioux country with an offer of $1.50 per acre-and the implied threat that the land would be seized if the Indians did not agree to sell. Crook, dealing with the tribal leaders one by one, got nearly all to sign-with the notable exception of Sitting Bull. Asked how the Indians felt about surrendering so much land, Sitting Bull replied abruptly, "Indians! There are no Indians left but me!"
Having heard of the Paiute prophet Wovoka, several northern Plains tribes sent a delegation to Nevada late in 1889 to learn more about his prediction of a new age without white men. The emissaries returned the following spring to introduce the Ghost Dance religion to the Sioux and other tribes; by autumn of 1890 virtually all activities-trading, schooling, farming-came to a standstill as the people took up the frenzied ritual.

Understandably, perhaps, the whites grew alarmed; predictably, Sitting Bull was blamed for the unrest. "He is the chief mishchief maker," James McLaughlin wrote from Standing Rock, "and if he were not here this craze so general among the Indians would never have gotten a foothold at this agency." Barred from visiting other reservations in South Dakota, Sitting Bull led the Ghost Dance at Standing Rock, once gathering about 100 followers to dance for 200 spectators. By mid-December, McLaughlin had received orders to arrest him.

The agency police who came to arrest Sitting Bull on December 15 were Native Americans themselves, as it happened-though a cavalry squadron was posted nearby in case of trouble. The chief put up no struggle, but one of his irate supporters shot the officer in charge, Lt Bull Head. As he fell, Bull Head fired his revolver, wounding Sitting Bull in the chest. A second police officer, Sgt Red Tomahawk, shot the prisoner in the back of the head. Sitting Bull fell dead to the ground.

A skirmish broke out between agency police and Sitting Bull's followers, then most of the Hunkpapas surrendered. A few fled south toward the Badlands to join the Miniconjou chief Big Foot, who had been leading Ghost Dancers on the Cheyenne River Reservation. On December 28 the cavalry caught up with Big Foot's band-106 warriors and about 250 women and children-and persuaded the chief, who was grievously ill with pneumonia, to bring them to the Pine Ridge Reservation.

They were taken to a location on Wounded Knee Creek to be disarmed. Somewhere along that stream, according to tradition, was buried the heart of Crazy Horse, killed in captivity 13 years earlier. Big Foot's band included several veterans of the Little Bighorn. The cavalry, commanded by Col James Forsyth, numbered about 500 and had four Hotchkiss guns-lethal, fast-firing small cannons. That night the officers broke out a keg of whiskey to celebrate Big Foot's capitulation.

On December 29, Colonel Forsyth distributed rations to the tribe. Then, summoning the men to a council, he ordered them to surrender all their weapons. When only a few complied, Forsyth sent soldiers to search the tepees. They found 38 rifles. Forsyth next demanded that the men open the blankets in which they had wrapped themselves to show they had no hidden weapons.

An aged medicine man named Yellow Bird started chanting and swaying to a Ghost Dance song. Black Coyote, a young warrior who was reportedly deaf, raised his Winchester above his head and shouted that he would not give it up. When two soldiers tried to wrest it away from him, the gun went off. Taking the shot as a signal, other Indians threw aside their blankets and opened fire with previously concealed weapons. The troopers fired into the ranks of native warriors. Big Foot was among the first casualties.

Even when most of the warriors lay dead, the shooting did not end. As women and children fled in terror, the rampaging soldiers followed, capturing and killing them in small, scattered groups as far as two miles away from Wounded Knee. By noon the guns were silent. About 300 Indians had been killed, most of them women and children; 31 soldiers had also died, some caught in their own crossfire.

Visiting the scene of the massacre later that day, the Oglala Sioux holy man Black Elk found dead and wounded women and children scattered all along a dry gulch where they had caught cover. Some lay in heaps where they had huddled together. An infant was trying to suck milk from its dead mother's breast. "When I saw this," Black Elk said in despair, "I wished that I had died too, but I was not sorry for the women and children. It was better for them to be happy in the other world."

The press hailed the killings as revenge for the Little Bighorn. "There is nothing to conceal or apologize for in the Wounded Knee Battle," an army investigator concluded. "The Indians brought on their own destruction as surely as any people ever did. That they were under a strange religious hallucination is only an explanation, not an excuse." Eighteen of the troopers who took part in the killings were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Even more than the schools, the reservations themselves evolved. At first they were little more than prisons for most Native American communities. Administered in heavy-handed manner by agents, many of whom lacked any qualifications for their assignments, reservations appeared to be nothing more than barren, isolated acreages to which unwilling groups of people had been banished.

The tribesmen on the northern Plains reservations seeemed particulary bereft. The buffalo could no longer be hunted; wars could no longer offer glory and honor. Farming, an occupation advocated by the government, was deemed unworthy work for a man. Cheyenne, Sioux, and other Plains Indian males no doubt shared the sentiment concisely expressed by the Shoshone leader Washakie: "God damn a potato!" Nonetheless, as early as 1886, the Indians at Wind River, Wyoming, were pooling their labor and sharing the produce of reservation hay fields and vegetable gardens.

Court decisions under the Dawes Act and related legislaton wrenched millions of acres from Indian control. The carving up of the Great Sioux Reservation in the Dakotas was a bleak harbinger: as hordes of non-Indians swarming into vacated Sioux lands began to clamor for more, the new, smaller reserves-Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Lower Grule, Crow Creek, Pine Ride, Rosebud-seemed only temporary themselves.

Rosebud was one of the reservatons opened to non-Indian settlement in the wake of the Supreme Court's Lone Wolf decision of 1903. Cheyenne River then caught the eyes of ranchers, farmers, speculators, and boosters. In December 1907 a US senator from South Dakota introduced a bill to chop off a piece of Cheyenne River to accommodate new homesteaders; not to be outdone, a local congressman introduced a bill in the House of Representatives calling for the entire unallotted portion of the reservation to be opened.

But at Cheyenne River, residents went on the offensive. Forming special reservation councils, they appealed to the Indian Rights Association, an influential group made up mostly of sympathetic whites. They sent a delegation to Washington DC, to lobby directly on their own behalf. Such united action represented a wave of larger changes taking place in Indian life.

Within a generation, a new sense of community was emerging at Cheyenne River through a process similar to the one in the boarding schools. The reservation brought together several previously distinct and fiercely independent bands of Teton Sioux: Miniconjou, Sans Arc, Blackfeet, and Two Kettle. While band affiliation remained important, the people soon began to see themselves as Cheyenne River Sioux. The ability to act together in a common cause would prove crucial to their survival.

The American Indian Movement, AIM, had started in 1968 with a program, modeled after the Black Panthers, to monitor police harassment of the urban Indian community in Minneapolis. It soon had chapters in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, and Cleveland.

Two men emerged as AIM's most visible leaders: Dennis Banks, an Anishinabe Ojibwa from Minneapolis, and Russell Means, an Oglala Lakota. Both had been born on reservations, and both had lived on the margins of white society-Banks serving time in jail for armed robbery, Means drifting in and out of schools and part-time jobs. Now in their 30's, they found a new focus for their energies.

Indian militancy reached its high point in 1973 at a fitting spot-near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, site of the 1890 massacre (still officially a "battle" in US Army records) .

The new confrontation began as a dispute over local Sioux politics. When the conservative reservation chairman, Richard Wilson, banned all AIM activities from Pine Ridge, Russell Means began campaigning to remove him from office. Various tribal factions maneuvered for power. Eventually, on February 28, armed AIM members moved into the hamlet of Wounded Knee, took over the church and general store-and declared their independence from the United States.

During two months of occupation they were surrounded by the largest array of government forces to confront Native Americans in this century, and two Indians were killed in sporadic exchanges of gunfire. The conflict ended without further bloodshed-but not before the nation's long-buried history of injustice toward its native people had been brought into the light. Whatever they thought of AIM's tactics, the vast majority of American Indians heralded what became know as Wounded Knee II for focusing attention on their cause.
As late as 1994, Sioux tribes were refusing to accept the $100 million offered for their beloved Black Hills-holding out instead for restoration of the land.

Sioux, First Part

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