Robert Warrior

by a caravan of protesters who were prohibited from camping in the nation’s capital; and the 1973 American Indian Movement-supported takeover of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation that lasted 71 days and cost the lives of two Indian defenders.

The book grew out of “a profound dissatisfaction with the existing narratives of this crucial period in Indian and American history,” the two authors write in their foreword. “Our focus is not on the U.S. government’s failed policies or on police repression, but on how Indian people, for a brief and exhilarating time, staged a campaign of resistance and introspection unmatched in this century.”

Warrior and Smith spent five years researching three pivotal years. They interviewed Indian leaders and searched indexes of news broadcasts to compile an account “where not everything is red or white.”

In the process of writing the book, Warrior says, he came to appreciate the challenges of writing recent history.

“When writers of color write about their own group, there’s an expectation that everyone is going to like the group,” he says. “But in fact the scrutiny under which your work falls within that group is very high. People who invested so much of their lives want things to accurately reflect what happened.”

A recent review by the Shoshone-Bannock editor of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News in Idaho describes Like a Hurricane as “a continual education in the missteps and errors of the [Indian] movement” that demonstrated that the “leadership of the American Indian Movement was, all at once, brilliant, drunken, serious, flippant, traditional, modern, savvy and clueless.” Nevertheless, the editor notes, the book “has only increased our admiration for the imagination and daring displayed by so many courageous Indian people.” ST

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