AMERICAN INDIAN ACTIVISM FROM ALCATRAZ TO WOUNDED KNEE
By Diane Manuel
He was only 9 years old at the time of the 1973 takeover of Wounded Knee
by the Oglala Sioux,
but Robert
Warrior will never forget the prime-time event
that brought international attention to the concerns of American
Indians.
“The thing I remember most
clearly was Marlon Brando refusing the Academy Award,” says the
assistant professor of English. “In his place Sacheen Littlefeather
tried to make a speech and got booed off the stage.”
Warrior revisits the activism that swept Indian country from 1969 to
1973 in the recently published Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement
from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: The New Press).
Warrior, a member of the Osage nation, co-wrote the book with Paul Chaat
Smith, a Comanche who writes and lectures on Indian art and
politics.
“People who’ve read it say to me, ‘I thought it was going to be a
heavy book about injustice,’” Warrior says. “Instead, we tried to tell a
story that would be a biography of a period, from the revolutionary
euphoria that surrounded Alcatraz to the sense of sobering reality that
followed Wounded Knee.”
The narrative is focused on three events: the 19-month occupation of
Alcatraz by 78 young Indians, which began in November 1969 as an attempt
to reclaim “surplus federal land” granted to Indians under the terms of
the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868; the unplanned occupation of the Bureau
of Indian Affairs building in 1972 that was launched 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