Chapter 6 - California: "What about the cowboys?

"

"Power remained always in the hands of the white superintendent

and the white BIA bureaucrats. People were beaten and shot. Pine
Ridge experienced a rash of violent deaths, unexplained and uninvestigated.
People were afraid to leave their homes. A small girl had her eye shot out.
Most of the victims were people who had stood up against Wilson or had
otherwise offended him. He had people stomped and beaten in his
presence. Things got so out of hand that even the long-suffering back-
country full-bloods, known for their capacity to endure in silence, began
to grumble. The old treaty chiefs, medicine men, tribal interpreters,
and traditionalists finally formed an organization known as OSCRO,
Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization. Its head was Pedro Bissonette,
a close friend who was later killed under mysterious circumstances
by Wilson's goons."
- Mary Crow Dog (21)

"With legal channels for change effectively blocked, the OSCRO

group - whose membership totalled about 800 persons prior to the
Wounded Knee occupation - faced the choice of submitting to
Wilson's rule or challenging it by direct action. Thus, on the evening
of February 27, 1973, the OSCRO met at Calico Hall, a small log
building outside Pine Ridge village to discuss the refusal of both
tribal and BIA officials to deal with their grievances. AIM leaders
Russell Means, whose home is the Porcupine district of the
reservation, and Dennis Banks, a Chippewa Indian from Minnesota,
were at the meeting. Also attending were the traditional chiefs
and headsmen from all eight reservation districts."
- 'The Life and Death of Anna Mae Aquash' (22)

- - - - - - - [ PIX of Wounded Knee:

Anna Mae Aquash
goon squad
Sacheen Little Feather refusing Oscar ] - - -

"On the afternoon of February 27, twenty-one AIM members,

including some of the toughest guys in our organization, drove
down to Calico in six cars. We joined about three hundred Oglala
Lakota, mostly older women, who were packed into the meeting
hall. One person after another got up to give testimony about the
loss of civil rights under Wilson's dictatorship. After hours of that,
the chiefs went downstairs to deliberate. When they returned,
they had agreed that something had to be done quickly, but hadn't
decided what it should be. They asked to talk to AIM members
in private.
"At one end of the room sat our seven chiefs, men of immense
 dignity who had earned the respect of all traditional Oglala. The
others in the basement were Gladys Bissonnette, Pedro Bissonnette -
a nephew by marriage - Ellen Moves Camp, Severt Young Bear,
Edgar Bear Runner, Vern Long, Dennis Banks, and me. The two
women spoke first. They said it was up to the chiefs to lead our
nation and to protect the people. They went down the list of
responsibilities which tradition reserved for our leaders. They asked,
'Where are our men today? Where are our defenders? Why is it
mostly women and older men who are marching? When will
decisions be made?'"
"Finally, Grandpa Fools Crow, speaking for all of them, said, 'Go
to Wounded Knee. There, you will be protected.' No one had to ask
what he meant. It was suicidal to go to the BIA building. At Wounded
Knee, as nowhere else, the spirits of Big Foot and his martyred
people would protect us."
- Russell Means (23)

"When I was nominated for 'The Godfather', it seemed absurd

to go to the Awards ceremonies. Celebrating an industry that had
systematically misrepresented and maligned American Indians
for six decades, while at that moment two hundred Indians were
under seige at Wounded Knee, was ludicrous. Still, if I did win an
Oscar, I realized it could provide the first opportunity in history
for an American Indian to speak to sixty million people - a little
payback for years of defamation by Hollywood. So I asked a friend,
Sacheen Little Feather, to attend the ceremony in my place and
wrote a statement for her to deliver in my name denouncing the
treatment of American Indians and racism in general. But Howard
Koch, the producer of the show, intercepted her and, in his wisdom,
refused to let her read my speech. Instead, under great pressure
she had to ad-lib a few words on behalf of the American Indian,
and it made me proud of her."
- Marlon Brando (24)

- - - - - - { PIX of Marlon Brando } - - - - - - - -

It was a mythological night in 1973 when Brando and the woman threw the godfather
back in their faces, at the exact same time we were fighting them at Wounded Knee like
unearthly martians invading our planet. We stood up and cheered when he sent Sacheen
to reject the damn prize. Six carloads of us had taken the night off, in a remote Nebraska
town on our way to South Dakota with warriors, weapons, ammo, food, and medical
supplies, and spent it in rare luxury in a cheap motel watching the Oscars on TV. I was
the scout of the group of mostly denver chicanos because I was the only one who'd
already been to Pine Ridge and knew the back roads to get in. All the main roads were
heavily blocked by military and vigilante freaks who were watching for any off-color
"outside agitators".
 Then Clint Eastwood came out immediately for the next award presentation, after
Sacheen Little Feather did not leave with Brando's golden statuette, and asked the
stunned audience, "What about the cowboys?" Most of them clapped deliriously and gave
the cowboy movie star and second-rate actor a standing ovation, while he beamed
smugly, anti-heroically, just like he did in his hit, spaghetti westerns killing off many
many celluloid villains: a real life Hit Man. His cheering fans were the same ones in
diamonds and furs who'd just booed the only American woman there; but we were still
cheering her all over the real West, in Boise Idaho and Miles City Montana and Fort
Duchesne Utah, and giving the great leap forward in the revolution our own standing
ovation that went back to a lot of other incomprehensible indigenous tribesmen in Libya
and Egypt, with their god Osiris like our own Quetzalcoatl and Deganawidah and Sweet
Medicine, Isis like White Buffalo Woman up there in her white doeskin dress, all our
Mitakaye Oyasin relatives who landed from other worlds at Roswell New Mexico and
Flagstaff Arizona and Syracuse Kansas. The juxtaposition of California with Egypt and
the ultraterrestrial Roswellians swept over my own play I wrote that night in the motel
room, like a sexual torque that H.G. Well's time machine travelled on the hollywood
stage, in the blink of a clause inside a phrase, inside a single sentence we diagrammed
back in school, in clint eastwood's silly cowboy hat imitated on the open rangeland by
even sillier fools acting out their own movie fantasies. Eastwood and his ilk went on to
win their own anti-OSCRO Oscars for mediocre movies, in the 90s, in revenge killings.
The slaughter and firefights that were going on every day and night at Wounded Knee
during that time, that spring solstice season from February to May 1973, in which 2
Indian warriors were killed and a dozen wounded by a full-fledged paramilitary assault
that included the veterans of the 82nd Airborne and many SWAT teams, Black-ops
Special Ops snipers and assassins, hundreds of drunken cowboys and good-old-boys
taking potshots at children from behind the safety of US Army tanks, continued in the
dark after the TV cameras of Dan Rather and Huntley-Brinkley were turned off, and the
chic los angeles crowd went home.
Many of the AIM warriors were US veterans themselves, just home from Vietnam.

On May 7, 1975 the ABC evening news report showed an action

shot of the North Vietnamese hierarchy celebrating its victory over
South Vietnam. From a platform in front of the Presidential Palace
in Saigon, Pham Van Dong, the North Vietnamese premier, pointed
to Sr. Gen, Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese minister of
defense and commander in chief of its armed forces. "There,"
proclaimed Dong, "is the architect of our victory." This was not the
usual hyperbole of triumph; this was a fitting tribute, for Giap commanded
the North Vietnamese armed forces from 1944, when it consisted of
one platoon of thirty-four men, until 1972 or 1973, when it became
the third-largest army in the world. He made war for over thirty years,
and he beat the French, the South Vietnamese, and, judged by the
final results, the United States of America. What is more unusual
is that Giap had no prior schooling, training, or experience to fit
him for the role he played.
- 'Vietnam at War' (26)
 This was just more proof that amerika couldn't win wars, despite all its flaunted
firepower and telecommunications hardware. Vietnam Vets told us of the incompetence
of their officers, the corruption of the politicians both foreign and domestic, and above
all, the religious hypocrisy that tried to justify and rationalize the mass murder in the
name of their incoherent 'Jesus Christ'. We smoked our Pipes and hit the road again
before dawn.