A Warrior's Legacy
kicker
BooksBY ROBERT SHERRILL
IN THE SPIRIT OF CRAZY HORSEby . Viking, $20.95.
CRAZY HORSE was considered by many to be the greatest military tactician ever produced by the Sioux, an Indian nation noted for its warriors. His most famous victory, shared with Sitting Bull, was the extermination of Colonel George Custer’s troops, in 1876; but among the Sioux, it was probably not any particular victory by Crazy Horse that lifted their hearts but rather his stubborn refusal to go gently into the reservation night. Believing that the Dakotas belonged to his people both by aboriginal claim and by formal treaty with Washington, Crazy Horse would not be pushed onto a restricted piece of turf; for taking that attitude he was, though unarmed, killed by federal soldiers. At the moment, he was their captive; they said he was trying to escape. (Sitting Bull was later killed for “resisting arrest.”)
It probably was not easy for Peter Matthiessen, the adventurer and novelist, to uncover the legacy of Crazy Horse’s vitality, heroism, and indomitable humor that is buried in the lives of reservation Indians today. Those who have tried to maintain their traditional ways, says Matthiessen, have been so starved and neglected and generally abused by the federal government and by white society that it is “difficult to find a family without an alcoholic or a member in jail, a recent suicide or carwreck victim, a woman sterilized by the Indian Health Service without her consent, or a child removed to a government boarding school or foster home against the family’s will.”
Many of the Indians who venture into the white man’s world fall into two categories: drifters and drunks. The rare ones who show spunk often do so in criminal ways. In South Dakota, where much of Matthiessen’s book takes place, Indians make up only 6.5 percent of the general population but between a quarter and a third of the prison population. No minority group in America is more impoverished. And even when Indians do find decent work, they often are consumed by a restlessness, a sense that they don’t really fit in.
A lot of Indians would still like to grab the white man where it hurts and make him live up to all those treaties he has broken. It was this passion that launched the American Indian Movement (AIM), in 1968. For most people, the only names that come easily to mind from that movement are Dennis Banks and Russell Means, but Matthiessen says that in fact they did not operate as a team and were often at odds. Perhaps the worst feature of Indian poverty, at least on the Sioux reservation central to Matthiessen’s study, is that it helped create terrible schisms, Indian against Indian (the “traditionals” versus a group supported by the Bureau of Indian Affairs) in a power struggle that left dozens of unsolved murders and an atmosphere of anarchy in which everyone went armed. The inner tensions were increased by rumors that AIM had been infiltrated by FBI spies.
Nevertheless, despite its fractured leadership and undisciplined following, AIM managed to pull off enough flashy confrontations with white authority—including a sit-in and a riot at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in Washington; a seizure (and holding, from 1969 to 1972) of Alcatraz Island; and the “capture” of the trading post at Wounded Knee (site of the 1890 massacre, a popular place with tourists)—to alarm federal and state authorities. To them, it seemed obvious that Indians were a serious threat to national security.
THE GOVERNMENT’S embarrassingly excessive reaction was most clearly evident at Wounded Knee, where AIM’s ragtag group, though it hadn’t given any indication of becoming violent, was surrounded by scores of U. S. marshals, FBI agents, BIA “tribal police” (usually referred to by the traditionalists, and by the author, as “goons”), state troopers, and an assortment of rancher vigilantes—a veritable army, equipped with “armored personnel carriers, automatic weapons, and enough ammunition (133,000 rounds for the M-16 rifles alone) to wipe out every Indian in the Dakotas.” At one point, the FBI asked that 2,000 soldiers surround the reservation, but this request was rejected by Washington, as was one for a dozen rocket launchers.
Just how overblown the whole episode was (the national press must bear some blame) is shown by the fact that virtually all the government’s charges against AIM leaders were thrown out of court when the case came to trial. The government’s case was not helped when an FBI witness turned out to be a perjurer. After that trial, there was so much hatred on both sides that further diplomacy was out of the question. Speaking for AIM, Dennis Banks said: “All FBI agents strike me the same. They look like amateurs, and they look like killers.” Speaking for a significant part of the government, William Janklow, a prosecuting attorney who would later win popularity—and the governorship— as South Dakota’s leading anti-Indian politician, said: “The only way to deal with the Indian problem in South Dakota is to put a gun to the AIM leaders’ heads and pull the trigger.”
A murderous encounter was probably inevitable. It occurred during the late morning of June 26, 1975, when two FBI agents, in separate cars, drove onto the Oglala Sioux’s Pine Ridge Reservation. Because of the FBI’s past harassment, their presence was interpreted as a hostile intrusion. Apparently, the agents saw that they were driving into deep trouble, for they stopped their cars on the road. Around them, at some distance, was a scattered group of Indians. No one knows which side fired first, but considering the odds against them, the agents were fools if they started the fight. They were caught in the open, with only their cars to hide behind, and in the cross fire both agents were wounded, one so seriously that he passed out from loss of blood this arm was nearly shot off). The other agent was helpless too; somebody came up and finished them off at zero range with a high-powered rifle. The agent who was still conscious when his assassin approached may have tried to ward off the fatal bullet with his hand, because there were powder burns on it. THIS WAR IS so lopsided, though, that it might better be called a hunt. So it is good to have Matthiessen as our guide. He has had considerable experience observing others hunt all sorts of beasts and fish. This is the first time he has observed manhunts, and there are moments in this book when I get the feeling that, though he follows the events with meticulousness and gusto, he almost wishes he were back dealing with more admirable predators, such as the lion in Kenya that snapped off a schoolgirl’s head (Sand Rivers) or the shark that swam off with the bottom half of a Californian (Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark).
Many Indians had participated in the shoot-out. Their identities were known, but for some reason the government decided—after the biggest FBI manhunt in history—to take only three to trial. Two, tried in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, were acquitted. The jury concluded that because of previous provocations by police agencies, the Indians felt they were shooting in self-defense.
That left only Leonard Peltier, an Ojibwa-Sioux. Fearing that he would not get a fair trial, Peltier fled to Canada. U.S. officials won his extradition by offering Canadian authorities the deposition of a witness who, the prosecuting attorney later admitted, “was incompetent in the utter, utter, utter, ultimate sense of incompetency.” An appellate judge noted that if the government would use such a witness, “they must be willing to fabricate other evidence” as well.
Peltier’s trial was held in Fargo, North Dakota, before what Matthiessen describes as “very conservative rural jurors—mostly Lutherans of Scandinavian ancestry, with long faces and a long ruminative memory of the nineteenth-century massacres in Minnesota,” a group that was suspicious of Peltier’s sarcastic (and bungling) “East Coast Jewish radical lawyers.” The judge refused to let the jurors take notes or consult the transcript of the enormously complex trial. He permitted the prosecuting attorney to tell the jury of Peltier’s previous runins with the law (serious run-ins, though Peltier had never been convicted of anything) but did not permit defense attorneys to point out that Peltier’s two codefendants, against whom the evidence was essentially the same, had been acquitted. Also, the judge blocked defense efforts to remind the jury of the FBI’s highly suspicious ballistics work.
And so today we find Peltier alive (despite what Matthiessen convincingly portrays as a government plot to have him killed by a fellow convict) but serving two consecutive life sentences. If he behaves himself, he may get out by the year 2015.
WHAT ARE WE to make of this? It will certainly do no good to be swept up in AIM’s romantic interpretation of the episode. Matthiessen strikes the right note of caution: “With the passage of time, the events of June 26, 1975, were being portrayed [by AIM propagandists] in the bright proud colors of Crazy Horse and the days of Lakota [Sioux] glory, when what had happened at Oglala was not glorious at all but sad and ugly.” Considering the imbalance of power on that occasion, it was cowardly as well. Yet, as Matthiessen goes on to argue, the engagement must be judged not as an isolated event but as a part of an environment that the federal government created over many years. It is only fair to consider the possibility that what was done at Pine Ridge was done not as individual violence but as part of a war. Peltier claims that he was acting simply as a warrior and a soldier, and that it is illogical to judge him otherwise. “When white society’s efforts to colonize people are met with resistance it’s called war,” he says. “But when the colonized Indians of North America meet to stand and resist we are called criminals. . . . We are an Indian nation and the governments of Canada and the United States and the dominant white society they represent have made war against our people, culture, spiritual ways and sacred Mother Earth for over 400 years.” He has a point, and Matthiessen supports it persuasively by a quick review of what the government has done to the Sioux.
In 1868, federal officials signed a treaty at Fort Laramie granting the tribe “absolute and undisturbed use” of a vast tract of territory that included the Black Hills, an area sacred to the Sioux. When gold was discovered in the Black Hills, Washington took them back, and much more besides, and gave the land to whites. In 1878, Christian missionaries began heckling the Sioux, and within a few years had persuaded federal agencies to outlaw rituals that were central to the Sioux religion. In 1883, “the last herd of northern bison was wiped out by soldiers and mercenaries,” and “a century of utter dependence on the white man had begun.” In 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Act, permitting whites to begin a wholesale stealing of Indian land, and over the next half-century, writes Matthiessen, “the native people all across the country would lose two thirds of their remaining lands by sale and swindle.” In 1890, the U.S. government was so grateful to Custer’s former regiment, the Seventh Cavalry, for massacring about 200 Indians (including quite a few women and children) at Wounded Knee that it awarded the soldiers twenty Congressional Medals of Honor despite, Matthiessen says, “a bungled maneuver in which at least twenty-five Blue Coats perished in the cross fire from their own guns.”
The list, of course, could be brought down to the present, and though the government’s techniques for abusing Indians have become somewhat more sophisticated (U.S. soldiers no longer play catch wdth the severed breasts of Indian maidens, as the author says Kit Carson’s troops did), the overall pattern is clear enough: a protracted effort—through physical repression, territorial restrictions, and the use of arms, starvation, psychological intimidation, and various stratagems of deceit—to force the Indians into a “citizenship” that amounts to nothing but the most abject surrender. Moreover, the Sioux, remembering what happened to the Black Hills and very aware, as Matthiessen tells us, that “more than half of the continent’s uranium and much of its petroleum and coal lie beneath Indian land,” may be forgiven if they suspect that the white man has decided “Indians are in the way again.”
Those who have, through his books, accompanied Peter Matthiessen on his wide-ranging adventures know that he is a man of great courage, conscience, insight, sympathy, and tenderness. Those characteristics are seen again in In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. But unless I am badly misled by the internal evidence, there has also been a profound change in Matthiessen: he is losing confidence in mankind, and perhaps in himself. In Sal Si Puedes, his 1969 book about Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, Matthiessen, after quoting a black migrant farm worker as predicting “the world gonna be great one day,” adds that “Cesar Chavez shares this astonishing hope of an evolution in human values, and I do too; it is the only hope we have.” On the final page of that book, he predicts that sooner or later “the new citizens” who prefer freedom to conformism and fear will “win, for the same reason that other new Americans won, two centuries ago, because time and history are on their side, and passion.” But fourteen years later, in this, his first “social issues” book since Sal Si Puedes, there is no such note of hope, no assurance that mankind will outgrow its orneriness.
If Matthiessen has changed, when and why did it happen? In the early 1970s, having recently lost his wife to cancer, Matthiessen set out to find answers. He went in search of the ultimate Zen experience and, almost coincidentally, in search of a rare Himalayan beast. In The Snow Leopard, his account of the trek, he told us that when the journey down the mountains was nearly at an end, his tent was invaded by a Hindu with a scabby head and rotting lip. “I lunge at him,” he wrote, “and shove him bodily out of my sight, lashing the tent flap and yelling incomprehensibly myself: I do not have the medicine he needs, and anyway there is no cure for him, no cure for me. How can he know, poor stinking bastard, that it is not his offensiveness that offends me, the pus and the bad breath of him—no, it is his very flesh, no different from my own. In his damnable need, he returns me to our common plight, this pit of longing into which, having failed in my poor leap, I sink again.” The great enlightenment that he hoped the trip would produce did not take place. “For all the exhilaration, splendor, and ‘success’ of the journey to the Crystal Mountain, a great chance has been missed and I have failed. I will perform the motions of parenthood, my work, my friendships, my Zen practice, but all hopes, acts, and travels have been blighted. I look forward to nothing.”
The search for the snow leopard was made in late 1973, but since the account of it was not published in book form until five years ago, I assume that the underlying despondency persisted at least until then. Indeed, I think it persists in Crazy Horse. Matthiessen knows he does not have—and knows our society does not have—the “medicine” the “poor stinking bastards” on the reservations need, either.
Maybe that’s too melodramatic an interpretation. Maybe I read too much hopelessness into Crazy Horse. But I am fairly certain of one thing, and I think it relates to his depression: Matthiessen has lost, for the moment at least, his touch of poetry. At its best, Matthiessen’s prose is so right that it becomes more than prose, as when he tells us of the song of the whales in Blue Meridian, those marvelous oinks, squeaks, grunts, and whistles, “tuned by the ages to a purity beyond refining, a sound that man should hear each morning to remind him of the morning of the world”; or recalls his meeting with the sharks in “a nether world of openmouthed dead staring forms that moved in slow predestined circles”; or paints that primordial scene, in Sand Rivers, of “spleen-yellow” crocodiles feasting on a rotting hippopotamus, “swollen a pale purple, that was stranded like a huge rubber toy on a hidden bar out in mid-river.” Death and violence have often inspired him before; victims have stirred him to some of his finest writing. But not here. Here there is only prose hardened by unhappiness with a mean system that defies reform. In this respect, I guess, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse is a perfect book for our times.