Wounded Knee broke American Indian hearts, but things are improving

Clyde Bellecourt was no saint, far from it, but he set out to change the fortunes of America’s Indians and scored a few home runs.

Clyde Bellecourt, a founder of the American Indian Movement, who led violent protests in the 1970s over the federal government’s grim record in Indian welfare

OBITUARY
Clyde Howard Bellecourt, activist. Born May 8, 1936 at White Earth Reservation, Minnesota; died, aged 85, on January 11 in Minneapolis.

Wounded Knee Creek rises in the southwest corner of South Dakota and heads towards the state’s hardscabble Badlands. It’s tough to live there, but Indians had for centuries, existing off the bison of which there were 60 million in 1800. The creek and nearby town were so named to mark the story of a native man injured in a fight. But these days Wounded Knee lends its name to two indelible black marks on the story of America’s relationship with the Indians.

By 1890, bison numbers had collapsed and miners and settlers had moved on the lands of the Lakota people. The year before, the Badlands had been pledged to the Lakota in perpetuity. But the US government reneged on this, seriously inflaming relations between them. Leading the resistance against the government was the most famous Lakota, Chief Sitting Bull. Aggrieved Indians adopted what was known as the Ghost Dance. This would summon their dead ancestors in the fight against colonialists and the bison would return. The dance was everywhere and it had settlers and officials worried that they might be attacked by Lakota emboldened by its promises. Police visited Sitting Bull on December 15, 1890, to arrest him, but he resisted and was shot dead (by an Indian officer). On December 29, 1890, soldiers and Lakota families who had been summoned gathered at Wounded Knee, and in confused, intensely disputed circumstances 350 Lakota, 120 of them woman and children, were shot dead by troops.

There were echoes of those events throughout the life of Clyde Bellecourt, who was born on a pauperised reservation. Bellecourt was angry at the poverty and discrimination. He ended up in youth detention for truancy. Later, after some criminal episodes, he was sent to jail in Minnesota. There he met other Indians also provoked by their lack of opportunity and lost culture and folklore. They established a scheme to help Indian prisoners. When released, some of these men established the American Indian Movement to reintroduce to urban Indians their history, and the traditions of spirituality that involved. Bellecourt was chairman. They also sought action on food shortages, police brutality and the protection of civil rights. Many saw him as a warrior and he certainly was not afraid of breaking the law with militant demonstrations of their resolve to bring change.

In 1970, he and others took over a Bureau of Indian Affairs office – the government agency, among other responsibilities, that administers more than 220 million hectares held in trust for their Indian owners. He demanded Indians be put in charge, and the unrest spread across the country. Two years later he was part of the march on Washington called the Trail of Broken Treaties. They were to negotiate their list of demands at the Washington BIA office, but a security guard may have overreacted and a scuffle turned into a riot. The rioters broke furniture to make barricades and weapons. Their supporters ringed the building. President Richard Nixon, facing an election days later, didn’t want a massacre, of police or protesters. He caved in and offered to review the BIA and gave an amnesty for the people who had taken over the building.

The following year, Bellecourt and his team were invited by unhappy Indians to South Dakota to help deal with the corrupt mismanagement of their reservation affairs and finances. They also believed their elections were rigged. Better organised this time, AIM and others, some armed, arrived at Wounded Knee for the meeting, and seized the town in what quickly became an entrenched standoff that generated unprecedented worldwide publicity for the Indians’ causes. It was violent and both sides exchanged fire. Two men were shot dead – a local protester, allegedly by a sniper, and another who just arrived with his pregnant wife. A US marshall was shot and paralysed. Black civil rights activist, former boxer Ray Robinson, who flew in from Alabama to marry the protesters’ causes with his, went missing, possibly killed during a dispute with an AIM leader. His body was never found.

The authorities could easily have taken the town, but it would have been a bloodbath. In the end, the protesters believed they had won again when Nixon sent down a team of negotiators and Bellecourt took part. The 71-day standoff ended. But it took much longer for change.

Recently, Bellecourt campaigned to have sports teams drop the Indian names and mascots he believed were lazy, racist stereotyping. This looked impossible 30 years ago, but with name changes for the Washington, Miami and Cleveland Redskins, and axed tomahawk logos, he was winning. The Atlanta Braves are next. Bellecourt said 30 years ago: “We are trying to convince people we’re human beings and not mascots.”