Russell Means: An Indian Seeking Freedom
RUSSELL MEANS was a full-blood Oglala Lakota when he was born in South Dakota, on a Pine Ridge Reservation which he considered a sorry substitute for a home. During WWII, it had been Prisoner-of-War Camp 344. On the other hand, the Pine Ridge Reservation was in the Black Hills, and these hills were sacred; not even the white man had been able to ruin them. Yellow Thunder Village in the Black Hills was to Means a holy land.
He was proud to know what clans he came from. His mother was of the War Eagle clan, and his father from the Crazy Horse clan.
Means was very American in his deep love of freedom. He was a leader with energy, charisma and brains — but he was impulsive, with little commitment to the scut work of organizing. He always chafed at restrictions on his freedom.
At age 29, drifting in and out of trouble, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Means joined the American Indian Movement (AIM) and with his bulk, toughness and ability to inspire, moved quickly up the ranks until he was head man in the AIM. But he resigned six times, deeply frustrated by many things. He hated the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) for its corruption and indifference, its lazy assumption of superiority. He hated the history of the whites and Indians, treaty after treaty solemnly signed, with the white man always failing to live up to the treaty’s promises.
More controversially, Means also hated many Indians for their passivity, and many of their “leaders” for the way they accepted meager handouts, which he saw as crumbs from the white man’s table.
Sometimes Russell Means hated himself.
When people told Means that Indians didn’t do well in American-style schools. He said ‘Good for them!’ He felt the schools were built on a terrible model, and squeezed the souls out of children, especially the strong ones. He felt the schools lionized the rights and vastly exaggerated the deeds of selected groups of human beings.
He treasured something his parents and grandparents had taught him: if there were no land animals the earth would be barren; if there were no birds, the earth would be barren; if there were no plants, the earth would be barren and without life — but if there were no human beings, the earth would flourish.
Means pulled various “publicity stunts” with AIM — occupied Alcatraz Island; in 1970, seized a replica Mayflower ship in Boston Harbor on Thanksgiving Day; did a prayer vigil on top of Mount Rushmore — which is Lakota holy land. Means also occupied the BIA’s Washington offices and threw some desks and files around, making an unholy mess.
But in 1973, Wounded Knee was by far his biggest media event. On December 29, 1890, The Battle of Wounded Knee, the last of the Indian Wars, was little more than the slaughter of several hundred mostly defenseless Dakota men, women and children. It had traumatized the Teton Dakota tribes, and loosened the ties binding them.
Means decided to use Wounded Knee to promote solidarity among Indians. Furious about squalid Native American neighborhoods, and about police goon squads operating there, Means seized the historic village of Wounded Knee, and took hostages. A siege began. He had 200 Native Americans with him and felt the support of the spirits of the ancestors slaughtered by whites at this spot.
Means was an odd man, part charismatic, part true believer in Indian rights, part opportunist. Like David Koresh at Waco 25 years later, Means was a moral leader with an arrest record, carrying illegal guns and willing to use them on the innocent. He did not feel that he was the aggressor; he was an Indian, defending himself and his people. It was the white men who always brought danger and war down on themselves by their selfishness, their eternal hunger for the lands of others, of people who were there long before the white man came along, who loved the land far more than whites did, and knew better how to care for it.
Unlike the siege at Waco, the Federal Government waited Means out, and after 75 days the siege ended peacefully.
When he testified to the U.S. Congress, Means began by greeting them in the Lakota language, which he then translated for them. He noted that ‘My prayer to the great mystery always includes you, the Congress, and the leaders in all governments.’ He then told the Congress that in America the Indian can be anything he wants to be — except an American Indian. It was a sharply pointed history of the Indian that he recited to Congress, in which he charged the white man set the Indian up to fail, to be expendable. He did not like the Wheeler-Howard Act of 1934, nor Public Law 280 of 1953. He said these acts gave the Indian a bogus kind of freedom — freedom on the white man’s terms, within the white man’s political forms.
Means hated the “tribal governments” which the white man handed the Indians. Leave us alone! he wanted to scream. Our culture is vanishing, but we could reclaim it if you would remove yourself from our lands, from inside our heads… He wanted every Indian to know what clans they came from, to know the languages and traditions of those clans. But with young Indians watching TV and going to Hollywood movies, those traditions were severely threatened.
Believing passionately that Indian leaders were set up to fail, Means felt that Indian leaders had to be better than that, smarter than that, that they must refuse to be cast aside, marginalized. Yet he courted the interference of law enforcement, of white cops because, though he married several times, he never did right by any of his wives. In several different states, he got involved in barroom brawls.
In 1987, Russell Means declared the Republic of Lakota, which he claimed stretched for thousands of square miles in five different states. But most Sioux/Lakota didn’t get behind this “Republic” and the mainstream media barely noticed.
Means was a flawed man, and he knew it. He resented the way the Nixon White House had lied to him in the negotiations around Wounded Knee. Like so many Indians, he liked alcohol and couldn’t contain himself around it. He got in fistfights, served time in prison.
Wearing his hair long he considered part of remaining fully aware; he felt a man’s hair stored important memories. He wore the beads and leather, wore his hair long, dressed like an Indian. But he was adamant that being an Indian was not about wearing beads and leather moccasins and long hair. Being an Indian was about being free. It was about freedom to move through the natural world, praising and using the sunrise, the sunset, worshiping animals, killing animals and using their skins, and their furs, but never denying or forgetting their souls.
To him, everything was a wheel ceaselessly turning, the end bringing us back the beginning. A medicine wheel, a sacred hoop. A good life meant living the whole circle, and closing the circle in peace.
He distrusted the white liberals who were so proud of using the word “Native American” with him. He much preferred “Indian.” He never used the word “Navajo” either; that tribe was the Dine.
The white man’s idea of “progress” he found unworthy of serious thought, and the way they produced this “progress” by lying, stealing and elbowing others aside he thought was nothing short of criminal. The way they denied that other animals had souls also seemed to him profoundly blind.
The issuing of ID cards, the record-keeping by the government, the laws about who could live on which land, the seizing of large hunks of the best land by the wealthy and by the government — all of these things reduced freedom, and separated his people from their ancestors. He was afraid there would be no way to close the circle, and modern Indians would be lost, cut off from their history, from the rituals that had fed their souls and kept them safe for centuries.
Russell Means refused to get a driver’s license, refused to apply for a fishing permit. He believed he drove and fished on land which belonged to his people, and none of the white man’s paperwork applied. He would not carry an Indian ID card, and for 21 years he paid no income tax.
All the groups he was told to make alliances with he also found to be a poor match. The Marxists were not nearly spiritual enough for his taste. They seemed to be convinced of a vast, mechanistic plan that sounded like it was hatched by an over-educated fool. Christians were somewhat better — but Means couldn’t get over the fact that this Christian God of theirs, whom they described with such reverence as a peaceful God, seemed to bless and sanctify the taking of America by force from all the tribes who’d lived here first.
Black people and Indians had certain things in common, but in the end Means decided that the way in which African-Americans had experienced race-hatred was too different from those of Indians, as were the ways the two groups had tried to resist.
Russell Means went to Hollywood and played Indians in white man’s scripts. He acted in “Pocahontas” and “Last of the Mohicans” because they paid him well to play a wise and noble leader in the movie. But the pain of being directed by white men out to make money was sometimes too much, and he’d walk off the set.
In ‘Mohicans’ he played Chief Chingachgook and stood on top of a mountain, sending off his dead warrior son to the ancestors, crying out in a way that was despairing, boasting and mixing spiritually with the spirit world, all at the same time. In a white man’s movie, he knew who he was. If Hollywood was using him, he, too, was using them.
In 2012, when Russell Means died of cancer of the esophagus, he was 72 years old. By his request, his ashes were spread over Yellow Thunder Camp, in the Black Hills.
One day, while driving through New Mexico with one of his wives, Means saw a shepherd of the Dine tribe, expertly guiding his flock while also praying, listening to the sky. Means stopped the car and watched the shepherd with a reverent eye. His wife asked him why. Means was saddened that she needed to be told: here, finally, was a free man.