The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 86

iTT" 4 -Part VI-SunvMar. 1 1,1 973 Zttti XHtU Zimt4 emma: tne inaiansr Militants vs. Tribal Leaders An "What JHn- tu mini 7 PINE RIDGE SCENECopy of illustration by Dan Long Soldier shows women fixing meat for winter. Ancient Tribal Culture Enclaves Alien without false protest as an honor to the giver. 6 Indirection in trying to influence the behavior of others.

Troublemakers may be shamed by gossip, or by other Indians withdrawing into cold indifference, faces expressionless. 7 Respect for people which allows long silences to let another person mull over new information or think to himself. Indians may thus appear sullen to whites when they do not respond to conversation. 8 Withdrawal from tense This departure or sudden un-communicativeness can frustrate and exasperate outsider. 9 Better powers of observation than most whites.

Avoidable injury receives little sympathy. Even children are expected to be alert. highly industrialized -But some conservationists believe ''the Indian's living in harmony with nature has lessons for man's future. As early as Stewart Udall, then secretary of Interior, wrote in The Quiet Crisis: "It is ironical that today the conservation movement finds itself turning back to ancient Indian land ideas, to the Indian understanding that we are not outside nature, but part of it. From this wisdom, we can learn how to conserve the best parts of the continent." "In recent decades, we have slowly, come back to some of the truths that the Indians knew from the beginning: that the unborn generations have a claim on the land equal to our own; that men need to learn from nature, to keep an ear to the earth, and to replenish their spirits arms when7 he saw the troops, declaring that he would not fight because they were his friends, was also killed.

a later, in an age without heroes," writes Brown, men like these "are perhaps the most heroic of all Americans." Names such as Sitting Bull, Gero-nimo and Crazy Horse, he continues, have "become as well known as those of the men who tried to destroy them." Theirs was a continuous struggle with the white man and his promises. "They made us many promises, more than I can remember," one old Indian said, they never kept but one; they' promised to take our land, and they1 took it." 1 AIM's leaders may or may not one day be acclaimed heroic, but their six-day sacking of the BIA headquarters shook up the Indian reser vations with an earthquake sized jolt. It was hailed by some Indians, stewing in frustration, as a welcome call to By others as a giant step leading to futile bloodshed. It intensified a growing unrest on the reservations and polarized atti- tudes. One Indian leader, who openly feared violence, said that he and other tribal leaders have no quarrel with many AIM objectives such as those to gain control over all Indian programs, up to and including elimination of the "But any reasonable Indian," he, said, "knows that violence is not the answer.

We suffered our greatest losses on the battlefields." He said AIM people, if they are to get anywhere on the reservations, must be responsible to the tribal governments and to the tribes themselves. "Without a tribe," he pointed out, "an Indian is no different from any other U.S. citizen." r. A man who claims to be a disinterested spectator says of the AIM leaders: strangers, know, even Russell Means. He was standing in the Billy Mills Hall and someone came up to him and, said something to him in the Sioux language.

Means doesn't know the Lakota. All he could do; was stand there and look Indian." Following the BIA building takeover, most tribal leaders in messages to Washington disassociated themselves from the violence. 1 And many tribal councils quickly moved to insulate their people by enacting laws restricting political activity within reservation borders. Whether government inaction to punish the BIA sackers has served to. undermine the nonviolent position of tribal leaders is hard to assess.

,3 Richard Wilson, 44-year-old tribal president of the Oglala Sioux, last week denounced the government's proposal not to arrest any participants in the Wounded Knee occupation pending issuance of federal grand jury indictments. Wilson said he was "pretty upset 1 about amnesty being given to knuckleheads." Wounded Knee could servers a launching pad for AIM or it could be the scene of its last stand theBIA rampage representing the movement's high point. It is clear, however, that the Indian leadership, militant or peaceful, has arrived at a new crossroads in its relationship with Washington. What seems to be happening, In the words of Peter MacDonald, chairman of the Navajo nation, Is that "American Indians are now awakening to more than 100 years of unfulfilled promises and broken treaties." ED MEAGHER and STEVE HARVEY Times Staff Writers were found guilty of manslaughter and a fourth was found guilty of a lesser charge. And following their confrontation with the whites in Gordon, the AIM leaders returned to the reservation to be greeted by many as heroes.

The tribal council responded to pressures and invited AIM to stay on the reservation with a voice in the tribe's It was the first AIM affiliation with a major Indian tribe-Mhe sec- ond largest in the nation after the Nayajos and appeared to -be the breakthrough the militants needed. But AIM aggressiveness soon wore thin with the tribal leaders. They beat down a move to install Russell Means, an AIM leader who happens to be an Oglala Sioux, as chief of the reservation's police force. And whatever reservoir of friendliness for AIM remained among the Oglala chieftains apparently was drained by AIM'S action against the BIA headquarters last November. after that, when the 32-year-old Means returned to the reservation, he was jailed on unlawful assembly charges and released on bond.

An associate, Dennis Banks, was banned from the reservation at-that time. The Beginning of a Relationship Although the occupation of Wounded Knee may have further undercut AIM's status among the tribal establishment, it has brought the Indian problem so often ignored in America's history back into the spotlight, "It was Columbus who discovered the Indians' and belipying he had found India gave them the misnomer that stuck. He.took a few Indians back to Spain with him for display and conversion. He reported them "peaceable" and "praiseworthy," but righteously noted that they "should be made to work" and "adopt our ways." That was the beginning of a relationship between the American natives and hordes of outsiders who arrived after Columbus and did not leave. Most the battle, of course, has been fought over land.

The Indians' land. "The love of possession is a disease with them," Sitting Bull said of the white man. The pattern of the relationship was fixed early. Spain's Laws of the Indies, decreed in 1539, held that Indians were free men and any administration by foreigners on grounds of superior intelligence and experience must be only temporary until the Indians were capable of self-government. Sound familiar? It is approximately the same justification given for the creation and continued operation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Somewhere between Spain and the New World, the Laws of the Indies were largely forgotten by the greedy conquistadors. Later, the English arrived, making perpetual treaties with the Indians, breaking them when convenient The Indians swere no match for. 1 1 weaponry. In Massachusetts, and Nar-ragansetts were all but exterminated in King Philip's War in 1675. King Philip's head was publicly dis-' played for 20 years in Plymouth.

In 1763, the British, under pressure from their French rivals and Increasingly combative Indians, issued a proclamation recognizing Indian land titles and stipulating that all land west of the Appalachian Mountains was reserved for Indian use. The British soon had to leave America, at the insistence of the colonists, however, and in 1830 an Indian Removal Act was passed. Almost all of the estimated 100,000 Indians living east of the Mississippi were moved west, often by force. Under the Removal Act, the Indians were granted perpetual title to the land west of the river. But in 1848, gold was discovered in California and another batch of treaties were drawn to clear a cross-country path to the gold fields.

In justification, Washington came up with the phrase, "Manifest Destiny," to describe a premise that Europeans and their descendants were ordained by destiny to sweep across and eventually rule all of America. The only trouble was that the Indians were in the The years between 1860 and 1890 brought bloodshed on both sides as the white man continued his ruthless conquest of the red man. Author Dee Brown has told the story in his recent best seller, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Before Wounded Knee, there was the 1864 massacre at Sand Creek, Colo. a domestic My Lai where 133 Indians (including 105 women and children) were massacred after greeting the onrushing U.S.

Cavalry troops by raising the American flag. It was here that White Antelope, an old man of 75, unarmed, sang the Cheyenne death song before dying: Nothing lives long Only the earth and the mountains. And Left Hand, who folded his NO ONE really knows whether Black Coyote shot ff his Winchester intentionally or whether it just discharged while he was struggling with the soldiers. Nor Is it clear whether anyone was hit by his shot that day in 1890 at Wounded Knee, S.D; 1 But one thing is certain. It set the stage for a confrontation that has been repeated in recent days at Wounded Knee, raising an old American dilemmar what to do about the Indians? Black Coyote was one of a band of Minneconjou Sioux who were intercepted 'by the 7th U.S., Cavalry Custer's old regiment.

The Indians had been on the' move because the nearby assassination of Sitting" Bull a few days earlier had panicked them into believing that the white man was going to wage more war and they wanted to escape the troops arrayed against them. Attrition had reduced Chief Big Foot's band to just 120 men many of them elderly and 230 women and children. And now they had been caught and forced to surrender their arms. From there; the Indians would be shipped to the military prison in Omaha as "fomenters of disturbances." Big Foot probably wouldn't have lived that long, anyway. He was dying of pneumonia.

But it didn't matter because when the troops frisked the warriors, Black Coyote's rifle was discovered. And when it discharged, the soldiers retaliated en masse. When the shooting ended, and the Army artillery overlooking the camp quieted, 153 Indian men, women and children lay dead, including Black Coyote and Big Foot; many more perhaps 150 crawled away to die. the soldiers -lost 25 dead and 39 wounded, many of them struck by their own bullets and artillery shells. This was the last of the Indian wars if it could be called that and the site of the massacre came to symbolize the end of the Indians' armed struggle to resist conquest as well as the inhumanity of the white man.

It was apparently for those sons that leaders of the American Indian Movement chose -Wounded Knee for their latest confrontation. her, their occupation of Wounded Knee ushers in a new period of sustained Indian militancy depends largely on the outcome of a power struggle among the Indians themselves. On the one side are the tribal leaders on most of the nation's reserva-, tions. On the other is the AIM, a militant rights organization which directed the assault on the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, D.C., last November as well as the recent seizure of Wounded Knee. The Activists' Need for a Tribal Anchor AIM's leaders are mostly city men from Cleveland, Chicago and other Great Lakes area centers obviously well-educated, intelligent, calculating and disciplined activists.

All along they have recognized that a national Indian movement must be anchored on the tribal reservations if it is to be taken seriously. AIM has established chapters on most reservations and won converts, principally from among the young, appealing to their pride, but they have been unable to win a voice in the reservations' power structures. They came closest a year ago on the Oglala Sioux reservation at Pine Ridger, S.D., a few miles from Wounded Knee. They exploited an ugly incident at nearby Gordon, involving an Oglala Sioux named Raymond Yellow Thunder and several town toughs. Yeow Thunder was found dead and rumors swept the reservation that eight days before his death he had been forced to dance naked from.the waist down before 200 persons at the American Legion clubhouse.

(It was later learned that Yellow founder had been stripped and pushed through the door onto the edge of the dance floor but was quickly removed before many pa-tronswitnessed the incident.) 1 AIM leaders gathered a force of about 250 Indians from the reservation And descended on Gordon. Thirty state troopers, along with other were deployed about town. National guardsmen were alerted. AIM spokesmen simply lectured the officials on discrimination and racism, announced formation of an AIM'unit in the area and submitted a number of demands. However, the next day a group of about 100 Indians, en route to Yel-lcw Thunder's funeral in reservation iuses, stopped at the now-famous Wounded Knee trading post and vandalized sections of the adjoining Indian museum.

Eventually, three Gordon men an i TRIED the white man's ways. But we're different. The white man has his way of life, and the Indian has his. Someday; maybe we'll be one and the same. But not now." Dan Long Soldier, a young Sioux heading from an Ohio city back to his Pine Ridge reservation home in South Dakota, was passing judgment on nearly a century of white men's efforts to break the hold of the tribe and groom the red man for the American melting pot.

At least half of the nation's approximately 800,000 Indians, divided among roughly 300 tribal and linguistic groups, are still on reservations. Conditions there may be miserable. But the reservation is the stronghold of the tribe, and the trir bal system is at the center of Indian experience and Indian culture. "Tribal society is of such a nature that one must experience it from the inside," says Vine Deloria Indian spokesman and author of We Talk, You Listen, and Custer Died for Your Sins. "Being inside a tribal universe is so comfortable and reasonable that it acts like a narcotic.

When you are forced outside the tribal context, you become alienated, irritable and lonely. In desperation you long to return to the tribe if only to preserve your sanity." Indian activists now want to revitalize the tribal sovereignty that once was the foundation of Indian society. For some, the campaign for "red power" is even more a renaissance of race and culture a culture which they believe has much to offer their own people and white society, too. 1 The Indian's traditional respect for nature may not have the answers to pollution and environmental problems of a heavily populated, Civilization in frequent contact with animals in irequeni coniaci wiui anunais and wild land. And most important of all, we are recovering a sense of reverence for the land." This theme of man's wholeness with nature also surfaced at an American Academy of Religion meeting in Los Angeles last September.

Said Prof. J. W. E. Newberry, a specialist on Indian religion from Ontario's University of Sudbury: is.

needed is a recognition on the part of the church that the native concepts were and are basically religious ones, that they hold truth they were expressing in their own way when the white man fell upon them, but the invaders were blind to what they found. "Our ecological and sociological problems demand spiritual as well as technological solutions, and I am thrilled to find the essence of that solution in ancient native cultures, and the core of these concepts is Christian." 'All Is Spirit a Core of Belief The Indian, he added, "was not a pagan nor an idolater," but recognized that all is spirit and all spirits are united. "Indian religion must take its rightful place as one of the great religious traditions," said Prof. Ake Hultkrantz of the University of Stockholm. "It is no finished chapter but a continuing phenomenon of our times." Indian beliefs and practices vary widely, of course.

But a core of values and behavior links Indians in a pan-Indianism which unites various tribal groups in a movement to assert Indian ideas and rights. Nancy Oestreich Lurie, of the University of Wisconsin, lists these common Indian traits: 1-Relaxed patience and a preference for reaching decisions by consensus. 2 Oratory as pure artistry, and reasoned persuasion to achieve agreement. Although the oratory reflects a background of limited use of the written word, even Indian writings in English have eloquence. 3 Humor which pokes fun at the dominant group, uses ridicule for social control, sometimes sums up serious talk with outrageously funny metaphors or puns, and occasionally teases at physical disabilities or old mistakes, not to be cruel, but to express close friendship.

4 Generosity, a pattern of sharing, and dislike of greed, envy, selfishness or excessive materialism. 5 Lack of emotional attachment to material possessions. Finely crafted jewelry or costumes are readily given even to casual acquaintances, and are to ba accepted graciously and IJlC uCCliritV OI Reservation Life Indians who have tasted the white person's life often long for these and similar Indian ways. "You can't really get close to anyone here, but on the reservation it's like one big happy family," said 16-year-old Jackie Hatt as she gave up living in Dayton and returned to Pine Ridge, abandoning her plan to go to college in Ohio, then "talk other Indian youngsters into getting higher education." Many young Indians who are getting higher education some of them at Indian-run schools like the Navajo Community College in Arizona see their schooling not as a way of rejecting their Indian culture, but of preserving and defending it. This apparent renaissance of things Indian includes: Training of young Indian artists at the new Institute of Indian Arts in Santa Fe.

Performances of the American Indian Theater company, organized by Indians and supported by grants, off Broadway last fall. Revival of religious observances such as the Sundance among the Sioux, not just as a tourist attraction but as a serious religious expression, and the rapid growth of the Native American Church, which uses hallucinogenic peyote in its services. Religious gatherings like the Indian Ecumenical Conference in th Canadian Rockies last summer. "Our people are beginning to realize that we have a religious faith that is as good as any other," said Chief John Snow of the host Stoney tribe. "After many years of seeing it condemned as pagan and accepting such judgments ourselves we are ready again to take pride in it." Seeking to maintain their ties to other Indians and to the tribe, some Indians have taken to commuting to city jobs in Denver or Chicago from Pine Ridge and other reservations a sort of reversal of the white pattern of leaving city homes for short, nonworking vacations in the outdoors.

Some Indians, of course, have made the jump and blended into the white community, adopting a white life-style and usually being accepted more readily than are blacks. But the cultural differences run deep, and the pull of the tribe is strong. "Quite a few of us have tried to live in the white man's world," said Long Soldier. "A few of us have made it, but most return to the reservation. A lot of things will have to change before the Indian feels at home in the world of the white man.

DONALD BKEMNER Times Staff Writtr The Militants 9 Demands Key demands among those presented by the American Indian Movement: Recognition of the sovereignty of the Indian people, and of the legal status of tribes as political entities which can contract treaties with the United States. Establishment of new treaty commission, enforcement of 371 disregarded treaties and belated Senate ratification of more than 200 treaties negotiated in 1848. Restoration of permanent, nondiminishing land base of not less than 110 million acres to Indian people by 1976. (Today, Indians possess about 50 million acres out of 1.9 billion they started with 500 years ago.) Dissolution of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Establishment of a new unit, placed in the executive offices of the President, which would ba headed by three commissioners one appointed by President, one by Congress and one by national election among Indian people.

Extension of protective jurisdiction of United States over Indian' persons outside reservations and provisions declaring that prescribed offenses of violence against Indian persons in those areas shall be federal crimes. Establishment of a national federal Indian grand jury to be granted jurisdiction to act in any federal judicial district where a crime of violence has been committed against an Indian and where handling of the case by local authorities is suspected of being unsatisfactory. Action by Congress to eliminate immunity of non-Indians from laws within reservation boundaries and to make all persons on Indian land subject to laws of the Indian nation and the exercise of Indian governing authority. Ertablishment of an Indian commission to conduct surveys of all Indian prisoners presently confined with the objective of establishing new sys terns of community treatment and rehabilitation centers. Tl.