FOR DEANNA

5

Red Power

They can’t stop the wind and they can’t stop the rain. They can’t stop the earthquake and the volcano and the tornado. They can’t stop power.

—John Trudell, “We Are Power,” Black Hills Survival Gathering, South Dakota, July 18, 19801

Visions for Indigenous freedom coalesced into the Red Power movement in the 1960s. For the Oceti Sakowin, the American Indian Movement (AIM) became the militant vanguard for the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and Indigenous nationhood in the 1970s. Policies of termination, relocation, and the damming and flooding of the Missouri River had torn thousands of Indigenous peoples from rural reservations, scattering them in far-off urban centers. Many of them saw a direct link between the Pick-Sloan Plan, which took reservation lands in the 1950s and 1960s, and relocation policies. “I grew up along the Missouri River,” Madonna Thunder Hawk told Indian Country Today, “and I saw that land go when it was flooded.” The Oahe Dam flooded her home and community on the Cheyenne River Reservation. “I’ve never been able to take my children and grandchildren to where I grew up. That was probably one of the major events that put me on the road to activism.”2 She later joined AIM, following the 1969 Alcatraz takeover. The eighty-nine-day occupation of the federal prison island in the San Francisco Bay marked the beginning of a militant protest movement. “It was like a bomb that dropped, and we were scattered like shrapnel,” Lakota and Ho-Chunk AIM activist Lakota Harden recalls.3 The shrapnel that was Native life, which became radical activism, was scattered to places like Minneapolis, Chicago, San Francisco, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Denver, and other major cities.

In 1973, Thunder Hawk served as a leader and medic during AIM’s armed takeover of Wounded Knee. But the hard work for her began once

the occupation ended. She was central to organizing the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee, to combat the legal repression following the takeover; the We Will Remember Survival School, to provide an alternative education for Native youth; the International Indian Treaty Council, which advocates for the defense of Indigenous treaty rights at the United Nations; the Women of All Red Nations, organizing American Indian women around reproductive health, including against illegal sterilization and environmental contamination of Native lands; and the Black Hills Alliance, a Native and non-Native alliance formed to halt uranium mining in Black Hills. Lakota Harden, like her sister Marcella Gilbert (Thunder Hawk’s daughter), came of age in the movement. As a student of the We Will Remember Survival School, she also became a leader. Each of these women had been impacted by genocidal Indian policy. Finding themselves flung far from their reservation homelands, instead of dissolving into the melting pot of settler society, they helped organize the twentieth century’s most audacious Indigenous uprisings: Red Power.

Originally envisioned as a means to dismantle Native communities by removing them from the land and integrating them into mainstream urban society, relocation in fact had the opposite effect. Indians didn’t simply stop being Indians once they left the reservation. Relocation, for all its malicious intent, helped birth a new movement that arose from both poverty-stricken urban ghettos and rural reservations. Natives on relocation found each other in the cities and at universities, forming pan-Indigenous organizations such as the National Indian Youth Council, United Native Americans, AIM, and many more. Their concerns, however, were fundamentally no different than those of their reservation-based relatives. They merged their respective rural and urban experiences into one, and what emerged was a radical, explicitly anti-colonial political consciousness that took the world by storm. It viewed the federal system as a colonial structure rather than as a solution. And, unlike youthful generational protests of its day, Red Power looked to older generations, the traditional reservation leadership, for guidance—the elders who had rejected federal administration and kept alive the “old ways.”

In less than a decade from its founding in 1968, AIM would go from being a neighborhood patrol in the streets of Minneapolis, stopping police violence against Natives on relocation, to a far grander stage: the United Nations. To understand this trajectory, and how they wound up there, it is necessary to take a deeper look at the historical context of Red Power.

Powerful pan-Indigenous organizations, including the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), preceded Red Power by nearly two decades. While it had led the fight against and successfully defeated termination legislation in the 1950s, which sought to end trust responsibilities to tribes, NCAI was ambivalent about the future of Native sovereignty, seeing it as heavily wedded to formal IRA governments and incremental reforms within the federal system. NCAI hoped to keep in place what a younger generation intended to end: colonial administration. Like its predecessors, many of NCAI’s solutions pandered to the rampant anti-communism and flag- waving patriotism at the time. It was the height of the Cold War. To curb Soviet influence in the Third World, where colonial regimes were being violently overturned, the United States expanded its covert counterinsurgency campaigns in Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The justification was an intensifying ideological and economic struggle between Soviet Communism and Third World decolonization, on one side, and North Atlantic imperialism and capitalism, on the other. Humanitarian aid became empire’s bargaining chip, a way to win hearts and minds, both at home and abroad. NCAI leaders understood this and appealed to domestic contests over the meaning of freedom and democracy. Black Americans had also pointed to the disparities in civil rights and racial injustice in the United States. In 1951 NCAI cofounder D’Arcy McNickle called for “a domestic Point Four Program for our Indian reservations.” McNickle drew parallels with President Harry Truman’s Point Four Program for international aid, which he undertook in the world’s poorest countries in an effort to forestall the spread of communism.4 Furthermore, McNickle understood that Natives shared “the world experience of other native peoples subjected to colonial domination.”5

How could the United States defend its claims to moral superiority when Native people were not free and remained in an impoverished state, excluded from the wealth and bounty of the new global superpower? “The assertion of a global indigenous identity stands among the most potentially transformative aspects of the struggle for tribal sovereignty during the Cold War era (1945–1991),” writes Daniel Cobb.6 The geopolitical realignment of the world created a sense of uncertainty and urgency. New nation-states emerged as old European empires were carved up, and more division was on the horizon as colonized people clamored for independence. Native people posed a parallel threat to the United States, and the fast-growing

decolonization movement inspired Indigenous activists. During the Cold War, the Indigenous movement began to identify less with domestic policy solutions, instead starting to imagine itself as part of a larger political community of colonized peoples.

The more Native youth followed NCAI leadership, the more they became disenchanted with its limited vision for change. As part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty,” NCAI’s efforts had garnered funding from the new Office of Economic Opportunity for rural and community development known as “Community Action Programs.” Once Johnson’s priorities switched from the war on poverty to the war in Vietnam, organizations like the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) adopted more militant tactics, arguing for a more robust form of Indigenous autonomy that wasn’t wedded to the Indian Bureau. NIYC was founded in Gallup, New Mexico, in 1961 after the fallout of an NCAI conference in Chicago, where young activists “grabbed the mic” to protest the conservatism of the older generation and demanded for more radical change. The young militants initially gained traction by supporting the “fish-ins,” a drawn-out struggle for Pacific Northwest Native treaty rights where many were beaten, and some killed, by white vigilantes and state officials.7 This generation of activists—including Hank Adams, Clyde Warrior, Shirley Hill Witt, Janet McCloud, and many others—pioneered a new era of Indigenous protest that called itself “Red Power.” It deployed confrontational tactics that included sit-ins, occupations, and direct action, while also working within existing channels of power.

At its core, as Vine Deloria has suggested, Red Power was ideological, and it went beyond the facile settler politics of liberal versus conservative. In line with a flowering worldwide revolutionary spirit, Red Power was about Indigenous liberation. More so than others of his generation, Deloria read the pulse of Indian Country. His wit and relentless advocacy made him the most prolific and iconic Oceti Sakowin intellectual of the twentieth century. His 1969 classic Custer Died for Your Sins set aflame a generation of young Indigenous activists. Deloria’s calls for a renewal of Native politics and culture spoke truth to everyday Native experiences. What’s more, Custer Died for Your Sins’s main arguments still ring true today: Indigenous peoples are political by default. They continue to exist as nations when they are supposed to have disappeared, and they have to fight, not only for bare survival, but also for accurate representation. They

incarnate the inconvenient truth that the United States was founded on genocide and the continuing theft of a continent. Deloria understood all this. He also came from a prominent family of scholars and activists—his aunt Ella Deloria was a prominent anthropologist who studied under Franz Boas; his father, Vine Deloria Sr., was a well-known reservation-based Episcopal priest; and his son Philip Deloria is a preeminent Native historian.8 This pedigree, combined with the tumultuous years—in which, according to him, “the Indian revolution was well under-way”—situated Deloria as the intellectual lightning rod for the burgeoning movement.9

Deloria’s potent Red Power ideology—spelled out in his numerous writings—was fundamentally at odds with US and Western values and their corresponding economic and political systems. This new ideology sought to reclaim tribalism, not as a thing of the past, but as a modern political identity that existed both within and beyond the borders of the United States. From the reservation era onward, a collective Indigenous national identity had been targeted by assimilation and allotment policies and was seen as preventing individuals from achieving “civilization.” The destruction of tribalism meant the eradication of nationhood, which worked in tandem with land theft. In a 1964 Senate hearing on termination legislation, Deloria, then the executive director of NCAI, charted a new path forward. “We suggest that tribes are not vestiges of a past, but laboratories of the future,” he stated. For him, the difference between “civil rights” and Indigenous rights was that settlers “came over as individuals” and earned citizenship by converting Indigenous lands into private property. Indigenous peoples, on the other hand, had been brought into the US constitutional framework as separate nations through treaties—not by way of individual or civil rights. “We were here as independent nations,” he proclaimed, “and treaties were made with us, and we each have traditions.” Pan-Indigenous organizations such as NCAI and NIYC unified Indigenous nations, not in sameness, but in difference, with “independent relations to each other” as “a kind of miniature United Nations.”10 He envisioned Indigenous international relations as existing not only among themselves or within the United States, but also with nations from around the world.

Deloria was especially taken by the version of Black Power enunciated by Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael). Kwame Ture, the former leader of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), had adopted a pan-African Black nationalism, which saw little use for civil rights or

further incorporation into a white supremacist state. For Deloria, Black Power and Red Power weren’t just repudiations of “the exploitation of land, people, and life itself” by capitalism, colonialism, and racism; they were also affirmations of peoplehood. “Peoplehood is impossible without cultural independence,” Deloria argued, “which in turn is impossible without a land base.”11 The notion of peoplehood was a departure from civil rights discourse that called for equality under the law. Rather, Deloria’s calls for peoplehood—an understanding of unique tribal or national status—were a step toward national self-determination: Black and Indigenous peoples taking charge of their own lives and destinies. To do so first required the restoration of Indigenous governance and territories, a project long in the making, as well as the abolition of the colonial system.

Deloria saw the 1960s and 1970s as “the third ideological American revolution.” According to his thinking, major racial groups—Blacks, Mexicans, and Native nations—had been brought under the US constitutional framework not as individuals, but as entire groups of people and nations, making them more apt to wage struggle as whole peoples or nations (versus as alienated individuals). For example, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the US–Mexican war and annexed Mexican territory and citizens; the end of the Civil War in 1865 made freed Black slaves citizens; and the 1871 abolition of Indigenous treaty making made Native nations an internal “problem” to be dealt with.12 In each instance, each group had no say about citizenship or how they would be incorporated. It was thrust upon them, often without consent. The revolutionary potential of these colonized peoples had to do with the inability of the settler state to seamlessly “absorb” them into mainstream political and social life as individuals. At the same time, understanding Native grievances as simply linked to their economic status as poor people failed to account for how race and colonialism intersected with class; doing so also reproduced the “melting pot” theory that the United States is a “nation of immigrants.” Native nations and Indigenous Mexicans had not migrated from elsewhere. Black slaves had come in chains. These people were not “immigrants.” And even if economic inequality could be leveled, it would still be atop stolen Indigenous land. After all, Third World nations, at the time, had waged the most successful and widespread struggles, linking race, class, and colonialism. Why couldn’t the same happen in the United States, where

entire peoples had been incorporated into a colonial system against their will?

Indigenous concerns were, nevertheless, socioeconomic. The devastating poverty experienced both on and off the reservation was closely linked to centuries of land theft and forced removals. But the false promise of “equality” had also been guaranteed under termination. For Natives, “civil rights” frequently meant assimilation into settler society, and the language of civil rights had been the justification for termination. “Equality of the law” was the language of termination Utah Senator Arthur V. Watkins, a right-wing Mormon, used in 1954 when he invoked the Emancipation Proclamation: “I see the following words emblazoned in letters of fire above the heads of the Indians—THESE PEOPLE SHALL BE FREE!”13

“Restrictions” on Native property, so the argument went, held Native people back from “freely” selling their lands and lives to white people. Native concerns dealt specifically with the colonial relation that many saw enshrined in the 1871 abolition of treaty making. Prior to this, the United States had confirmed through its ratification of more than 370 Indigenous treaties that Indigenous peoples were in fact distinct, self-governing nations in control of their own territories. In total, the United States negotiated more than 500 treaties and agreements with Indigenous nations. As a result of treaty making, numerous other agreements, and the reservation system, more than 567 federally recognized tribes still exist as largely autonomous political entities. “The real issue for Indians—tribal existence within the homeland reservation—appeared to have been completely be ignored,” Deloria observed, criticizing Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, which had not garnered significant Native support.14 Poverty was only a symptom of the root problem: colonialism. And the Native struggle, for Deloria, “was one of historical significance, not of temporary domestic discontent.”15 If Native people truly were nations, then they should act like nations, make their own relations, and determine their own futures.

A fellow traveler, the fiery Ponca prophet and NIYC president Clyde Warrior, explained in a 1967 speech before a presidential committee on poverty that the very things holding back Native freedom were the systems in place to secure it:

We are not free. We do not make choices. Our choices are made for us; we are the poor. For those of us who live on reservations these choices and decisions are made by federal administrators,

bureaucrats, and their “yes men,” euphemistically called tribal governments. Those of us who live in non-reservation areas have our lives controlled by white power elites. They are called social workers, “cops,” school teachers, churches, etc., and now OEO [Office of Economic Opportunity] employees.16

The bureaucratic practices of the BIA, tribal governments, and state institutions were part of the same colonial structure, he argued, and therefore part of the same problem. Throwing money at the “Indian problem” wouldn’t make it go away, especially when Congress determined the amount of money (which was never enough), and unelected bureaucrats determined how and where it was spent. According to Warrior, “the solution to Indian poverty is not ‘government programs.’” Rather, the solution could only be self-determination: “Let poor people decide for once, what is best for themselves.”17 Centuries of paternalism dictated everyday Native life. It was engrained in the very institutions and ways of thinking that were meant to lift them out of poverty; it was an ideological force with real power that had to be reckoned with.

By contrast, Red Power was not just an abstract theory or an intellectual exercise. It was a practice of everyday Native people taking charge of their lives and their communities. It was a movement, a revolution. Education, paternalism, police violence and incarceration, and the false promise of citizenship all had to be challenged, if not entirely undone. Red Power, built upon centuries-old traditions of Indigenous resistance, sprang into action in rural reservations and urban centers alike.

In the coming years, Red Power galvanized around attention-grabbing occupations and protests, including takeovers of Alcatraz, the BIA headquarters in Washington, DC, Mount Rushmore, and Wounded Knee. While these actions often overshadow their origins, specifically in the 1960s and with NIYC, they also point toward a significant shift. The 1969 occupation of Alcatraz island, an abandoned federal prison, by Natives in the San Francisco Bay was the spark, and growing Native discontent was the kindling. Previously, in 1964, a group of Lakotas—Russell and Hank Means, Belva Cottier, Richard McKenzie, and others—attempted unsuccessfully to reclaim the island as federal surplus property when the prison shut down, under an alleged provision of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. In fact, the island is Indigenous land belonging to the Ohlone people. Five years later, another group—organized by LaNada Means (War Jack), a Shoshone-Bannock student who helped organize the Third World

Liberation Front strikes (calling for the creation of ethnic studies programs, among other things, at the University of California Berkeley), and Mohawk activist Richard Oakes (murdered in 1972 by a white man)—led a nineteen- month occupation of the island.18 Calling themselves “Indians of All Tribes,” the Alcatraz occupiers symbolized and practiced a pan-Indigenous unity that had been “long dreamed by our people.” They saw themselves as a “new” but “old” movement, beholden not to government funding, but to the people. Its principles arose from desires and experiences of everyday Natives, both on relocation and in reservation communities. “New concepts based upon old ideas demand that new leaders emerge,” their manifesto read. “Our children will know Freedom and Justice.”19 To be sure, the reclamation of the island and the plans to turn it into an “all-Indian university” constituted a major historical event and turning point. Although they never achieved their goals and were evicted by police under orders from the Nixon administration, the occupiers had galvanized the movement to go beyond merely seeking reform within the halls of power, turning power into the hands of poor, working-class Native people.

The formation of United Native Americans in the San Francisco Bay and the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis made the occupation possible. In 1968 AIM was founded by a group of Ojibwes—Dennis Banks, Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt, Patricia Bellanger, George Mitchell, and others—as a community patrol, partly inspired by the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, founded two years earlier in Oakland. Like the Black Panthers, the original focus was on community empowerment and service programs, such as creating survival schools to educate urban Native youth about native history and culture. But AIM also confronted the institutions of the state, such as the police and education systems. At the time, police often swept Indian bars, making mass arrests and profiling poor, urban Natives, many of whom were on relocation. Through community organizing and AIM patrols, often involving violent confrontations with police that ended in the arrests of AIM members, they succeeded in bringing the practice to a near halt.

Even in its early days, AIM was more than a protest movement. It founded survival schools in Minneapolis, Rapid City, and Pine Ridge—an alternative for youth who had faced discrimination in public schools. By the 1970s there were about sixteen AIM survival schools in urban centers and reservation communities. The founders of these schools were all women,

among them Miniconjou activist Madonna Thunder Hawk and Ojibwe activist Patricia Bellanger. According to the We Will Remember Survival School, founded in Rapid City, South Dakota, in 1974 and then moved to the Pine Ridge Reservation, the school didn’t accept government funds. “If we are to learn the truth about the history of the Lakota since the start of colonization and its results called genocide,” the teachers and students wrote in a collective document, “we must maintain our independence. To learn the true meaning of Native American Sovereignty, we must have full control of what our young people are taught.”20 AIM also provided legal advocacy for parents and children against state welfare programs that incarcerated Native youth, or otherwise removed them from their homes and placed them in the custody of white families—a practice that continues, to a large degree, to this day.21

As in every revolutionary movement, women’s roles in AIM are nearly forgotten, with men taking center stage as leaders. The feminist slogan “women hold up more than half the sky” was equally true for AIM and has been for Indigenous movements, in general. When the FBI began targeting AIM men, AIM women filled the vacuum and kept the movement going. As in the past, Indigenous women were not seen as leaders by the media or by state institutions; this relative invisibility, however, also provided freedom and security in ways not granted to male leadership. “The women of AIM then realized that we could just about do anything under the eyes of the feds and press because we were invisible,” Madonna Thunder Hawk recalled.22 “The stability of our people has always been with the women, regardless of what disease has come along, whether it has been religion, or federal Indian policy.”23

Nevertheless, Indigenous women participated and filled leadership roles in all major AIM actions, takeovers, and campaigns. In 1977, after attending an international conference on ending apartheid and colonialism, and seeing other women’s committees with other revolutionary movements, the AIM women decided to create their own. The next year in Rapid City, with the motto “Indian women have always been in the front lines in the defense of our nations,” Thunder Hawk, Young, Bellanger, Lorelei DeCora Means, Agnes Williams, Lakota Harden, and Janet McCloud formed Women of All Red Nations (WARN).24 “We are American Indian women, in that order,” their manifesto read, which was read by Oglala activist

Lorelei DeCora Means. “We are oppressed, first and foremost, as American Indians, as peoples colonized by the United States of America, not as women.” Moreover, what defined American Indian women’s struggles was decolonization—the end of the continual destruction of Native life and land —which Means declared as “the only agenda that counts.”25 Within the movement, WARN argued that colonialism had different consequences for American Indian women than it did for men. Both on and off the reservation, women faced forced sterilization, malnutrition among young children, and high levels of domestic violence and abuse.

But ultimately, AIM came to be known more for its high-publicity protests. After Alcatraz, AIM grew rapidly: by 1973, there were seventy- nine chapters, eight of them in Canada.26 When the movement swept through Oceti Sakowin country, it adopted a specifically nationalist character, focusing on the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and the Oceti Sakowin. In 1970, AIM, United Native Americans, and Lakota activists from South Dakota occupied Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills to bring attention to the 1868 Treaty and the fact that the land upon which the monument had been built was stolen. Activists pointed out that the monument itself was a form of vandalism—not “a shrine of democracy” but “a shrine of hypocrisy.” Each president—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt —had participated in Indigenous genocide and land theft. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy called Washington “Town Destroyer” for his role in the extirpation of their villages. Jefferson had advanced Indigenous removal policies and begun the expansion of the US empire west of the Mississippi. Lincoln had ordered the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota patriots after the 1862 US–Dakota War and oversaw the 1864 Long Walk for Navajos in the Southwest. Roosevelt had “nationalized” millions of acres of Indigenous lands for national parks. While symbolic, there was a growing militancy to the tactics of takeover and occupation. Across the United States, BIA headquarters became the targets for protest. Among the protestors’ many concerns was the failure to uphold treaties. Critics in the federal government viewed treaty claims as mere rhetoric.

As the war in Vietnam intensified, by 1972 a full-throated treaty movement had crystallized. Eight Native organizations—including AIM, NIYC, and the Canadian National Indian Brotherhood, among others—led a coast-to-coast caravan of thousands of Natives to Washington, DC, gathering participants in each city and reservation along the way, and

occupied the BIA headquarters from November 3 to 9. The occupation and the negative media it attracted overshadowed the real issues of the caravan. The Trail of Broken Treaties, as it was known, intended to disrupt the presidential election by drawing attention to unfulfilled treaty rights. Organizers drafted a document, primarily authored by Hank Adams, called the “Twenty Points.” The first point demanded, “Restoration of Constitutional Treaty-making Authority: This would force federal recognition of each Indian nation’s sovereignty.”27 The most salient points proposed the restoration and enforcement of treaty making. Although the federal officials promised to look into the demands, their response led to no action. A genius document, the Twenty Points was presented in 1977 at the United Nations, forming the basis of the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.28

After the Trail of Broken Treaties, AIM regrouped and continued working on urban Native rights, or what Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Warrior call its “border town campaign.”29 In February 1972, in brutally harsh winter conditions, four white men—Melvin and Leslie Hare, Bernard Ludder, and Robert Bayless—kidnapped fifty-one-year-old Oglala man Raymond Yellow Thunder, stripped him naked, beat him, forced him to dance as a “drunk Indian” for the entertainment of whites in a dance hall, and left him to die in Gordon, Nebraska. The town is on the southern border of the Pine Ridge Reservation. In common vernacular, the white-dominated settlements—cities and towns—that ring Indian reservations are called “border towns.” In border towns, persistent patterns of anti-Indian exploitation, discrimination, violence, and criminalization define everyday Native life. Gordon was such a place. AIM was called to investigate the death by Yellow Thunder’s family, who were worried that the authorities would chalk it up as “just another dead Indian,” an all-too-frequent sentiment for dead Natives found off the reservation. Because of AIM’s advocacy, Leslie and Melvin Hare were charged with manslaughter and sentenced to prison. Yellow Thunder was immortalized in the “Raymond Yellow Thunder Song” that became the AIM anthem.30 The successful campaign earned AIM the respect of the Oglala elders and traditionalists in Pine Ridge, who called upon AIM again in 1973 to take a stand at Wounded Knee.

Despite the horrific nature of the crime, it is important to turn to career anti-AIM critic and journalist Stew Magnuson who has cast doubt on

Yellow Thunder’s murder. He criminalizes Red Power activists much in the same way Yellow Thunder’s killers targeted him for violence: they were all Indians off the reservation and deserved what they got. For example, Magnuson’s award-winning 2008 book, The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder, purposefully questions calling a “murder” what even an all-white jury had unequivocally decided was one. Like generations of journalists before him, Magnuson peddles a myth of white settlers and friendly Indians as victims of “criminal, “militant,” and “hostile” “Sioux warriors.” In this view, there are “good Indians” and “bad Indians.” AIM members were the “bad Indians.” Magnuson’s narrative has less to do with the historical and brutal reality of colonialism than it does with an obsession with the bravado of AIM men. In the book’s opening pages, he describes a 1999 protest against alcohol sales in White Clay, a notorious border town less than a mile south of the reservation, with a population of about a dozen. White Clay liquor stores sold millions of cans of beer a year, entirely to residents of Pine Ridge, where alcohol is banned. A frequent site of protest until relatively recently after liquor stores closed, countless Native lives have been consumed and destroyed by such profiteering of death and suffering on the part of White Clay and border towns like it. “Everyone feared the young men,” Magnuson writes of the protestors as they descended on White Clay—a description evocative of the common trope of settlers being surrounded by lawless Natives.31 By casting the settlers as victims—in this case, a handful of white liquor store owners—he makes colonialism look like self-defense. The description also invokes the fearsome image of AIM warriors descending on racist border towns, like they did in Gordon and elsewhere in the 1970s.

Despite its racial undertones, Magnuson’s “angry Indians” stereotype is useful for understanding what AIM was trying to accomplish and how they became criminalized for it. AIM consisted primarily of Natives “off the reservation.” “Off the reservation” is an American English idiom that took on murderous meaning with the creation of Indian reservations. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the phrase as meaning “to deviate from what is expected or customary.”32 The expression is also current in military and political spheres to describe someone who defies orders, who is unpredictable and therefore ungovernable. Those who “go off the reservation” are rogues or mavericks in military jargon—the ones who “cross the wire” of military bases (called “reservations”) or enter hostile

territory (called “Indian Country”).33 For Natives, to “go off the reservation” refers to those who historically refused reservation life or refused to respect its borders, where they could be contained and managed. Those willfully crossing borders were considered renegades, outlaws, or hostiles and were usually hunted down and summarily shot, hanged, or imprisoned. It is no coincidence the phrase arose from the language of the nineteenth-century Indian Wars and the murderous consequences inflicted upon those who refused reservation life. In this way, to go “off the reservation” is to question territory and sovereignty, and a political practice. To evoke Kahnawà:ke Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson, Native trespass into the domain of what is considered “settled” territory calls into question the legitimacy of settlement—asserting that indeed it is anything but settled.34 In other words, Natives off the reservation are the unfinished business of settler colonialism—the ones who refused to disappear, refused to sell their lands, and refused to quit being Indians.

In Rapid City, South Dakota, such sentiments thrived and became a target for AIM’s border town campaign. The city occupies the moral and political universe of the Oceti Sakowin, He Sapa, the Black Hills, and, like the towns of Gordon and White Clay, is within the territory of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. As they had for generations, most Natives in Rapid City lived in squalor in shantytowns near Rapid Creek, the downtown area next to the railroad district, or in Sioux Addition, the “Indian ghetto” (or “Red ghetto”) outside city limits and built upon remaining trust lands of the Rapid City Indian School, an off-reservation boarding school that closed its doors in the 1930s.35 The “Indian problem” had returned in the form of “urban Indians” who left the reservation.

To curb and control off-reservation migration into white towns, in 1939 South Dakota passed a series of “warning out” laws that required “transient” populations to fill out and sign “certificates of non-residence” that excluded them from poor relief, public welfare, voting, and establishing permanent residency. In Rapid City, Pennington County, and South Dakota more broadly, warning-out laws specifically targeted off-reservation Natives, barring them from legally residing within certain communities or receiving basic housing, social, welfare, educational, and medical services. Ramon Roubideaux, a Sicangu attorney from the Rosebud Reservation, described the practice at a 1962 civil rights hearing: “In Rapid City they follow that program religiously. They serve transient Indians … a

nonresident notice. This is what they call it. In other words, by service of this notice on the individual, you prevent him [sic] from acquiring, as the statute says, a legal settlement.”36 Often county social service and health officials issued nonresident certificates when Natives applied for services, or they were simply denied services altogether. The labeling of Natives off reservation as “transient” did important work. It normalized the practice of settling—home ownership, citizenship, paying taxes, employment, and so forth—as a prerequisite for personhood, as opposed to the lifestyle of a “nomadic” or “transient” Indian. Questions of personhood and citizenship came to a head in 1972. It began with a flood.

On June 9, fifteen inches of torrential rain clogged the Canyon Lake Dam, which burst early the next morning, sending a wall of water down Rapid Creek. In a matter of hours, the flood swept away more than 1,300 homes, 5,000 automobiles, and 238 lives. Hardest hit were the poor—both Natives and whites—who lived near the creek in mobile homes and dilapidated structures. Although Natives made up 5 percent of Rapid City’s population, they accounted for 14 percent of those who perished in the flood, and a significant number of those displaced. The city received $160 million for disaster relief and urban renewal programs.37 The relief money, however, was allocated along racial and class lines. While all flood victims were equally entitled to relief, Mayor Don Bartlett, a liberal Democrat, observed, “That doesn’t mean that we just divvied up the money equally all around. The Indian who lost a shack and few sticks of furniture didn’t get as much as somebody who lost a $40,000 house with 25 years of accumulated possessions.”38 More relief was dispensed to white, middle-class homeowners and business owners. Discrimination didn’t end there. Many Natives fled to live with relatives elsewhere, including on the reservation, making them ineligible for relief. For those who stayed, temporary shelter was offered but was segregated.39

While white residents re-sheltered within city gymnasiums and churches, hundreds of Natives were concentrated at “Camp Rapid” at the National Guard base, on land originally belonging to the Rapid City Indian School. The camp housed Natives in militarized conditions that were intensely policed and they were kept under constant surveillance, in what amounted to little more than an open-air concentration camp. “The segregating of HUD [Housing and Urban Development] trailers, we believe, was partly done out of prejudice against the stereotype (drunken, troublemaking)

Indian,” described Lakota housing activist Edgar Lonehill. “It was done, we think, so that it would be easier for the white police and HUD to ‘keep an eye on us.’ Further proof of this is offered by the fact that the Indian trailer courts are floodlighted at night.”40

Relief was slow, uneven, and often used to collectively punish the Native community. Camp Rapid was supposed to be temporary, but months passed before all the Native families were given homes, although many white families had already been rehoused. HUD homes were made available at Sioux Addition for Native families—which became the federal housing project Lakota Homes—outside city limits. Yet, community harassment and policing intensified because Natives were now cordoned off into a designated neighborhood—a permanent fix to the city’s perpetual “Indian problem.” It wasn’t leaving the reservation but rather leaving the “Red ghetto” that made the Indian suspect.41

The flood accomplished what could not be done previously: it gave the city a clean slate, as the built environment that had kept everyone in their place was destroyed. City officials viewed the flood as a social equalizer that leveled not only homes but also race and class divisions. Yet, the flood also cleared the way to reinforce structural racism in new ways. It removed (and killed) the undesirable, poor, and Native people concentrated in the city center, literally forcing them out of town to make way for the business community’s “urban renewal” program to rebuild the destroyed downtown area. The practice aligned with federal housing policies and community development programs in targeting low-income families and disenfranchised communities. Housing activists call this “gentrification”— the process, often backed by wealthy business interests, of removing poor, racialized urban communities to make way for middle-class and wealthier neighborhoods and businesses that raise real estate values. High rent and housing prices make it nearly impossible for poor communities to return to or inhabit these “renewed” neighborhoods. Typically, activists and scholars see such practices as taking place in larger cities, most famously in New York City’s Lower East Side during the 1970s. But gentrification doesn’t only happen in cities, and it doesn’t only mimic colonial processes—it is colonialism. Settler colonialism, whether in border towns, rural areas, or urban geographies, is fundamental to the history of US expansion that has required the removal, dispossession, and elimination of Indigenous peoples. Rapid City is thrice-stolen land—first, in the illegal seizure of the Black

Hills; second, in the theft of remaining Indian trust lands from the Rapid City Indian School; and third, in the taking of Native and poor communities by the flood and the subsequent imposition of exploitative housing policies. But the colonial parallels don’t end there.

A 1974 article in HUD’s serial publication, the Challenge, promoted “urban homesteading” inspired by the 1862 Homestead Act that gave rural acreage to farmers for free under the condition they migrate to it and improve it. “Just as nineteenth century homesteaders required government aid to hack out an existence as they helped to develop the West,” the article reasoned, “people who are willing to undertake a difficult and rugged experience in the urban wilderness require aid designed to make the communities around them viable.” In other words, urban homesteading sought to revitalize and repurpose land and housing “not worth maintaining because disease, crime, and lack of public services have made it too depressing and dangerous for anyone to live in.”42 Former slums and abandoned neighborhoods would be made anew. It was a civilizing effort. Rapid City utilized this program to deal with its own “urban wilderness,” the savage Indians who refused to go away and who brought down property values because they embodied the disease and crime of what Lonehill identified as the criminal, “drunken, troublemaking Indian.” Nevertheless, the city rebuilt itself and became an HUD success story. Meanwhile, Native resentment simmered against enforced gentrification and further segregation. In fact, the fundamental “challenge”—that the city sat atop stolen land—was never addressed, and was only exacerbated by the influx of federal programs meant to “improve” Native lives by granting community self-determination and autonomy through subsidized housing.

While federal housing policies re-entrenched Native-settler boundaries within border towns such as Rapid City, vigilantes, police, and everyday settlers defended (often with violence) against the hyperbolic threat of Native invasion. The figure of the “drunk Indian” became a specific target. The murderous practice of “Indian busting”—the targeting of intoxicated Native men for beating, torture, and homicide—was a weekend pastime and sport for white settlers in border towns. In January 1973, after Wesley Bad Heart Bull was stabbed to death by a white man in Buffalo Gap near Custer, South Dakota, 200 AIM members descended on Custer to demand murder charges be brought against the accused. After being denied access to the courthouse where Bad Heart Bull’s murderer was being arraigned for

manslaughter, a violent confrontation with police ensued. Several police cars were set ablaze. Dozens were arrested.

The Custer fight spilled over into Rapid City’s bar district, where Natives faced violent discrimination from both white vigilantes and the police. The figure of the “drunk Indian” is seared into the popular settler imaginary. Although being “drunk” or “Indian,” or both, as not definitively illegal, constructing Natives off the reservation as drunk, militant, and violent is a classic example of the political art of policing. Native presence in border towns, therefore, is always conflated with criminality and lawlessness. “I don’t think any of us go out on purpose to arrest Innuns [sic] for being drunk, but chances are an Innun’s on the street by himself, he’ll be arrested, because chances are he’s got no place to go. A drunken white man’ll have a home,” explained a Rapid City police officer in 1973. “Of course that makes our record for arresting Innuns look pretty high.”43

To counter this, AIM called for actions in Rapid City bars and saloons— where Natives had been victimized by vigilantes and the police—to “keep the people stirred up.”44 Mayor Bartlett described AIM’s campaign as creating “a sense of uncertainty and fear.”45 On February 6, 1973, just weeks before the armed takeover of Wounded Knee, AIM stormed a hearing of the Racial Conciliation Committee, a commission created partly to resolve ongoing discrimination in housing and employment (exacerbated by the flood) and to improve “race relations.” About 200 Natives packed the meeting. “They weren’t committed civil rights people,” Bartlett described the crowd. The officials sank in their seats as AIM leadership gave fiery speeches calling for revolt if their demands for equal housing, more Native police officers, and the hiring of a Native city attorney were not met. AIM leader Dennis Banks stated that they were prepared “to declare war on every town in the Black Hills” if demands were not met. The committee agreed to host a series of meetings to discuss the demands— some of which were carried out, although most were not.46

In response, Bartlett reminded the Native community that if they participated in “uncivil” disobedience and didn’t follow the liberal doctrine of level-headed, rational dialogue, he would respond with violence. “If [AIM] wanted Rapid City to be as famous as Selma, Alabama I could take care of that in about 15 minutes,” he said. AIM didn’t relent. Neither did Rapid City. For several nights AIM members took to the streets after their demand to close the bars for thirty days, while they negotiated with city

officials, was not met. Street fights broke out. Riot cops were deployed and hundreds were beaten, arrested, and driven out of town. Bartlett even directly participated in strong-arming AIM members from local motels and out of downtown.47 White elites were on high alert as the tenuousness of their claims to the land were made clear.

The same month that AIM took Rapid City by storm, they also occupied Wounded Knee. In February 1973, the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Commission (OSCRC), a grassroots organization, along with a group of traditional leaders, called upon AIM to take a stand. Richard “Dick” Wilson, the elected tribal councilman of Pine Ridge, had become increasingly authoritarian, terrorizing political opponents with his paramilitary “GOON” squad (which stood for “Guardians of the Oglala Nation”). In particular, the grassroots people opposed the Indian Reorganization Act government and called for the restoration of the treaty councils and customary leadership. At this time, ceremonies such as the sun dance were still criminalized and were practiced underground. People wanted a return of the “old ways,” the return to treaty relations with the United States, and the end to the rampant violence on the reservation. They saw the successful publicity received by AIM as potentially useful for inspiring a political and cultural revitalization of the Oceti Sakowin. More importantly, they wanted the means for their own self-defense against the GOONs and the rest of Dick Wilson’s regime, which was backed by federal marshals.

On February 27, in a late-night meeting in Calico, a small village in Pine Ridge, the OSCRC and a council of customary chiefs—Red Cloud, Iron Cloud, Fools Crow, Bad Cob, and Kills Enemy—met with AIM and deliberated on what was to be done. But it was the elder women who proved decisive. While the men discussed in the public forum, Oglala elders Gladys Bissonette and Ellen Moves Camp spoke directly to the AIM warriors, pleading with them to take a stand. The two recalled how those who protested Wilson were mostly elders and women who strongly believed in traditional governance. Moves Camp asked, “Where are our men? Where are our defenders?”48 Their impassioned plea worked, and Fools Crow asked Russell Means, an Oglala leader of AIM, to take his warriors to the hamlet of Wounded Knee, the site of the 1890 massacre at the hands of the vengeful Seventh Cavalry. AIM would make a stand for the

life and liberation of all Indigenous peoples. The message was heard around the world.

While the media trailed AIM and the Red Power movement from one action to another, the FBI also followed. Informants infiltrated the organization, and a smear campaign began. In 1956 the FBI began its Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) to infiltrate, disrupt, and destroy the Communist Party. By the 1960s and 1970s, COINTELPRO also targeted civil rights leaders, student antiwar movements, the Black Panther Party, and the Black freedom movement in general. According to an internal 1967 memo titled “Counter Intelligence Program Black Nationalist- Hate Groups,” the program’s stated goal was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” targeted groups and “their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to count the propensity for violence and civil disorder.”49 After reports were leaked to the press about COINTELPRO, it was officially terminated in 1971. It was later revealed, however, that the FBI had infiltrated AIM and begun its own COINTELPRO operation to discredit and neutralize the organization and its leadership.

The seventy-one-day takeover of Wounded Knee revealed to AIM and the world the lengths to which the United States was willing to go to crush the Indigenous movement. Armed mainly with shotguns and hunting rifles, AIM faced off with the paramilitary GOON squad and federal marshals armed with fully automatic weapons and armored personnel carriers. Fire fights broke out daily. On AIM’s side, Frank Clearwater and Lawrence “Buddy” Lamont were killed by law enforcement. Despite the heavy- handed police tactics, AIM, OSCRC, and the Oglala traditional leadership declared the Independent Oglala Nation under the authority of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, and with it the need to end the colonial relationship between the United States and the Oceti Sakowin and Indigenous peoples.

Coincidentally, the five-year anniversary of the My Lai Massacre occurred during the 1973 Wounded Knee takeover. It was hard to miss the similarities between Wounded Knee in 1890 and the US Army’s wanton slaughter of hundreds of Vietnamese villagers. Military historian John Grenier defines what he calls “the first way of war” as frontier violence: “From both military necessity and hands-on experience, successive generations of Americans, both soldiers and civilians, made the killing of Indian men, women, and children a defining element of their first military

tradition and thereby part of a shared identity.”50 What D’Arcy McNickle in 1949 termed “the Indian war that never ends”—the perpetual conflict between Natives and imperial dispossessors—clearly had global implications.51 It’s been said that the war was “brought home” to America in the 1960s and 1970s, but it had always been “home” in occupied Indigenous lands. The US empire’s counterrevolutionary wars to crush the decolonization campaign, the Viet Cong in Vietnam, and Black Power and Red Power activists in the United States employed tactics first used in its “irregular wars” against Indigenous people—the original enemies of empire. Vigilante murders and rampant police violence against Indigenous peoples in border towns were simply the modern face of the military tradition of frontier homicide. AIM had painstakingly linked the everyday policing, surveillance, and criminalization of Indigenous peoples in border towns to the global anti-colonial struggle and treaty rights. The takeover of Wounded Knee was the continuation of this struggle.

For seventy-one days, Wounded Knee was an independent Indigenous territory, attracting worldwide attention and the support of revolutionary movements. For the first time, American Indians had a captive and sympathetic international audience, the awareness of which attracted a harsh military and police response. In the aftermath of Wounded Knee in 1973, the FBI and Dick Wilson waged a dirty war against their opponents in Pine Ridge in what became known as the “reign of terror.” Dozens were murdered. Hundreds were imprisoned. On June 26, 1975, ninety-nine years after Custer Jumping Bull ranch. The two FBI agents entered the property over a reported theft of a pair of cowboy boots. AIM had set up camp on the property to protect the Jumping Bulls, an elderly couple, from GOON and FBI harassment. They had also constructed a culture camp there for youth. A firefight broke out, in which agents Ronald A. Williams and Jack R. Coler were killed. In the ensuing battle with FBI and BIA officers, Joeseph Stuntz Killsright, a young Native man, was killed by sniper fire. A massive manhunt ensued. AIM leader Leonard Peltier was later charged and condemned to two life sentences for the murder of the FBI agents. Federal prosecutors and agents manufactured evidence, hid proof of innocence, presented false testimony, ignored court orders, and lied to the jury about Peltier’s involvement in the murders. Since his incarceration, former FBI agents and federal prosecutors (including the head of the prosecution team that convicted him), along with numerous civil rights and human rights

organizations, have found faults on the FBI’s handling of Peltier’s case and called for his clemency. Twice Peltier’s case has come close to presidential pardon or clemency. In both instances, the FBI led a smear campaign against AIM and Peltier, showing that the Indian War continues unabated. Most recently, President Obama denied Peltier’s clemency application during the efforts to halt Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, after issuing more executive clemencies than the past thirteen administrations. He could not let go of neither his commitments to the oil and gas industry, nor to the continued imprisonment of an innocent Indigenous freedom fighter.

As a result of the loss of life at Wounded Knee in 1973, AIM has been blamed for the murderous crackdown and the increased deprivations of Indigenous communities that followed. The dirty war that came after in Pine Ridge left forty-five unsolved homicides of AIM leaders and organizers. Among the more well known was the execution of Anna Mae Aquash, a Mi’kmaq activist, whose murder resulted in the conviction, years later, of two Native men associated with AIM. While the rumors swirl about Aquash, the other forty-five killed, mostly Lakotas who were less well known, left behind families, relatives, and children who are to this day without answers.52 While Red Power attracted a heavy response from the state, historian Jordan Camp notes that “those focusing on the criminalization of street protests rarely connect it to the everyday and routine policing, surveillance, and criminalization of the racialized poor.”53

In other words, those struggles—whether on the part of AIM or the Black Panthers—seek to undo the state violence inflicted on them each day. AIM’s border town campaign, which confronted rampant police and vigilante violence head-on, is a case in point.

Pervasive anti-AIM sentiment persists, especially in places like South Dakota, where state politicians, including William Janklow, have made careers out of arresting and demonizing Indigenous activists. In 1974, after being elected attorney general on a wave of anti-Indianism, Janklow remarked: “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.”54 But instead of killing AIM members, in 2003 the two-time state governor and South Dakota senator killed a white man, Randy Scott, with his Cadillac. Janklow subsequently resigned from politics, serving one hundred days in jail for manslaughter, and died in disrepute in 2012.

Anti-Indianism has also been reinforced under neoliberalism—the restructuring of politics and economy towards privatization, including the widespread defunding of public education, transportation, healthcare, and public sector employment—services that in other parts of the world are considered fundamental human rights. But the role of the US state in reproducing anti-Indianism has also increased since the mid twentieth century, including through the expansion of the military and prisons. For example, the prison population increased from about 200,000 in the late 1960s to 2.4 million in the 2000s; as of 2018, there are 6.9 million adults in jail, in prison, or on probation or parole. Most are nonwhite and poor. In South Dakota, incarceration rates are among the highest in the nation. In spite of an overall decrease in crime nationally and statewide over the last two decades, South Dakota’s imprisonment rate is ten times higher than the national average, growing over 500 percent from 1977 to 2012. Native inmates make up over 30 percent of the total population while only constituting about 9 percent of the state’s population.55 The rise in incarceration rates directly correlates with increased Native political activity in the 1970s. The historical process of elimination as a tool for political repression—removing Natives from the land and imprisoning them —has taken the new form of mass incarceration. The “Indian problem” was thus solved not through granting treaty rights—such as access to healthcare, employment, education, and social welfare—but through the use of police and prisons.

Today, in Rapid City, South Dakota—a city located in the cosmological and political center of the Lakota universe, He Sapa (the Black Hills)— Natives (mostly Lakotas) make up 12 percent of the urban population. Yet, more than half of the Native population lives below the poverty line—a rate higher than in most reservations.56 Three-fourths of the city’s homeless are Native. Natives also make up half the city’s jail population and are five times more likely to get arrested or receive traffic citations.57 These statistics reveal a general pattern of police violence against Natives in the United States. According to The Guardian’s “The Counted,” an online database of police killings, 2016 was a particularly deadly year for Natives. Police killed twenty-four Natives, more than they had the previous year and at a rate higher than any other group. Almost all the killings were at the hands of non-reservation law enforcement.58 Police are the instrument employed to manage the political, social, and economic crisis that is

Indigenous life, especially off reservation. The intense police violence directed against the #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock was no aberration: most, if not all, arrests of Water Protectors protesting the pipeline were at the hands of non-Native, off-reservation law enforcement agencies.

From the perspective of the United States, it has been more realistic to increase incarceration and law enforcement budgets than it has to uphold the basic tenets of treaties—international agreements—made with Indigenous nations. Despite the violent backlash, AIM and Red Power turned their sights elsewhere (as noted earlier in this chapter), to the United Nations, to let the world judge the United States for its criminal behavior. But the legacy of AIM remains incomplete and underappreciated to this day. In 1981 Nisqually activist Janet McCloud (Yet-Si-Blue) noted that “AIM’s brave and daring effort to uplift the lives of their people, to challenge a powerfully hostile enemy, and to promote a better social order for all Indian people” inspired not only Native people but the oppressed of North Vietnam, Northern Ireland, the peasants of Southern France, and the aboriginal peoples of Australia and Africa. But “the greatest beneficiaries of the American Indian Movement are the tribal council leaders who are always quick to seize opportunities created by the Movement, and to claim unwarranted credit for the positive social changes won for Indian people.” Yet many others benefited too: Native youth who enjoy “new cars, live longer, have better health, are bettered educated, have well-paid jobs,” she said.59

The formation of the International Indian Treaty Council in 1974— another outcome of Wounded Knee and the rise of AIM—also paved the way for Indigenous internationalism at the UN and laid the groundwork for the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In 1980, AIM returned to the Black Hills and Rapid City. This time, however, Women of All Red Nations, an AIM contingent of women leadership, formed the Black Hills Alliance (BHA), a coalition of white ranchers and Native activists to halt uranium and coal mining in the Black Hills. Eleven thousand people from around the world gathered, succeeding in halted mining operations altogether. After the Alliance dissipated, AIM formed a short-lived encampment on the outskirts of Rapid City, named “Yellow Thunder Camp” (YTC), after Raymond Yellow Thunder. Their goal was to begin to reclaim the Black Hills region under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty.

Unlike the previous border town campaign, BHA and YTC garnered local white support under the umbrella of environmentalism and treaty rights. For example, a union of Black Hills gold miners supported both campaigns, citing the inviolability of Lakota treaty rights and concerns regarding corporate energy development that jeopardized “the health and welfare of working people.”60

The alliance with white working people and farmers—historic enemies of Lakotas—proved vital because it demonstrated that working-class settlers and Natives shared a common struggle against corporate exploitation. Fighting for Native land rights and sovereignty was also necessary to protect the lands upon which both groups depended for their continued existence. If dispossession was the primary mode for exploitation in Rapid City and the Black Hills, then liberation for both Native and settler required upholding, at bare minimum, the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. For a while, white sentiments toward Natives in border towns actually improved. Even one of AIM’s main detractors, Mayor Bartlett, conceded that in the wake of the uprisings, “quietly behind the scenes there is an effort being made without headlines” to improve the lives of Natives in Rapid City.61