Winds of change blew with cyclone force across the UnitedStates and across Indian country in the late 1960s and early 1970s.This was the era when the most famous and infamous Red Power war-riors, the American Indian Movement (AIM), had its heyday. Theseputatively “new” Indians challenged five hundred years of colonialdomination by fighting for a return to full sovereign status for Nativenations, restoration of lands guaranteed by treaty, just compensation forthe minerals exploited from reservations, and a renaissance of Nativecultures. But it is important to say at the outset that, despite its name,AIM was not the Indian movement, but rather only one organizationamong many groups that formed a larger movement. Many other im-portant Indian resistance groups preceded AIM by many years, ran par-allel to AIM, and continued after AIM’s rise and fall. AIM was far fromuniversally loved in Indian country. To some they were true warriorsoffering a much-needed wake-up call. To others they were arrogant,disrespectful of tradition, and much too oriented toward white America.Their enemies admitted that AIM had a flair for getting the attention ofthe mass media, and that attention is the subject of this essay. Specifi-cally, I want to examine how Hollywood has framed the AmericanIndian Movement in a series of fiction films.

As I consider the strengths and weaknesses of movies about AIMproduced in Hollywood, I will be drawing information about the groupfrom various written sources, including primary documents, memoirs,

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Old Cowboys, New IndiansHollywood Frames the American Indian

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and histories, and from two documentary films, all of which offer gen-erally better information than the fiction films. Indeed, I would not rec-ommend any of the films as the best sources of information aboutIndian radicalism. For that I would direct readers especially to the pri-mary accounts given in Akwesasne Notes (newsletter) and to the sec-ondary analysis given in the first full-length history of the Red Powerera, Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Warrior’s book Like a Hurricane.1 Butthe films are the most widely circulated texts about AIM, the onesreaching the widest audience of Indians and non-Indians. Thus it is im-portant to examine what they have to say to folks who may not haveaccess to other information on the Red Power era, especially youngpeople who were not alive during the peak years of Indian radicalism inthe sixties and seventies. My focus will be on three fiction films thatdeal to one degree or another with the AIM, and I’ll talk about each ofthem in order of release: Powwow Highway (1989), Thunderheart (1992),and Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee (1994).2 In addition to assessingand comparing each film’s strengths and weaknesses as a representationof the nature and aims of Indian radicalism, I will be asking some gen-eral questions about the possibilities and limits of insurgent groups try-ing to get messages across through mainstream media.

While there is a small but thriving independent Native Americandocumentary and fiction film community, no breakthrough to the main-stream has occurred such as that achieved to one degree or another byAfrican-American, Latino, and Asian-American filmmakers.3 Racismand extremely high production costs have so far kept Hollywood-stylefilms largely beyond the control of the economically poorest popula-tion in North America. This means that the filmed stories about AIMdo not emerge directly out of the movement’s culture or even out of theNative community. AIM activists were involved to one degree or an-other in each of the three narrative films I’ll discuss, but in none didthey have anything approaching full control of the final cinematicproduct. Given this fact, what occurred were various attempts by AIMmembers to influence a movie-making process in the hands of mostlysympathetic but culturally and politically limited white outsiders whowere at best translating movement ideas and values, sometimes well,more often poorly. And these outsiders, mostly from that mythical landcalled Hollywood, were attempting this translation within a mediumsaturated with a history of racial stereotyping totally at odds with thegoals of the Indian movement. The AIM activists were trying to gettheir message out to a wider public whose political unconscious is, likethat of the filmmakers, deeply shaped by the “cowboy and Indian” con-ventions of the Hollywood western. To further complicate this wholepicture, I want to suggest that the real AIM activists and their real-lifeopponents to a certain extent were acting out their own internalizedHollywood scripts from the beginning of the movement. And as we’ll

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see, from the start, for better and for worse, AIM was engaged in a battleover control of its mass-mediated image.

I N G I N D I A N S I N N E W D I R E C T I O N S

Before AIM was founded in Minneapolis in July 1968, with early leader-ship provided by Anishinaabe organizers like Dennis Banks, ClydeBellecourt, and Mary Wilson, the leaders considered another name forthe group. They were originally going to call themselves ConcernedIndians of America. And while the acronym CIA certainly would havebeen a resonant one, the choice of “American Indian Movement” says agood deal about the genius and the presumptuousness of the group.Many observers and writers, including, most recently, Robert Warriorand Paul Chaat Smith, stress the sense of drama and the orientationtoward the mass media that was both AIM’s strength and its weakness.Warrior and Smith summarize the dramatic flair already apparent inAIM’s self-naming:

[The name was] [p]erfect because it suggested action,purpose, and forward motion. Perfect because it was big,transcending the lesser world of committees and associa-tions and congresses and councils. Organizations hadrecording secretaries and annual dinners. Movementschanged history. The initials—A-I-M—underscored allof that, creating an active verb rich in power and imagery.You aimed at a target. You could aim for victory, for free-dom, for justice. You could also, defiantly, never aim toplease. Written vertically and stylized a bit, the acronymbecame an arrow. (127)

Though they don’t say it here, it is clear from the rest of the book thatSmith and Warrior also recognized that the name was more than alittle bit arrogant. Imagine what would have happened if the BlackPanther Party had tried to name itself the Black Power Movement, or ifthe Brown Berets had called themselves the Chicano Movement. AIM’sbold naming and equally bold actions certainly got it the attention itwanted, but in the process it did a disservice to those Indian resistorswho came before it and those alongside whom it struggled in the 1960sand 1970s.

After initially focusing on providing various daily-life services toMinneapolis Indians and in working against widespread brutality againstIndians by policing the police in a style inspired by the Black Panther’scampaign against police brutality, AIM extended its work to actionsin white-dominated towns like Custer, South Dakota, that borderednearby reservations. In such towns Indians were routinely beaten, and

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sometimes killed, by local racist ranchers (an encounter with “real”cowboys that set a tone for later encounters). AIM successfully inter-vened in several of these disputes, forcing local law enforcement to workthe cases and serving notice that Indians would not take such abuse anymore. It was largely these actions that first built up an AIM followingon the reservations. But it was AIM’s penchant for dramatic mediaevents staged at sites of traditional, nationalist white power that spreadthe word of their brash style. For example, at Plymouth Rock, Massa-chusetts, AIM held an action challenging the Thanksgiving myth, of-fering evidence that white settlers were in fact giving thanks for a re-cent triumph in massacring New England Indians. A similar action wasstaged at Mount Rushmore, symbol of white desecration of the sacredBlack Hills. Such well-publicized actions sparked AIM chapters allover the country, some totally unknown to the central leadership.

AIM also played an important role, along with numerous otherIndian activist groups, in the Trail of Broken Treaties car caravan thatcrossed the country from west to east in 1972. The caravan pickedup various tribal contingents along the way and stopped at key sitesrepresenting the continuing impact of two hundred years of treatiesbroken by the U.S. government. The Trail of Broken Treaties ended inWashington, D.C., with an unplanned occupation of the Bureau ofIndian Affairs office. AIM members and others, with help from FBIprovocateurs, sacked BIA headquarters, destroying and stealing docu-ments and other government property. The trashing split the Indiancommunity deeply, greatly increased the fame of AIM, and upped theante of FBI surveillance and counterattacks against them. Whatever itslimits as an action, the BIA trashing had great symbolic power to manyyoung Indians who had felt themselves being trashed by Washingtonbureaucrats their whole lives. And to a nation whose most popular cur-rently circulating image of Native Americans was Indian actor “IronEyes” Cody weeping in a television commercial against littering, theimage of young Indian warriors littering the BIA building with the bu-reaucratic detritus of two hundred years of broken promises was surelystartling.

But all this was soon overshadowed by AIM’s most (in)famousand dramatic action, the two-and-a-half-month armed standoff with lawenforcement during the Indian occupation of the village of WoundedKnee, South Dakota, in spring 1973. This AIM-led siege is the eventmost often referred to in all three films, and it amply illustrates mypoint about the entwining of cinematic images and real life AIM ac-tions. The occupation started after AIM was invited by elders onto theOglala reservation to help them in ousting allegedly corrupt triballeader Richard “Dickie” Wilson. The village of Wounded Knee was aresonant stage for the action, given its proximity to the site of the lastgreat massacre of Indians by the U.S. Cavalry, the site where three

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hundred undefended men, women, and children were slaughtered in1890.4 Ostensibly, the second battle at Wounded Knee, which, in aneerie echo of the first, involved about three hundred Indian resistors,was about wresting tribal governance away from U.S.-government-backed Oglala leader Wilson and returning it to a sovereign OglalaNation. But beyond the local dispute, this was clearly a symbolic battleto reassert the sovereignty of all Indian nations once guaranteed bygovernment treaties.

While real bullets were exchanged, and two Indians died in thecourse of the action, the war by guerrilla tactics was less importantthan the war by guerrilla theater. There is more than a little evidence tosuggest that the Wounded Knee occupation included much “acting”and “staging” by participants from all sides. Robert Warrior and PaulChaat Smith follow many others in observing that the AIM actions atWounded Knee can be seen as “a daring brand of political theater.”Warrior and Smith make clear that “the Knee” was, among otherthings, a self-conscious attempt to stage a media event that could dra-matize claims about broken treaties, continuing economic exploitationof American Indian lands, and an unrepresentative, puppet Indian gov-ernment on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The FBI and other governmentforces were equally theatrical in their actions, and generally more suc-cessful at manipulating the media. For example, they banned the mediainitially from any coverage, restricted media access throughout the oc-cupation, and threatened to arrest progressive press representativeswho offered sympathetic accounts from inside the AIM compound.

Comments from the activists and journalists on the scene at thebattle of Wounded Knee in 1973 also draw attention to the role theHollywood imagination played in the action. Indeed, it would be hardto imagine how this could not be the case to some extent, since there areno groups more powerfully mythologized by U.S. popular culture thancowboys and Indians. Journalistic accounts of AIM/FBI encounters atWounded Knee reflect this mediation, and even if they had not, it seemslikely that those accounts would have been interpreted in part throughreception mechanisms shaped by years of cinematic and televisual im-ages. AIM member John Trudell, for example, has commented that “[if]FBI agents that grew up watching John Wayne and cowboys and Indianscome out here and want to play cowboys and Indians, then they gottasuffer the consequences, just as we do.” In speaking like this, Trudell re-veals the extent to which he and his compatriots were also playing outthe cowboy and Indian script. And that script was further encouraged bythe mainstream media. For example, one journalist on the scene atWounded Knee recalls that correspondents “wrote good cowboy andIndian stories because that was what they thought the public wanted.”5

If the occupation of Wounded Knee was a staged production,then AIM leader Russell Means was surely its star. One Time magazine

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reporter recalls that Means could sometimes be seen directing camerasand staging events for the media’s benefit.6 Means’s career subsequentto the Wounded Knee siege is also suggestive in regard to the role heplayed during the occupation. During the last decade Means has ap-peared in a number of movies, most recently as the voice of Powhatanin Disney’s travesty of the Pocahontas story. Indeed, Means’s career hasled one cultural critic to invent a new term for his social role. AmericanIndian studies scholar James Stripes refers to Means as an “actorvist,” aterm that might fit John Trudell, national leader of AIM in the late1970s, equally well since he appeared in two of the fiction films I’ll dis-cuss and was interviewed in both of the documentaries as well.7

Certainly a case can be made that the role of leader of AIM in theearly 1970s was one that trained Russell Means well for a career in “real”acting. More than one historian of the American Indian Movement hasspoken of Means’s flair for the dramatic. During the American Indianoccupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in 1972, for example,Means let himself be caught on camera using a confiscated oil paintingportrait of then president Richard Nixon as a shield while engagingpolice on the steps of the building. Means’s “shades and braids” imagewas enough to get him not only more than the fifteen minutes of fameAndy Warhol suggested all Americans would soon have, but his por-trait done by Warhol himself. More than one detractor in Indian coun-try has used such facts to portray Means as more image than substance,and he was sometimes accused of “impersonating” an Indian even dur-ing his AIM heyday, partly because he spent relatively little time onthe reservation while growing up.

But implying that these AIM actorvists “sold out” to Hollywood orwere never real activists is too easy. Both Means and Trudell remainvocal critics of Indian oppression, and both have claimed that they areusing, not being used by, the mass media. As Russell Means frames it,“I haven’t abandoned the movement for Hollywood. I’ve broughtHollywood to the movement.”8 I partly agree, though I’d rephrase it tosay that Hollywood, for better and for worse, was in the movement fromthe beginning. In this sense, the fiction films about AIM are a logical ex-tension of a process already at work in AIM actions themselves. Thus, Ilook at the films as embodying a struggle between the cultural frames of-fered by movement activists and the cultural frames of the Hollywoodfilm, and I want to suggest that at times those frames overlapped and in-teracted, fused and confused, in a variety of different ways.

Perhaps the most unambiguously positive thing I can say about thefilms in which AIM is represented is that Kevin Costner (also known as“Dances with Wolves”) was not involved in any of them. On the other

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hand, similarly inclined movie mogul Indian wannabes were involved.Ted Turner (aka “Used to Dance with Jane Fonda”) was behind one ofthe films, Robert Redford (aka “Sundanced with Paul Newman”) wasinvolved in another, and George Harrison of the Beatles clan of theLiverpudlian nation produced a third. Whatever limitations these filmshave, they are an advance over the Dances with Wolves version of noblesavagery in one important respect—the AIM films attempt to portrayliving American Indians. Costner’s film, while arguably a slight improve-ment over the traditional Hollywood western, reinscribes a contempo-rary version of the noble savage myth that pervades U.S. culture in theform of nostalgia for what “the Indian” allegedly was. Whether this takesthe form of pseudo–vision quests in the so-called Men’s Movement, orthe various New Age white women and men, who, as Native activistAndy Smith puts it, claim to have been Indians in a past life in order tomake a great deal of money in their present life through selling traves-ties of American Indian spirituality, or just liberal guilt about what “thewhite man” did to the Indians in “the past,” the sentiments seldom ex-tend in any significant way to concern about the hideous injustices thatcontinue to be heaped upon Native peoples in the United States today.In Hollywood, the only really good Indian is still the dead Indian. TheAIM films, whatever their flaws, are at least among the very few main-stream productions that even attempt to make visible the generally“disappeared” lives of Indians in contemporary America.

Powwow Highway, bankrolled by George Harrison, was an inde-pendent film that managed to gain something of a mainstream audi-ence, especially via television and video. As arguably the first widelycirculated attempt to present something of the contemporary lives ofAmerican Indians on celluloid, its relatively low-budget and low-techfeel in some ways equip it better than the other two glossier films toconvey the low-budget, low-tech lives of most Indians today. At itsbest, Powwow Highway gives a complex sense of some of the intricatestruggles between tradition and modernity faced by descendants ofFirst Nations and captures a certain casual resistance to white ways thatpeople in Indian country identify as living on “Indian time.” At othermoments the film seems little more than a buddy film, a kind of “On theRoad” Indian-style. Indeed, when the highbrow TV network Bravoscreened Powwow Highway, they characterized it as “an off-beat roadmovie,” evoking visions of Jack Kerouac in braids, or worse still, Bingand Bob on the road to Pine Ridge. The film is based on the novel ofthe same title by David Seals who, as I will discuss later, came to disso-ciate himself from the movie.9

The central protagonists are Philbert Bono, a seemingly none-too-bright, gentle, three-hundred-pound Cheyenne who fancies him-self a spiritual warrior and refers to his beat-up old car as his “pony,” andPhilbert’s pal Buddy Red Bow. Buddy is a former AIM activist, veteran

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of Vietnam and Wounded Knee, and a still angry fighter against federal/corporate corruption and exploitation of the reservation. Clearly thefriendship between the two male leads is weighted with symbolicvalue. They embody a complicated play between Indian spiritual tradi-tionalism and modern militancy that was part of AIM’s history.

When Philbert attempts to get elder wisdom from his great aunt,she laughs derisively at him and tells him she is sick of young Indianslooking for some magic in the past. Undaunted Philbert begins to cobbletogether bits of traditional “medicine,” filtered through the distortedlens of white Indian fantasy. Much as Leslie Silko shows in her Storytellerthat traditional rituals have always changed to meet needs of the pres-ent, rather than being lodged in an impossible-to-return-to past, PowwowHighway suggests that contemporary Indian survival will blend respectfor the past with wild improvisation, making do with the impure toolsof the present (as when Philbert leaves a candy bar as an offering to hisancestors).

We first meet Buddy in a powerful scene in which he challenges aslick presentation to the Cheyenne tribal council by a sell-out Indian“apple” (red on the outside, white on the inside) working for a miningcorporation that hopes to further exploit the tribe’s mineral wealth.Buddy eloquently rattles off statistics on Indian poverty and comparesthe rosy promises of the corporation to hundreds of nice-soundingtreaties signed and ignored by the U.S. government for hundreds ofyears. He ends his speech by rejecting the mineral rights colonialismbeing offered as a chance at the American dream, noting that Indiancountry “isn’t America. This here’s the Third World.”

When Buddy’s sister is busted for drugs in New Mexico on whatturns out to be an FBI-directed frame-up used to get Buddy off the “rez”in order to push through the uranium deal, he teams up with Philbert,the only person he knows with a car. The plot meanders as the twotravel none-too-directly from Montana to New Mexico to help getBuddy’s sister out of jail. The evolving plot includes a slight mellowingof Buddy’s anger in the face of Philbert’s gentle but strong faith in hispartly improvised spiritual tradition. In this the plot resembles the in-creasing commitment to traditional spirituality that AIM underwent asit evolved.

The most direct treatment of AIM occurs in the middle portionof the film when Philbert, following the powwow highway rather thanthe most efficient route to New Mexico, diverts his trusty Buick pony“Protector” to Pine Ridge, South Dakota. There Buddy meets up withsome of his old comrades from the Wounded Knee siege. When he ar-rives, his friends tell Buddy of the terror still being waged against AIMsympathizers on Pine Ridge; “a shooting every day” one of them re-marks. This is hardly an exaggeration, given the fact that close to sev-enty AIM members and sympathizers were murdered or died under

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mysterious circumstances in the three-year period following WoundedKnee. Most of these unsolved deaths have been attributed by scholarsto AIM’s prime enemy, conservative tribal chairman Richard Wilsonand his vigilante “goon squad,” actively or passively abetted by the FBI.

In Powwow Highway, Buddy has a brief encounter with the leaderof the goon squads who have been harassing his friends. He publiclybacks the goon down at a powwow, with the aid of a knife thrown as awarning by a war buddy suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.This is an important moment because an unusually large number of AIMmembers were in fact Vietnam vets who had concluded that they hadbeen fighting against the wrong government. They turned their deepanger and their military skills to the service of Indian war against theU.S. government and its tribal puppets, and in so doing they broughtthe war in Vietnam home in ways that deeply shaped Indian radicalism.

The morning after the powwow, Buddy and Philbert give a rideto a couple of friends who’ve been under siege from the goons, drop-ping them off in a suburban tract house. The subplot here involvesBuddy claiming that they have sold out, and his friend replying thatBuddy hasn’t been living under the constant threats he and his wifehave been enduring. A kind of respectful standoff is achieved, in whichBuddy’s ongoing militancy is given greater weight without condemn-ing the difficult choice made by his friend. I read this as a kind of rec-onciliation narrative working within the orbit of AIM, where manysuch difficult choices were being made in the years following the inter-nal struggles and savage repression by the FBI and other authoritiesthat followed in the wake of Wounded Knee.

The remainder of Powwow Highway never discusses AIM directly,but we do see the FBI’s involvement in framing Buddy’s sister as a clearindication of the continuing collusion between the federal governmentand corporations in exploiting mineral rights on Indian lands, one ofthe key themes of AIM’s position.

The climactic event of the film suggests a complicated play ofmedia frames. Philbert, with the aid of powerful medicine he gathersalong the powwow highway, springs Buddy’s sister from jail Old Weststyle by pulling out the bars of her cell with his Buick pony’s horse-power. Philbert’s inspiration for this Indian liberation moment camewhile watching an old western on TV. The scene suggests that Indianresistance will require a combination of turning white mass-media cul-ture against itself, Philbert’s traditional tribal magic, and Buddy’s AIM-inspired militancy.

The final scene of the movie, immediately following the jail break,also helps to undermine the “buddy movie” quality somewhat. We seePhilbert, his pony aflame at the end of a car chase with the police,walking down the road alongside Buddy, Buddy’s sister and her twokids, and a white girlfriend who had helped with the escape. In the

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background is the pragmatic Cheyenne tribal chairman whose faith inthe more ideologically aggressive Buddy had led him to assist the warparty from a distance. The ending is a utopian one, suggesting thatforces separating AIM-style militancy from existing tribal governments,Indians from whites, men from women, can be easily transcended. Itseems at best only a magical resolution, a fantasy projection rooted asmuch in New Age white imaginations as in serious Indian resistance.

While the film has its moments, reading reviews from Euro-American critics suggests that much of the subversive potential of thefilm is recontained for a white audience because the AIM material isgiven too little context, and either the harmless buddy film or a feel-good-about-Indians, New Age, spiritual reading predominates. Turningto Native reactions, reviews and personal accounts suggest that PowwowHighway was received with mixed feelings in Indian country. On the onehand, it seems to have been received with a certain amount of apprecia-tion that living, breathing rez Indians were portrayed on screen at all.On the other hand, there was a sense of disappointment that a ratherwhite-washed and superficial portrait emerges. Several reactions, in-cluding that of author Seals, discuss the way in which the film sanitizesthe book, making the Indians too good, as if merely switching black hatsfor white could undo the limits of the cowboy and Indian formula. Thenovel’s Indians are far more ambiguously depicted, with real human flaws(Buddy’s sister, for example, is not just a victim of an FBI frame-up butreally is dealing drugs). Seals’s response includes having the film appearbriefly as a spectral character in his novelistic sequel to Powwow Highway,Sweet Medicine, in order to underscore the movie’s differences from hisnovel. Clearly, Powwow Highway broke some new ground in Hollywoodcinema, but ultimately it veers away from tough questions.

The second of our films, Thunderheart, was directed by British filmmakerMichael Apted. In the same year he made Thunderheart, 1992, Aptedalso directed one of the documentaries about AIM, Incident at Oglala, aneffort paid for by the aforementioned “Sundance” Redford. Like Incidentat Oglala, which deals with the case of Leonard Peltier’s alleged in-volvement in the murder of two FBI agents in 1976, Thunderheart ’sfictional story is a thinly veiled effort to deal with the period of AIMactivity after its apogee at Wounded Knee had passed. The film openswith the following words on the screen: “This film was inspired byevents that took place on several Indian reservations during the 1970s.”This would seem to be at once a claim for realism and a disclaimer,probably aimed at Justice Department lawyers. “Inspired by,” after all,would seem to leave enough room to claim poetic license in the eventthat the FBI should take exception to being portrayed in the film as

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conspiring to commit murder, obstruct justice, and collude with pri-vate corporations to steal uranium-rich Indian lands. But as added in-surance, the director also changes the name of AIM in the film to ARM,the Aboriginal Rights Movement. It also changes the name of the FBIin the film but in quite a different way.

The FBI’s name changes are made by a character in the filmnamed Crow Foot, a local Oglala cop whose skills make him a kind ofcross between a Hollywood Indian scout and Sherlock Holmes. Playedwith brilliant humor by Graham Greene, Crow Foot makes a seriesof revisionist readings on the most famous initials in American lawenforcement—from the Federal Bureau of Intimidation to the FederalBureau of Interpretation (here stressing the fictive dimension of interpre-tation), until finally another Indian points out that on the rez FBI standsfor Full Blooded Indian. This progression from intimidator to inter-preter to Indian also marks the progress of the central character in thefilm, an FBI agent played by Val Kilmer. Kilmer’s character is namedRay Levoi, a naive young agent who has an American Indian heritagethat he has deeply and successfully buried, at least until he arrives onthe reservation. He is sent there as a token Indian to help legitimatethe FBI’s attempt to round up an AIM/ARM member they claim mur-dered another Indian. The ARM activist is played by AIM actorvistJohn Trudell.

The rather predictable plot revolves around the gradual re-Indianization of Kilmer’s FBI character as he is at once seduced by thepowers of ARM’s tribal elder medicine man, played by Ted Thin Elk,and appalled to find evidence of an FBI plot to frame the ARM activistand abet the sale of uranium-rich lands. Thunderheart, like PowwowHighway before it, rightly draws attention to the deadly effects, botheconomically and through water contamination, that illegal miningpractices have brought to Pine Ridge and other reservations.

One key scene in the film momentarily shatters the Hollywoodframe that dominates this film more than the other two. It occurs whenTrudell, playing James Looks Twice, is arrested by Kilmer and his hard-nosed FBI boss played with aptly laconic flatness by Sam Shepard.Kilmer’s character refers to Trudell as a militant, to which he replies,“I’m not a militant, I’m a warrior.” Shepard’s character retorts, “Yeah,and I’m John Wayne.” Trudell follows up with a quick speech as fol-lows: “[I’m p]art of a five-hundred-year resistance. Deep voices thathave to be heard. You can kill us but you can’t break our spirit.” Thesewords closely echo ones Trudell has made in his AIM speeches, and itprobably matters little to this analysis whether he gave them to or gotthem from the movie script (though I think it likely was the former).The effect is a momentary crack in the film’s melodrama.

As in Powwow Highway, there is a strong theme of connection be-tween tradition, spirituality, and warriorhood. In the real-life history of

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AIM, such a connection was often the goal, though not one alwaysachieved. But accounts of the involvement of Sioux elders in the deci-sion to make a stand with AIM at Wounded Knee suggest that that eventmay in fact have done much to solidify a bond between the mostly urbanIndians of AIM and spiritual traditionalists that is one of the most impor-tant legacies of the AIM era (even though AIM’s often vague pan-Indianism paid too little attention to particular tribal cultural histories).

But no account I know of says anything about a turncoat FBIagent playing a role in any of this. And that is surely among the mostdisappointing elements of Thunderheart. Just as the film Mississippi Burningundercuts its important retelling of the history of Freedom Summer bymaking the FBI, which did so much to try to destroy the Civil Rightsmovement, a hero in the film, Thunderheart ’s use of this turncoat FBIagent turns it at points into a ridiculous Mississippi Burning Goes West. Butat least in this case the Indian FBI agent is used as a device to expose theFBI, not to make the bureau the unsung hero of another movement itdid so much to try to destroy.

In Thunderheart the device may in fact work to some extent to lurein the unsympathetic audience member who might initially identifywith the FBI position, given its prominence in hegemonic Americanismgenerally and its reported role in saving the world from wild militantIndian criminals like AIM. But the cost of the device is to underminethe film in many other ways and turn it in some absurd Hollywood di-rections. Kilmer’s character is revealed to be a descendent of Thunder-heart, a medicine man killed at the original massacre at Wounded Kneein 1890. A kind of blood essentialism perversely combines with a pa-ternalistic suggestion that only a hero from the outside, trained in thewhite world, can rescue the Indian nations.

This plot line severely undermines the political pull of the filmand particularly undermines the movement dimension. Too little senseof even symbolic collectivity is suggested around ARM in the movie,and what sense of Indian community there is in the film is underminedby an incongruous ending in which Kilmer’s character heads out downthe road as if this were just one in a series of adventures. In a seriousconfusion of the cowboy and Indian plot, the movie ends with the FBIIndian “riding” off into the sunset alone, cowboy style. The film thusends on a rather hazy, nostalgic moment that locks Indian activism in amore recent past as surely as Dances with Wolves locks Indian cultures inthe nineteenth century.

The third and final film I want to examine is Lakota Woman: Siege atWounded Knee, a Ted Turner–Jane Fonda coproduction originally shownon television and then released to video stores. The film is based on a

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controversial (auto)biography of AIM activist Mary Crow Dog “as toldto” Richard Erdoes.10 The book is controversial for a number of rea-sons, including the question of who “really” wrote it, its sympathetictreatment of AIM, and its long-time failure to find a publisher. This lat-ter point is of interest because the reason given for the initial failure inthe late 1970s for the book to find a publisher was in effect that Indianswere no longer fashionable. This raises the question of why they be-came “fashionable” once again in the late 1980s and early 1990s whenall these films were produced. One partial answer, which probably miti-gates the effects of all the movies, is a pervasive capacity of Americanculture to nostalgize any topic, even one as initially disturbing as theRed Power movement. In this case one might speculate that this generalnostalgia might have been augmented by the particular nostalgia of Ms.Fonda, who had assisted in airlifting supplies to the Wounded Knee en-campment during her more radical, but less aerobically sound, youth.

In any event, the passage of time between the original events andtheir filmic reenactment surely works to the advantage of the cowboysin this story, since in the intervening years they viciously suppressedthe American Indian Movement, using the goon squads when neces-sary, disinformation campaigns at every opportunity, and the court sys-tem continuously. The general strategy was to use trumped-up chargesthat were later dropped after they had done their damage of keepingkey figures tied up in legal battles and movement coffers directed to-ward legal fees rather than organizing. Sometimes the government hadgreater success in actually framing and incarcerating individuals likeLeonard Peltier. Though 92 percent of cases that made it to trial werewon by AIM, the costs in money, time, jail time while awaiting trial,and movement energy were devastating. While AIM continues to existto this day, the movement never recovered from this assault.

With those limitations in mind, it is possible to say that LakotaWoman is the most complete, and in most respects the best, of the AIMfiction films done so far. Much of the credit must go to the original ma-terial, since Mary Crow Dog was for a time at the very heart of AIM,and she provided a lucid and compelling story for Erdoes and later thefilmmakers to work with. Another key element is the fact that the storyis told from the point of view of an Indian woman. One of the least ad-mirable aspects of AIM, in my judgment, is a tendency toward mas-culinist posturing that Mary Crow Dog does a nice job of puncturingfrom time to time in both the book and the film. I read that posturing asin part a product of the Hollywood script in which warriorhood was al-ways just about armed confrontation, rather than about building andprotecting community by many means. Putting Mary Crow Dog at thecenter decenters the cowboy and Indian dynamic considerably. It isalso important because women have played and continue to play keyleadership roles in many parts of Native cultures, and they certainly

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played crucial roles in AIM. The film gets right, for example, the factthat traditional women of Pine Ridge played a particularly strong rolein pushing to invite AIM to take up the occupation at Wounded Knee.And when a male leader suggests in the film that women leave theencampment, Mary and the other women present give a resoundingresponse that could be summed up as hell, no. More generally, a femalecenter is important because, as in most movements of the era, womenin AIM did much of the real organizing work while too often maleleaders took starring roles in the spotlights. Those starring roles, how-ever, also meant that it was disproportionately the men who endedup in jail. Eventually women in AIM formed their own organization,WARN (Women of All Red Nations), which supported the men of AIMbut recognized the need (and the traditional right) of women to formseparate groups. WARN remains today an important Native resistanceorganization.

The Mary Crow Dog figure in the film, played by Irene Bedard(later to be the voice of Pocahontas in Disney’s animated film), is alsoused to illustrate the ambivalence in AIM about the use of violence.While the women in the film are portrayed as every bit as militant asthe men, they don’t fetishize guns. On the one hand, the promos forthe television presentation of the film seem to play up Mary’s womanwarrior stance by picturing her peering through the scope of a rifle.On the other hand, in the movie itself we learn that when she peersthrough that scope and gets a government soldier in her crosshairs, sheacknowledges his humanity and doesn’t pull the trigger. That is for mean important moment because, looking back on the radicalism of the1960s and 1970s, it is clear that the FBI cowboys tried to provoke vio-lence as often as possible in order to discredit movements. Dismissingmovements as “violent” and “extremist” has long been a way for thegovernment to avoid confronting the issues radical movements raise.In the case of AIM, while the government wanted to avoid a secondWounded Knee massacre, they were pleased whenever they helped thewarriors live up to a violent, criminal “renegade” image they and themedia had crafted for them. While AIM’s official stance was always oneof violence only in self-defense, that proved a difficult distinction tomake, as it had been for the Black Panthers, and was made more diffi-cult by law enforcement infiltrators who joined AIM often for the ex-press purpose of pushing for more violent actions.

Mary Crow Dog’s involvement with AIM becomes the center ofthe film even more so than in the book, and the movie gives a far moredetailed portrait of the spirit, ideas, and goals of AIM than any otherfilm, including the two documentaries. The film is also careful to makeclear at the beginning that it is only the story of “Mary Brave Woman[as she was named after she gave birth inside the encampment duringthe siege]—this is how she saw it.” While this may, again, have been

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written partly as a legal disclaimer, it also plays the important role ofmaking it clear that this is a partial portrait, not a definitive one. Fol-lowing these opening printed words, the film segues quickly to scenesof the Pine Ridge landscape, as Mary’s voice-over tells us that this is thestory of how she “finds her soul.” She says modestly that it is “only alittle story” compared to that of Crazy Horse and other great warriors,but it is hers.

The film is good at giving a quick but textured sense of the back-ground that led Mary and many Indians like her to join the move-ment. An early scene contrasts her material poverty with a sense of thestrength of family in Native communities. Mary narrates, “We werepoor, but I didn’t know it, and we had love and respect.” The story of thefirst Wounded Knee massacre is also told as both a tribal and a familyaffair through Mary’s grandfather, who had witnessed it. This sceneof military genocide is soon followed by attempted cultural genocideas symbolized by Mary’s Indian braids being cut off in a repressiveChristian boarding school that systematically goes about trying toerase her cultural heritage, as such schools have tried to do for manygenerations. We also get glimpses of her teenage years that can perhapsmost aptly be described as aimless. We get statistical information on thepoverty and unemployment rates on the reservation that contextualizeswhat in the other films is too often mere background (though both ofthe other fiction films make remarks about the rez as part of “the ThirdWorld”). Mary and her friends court and in one case meet death indrunken car chase games. One of the documentary films, “The Spirit ofCrazy Horse,” reads alcoholism as a resistance to the life imposed onIndians by the dominant culture, and while that view is not made ex-plicit in Lakota Woman, it is clear that Mary redirects some of the recklessenergy and anger at what has become of her people under white domi-nation into the more creative and active response of working with AIM.

Her involvement is also portrayed fairly carefully as developingin stages, rather than through some flash of conversion as too oftenhappens in films about radicals. There is an amusing scene in which shefirst learns about radical Indian activism from an alterNative newspapergiven her by a young “hippie chick” clearly thrilled to be talking to areal live Indian. Later she gets a more direct lesson in the movementwhile in jail after one of her drunken adventures, and she graduallydrifts into movement circles. A male inmate gives her the gist of AIMphilosophy as follows: “We light the spark, we’re gonna take it all back,and then we’re gonna set it free.”

Bedard as Crow Dog offers voice-over narration that allows for afair amount of discursive development of AIM views and contextuali-zations that provide useful information for the audience as the filmmoves rather quickly through most of the major events in the evolu-tion of AIM. It begins with their intervention into border town killings

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that first established AIM as a force in the Dakotas. The uprisingaround the murder of Wesley Bad Heart Bull in Custer, South Dakota,which solidified AIM’s reputation, is staged carefully. The narrator tellsus that Bad Heart Bull’s mother was given three to five years for al-legedly inciting the courthouse riot, while the murderer was set free.

The Mount Rushmore action, where an AIM activist humorouslyremarks that “We reclaim this piece of bad art in the name of theLakota people,” is also touched upon. Crow Dog’s narration adds thatwhile “we had no magic to restore the mountain,” the FBI acted likethey believed we might and proceeded to brutalize the protesters.Another scene raises the important issue of archeological desecration,again with a touch of humor at the expense of white presumptuous-ness. AIM activists approach a dig overseen by a professor surroundedby graduate students and ask the befuddled prof, “Where’s your grand-mother buried? We want to dig her up and put her in our museum.”When the archeologist asks, “Who are you people?” the activists reply,“We are walking scientific specimens. We are quaint tourist attractions.We are living fossils. We are your conscience, if you have one.”

When the film turns to the siege at Wounded Knee, which takesup most of the second half, the effort to achieve accuracy is clear. Weget scenes of speeches by Russell Means (played by Lawrence Bayne)that give the spirit, if not always the specific content of AIM ideology.We also get a sense of how the urban members of AIM became ac-quainted with and influenced by traditional elders on the reservations.The fact that some of the conservatives among the traditionals op-posed AIM is also acknowledged, at least in passing, and one asks aquestion frequently directed at AIM—will these outside guys be herewhen the smoke clears? And in the meeting in which the decision togo to Wounded Knee is made, it is accurately women who take thestrongest stance.

Leonard Crow Dog, the young Lakota medicine man who be-came a spiritual advisor to AIM and whom Mary marries after WoundedKnee, has a central role in the latter part of the film. Lakota spiritualityand its relation to AIM work is handled with some care and without theheavy-handedness found in the New Ager’s rip-off version. Whilesome have argued that any depiction of Native spirituality is a sacri-lege, Lakota spiritual advisors were hired to assure sensitive handlingof the ritual scenes, and humor was used to fight against Hollywoodmedicine man stereotypes. For example, one elder remarks that “fatherpeyote” will lead AIM back “into the spirit world . . . where we’ll talkabout the great mysteries of life, like where the sunglasses go when youlose them.” (This is perhaps also a gentle slap at the “shades and braids”image of the male AIMsters.)

The battle with the forces of Dickie Wilson (played with nicelyicy power by August Schellenberg) is also trenchantly portrayed. Direct

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quotes from Wilson’s press conferences, including his famous threat tocut off Russell Means’s braids, give a sense of his growing frustrationwith challenges to his paternalistic authority at Pine Ridge. More seri-ously, Wilson’s campaign to wipe out AIM is referred to appropriatelyas a “reign of terror,” and his collusion with white vigilante cowboys inaddition to the federal marshal cowboys is clearly represented. In onescene, in fact, we overhear putative law enforcers relishing the fact thatfighting Indians is giving them a chance to be “real” cowboys. And an-other scene stresses that, as in the past, most of the firepower is on theside of the cowboy cavalry. FBI training of Wilson’s goons to use auto-matic weapons and details of the far greater firepower of the cowboys,including two armored personnel carriers, is carefully documented, asit was not by, for example, the original coverage in the New York Times.

The presence and limited understanding of events provided bythe media is also thematized. Mary notes that they “loved our Indianuprising” but suggests their focus on the cowboy-Indian dimensions ig-nored the subtantive issues and that they quickly grew tired unless newdramas were produced (a fact that may account for those events thereal Russell Means allegedly staged). When Mary herself is asked byreporters to explain the meaning of the siege, she at first tries to deferto the male spokesmen, but then offers her own answer. She liststhe names of various tribes—Mohawk, Nisqually, Ojibwe, Cheyenne,among many others—whose members had come together at WoundedKnee. To illustrate what this means, she holds up her hand, fingersspread, then brings the fingers together into a tightly clenched fist. Butrather than digging deeper into the meaning of her gesture, the mediajust asks her repeatedly to reenact it. In another scene, the RussellMeans character chastises the press for not doing the background worknecessary to understand what the occupiers were fighting for. LaterDennis Banks and Means address the issue of violence as raised by a re-porter. Banks says, “The history of AIM is one of action, not violence.”When a follow-up question asks about the guns in the AIM compound,Means makes a plea of self-defense by reeling off the names of Indiansmurdered in recent months, linking the deaths to a centuries-old tradi-tion of Indian killing.

There are a number of other points I could detail in which docu-mentary-style information about the Wounded Knee events and itssurrounding context are given. And one could also point out a numberof inaccuracies and distortions in details, most attributable to poetic li-cense. But I want to close out my discussion of the film with a couple ofremarks about a different dimension of the film, its portrayal of theethos of the AIM encampment. One of the most profound aspects ofcollective, social movement action, at least from my experience, is thefeeling political theorist Hannah Arendt referred to as “public hap-piness,” the sense of exhilaration that comes when one throws one’s

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whole being into a principled cause. This feeling is seldom captured infilm with its bias toward individualized storytelling. But a sense of com-munity, so much a part of Native nations as well as social movementcultures, is conveyed relatively well in the film and summed up byMary’s remark that she never felt more free than when inside theWounded Knee camp. That one can indeed feel most “free” when in jailfor civil disobedience or when surrounded by trigger-happy federalmarshals and FBI agents is a paradox of social activism rarely portrayedin the mass media. The sense of the encampment as a community, oneboth mundane and extraordinary, comes through powerfully at points.While framed as one woman’s story, and thus caught up to a certaindegree in Euro-American notions of individuality, the film’s narrativemoves her toward collective power and communal responsibility.

The film ends on a powerful note, one that attempts to fend offthe nostalgic move that might lock Indian resistance in the past.Standing in front of the mass grave monument to the 1890 masscre atWounded Knee, Mary looks directly into the camera and details theways in which the government lied in its negotiated settlement of theoccupation, notes the role played by the media in the action, thencounts off some of the assassinations that followed in the wake of theoccupation, and the names of members still in jail. “Once we put downour guns and the television and newspaper reporters went home, the arrests began. They could say anything they wanted. Whatever we said was gone in a cold Pine Ridge wind. Nearly everything is gonenow. The government tried to extinguish all signs that Indians oncemade their stand here. It will do them no good because the world saw,the world heard. Even though in time Annie Mae Aquash and PedroBissonette were murdered by goons. Even though once again the gov-ernment lied and betrayed us. Even though some of our leaders are stillin jail. In the end it will do them no good at all to try to hide it becauseit happened. Today it is still not ours, but tomorrow it might be be-cause of that long moment those short years ago at Wounded Kneewhere we reached out and touched our history. I was there. I saw it. Ithappened to me.” Then in Lakota and English she adds, “So that ourpeople may live,” as two Indian children run across the screen. Theending offers a refusal to have the past erased, and a call to bring thewarrior legacy into the future.

The ending is a powerful one, but it also solidifies for me a feelingthat the film has been too perfect, too neat. The too-perfect Indian-maiden beauty of Bedard herself seems to tie together a film with toofew rough edges, too much Hollywood idealism. The Indian resistorsare a bit too good to be true; the black hats on Dick Wilson’s Indiancowboys fit a bit too tightly. There is little sense of the internal strifethat wracked AIM, little sense that some of the leaders had less puremotives and less admirable characters than they are given in the film.

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Incarceration and Vietnam had deeply wounded many AIM members,some of whom were unstable, not to say just plain crazy. And, as I sug-gested above, the “shades and braids” corps gave in more than once to avanity that did not serve the movement. In addition, the film says fartoo little about the failure of AIM to follow through in the aftermath ofits symbolic victories. In their efforts toward sympathy, the filmmakerswhitewash AIM, make it too purely a victim. By robbing them of theirhuman imperfections, they ironically rob them of much of their humanagency.

But looking at Lakota Woman from the angle of production ratherthan product suggests a different ending to the story of Indian resis-tance through film. One of the more admirable facts about LakotaWoman and one that, along with its woman-centered story, no doubtaccounts for many of its strengths, is that the filmmakers went to somelengths to hire not only Indian actors for the film, but also Indian crewmembers and Indian consultants to assure a degree of accuracy on sev-eral levels. In addition to Richard Moves Camp as consultant on Lakotaspirituality, the film employed Mary Crow Dog herself as a consultant(on her own life story) and other former AIM members to go over de-tails about the occupation.

More important than the gestures toward authenticity, however,is the gesture of hiring the crew members. For I agree with critic JudyMerritt, novelist David Seals, and many in Indian country that in the fu-ture Indian films should be made as much as possible by Indian people.Merritt challenges the Ted Turners and the Robert Redfords to put theirmoney where their mouths are by turning over whole productions toIndian crews. Novelist Seals has said that he will not authorize a sequelto Powwow Highway unless it is directed by an Indian.11 And the Lakotapeople have recently worked to get Ted Turner to stop production on aproposed film about the figure he calls Crazy Horse and they know asTa’ Shunke Witko. This is not racial essentialism or “blood quantum”theory at work; it is about the need for a degree of cultural competencyHollywood has again and again fallen short of, and it is a call once againfor the rights AIM aimed at from the beginning—the right to self-determination and self-representation for Native people everywhere.Cinematic self-representation will, of course, be no panacea. It will besubject to all the contradictions that trouble Indian communities today.But it will be an important step in a larger process just as surely asWounded Knee itself was a step in a struggle that continues.

In the meantime, we have each of these films about AIM thathave strengths as well as serious flaws. In this they mirror AIM itself.And perhaps the deepest flaw in AIM was its own excessive relianceupon the mass media that my presentation itself replicates. AIM wasspectacularly successful, for brief moments, in drawing attention toIndian issues through effective guerilla theater. Actions like Wounded

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Knee awakened members of Native nations throughout the UnitedStates and around the world. But the often vague, pan-Indian politicsof AIM could not address the various differing, complicated situationsof Indian nations. And AIM’s mass media approach can at best mobi-lize, it cannot truly organize people or communities. That takes face-to-face, painstaking work.

In the wake of the relative decline of the organization due tointernal strife and FBI repression, much of the work of AIM passed onto specific, local political, cultural, and spiritual warriors in the manyIndian nations. Great successes in rekindling Native pride, Native cul-tures, and Native rights have occurred in the years since AIM’s heyday,despite ongoing economic exploitation. This work has been less visible,less spectacular, than AIM’s symbolic actions, but it has also gone fardeeper. It has understood that the most profound changes will be na-tion based, will build upon specific tribal traditions even as they openonto questions facing Indians more generally. And from this deeperbase in various particular Native nations, more substantive cross-nation, and even worldwide, Native organizations have emerged tocontinue interlinked struggles for land, sovereignty, and legal redress.At the same time, Native art, poetry, and fiction has flourished, bring-ing voices that both stir Indian hearts and minds and address difficultquestions to the white world.

But even in this new context, AIM’s work is not done. In a timewhen, as Warrior and Smith note, young Indians are growing up withlittle knowledge of the AIM era, AIM’s stories, even these flawed filmedversions, may prove useful. Who knows but that encountered bychance on TV, or used by a teacher or organizer who can point to thedistortions, one or another of the films might spark some questions,might ignite new kinds of resistance efforts as the next generation ofIndian and non-Indian activists examines and learns from the successesand the failures of the AIM era.

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1 Paul Chaat Smith and RobertWarrior, Like a Hurricane: The IndianMovement from Alcatraz to WoundedKnee (New York: New Press, 1996).See also Voices from Wounded Knee,1973: In the Words of the Participants(Rooseveltown, N.Y.: AkwesasneNotes, 1974). No single text hascome near the whole truth aboutAIM, but in addition to the above-named texts, the following pro-vide a variety of perspectives onIndian activism: Wounded Knee

Massacre: Hearings before the Committeeon the Judiciary, United States Senate,Ninety-fourth Congress, Second Session,on S. 1147 and S. 2900, February 5and 6, 1976 (Washington, D.C.:U.S. Government Printing Office,1976); Rolland Dewing, WoundedKnee II (Chadron, Neb.: GreatPlains Network and Pine HillsPress, 1995); Edward A. Milligan(He Topa), Wounded Knee 1973,and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868(Bottineau, N.D.: Bottineau

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Courant Print, 1973); RobertBurnette and John Koster, TheRoad to Wounded Knee (New York:Bantam Books, 1974); StanleyLyman, Wounded Knee: A PersonalAccount (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1991); RussellMeans, with Marvin J. Wolf,Where White Men Fear to Tread: TheAutobiography of Russell Means (NewYork: St. Martin’s Press, 1995);John William Sayer, Ghost Dancingthe Law: The Wounded Knee Trials(Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1997); Johanna Brand, TheLife and Death of Anna Mae Aquash(Toronto: J. Lorimer, 1978); WardChurchill and Jim Vander Wall,Agents of Repression: The FBI’s SecretWars against the Black Panther Partyand the American Indian Movement(Boston: South End Press, 1990);Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit ofCrazy Horse (New York: VikingPress, 1983); Mary Crow Dog,as told to Richard Erdoes, LakotaWoman (New York: Grove Weiden-feld, 1990); Mary Brave Bird, withRichard Erdoes, Ohitika Woman(New York: Grove Press, 1993);Joane Nagel, American Indian EthnicRenewal: Red Power and the Resurgenceof Identity and Culture (New York:Oxford University Press, 1996);Troy Johnson, The Occupation ofAlcatraz Island (Urbana: Universityof Illinois Press, 1996); LeonardPeltier, Prison Writings: My Life IsMy Sun Dance (New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1999). Some ofthe key documents of the era arecollected in Alvin Josephy et al.,eds., Red Power: The American Indians’Fight for Freedom, 2d ed. (Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press,1999). Four documentary filmshave also been made about AIMand its context: Incident at Oglala:The Leonard Peltier Story, dir. MichaelApted, Miramax, 1992; Warrior:The Life of Leonard Peltier, dir. SuzieBaer, Cinnamon Productions,1991; “The Spirit of Crazy Horse,”dir. James Locker, correspondentMilo Yellow Hair, Parallax Pro-

ductions and Access Productions,in association with WGBH, PBSFrontline, 1990.

2 Powwow Highway, dir. JoanelleNadine Romero and JonathanWacks, Handmade Films/WarnerBros., 1989; Thunderheart, dir.Michael Apted, Tristar Pictures,1992; Lakota Woman: Siege atWounded Knee, dir. Frank Pierson,Turner Films, made for TV withvideo release, 1994.

3 It remains to be seen whether therelative success of the independentfilm Smoke Signals (Miramax Films,1998), directed (Chris Eyre),scripted (Sherman Alexie), andacted (Adam Beach, Evan Adams,Irene Bedard, Gary Farmer, andTantoo Cardinal) by Indians, willmark such a breakthrough.

4 Mario Gonzalez and ElizabethCook-Lynn, in The Politics ofHallowed Ground: Wounded Knee andthe Struggle for Indian Sovereignty(Urbana: University of IllinoisPress, 1999), place WoundedKnee II in the context of the longstruggle to get the U.S. govern-ment to acknowledge the injusticeof the Wounded Knee massacre,and in the process they offer somepointed critiques of AIM’s actions.

5 Cited in Michelle Deshong, “NewYork Times Coverage of WoundedKnee, South Dakota” (master’sthesis, Washington State Univer-sity, 1973).

6 “Trap at Wounded Knee,” Time(26 March 1973), 67.

7 See James Stripes, “A Strategyof Resistance: The ‘Actorvism’of Russell Means from PlymouthRock to the Disney Studios,”Wicazo Sa Review 14, no. 1 (spring1999): 87–101.

8 Russell Means, on the RussellMeans home page (http://www.russellmeans.com).

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W9 David Seals, The Powwow Highway

(New York: Plume Books, [1979]1990).

10 Mary Crow Dog and RichardErdoes, Lakota Woman (New York:Grove Weidenfeld, 1990).

11 Seals himself is apparently a con-troversial figure in some parts ofIndian country. See Gonzalez andCook-Lynn, The Politics of HallowedGround, 152–54.

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