Russell C. Means, the
charismatic Oglala Sioux who helped revive the warrior image of the American
Indian in the 1970s with guerrilla-tactic protests that called attention to the
nation’s history of injustices against its indigenous peoples, died on Monday
at his ranch in Porcupine, S.D., on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. He was
72.
Watch an interview with him here.
The cause was esophageal cancer, which had spread recently
to his tongue, lymph nodes and lungs, said Glenn Morris, Mr. Means’s legal
representative. Told in the summer of 2011 that the cancer was inoperable, Mr.
Means had already resolved to shun mainstream medical treatments in favor of
herbal and other native remedies.
Strapping, and ruggedly handsome in buckskins, with a
scarred face, piercing dark eyes and raven braids that dangled to the waist,
Mr. Means was, by his own account, a magnet for trouble — addicted to drugs and
alcohol in his early years and later arrested repeatedly in violent clashes
with rivals and the law. He was tried for abetting a murder, shot several
times, stabbed once and imprisoned for a year for rioting.
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Protesting at a Columbus Day
Parade in Denver in 2000.
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He styled himself a throwback to ancestors who resisted the
westward expansion of the American frontier. With theatrical protests that
brought national attention to poverty and discrimination suffered by his
people, he became arguably the nation’s best-known Indian since Sitting Bull
and Crazy Horse.
But critics, including many Indians, called him a tireless
self-promoter who capitalized on his angry-rebel notoriety by running quixotic
races for the presidency and the governorship of New Mexico, by acting in
dozens of movies — notably in a principal role in “The
Last of the Mohicans”(1992) — and by writing and recording music
commercially with Indian warrior and heritage themes.
He rose to national attention as a leader of the American Indian Movement in
1970 by directing a band of Indian protesters who seized the Mayflower II ship
replica at Plymouth, Mass., on Thanksgiving Day. The boisterous confrontation
between Indians and costumed “Pilgrims” attracted network television coverage
and made Mr. Means an overnight hero to dissident Indians and sympathetic
whites.
Later, he orchestrated an Indian prayer vigil atop the federal
monument of sculptured presidential heads at Mount Rushmore, S.D., to dramatize
Lakota claims to Black Hills land. In 1972, he organized cross-country caravans
converging on Washington to protest a century of broken treaties, and led an
occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He also attacked the “Chief Wahoo”
mascot of the Cleveland Indians baseball team, a toothy Indian caricature that
he called racist and demeaning. It is still used.
And in a 1973 protest covered by the national news media for
months, he led hundreds of Indians and white sympathizers in an occupation of
Wounded Knee, S.D., site of the 1890 massacre of some 350 Lakota men, women and
children in the last major conflict of the American Indian wars. The protesters
demanded strict federal adherence to old Indian treaties, and an end to what
they called corrupt tribal governments.
In the ensuing 71-day standoff with federal agents,
thousands of shots were fired, two Indians were killed and an agent was
paralyzed. Mr. Means and his fellow protest leader Dennis Banks were
charged with assault, larceny and conspiracy. But after a long federal trial in
Minnesota in 1974, with the defense raising current and historic Indian
grievances, the case was dismissed by a judge for prosecutorial misconduct.
Mr. Means later faced other legal battles. In 1976, he was
acquitted in a jury trial in Rapid City, S.D., of abetting a murder in a
barroom brawl. Wanted on six warrants in two states, he was convicted of
involvement in a 1974 riot during a clash between the police and Indian
activists outside a Sioux Falls, S.D., courthouse. He served a year in a state
prison, where he was stabbed by another inmate.
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Russell Means in 1989.
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Mr. Means also survived several gunshots — one in the
abdomen fired during a scuffle with an Indian Affairs police officer in North
Dakota in 1975, one that grazed his forehead in what he called a drive-by
assassination attempt on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota in
1975, and one in the chest fired by another would-be assassin on another South
Dakota reservation in 1976.
Undeterred, he led a caravan of Sioux and Cheyenne into a
gathering of 500 people commemorating the centennial of Gen. George Armstrong
Custer’s last stand at Little Big Horn in Montana in 1876, the nation’s most
famous defeat of the Indian wars. To pounding drums, Mr. Means and his
followers mounted a speaker’s platform, joined hands and did a victory dance,
sung in Sioux Lakota, titled “Custer Died for Your Sins.”
Russell Charles Means was born on the Pine Ridge reservation
on Nov. 10, 1939, the oldest of four sons of Harold and Theodora Feather Means.
The Anglo-Saxon surname was that of a great-grandfather. When he was 3, the
family moved to the San Francisco Bay area, where his father, a welder and auto
mechanic, worked in wartime shipyards.
Russell attended public schools in Vallejo and San Leandro
High School, where he faced racial taunts, had poor grades and barely graduated
in 1958. He drifted into delinquency, drugs, alcoholism and street fights. He
also attended four colleges, including Arizona State at Tempe, but did not earn
a degree. For much of the 1960s he rambled about the West, working as a
janitor, printer, cowboy and dance instructor.
In 1969, he took a job with the Rosebud Sioux tribal council
in South Dakota. Within months he moved to Cleveland and became founding
director of a government-financed center helping Indians adapt to urban life.
He also met Mr. Banks, who had recently co-founded the American Indian
Movement. In 1970, Mr. Means became the movement’s national director, and over
the next decade his actions made him a household name.
In 1985 and 1986, he went to Nicaragua to support indigenous
Miskito Indians whose autonomy was threatened by the leftist Sandinista
government. He reported Sandinista atrocities against the Indians and urged the
Reagan administration to aid the victims. Millions in aid went to some
anti-Sandinista groups, but a leader of the Miskito Indian rebels, Brooklyn
Rivera, said his followers had not received any of that aid.
In 1987, Mr. Means ran for president. He sought the
Libertarian Party nomination but lost to Ron Paul, a former and future
congressman from Texas. In 2002, Mr. Means campaigned independently for the New
Mexico governorship but was barred procedurally from the ballot.
Mr. Means retired from the American Indian Movement in 1988,
but its leaders, with whom he had feuded for years, scoffed, saying he had
“retired” six times previously. They generally disowned him and his work,
calling him an opportunist out for political and financial gain. In 1989, he
told Congress that there was “rampant graft and corruption” in tribal
governments and federal programs assisting American Indians.
Mr. Means began his acting career in 1992 with “The Last of
the Mohicans,” Michael Mann’s adaptation of the James Fenimore Cooper novel, in
which he played Chingachgook opposite Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe.
Over two decades he appeared in more than 30 films and television productions,
including “Natural Born Killers” (1994) and “Pathfinder” (2007). He also
recorded CDs, including “Electric Warrior: The Sound of Indian America” (1993),
and wrote a memoir, “Where White Men Fear to Tread” (1995, with
Marvin J. Wolf).
He was married and divorced four times and had nine
children. He also adopted many others following Lakota tradition. His fifth
marriage, to Pearl Daniels, was in 1999, and she survives him.
Mr. Means cut off his braids a few months before receiving
his cancer diagnosis. It was, he said in an interview last October, a gesture
of mourning for his people. In Lakota lore, he explained, the hair holds
memories, and mourners often cut it to release those memories, and the people
in them, to the spirit world.
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