Farewell to Russell Means: Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

Russell Means
Photo: Lloyd Cunningham, Gannett/Argus Leader

Back in March 1973, David Garrick and I traveled down from Canada to South Dakota. We managed to hike and crawl some twenty miles through the brush and snow, passing armed Federal officers until we made our way into the village of Wounded Knee.

I was 22 years old, foolhardy, reckless and admittedly naïve, but I had just read Dee Brown’s "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" and I was determined to support the American Indian Movement (AIM).

I was there to support the occupation of Wounded Knee by AIM and to report on the situation back to Robert Hunter at the Vancouver Sun. I was also there to write about the experience for the Vancouver weekly newspaper, Georgia Straight.

David and I became citizens of the Independent Oglala Nation of Wounded Knee and Pedro Bissonette stamped and signed our Canadian passports to that effect.  David and I spent a month in the village while it was under siege and I volunteered as a medic. With food running low, all but the essential warriors were asked to leave to provide more resources for the small group of defenders that would stay behind.

So David and I once again crawled through the snow and the brush back to Porcupine on the Pine Ridge Reservation where Dewy Brave Heart met us and smuggled us past Dickie Wilson’s goon squads and off the reservation.

It was an experience I shall never forget and I learned many valuable lessons during my short time amongst this small group of committed and passionate members of the American Indian Movement led by Dennis Banks and Russell Means.

I am saddened to hear that Russell Means has died at the age of 72.

I remember him vividly. He was a larger than life personality back in 1973 just as he remained until the day he died. My fondest memory of him was the day he stood outside of the sweat lodge with Leonard Crow Dog and Wallace Black Elk and spoke to a small group of us. The impression that I had was, "Here is a man willing to die for what he believed in, and what he believed in was justice for his people."

He spoke just once to me when he asked me why I was there. I remember his words: “What brings you here all the way from Canada. You’re not an Indian?”

I answered that, “No, perhaps not, but then again maybe we all should be Indians.”

He laughed. “Good answer.” And walked away.

I did have the opportunity to hear him tell some colorful stories and I was able to observe him under stressful conditions. After all, the F.B.I. U.S. Marshalls, Bureau of Indian Affairs and U.S. soldiers had the place surrounded and were firing thousands of rounds of bullets into the village every night. I still remember the bullet that whizzed by my ear in the dark of night as I was walking down the hill from the Catholic Church.

And what I saw and heard impressed me. I saw a man of great courage and exceptional passion. There was a bitter side to him, and most definitely an undisguised anger festered within him. But more than anyone I have ever met, he personified everything that is embodied in the simple but powerful Lakota war cry of “Hoka Hey: It is a good day to die!”

Despite the risks he took Russell was a difficult man to kill. He was stabbed in prison and survived several gunshot wounds; one from the revolver of an Indian Affairs police officer (1975), two assassination attempts, a grazed forehead from a drive-by shooter (also in 1975), and a wound to the chest from another would-be-assassin in 1976.

Russell Means fought the government not just in the field but also in the courts and for all the energy and money the Federal government spent to lock him away in prison, Russell Means only served a year in a State prison when he was convicted of “involvement” in a riot.

Russell was more than just an activist, he was a musician, a writer, a politician and most famously an actor, notably starring in “The Last of the Mohicans,” and appearing in some 30 films including “Natural Born Killers” and “Pocahontas.”  He also ran for President.

Like any activist and outspoken personality, people either loved him or they hated him, and that to me always indicates someone who is actually making a difference. You don’t change the world by making everyone happy, because a good percentage of people will violently oppose you if you rock the boat. And Russell Means was one hell of a boat-rocking badass because ever since the notorious Mayflower landed in 1620 this boat called America has needed rocking.

Russell Means did in fact rock the actual Mayflower in 1970 when he led a group of AIM activists in seizing the Mayflower II.

Critics have accused Russell of a variety of sleights, called him a self-promoting opportunist, a charlatan and a coward.

Interesting. Not that Russell Means would care but the reality is this: Here was a man who risked his life for his people and for his beliefs, and there can be no denial of this fact. Here is a man who was undeterred by four attempts to kill him and who served time in prison for standing up for what he believed in. Here was a man who expressed himself in the art of writing, music and dramatic acting. Here was a man who spoke truth to power.

Most likely any critics who “boldly” step forward now to mock and insult the dead, have done little themselves and have never experienced the challenges that drove Russell Means to become the most famous Native American since Crazy Horse, Geronimo and Sitting Bull.

I knew Russell Means only briefly, although I followed his career with admiration for decades. He taught me to stand tall in the face of formidable opposition. He illustrated to me that passion combined with imagination and courage is what makes a warrior impeccable and worthy of being called a true hero.

As for faults, of course he had faults. He was a human and I have never met a faultless human being. I have however met a few heroes and they all have had faults.

As Abraham Lincoln once observed, “Show me a man without vice and I’ll show you a man without virtue.”

He always had and he always will have my admiration and respect.

Russell Means (November 10, 1939 – October 22, 2012)

Waŋná wanáǧiyata níŋ na uŋ líla ičháŋteuŋšičapi, oíyokšiče ló. Éyaš óhiŋniyaŋ čhíksuya uŋk’úŋpi kte ló.

Roughly translated: Now you are making the journey to the spirit world and we are sad. But we will always remember you.

(Source)

Related links:

* Russell Means Interview — Welcome To the Reservation

* Russell Means, Who Clashed With Law as He Fought for Indians, Is Dead at 72

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Russell Means Interview — Welcome To the Reservation

The United States is one big reservation, and we are all in it. So says Russell Means, legendary actor, political activist and leader for the American Indian Movement. Means led the 1972 seizure of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, D.C., and in 1973 led a standoff at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, a response to the massacre of at least 150 Lakotah men, women, and children by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry at a camp near Wounded Knee Creek.

American Indian Russell Means gives an eye-opening 90 minute interview in which he explains how Native Americans and Americans in general are all imprisoned within one huge reservation. Means is a leader for the Republic of Lakotah, a movement that has declared its independence from the United States and refused to recognize the authority of presidents or governments, withdrawing from treaties it made with the federal government and defining its borders which cover thousands of square miles in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana.

Means explains how American Indians have been enslaved within de facto prisoner of war camps as a result of the federal government's restriction of their food supply and the application of colonial tactics, a process that has now also been inflicted on the United States as a whole which has turned into, "one huge Indian reservation," according to Means.

Means warns that Americans have lost the ability of critical though, and with each successive generation become more irresponsible and as a consequence less free, disregarding a near-perfect document, the Constitution, which was derived from Indian law. Means chronicles the loss of freedom from the 1840's onwards, which marked the birth of the corporation, to Lincoln's declaration of martial law, to the latter part of the 19th century and into the 20th when Congress "started giving banks the right to rule," and private banking interests began printing the money.

Watch the full documentary below

Related links:

* Farewell to Russell Means: Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

* Russell Means, Who Clashed With Law as He Fought for Indians, Is Dead at 72

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* Facebook: National-Anarchist Movement (N-AM)

* Facebook: National-Anarchist Permaculture Information Network

Russell Means, Who Clashed With Law as He Fought for Indians, Is Dead at 72

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.

Protesting at a Columbus Day 

Parade in Denver in 2000.

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.

Russell Means in 1989.

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.

(Source)

Related links:

* Russell Means Interview — Welcome To the Reservation

* Farewell to Russell Means: Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

-----------------------------------------------

* Facebook: National-Anarchist Movement (N-AM)

* Facebook: National-Anarchist Permaculture Information Network