Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee

I entered the eighth grade in a new school in a new town. I cannot much remember the first days of other school years or even the first days of new jobs. However, I remember my first day of eighth grade and pretty much every day after that for the year. I got called a boy by the choir teacher. Consequently, I yearned to crawl into a ball and never leave the corner of the room. This town I moved to was small, and the mindset of the people felt small, and my bedroom felt small, and my tolerance for ignorance was becoming smaller and smaller. See, eighth grade was a time when I was really trying to understand myself and express myself. That is when I began to listen to "peace" music, like Joan Baez. I became, more than ever, interested in women's liberation. Most of all, though, I became interested in Native Americans. I was obsessed, you might say. When I fall in love, I fall hard. This was no exception.

I started to read about the American Indian Movement of the 1970s. I devoured the autobiographical books of Mary Brave Bird. I learned about the incarceration of Leonard Peltier and watched documentaries about him. I was convinced, then, that he was wrongly convicted of murdering FBI agents. I would write the White House on a fairly regular basis, urging the powers that be that Peltier was a political prisoner and nothing more. Those White House folks always wrote me back, saying that the Peltier case was still pending. "Yeah, right," I thought, as I popped in the CD of Joan Baez singing Prison Trilogy. I would like to say that I discovered the American Indian Movement on my own, that I just happened to be reading my encyclopedia when I decided to learn more about the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre and the 1970s re-taking of the land. No, that did not happen. What did happen was there was a television movie called Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee (based on Mary Brave Bird's books). I saw it and something clicked. The Native Americans were strangers in their own land; on some level, I could relate.

See, a 13 year old is sort of a stranger to herself. I mean, I was. I was awakening to the strength of my beliefs and realizing the passion behind my convictions. That's heavy for a kid. I needed help, so I transformed my struggle into the struggle of the American Indians. I made their struggle my struggle and vice verse. The historical, 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre was a slaughter of the American Indians. Then, in the 1970s, the American Indians (via the American Indian Movement), many of whom were living in poverty or who were indoctrinated with Christianity, came together to re-claim their land, to re-claim their identity. A symbol of the A.I.M. was the upside down American flag. That was used to symbolize the dissatisfaction of the American Indian people within American society.

My own mind was awakening to certain injustices and wrongs in our society. I understood the American Indians' overall unhappiness with the state of their world. I understood their unhappiness really by way of my own unhappiness with the world. I was coming into a time of my life (a state in which I still currently dwell) when I hungered to understand and paricipate in social movements for the betterment of society. Well, in a sort of solidarity with the idea and passion of social change that I saw in A.I.M., I painted an upside down flag and hung it on my window. I still remember when I was made to take it down for fear that people would shoot at the house if they saw it. (That's the kind of small town in which I was living.) I knew my flag was freedom of expression. I knew that it was unfair to take it off the window. But, I did it. I did it and I thought I understood the oppression of the American Indians. I now know how selfish I was for even relating my own pain to a whole people's. I did learn later, though, that there is no hierarchy of pain or oppression.