the other press page 8

 

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By Stephen Most for
Pacific News Service.
Stephen Most, a
California freelance
journalist and play-
wright, regularly

monitors Native Amer-
ican affairs for PNS.

Sa

Nearly 30 years ago, Sioux
medicine man Henry Crow Dog
leveled a shotgun at the U.S.
official who came to take his son
to a government boarding
school, where his native lang-
uage and religion would be
banned. One of the few medi-
cine men still able to perform
religious ceremonies long sup-
pressed by the federal govern-
ment, Crow Dog insisted on
teaching his boy Leonard this
sacred knowledge so that Sioux
religion would survive.

Today Leonard Crow Dog
lives in a federal cell in Indi-
ana’s Terre Haute Penitentiary,
far from the Rosebud Sioux
reservation. But as spiritual
leader of the American Indian
Movement (AIM), the impri-
soned medicine man has fulfil-
led his father’s vision, becoming
a key link between past and
future in the struggle for native
rights, land and cultural survi-
val.

In 1972 Crow Dog advised
AIM’s urban-based leaders to
return to the spiritual heart of
traditional Indian culture, kept
alive by a dwindling number of
reservation fullbloods. That
meeting has since been called
the real birth of AIM by its
leaders.

Crow Dog may soon be free
again, and, ironically, he may
owe his release to the white
Christian National Council of
Churches.

 

 

Taking up his cause, the
Council issued a resolution de-
claring itself ‘“‘appalled at the
severity with which Leonard
Crow Dog has been pursued,
prosecuted, imprisoned and vic-
timized for what were, at most,
minor offenses, suggesting that
his real offense has been to lend
spiritual force and dignity to the
struggle for Indian rights.’’

Perhaps as a result of the
Council’s efforts, two recent
decisions by federal judges have
reduced his sentence for two
assault convictions to the time
already served and cut his
sentence for taking part in the
Wounded Knee confrontation
from eight years to three. Now
eligible for parole, Crow Dog
has a hearing this December.

The medicine man’s troubles
with the law go.back to the 1973
occupation of Wounded Knee.
In that small South Dakota
town, once the site of a massa-
cre of Sioux by the Seventh
Cavalry, later a tourist attract-
ion in the middle of Pine Ridge
Reservation, native people un-
der Crow Dog’s spiritual leader-
ship survived 71 days of siege
by federal forces.

Asked Leonard Crow Dog’s
role in the struggle, a Meno-

minee Indian replied, ‘‘He is the
struggle. In the minds of the

_ Indians out there that’s why
' they ain’t been killed yet,

through the power of the pipe
and the power of their religion
out there.”’

At Wounded Knee, Crow Dog
conducted pipe and sweat lodge
ceremonies, praying ‘‘to all my

relations,’’ the entire human
family, all living beings, the
life-giving Earth and Sun and
the Great Spirit who moves
through all things.

For the first time since Sitting
Bull was murdered and Big
Foot’s people were massacred
to crush the Ghost Dance
movement in 1890, the outlawed
dance returned to the Sioux
under Crow Dog’s guidance.

The medicine man told those
who took part in the slow,
circling, vision-inducing move-
ment that the U.S. government
had tried to destroy Indian
religion by prohibiting the
Ghost Dance and for 50 years,
the Sun Dance. Recalling Black
Elk’s vision that the sacred hoop
of life was broken by the 1890
Wounded Knee massacre, Crow
Dog said, “‘This hoop has to be
not broken--for the whole un-
born generations.’’

Crow Dog was laboring to
bring his people to the sense of
communication with nature that
for centuries had been the
source of their culture--and has
largely been lost under the
impact of industrial America.

“Remember: -we are natural
people,’’ he told his supporters

recently. ‘‘We have a very
sacred communication with the
grandfather (the Great Spirit).
We know the grandfather’s
language and the grandmoth-
er’s (the Earth).

“They say I need an interpre-
ter,’’ he added, speaking of his
white imprisoners. ‘‘And people
in white America need a doctor
and a lawyer. That’s where
we're at.”’

Crow Dog and other Sioux
medicine people had originally
asked AIM members to help
occupy Wounded Knee to pro-
test unpunished murders of
Indians and the dictatorial rule
of Tribal President Richard Wil-
son. They chose Wounded Knee
vecause, Wallace Black Elk
explained, ‘‘The sacred hoop
was. broken here at Wounded
Knee, and it will come back
again.”’

After besieging Wound Knee,
the federal government pro-
secuted participants in over 130
separate trials. The government
lost most of these cases, partly
for lack of evidence and partly
due to illegal procedures such as
unauthorized wiretaps and
fraudulent testimony by paid
informers.

Nonetheless the trials suc-
ceeded in tying up the time and
funds of native activists.

Leonard Crow Dog was tried
for ‘‘interfering with federal
officers.’ Four postal inspectors
had entered the besieged vil-
lage, been arrested by security
people and taken to Crow Dog
who lectured them on Indian
rights and had them escorted
out of Wounded Knee.

Although the four testified
that Crow Dog did not harm
them but in fact protected them,
a Cedar Rapids jury found him

guilty.

The court placed Crow Dog on
probation--which was soon re-
voked when the government
charged him with other crimes.

In March 1975S, three strang-
ers came to Crow Dog’s Para-
dise, saying that ‘‘the Great
Spirit’’ had sent them. They
were drunk.

According to the testimony of
one witness, Royer Pfersick
made a pass at Mary Crow Dog,
the medicine man’s wife, and
when Leonard protested, split
his lip. Yet it was Pfersick who
filed charges, claiming the
Sioux assaulted him with a toy
tomahawk.

At the trial before an all-white
jury in Rapid City, one prosecu-
tion witness testified, ‘‘I never
saw Crow Dog strike a blow.’’
Judge Merhige instructed the
jurors, ‘‘If Crow Dog acted in
self-defense, you must find him
innocent.’’ Yet their verdict was

guilty.

That summer, when FBI
agents occupied the Sioux re-
servations following the deaths
of two agents and Joseph Stuntz

Spiritual leader link to Indian roots

in a shoot-out on the land of
Harry Jumping Bull, two more
trespassers came to the Crow
Dog camp. One was a suspect in
the murder of Crow Dog’s
nephew, Andrew Stewart, and
both were suspected of beating
another nephew earlier that
night.

The medicine man was home
at the time awaiting an appeal
on his assault conviction. Fri-
ends and relatives protected
him by ejecting the men from
the camp.

But within 48 hours over 100
FBI and Special Operations
Group forces invaded the camp
and arrested Crow Dog. Judge
Merhige sentenced him to a

five-year prison term for ‘‘aid-
ing and abetting an assault.”’

During a span of four months
Crow Dog was moved between
14 different prisons, spending
most of his time in solitary

reason?

life?

way of living?

 

ae ee
WHY BELIEVE ANYWAY

Belief —
What is it - just a head trip?

an emotional experience
putting your brains into

moth balls, and abdicating

Behef
What does it do for you?

- does it make any difference to

-1s it just intellectual escape?
- is there evidence that faith is
based on facts which if
believed, produce a brand new

This Is The Topic that will be
discussed Tuesday December
ist,.12 .-. 1. p.m. Room10@
Admissions Building, spon-
sored by the Douglas College
Varsity Christian. Fellowship.

sc SSE ETL RAS ET

confinement. When released
pending an appeal to the Su-
preme Court, he was 50 pounds
lighter.

The medicine man believed
that if he returned to prison, he
would be murdered. ‘‘I think I
should not give my life to the
U.S. government,’’ he told sup-
porters in Oakland, Cal. “‘I
should not surrender.”’

“If he’s going to kill me, he
must kill me. But you must
remember, he cannot kill my
spirit. Like Crazy Horse said,
‘It’s a good way to die.’ I’m a
spiritual man, I can’t go to jail.”’

But when the Supreme Court
denied the appeal, Leonard
Crow Dog went to a town in the
Black Hills where his great-
grandfather once sutrendered to
federal authorities, conducted a
pipe ceremony with friends and
family and turned himself in.

 

 

 

 

 

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