Publisher Description

An "indescribably touching, extraordinarily intelligent" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) chronicle of a fatal gun-battle between FBI agents and American Indian Movement activists by renowned writer Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), author of the National Book Award-winning The Snow Leopard and the novel In ParadiseOn a hot June morning in 1975, a desperate shoot-out between FBI agents and Native Americans near Wounded Knee, South Dakota, left an Indian and two federal agents dead. Four members of the American Indian Movement were indicted on murder charges, and one, Leonard Peltier, was convicted and is now serving consecutive life sentences in a federal penitentiary. Behind this violent chain of events lie issues of great complexity and profound historical resonance, brilliantly explicated by Peter Matthiessen in this controversial book. Kept off the shelves for eight years because of one of the most protracted and bitterly fought legal cases in publishing history, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse reveals the Lakota tribe's long struggle with the U.S. government, and makes clear why the traditional Indian concept of the earth is so important at a time when increasing populations are destroying the precious resources of our world.

Author Biography

Peter Matthiessen was the cofounder of the Paris Review and is the author of numerous works of nonfiction, including In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Indian Country, and The Snow Leopard, winner of the National Book Award.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
BOOK I
1. THIEVES ROAD: The Oglala Lakota, 1835–1965
2. THE UPSIDE-DOWN FLAG: The American Indian Movement, 1968–73
3. TO WOUNDED KNEE: February–May 1973
4. THE WOUNDED KNEE TRIALS: January–September 1974
5. THE NEW INDIAN WARS: AIM Versus the FBI, 1972–75
6. THE U.S. PUPPET GOVERNMENT: Pine Ridge and Dick Wilson, 1975
BOOK II
7. THE SHOOT-OUT I: June 26, 1975
8. THE SHOOT-OUT II: June 26, 1975
9. THE "RESERVATION MURDERS" INVESTIGATION: June–September 1975
10. THE FUGITIVES I: July–November 1975
11. THE FUGITIVES II: November 1975–May 1976
12. THE TRIAL AT CEDAR RAPIDS: June–July 1976
13. THE TRIAL AT FARGO: March–April 1977
BOOK III
14. THE ESCAPE: Lompoc Prison and the Los Angeles Trial
15. THE REAL ENEMY
16. ANOTHER IMPORTANT MATTER: Myrtle Poor Bear and David Price, 1976–81
17. FORKED TONGUES: The Freedom of Information Act and the New Evidence, 1980–81
18. IN MARION PENITENTIARY
19. PAHA SAPA: The Treaty, the Supreme Court, and the Return to the Black Hills
20. RED AND BLUE DAYS
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD BY MARTIN GARBUS
NOTES
INDEX

Review

"By the time I had turned the final page, I felt angry enough […] to want to shout from the rooftops, 'Wake up, America, before it's too damned late!' For Matthiessen, in this extraordinary, complex work, powerfully propounds several large and disturbing themes which the white majority in America will ignore at extreme peril."
—Nick Kotz, The Washington Post
 
"A giant of a book . . . indescribably touching, extraordinarily intelligent."
—The Los Angeles Times
 
"In the Spirit of Crazy Horse is really about contemporary America and the way American law is seen through the eyes of American Indians. . . . It is one of those rare books that permanently change one's consciousness about important, yet neglected, facets of our history."
—The New York Times Book Review

"[Matthiessen] is neither gullible nor uncritical. He realistically portrays individuals, landscapes, customs, and problems that, though wholly American, are unfamiliar to most American citizens."
—The New Yorker

"One of the most dramatic demonstrations of endemic American racism that has yet been written—a powerful, unsettling book that will force even the most ethno-pious reader to inspect the limits of his understanding."
—The New York Review of Books

Kirkus US Review

A comprehensive and impassioned account of American Indian activist warriors: what they struggle for and why, what they and all Americans stand to lose. Matthiessen (The Snow Leopard, etc.) concentrates on the bloody shoot-out between FBI agents and Indians that took place June 26, 1975, on the Pine Ridge Reservation and ended in the execution of two wounded agents. Were they killed by Indian warriors Dine Butler and Bob Robideau, acquitted of murder charges in a Cedar Rapids court which heard evidence of FBI lies, set-ups, and coercion? Or by Indian activist Leonard Peltier, convicted of the same charges in a Fargo court which ruled most of his defense "inadmissible" and sent him to prison for two consecutive life terms? Matthiessen, who believes Peltier innocent, builds a persuasive case for a new and fair trial. But Peltier, a poor Indian turned activist, dogged by the FBI to violence, railroaded into prison, and apparently set up by the feds to be "neutralized" there, is only one example of what has been happening to Indians all along. Matthiessen sketches the historical trail of broken treaties and the dismal fate of Indian leaders - Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse - betrayed and bumped off by the prevailing system of institutionalized greed. He traces the rise in the late 1960s of the American Indian Movement (which wanted the US to honor its treaties: that is, give back the uranium rich Black Hills); the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee and the resultant trials of AIM leaders Russell Means and Dennis Banks; the betrayal (by FBI informers) and murder of one leader after another, culminating in the diastrous shoot-out. The bottom line, according to Matthiessen and the Indians he quotes profusely, is the land itself, precious to Indians, raped by strip mining corporations with the collaboration of Bureau of Indian Affairs puppet tribal governments and their enforcing goon squads. It's a complex tale and a grim one (fuller, here, than in Rex Weyler's recent Blood of the Land, p. 929) - compellingly told all the way. (Kirkus Reviews)

Review Quote

"By the time I had turned the final page, I felt angry enough [...] to want to shout from the rooftops, 'Wake up, America, before it's too damned late!' For Matthiessen, in this extraordinary, complex work, powerfully propounds several large and disturbing themes which the white majority in America will ignore at extreme peril." --Nick Kotz, The Washington Post "A giant of a book . . . indescribably touching, extraordinarily intelligent." -- The Los Angeles Times " In the Spirit of Crazy Horse is really about contemporary America and the way American law is seen through the eyes of American Indians. . . . It is one of those rare books that permanently change one's consciousness about important, yet neglected, facets of our history." -- The New York Times Book Review "[Matthiessen] is neither gullible nor uncritical. He realistically portrays individuals, landscapes, customs, and problems that, though wholly American, are unfamiliar to most American citizens." -- The New Yorker "One of the most dramatic demonstrations of endemic American racism that has yet been written--a powerful, unsettling book that will force even the most ethno-pious reader to inspect the limits of his understanding." -- The New York Review of Books

Excerpt from Book

INTRODUCTION The buffalos I, the buffalos I . . . I am related to the buffalos, the buffalos. Clear the way in a sacred manner! I come. The earth is mine. The earth is weeping, weeping. O n June 26, 1975, in the late morning, two FBI agents drove onto Indian land near Oglala, South Dakota, a small village on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Here a shoot-out occurred in which both agents and an Indian man were killed. Although large numbers of FBI agents, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) police, state troopers, sheriff''s deputies, and vigilantes surrounded the property within an hour of the first shots, the numerous Indians involved in the shoot-out escaped into the hills. The death of the agents inspired the biggest manhunt in FBI history. Of the four men eventually indicted for the killings, one was later released because the evidence was "weak," and two others were acquitted in July 1976 when a jury concluded that although they had fired at the agents, they had done so in self-defense. The fourth man, Leonard Peltier, indicted on the same charges as his companions but not tried until the following year, after extradition from Canada, was convicted on two counts of murder in the first degree, and was sentenced to consecutive life terms in prison, although even his prosecutors would dismiss as worthless the testimony of the only person ever to claim to have witnessed his participation in the killings. This testimony was also repudiated by the witness, who claimed to have signed her damning affidavits under duress, as part of what one court of appeals judge would refer to as a "clear abuse of the investigative process by the FBI." Whatever the nature and degree of his participation at Oglala, the ruthless persecution of Leonard Peltier had less to do with his own actions than with underlying issues of history, racism, and economics, in particular Indian sovereignty claims and growing opposition to massive energy development on treaty lands and the dwindling reservations. In the northern Plains, the opposition was based on a treaty, signed in 1868 between the United States and the Lakota nation at Fort Laramie, in Dakota Territory, which recognized Lakota sovereignty in their Dakota-Wyoming homelands and hunting grounds, including the sacred Paha Sapa, the Black Hills. With the discovery of gold in the Black Hills a few years later, this treaty was illegally repudiated by the U.S. government; not until the 1970s was the justice of the Lakota treaty claim recognized in court. In the year of the 1868 Treaty, a former Governor of New York State named Horatio Seymour was nominated as the Democratic candidate for President of the United States; and the history of the Lakota people might possibly have been less tragic had the Democrats won, since Governor Seymour held strong convictions that Ulysses S. Grant did not share about the offense to its own Constitution in the young nation''s shameful treatment of the native peoples. Every human being born upon our continent, or who comes here from any quarter of the world, whether savage or civilized, can go to our courts for protection--except those who belong to the tribes who once owned this country. . . . The worst criminals from Europe, Asia, or Africa can appeal to the law and courts for their rights of person and property--all save our native Indians, who, above all, should be protected from wrong. Seymour''s unpopular opinion appeared on the title page of Helen Hunt Jackson''s A Century of Dishonor (1881), one of the first books to deplore the wrongs inflicted on "the tribes who once owned this country": There is but one hope of righting this wrong. It lies in appeal to the heart and the conscience of the American people. What the people demand, Congress will do. It has been--to our shame be it spoken--at the demand of part of the people that all these wrongs have been committed, these treaties broken, these robberies done, by the Government. . . . The only thing that can stay this is a mighty outspoken sentiment and purpose of the great body of the people. Right sentiment and right purpose in a Senator here and there, and a Representative here and there, are little more than straws which make momentary eddies, but do not obstruct the tide. . . . What an opportunity for the Congress of 1880 to cover itself with a lustre of glory, as the first to cut short our nation''s record of cruelties and perjuries! the first to attempt to redeem the name of the United States from the stain of a century of dishonor!1* The Congress of 1880 did not redeem the name of the United States, and that "century of dishonor" was followed by another--less violent, perhaps, but more insidious and sly--as the "frontiersman" gave way to the railroadman and miner, the developer and the industrialist, with their attendant bureaucrats and politicians. And the Congress of the 1980s will do no better, to judge from the enrichment of the powerful and the betrayal of the poor to which it has reduced itself under President Reagan. The poorest of the poor--by far--are the Indian people. It is true that in our courts today the Indian has legal status as a citizen, but anyone familiar with Indian life, in cities or on reservations, can testify that justice for Indians is random and arbitrary where it exists at all. For all our talk about suppression of human rights in other countries, and despite a nostalgic sentimentality about the noble Red Man, the prejudice and persecution still continue. American hearts respond with emotion to Indian portraits by George Catlin and Edward Curtis, to such eloquent books as Black Elk Speaks and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee , to modern films and television dramas in which the nineteenth-century Indian is portrayed as the tragic victim of Manifest Destiny; we honor his sun dances and thunderbirds in the names of our automobiles and our motels. Our nostalgia comes easily, since those stirring peoples are safely in the past, and the abuse of their proud character, generosity, and fierce honesty--remarked upon by almost all the first Europeans to observe them--can be blamed upon our roughshod frontier forebears. "The tribes who once owned this country" were simply in the way of the white man''s progress, and so most of the eastern tribes were removed to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), and the western tribes mostly banished or confined to arid wastes that no decent white man would want. By a great historical irony, many of these lands were situated on the dry crust of the Grants Mineral Belt, which extends from the lands of the Dene people in Saskatchewan to those of their close relatives, the Dine, or "Navajo," in New Mexico and Arizona, and contains North America''s greatest energy resources. More than half of the continent''s uranium and much of its petroleum and coal lie beneath Indian land, and so the Indians are in the way again. After four hundred years of betrayals and excuses, Indians recognize the new fashion in racism, which is to pretend that the real Indians are all gone.2 We have no wish to be confronted by these "half-breeds" of today, gone slack after a century of enforced dependence, poverty, bad food, alcohol, and despair, because to the degree that these people can be ignored, the shame of our nation can be ignored as well. Leonard Peltier''s experience reflects more than most of us wish to know about the realities of Indian existence in America; our magazines turn away from articles about the Indians of today, and most studies of Indian history and culture avoid mention of the twentieth century. But the Indians are still among us--"We are your shadows," one man says--and the qualities they were known for in their days of glory still persist among many of these quiet people, of mixed ancestry as well as full-blood, who still abide in the echo of the Old Way. My travels with Indians began some years ago with the discovery that most traditional communities in North America know of a messenger who appears in evil times as a warning from the Creator that man''s disrespect for His sacred instructions has upset the harmony and balance of existence; some say that the messenger comes in sign of a great destroying fire that will purify the world of the disruption and pollution of earth, air, water, and all living things. He has strong spirit powers and sometimes takes the form of a huge hairy man; in recent years this primordial being has appeared near Indian communities from the northern Plains states to far northern Alberta and throughout the Pacific Northwest. In 1976, an Indian in spiritual training took me to Hopi, where traditional leaders told us more about this being. Over several years, we visited the elders in many remote canyons of the West, and eventually I traveled on my own, from the Everglades and the Blue Ridge Mountains north to Hudson Bay and from the St. Lawrence westward to Vancouver Island. Along the way I learned a little of the Indians'' identity with land and life (very different from our "environmental" understanding) and shared a little of their long sadness about the theft and ruin of ancestral lands--one reason, they felt, why That-One-You-Are-Speaking-About had reappeared. From these journeys came a series of essays attacking the continuing transgressions against these lands by corporate interests and their willing allies in state and federal government.3 Like most people with more appreciation than understanding of the Indian vision, I clung to a romantic concept of "traditional Indians," aloof from activism and politics and somehow spiritually untouched by western progress. This concept had a certain validity in the

Details