Russell Means: Welcome To The Reservation [Archive] - Ron Paul Forums / Liberty Forest

donnay

11-01-2012, 06:59 PM

Russell Means: Renegade, Patriot, Freedom Fighter

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Confined to a barren prison camp in Washington, the displaced Paiute Indians were dying. The Interior Department had promised to send rations, but they never arrived. After being exposed to the elements during the winter of 1880, fifty-eight of them had died – including thirty children -- and many more were seriously ill.

James Wilbur, the pious fraud who served as Indian Agent at Fort Simcoe, wouldn’t exert himself to see that his prisoners were cared for, and wouldn’t permit them to migrate to more hospitable surroundings.

Sarah Winnemucca, daughter of the renowned Paiute chief of the same name, had gone to Washington to lobby Interior Secretary Carl Schurz for relief. In May she returned with a written promise that the department would arrange for the Paiutes to relocate to Lovelock, Nevada, where they could at least obtain food. When she arrived in Yakima, however, Sarah was informed that Wilbur had received no instructions from Washington.

Sarah called a public meeting in which she recited, in detail, the broken promises that had been made to her. In short order Sarah was summoned to a second meeting with Wilbur, who intended to slap her down for impudently assuming that a promise to an Indian meant something.

“Your people were content here until you came back and stirred them up,” Wilbur insisted, condescendingly rebuking Sarah of “putting the devil into their heads.”

That accusation came from a well-fed hypocrite who – in the classic “Indian Ring” tradition – was growing wealthy by embezzling money and supplies promised to the pitiful, dying people over whom he presided.

“Mr. Wilbur, you forget that you are a Christian when you can talk so to me,” Sarah chastised him, her composure barely concealing her contempt. “You are starving my people here, and you are selling the clothes which were sent to them. That is why you want to keep us here…. I say, Mr. Wilbur, everybody in Yakima City knows what you are doing, and hell is full of just such Christians as you are!”

“Stop talking or I will have you locked up!” bellowed Wilbur.

“I don’t care,” Sarah defiantly replied. “My people are saying I have sold them to you and get money from you to keep them here. I am abused by you and by my own people, too.” By this time, Sarah had become a nationally renowned lecturer and advocate of Indian rights, and she promised that she would use her formidable influence to expose Wilbur’s murderous corruption.

“From this day on,” records Dorothy Nafus Morrison in her biography, Chief Sarah, “Father Wilbur was Sarah’s unrelenting enemy.” Wilbur had previously extolled Sarah’s “noble work” and her impeccable character. Now his official reports bristled with insistent and conveniently vague references to Sarah’s “disreputable intrigues” and intimations of personal depravity. Sarah “is utterly unreliable and no dependence whatever can be placed on her character or her word,” insisted Wilbur in a communique to the Interior Department.

If Sarah had been alive and active during the 1970s, she would most likely have been described as a “militant,” an “agitator,” and quite possibly as a Communist.

The FBI would have collected a detailed dossier on her mistakes and shortcomings – whether real, exaggerated, or invented – which would have been artfully leaked to the press. She would have been surrounded by paid informants and provocateurs who would keep her under surveillance, sabotage her campaigns, and create whatever trouble they could.

After being arrested on spurious charges, Sarah might have found herself in federal court listening to one of the FBI’s paid perjurers describe her role in a grandiose Communist plot against the very existence of the United States.

In brief, she would have received the same treatment given to the American Indian Movement (AIM) and its most prominent spokesman, Russell Means, who died of cancer on October 22. He is most widely remembered for his prominent role in the 71-day standoff at Wounded Knee, in which a handful of poorly armed AIM activists withstood a siege carried out by a huge federal military force that intended to slaughter them.

The AIM was, to borrow Will Durant’s phrase, a medley of discordant fragments. The same could be said of Means, who made no effort to disguise his personal shortcomings or to sanitize the troublesome aspects of his career as an activist.

If the Soviet Union had somehow managed to invade and occupy the United States, the regime it would have imposed on the country would have differed little, if at all, from the Indian reservation system – which, let us not forget, was constructed by Carl Schurz, a German-born socialist who had been one of Lincoln’s “Red Generals” during the war against the South.

It’s not necessary to endorse everything AIM did -- or all of the alliances it made -- in order to understand that the organization’s grievances were entirely legitimate. Given that AIM’s objective was to liberate people living in America’s equivalent of the gulag archipelago, it’s reasonable to characterize it as a militant anti-Communist group. The role played by the FBI, on the other hand, was quite similar to that played by the Soviet Cheka in dealing with independence movements within the nations subsumed into the USSR.

“They are a conquered nation, and when you are conquered, the people you are conquered by dictate your future,” declared Norman Zigrossi, a high-ranking FBI special agent in Rapid City, South Dakota, in 1977. “This is a basic philosophy of mine. If I’m part of a conquered nation, I’ve got to yield to authority.” The proper role of the FBI in “Indian Country,” according to Zigrossi, was that of a “colonial police force.”

Protecting the lives and property of Indians was not a priority for the American Cheka. In 1972, when an Oglala man named Raymond Yellow Thunder was tortured and murdered by two white men in Gordon, Nebraska, the local police refused to pursue the case, and the FBI couldn’t be bothered to intervene. So Means and his AIM colleague Dennis Banks organized a protest of more than 1,000 Indians from nearby reservations, who converged on Gordon and “occupied” it until local authorities arrested and prosecuted Yellow Thunder’s killers.

It was this act of “Communist agitation” – that is, a demand that the laws be faithfully and equitably enforced – that prompted the FBI to make AIM a target of its COINTELPRO initiative. Secret police informants and provocateurs began to infiltrate the movement. One of them, a sociopathic former cop (and likely wife-murderer) named Douglas Durham – would organize some of the most notorious “militant” activities carried out in the name of AIM.

“Durham’s history as a blackmailer, thief, and cheat was readily available to the FBI from the Des Moines police, which in the 1960s had dismissed him from the force; a police psychiatrist had diagnosed him as a `paranoid schizoid’ personality with `violent tendencies’ and termed him `unfit for employment involving the public trust’ after the unexplained death of his first wife in 1964,” recalls Peter Matthessien in his book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.

Durham, the psychiatrist concluded, was “unable to tell right from wrong.” While I withhold judgment regarding the merits of psychiatry as a discipline, it’s reasonable to conclude that this particular diagnosis was quickly and amply validated.

In 1972, Durham was identified by a Des Moines grand jury as the “major culprit” in a police corruption scandal involving a sportswear theft ring: Durham, working undercover at a factory, would steal clothes that were fenced by his comrades on the police force. In the same year he was convicted of extortion on behalf of the Mob, but the conviction was thrown out by an appeals court, which ruled that the case had been tried in the wrong venue. In any case, by this time Durham was safely in the employ of the FBI.

During his September 1976 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Internal Security, Durham described the AIM as a domestic salient of a Communist-backed insurgency devoted to subverting American independence (and, for all we know, sapping and impurifying all of our precious bodily fluids). Durham wasn’t the only FBI sock puppet who was used to depict AIM as a cadre of “Red Indians.”

Continued... (http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2012/10/russell-means-renegade-patriot-freedom.html)