Ways and Means

We kept walking, and, as Means descended the stairs into the Metro station, wearing the Dolce & Gabbanas again, a woman passing by did a double take.

Russell Means became an American icon in 1973. As a telegenic and quotable front man for AIM, he starred on TV as 250 Native Americans took over the sole church in tiny Wounded Knee, S.D., and seized control of the town, which sits amid the desolate brown hills of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. For 71 days, even as the National Guard's armored tanks lurked in the pine trees and federal helicopters whirred overhead, spraying sniper fire, Means and his fellow Indians held their ground, bearing but a few old shotguns and hunting rifles as they burned down Wounded Knee's grocery store and flew the American flag upside down.

The conflict was a reprise of an earlier, symbolically potent battle -- an 1890 massacre that saw the U.S. Cavalry kill more than 150 Lakota men, women, and children. Wounded Knee II was a feud over what it means to be an American Indian. For much of the preceding century, the nation's indigenous people had been forcibly assimilated. They'd been legally denied the right to practice their religious rituals -- the sun dance, for instance -- and shepherded into government-run boarding schools where white administrators cut the students' long hair and forbade them to speak their native languages.

For some Indians in the early 1970s, the indignities were manageable: They harbored hope that in time the U.S. system could accommodate them -- that tribal governments, which answer to the Department of the Interior, could incrementally improve life for Native Americans.

Other Indians saw no such hope. Taking cues from the Black Panthers, they decreed that it was time to get radical, to proudly and violently assert their racial identity. These radicals saw their assimilationist counterparts as sellouts -- or "half-breeds," as Means puts it -- and in 1972 they found a target for their ire: Dick Wilson, the newly elected Pine Ridge tribal chair. A crew-cut Lakota prone to frothing with hatred for communists, Wilson bore a special animus for Means. At one point, he threatened, "I, Dick Wilson, will personally cut his braids off."

In AIM's view, Wilson was a puppet of the U.S. government. In the early days of his administration, he gave the Feds a large chunk of the Pine Ridge reservation, Sheep Mountain, that was coveted for its uranium and molybdenum deposits. In turn, the attorney general's office sent 65 U.S. marshals to keep the peace on Pine Ridge, by surrounding the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) building there at gunpoint.

Wounded Knee II was a retort -- a fiery demonstration calling for Wilson's removal. The U.S. government was there to defend Wilson as legitimate. Means played a valiant David to the Fed's Goliath. At one point, he announced to the surrounding forces: "You're going to have to kill us. I'm going to die for my treaty rights." The press reveled -- and lingered long on Means's hairy past.

Raised near San Francisco, the oldest child of a physically abusive Lakota mother and a Lakota father who struggled with alcoholism, Means burglarized stores and stole wallets from bar patrons before discovering AIM in 1969. Then, he resolved, as he put it in his 1995 autobiography, Where White Men Fear to Tread, "never again would I seek personal approval from white society on white terms. Instead É I would get in the white man's face until he gave me and my people our just due. With that decision, my whole existence suddenly came into focus."

In 1972, in Washington, Means helped lead 300 AIM affiliates in a six-day occupation of the BIA building -- a gambit that saw the Indians smashing the bathrooms and offices, toppling file cabinets and "repossessing" Indian paintings, pottery and rugs. Soon after that, he protested the killing of a fellow Lakota by leading hundreds of Indians to a demonstration at the county courthouse in Custer, S.D. There, he gouged a police officer in the eye. A nearby chamber of commerce building burned to the ground.

After the Custer riot, he was out of jail the following day -- "just in time," as he gloats, "to see national television coverage."

The 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee failed to deliver clear-cut glory, however. Means fled the battle zone under the cover of night, and the last of his followers soon surrendered to authorities.

To some Native Americans, the whole campaign was little more than misguided theater. This February, Tim Giago, founder of the Lakota Times, a newspaper, wrote that "an entire village was pillaged and destroyed" without AIM ever spending "a single dollar" to repair the wreckage.