Like a Hurricane: The American Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee.

In February 1972, several hundred people confronted authorities in Gordon, I Nebraska. The police in that town had neglected to prosecute the torture-murderers of a middle-aged Oglala Lakota named Raymond Yellow Thunder. The crowd demanded a trial, and got one.

The guilty parties became the first whites in Nebraska history sent to prison for killing an Indian. Movement members and their leaders, Native American activists Russell and Ted Means, became heroes on the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation. It was a crucial win for the American Indian Movement.

During the early 1970s, the American Indian Movement had "an incredible ride across this country, the likes of which no one has ever taken, before or since," Russell Means has noted. From its 1968 inception in Minneapolis as an indigenous version of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement rose swiftly to international prominence. Then, under an onslaught of federal repression, it declined almost as rapidly into a state of bickering ineffectuality. It has never recovered.

The story of the American Indian Movement is worth studying closely. A small group of insurgents had a substantial impact on American politics during a remarkably short period. The government responded with a range of methods -- everything from disinformation, to mass arrests, bogus trials, false imprisonments, and assassinations. This story says much about what the U.S. government will do to impose its order on rebellious Native Americans.

In a new book, Like a Hurricane: The American Indian Movement From Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, Paul Chaat Smith, a Comanche veteran of the American Indian Movement's crucial years, and Robert Allen Warrior, a younger Osage academic, take up the accomplishments of the American Indian Movement with gusto.

The authors show how several streams of activism -- including the founding of the National Indian Youth Council in the early 1960s, and the fishing-rights struggles in the Pacific Northwest a few years later -- led to the group's formation. They also explain in detail why the 1969-1970 occupation of Alcatraz Island gave the movement the boost it needed.

From there, they trace the events that made the American Indian Movement, however briefly, a force to reckon with. The series of sensational symbolic demonstrations that marked the American Indian Movement's beginnings -- holding an "anti-birthday" party for the atop Mount Rushmore on the Fourth of July, seizing the Mayflower replica, and painting Plymouth Rock red on Thanksgiving Day -- foreshadowed more serious actions to come.

The authors mention the important win in Gordon, Nebraska. However, they set the crucial date for the American Indian Movement about six months later, when members decided to organize what they called the Trail of Broken Treaties. The event brought more than 1,000 angry natives to Washington, D.C., for the purpose of publicly airing their grievances on the eve of the 1972 Presidential election.

The Trail marked the American Indian Movement's transition from an urban civil-rights-focused entity to an organization invested in securing the treaty rights of reservation-based people. And the seizure of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters once the Trail activists arrived in the capital set the pattern for the events that followed.

When an American Indian Movement contingent showed up in Custer, South Dakota, in January 1973, the activists were trying to replicate the movement's feat in Gordon a year earlier. They hoped to force prosecution of another man who'd killed an Indian. But they found a trap.

In the ensuing "riot," the local courthouse and chamber of commerce building were burned. Most of the American Indian Movement members, badly outnumbered, were arrested. And their leaders received charges for a variety of offenses carrying heavy prison time.

Meanwhile, on Pine Ridge, South Dakota, a storm was gathering. In 1973, the federally installed regime of tribal president Richard "Dickie" Wilson was attempting to transfer the barren but uranium-laden northwestern eighth of the reservation -- an area known as the Gunnery Range -- to the Interior Department. As his reward, Wilson anticipated U.S. support in establishing what amounted to his own feudal dynasty.

When traditional Oglalas resisted his attempt to seize their land, Wilson created a goon squad, paid with Bureau of Indian Affairs funds and largely composed of off-duty Bureau cops. The U.S. government dispatched a sixty-member SWAT unit of federal marshals from Washington to reinforce him. When the marshals came in, traditional Oglalas requested direct assistance from the American Indian Movement. This brought about the movement's occupation of Wounded Knee.

There is evidence organizers intended it to be more of a press conference than anything else, a place selected mainly for its symbolic value (it was, in 1890, the site of the last major massacre of Indians by U.S. troops). Quickly surrounded by Wilson's goons, imported Bureau of Indian Affairs police and marshals, FBI personnel, and military advisers equipped with everything from armored personnel carriers to F-4 Phantom jets, the American Indian Movement was presented with the alternatives of abject surrender or making a fight of it. The movement, with strong support from the traditional Oglalas, opted to stand its ground.

Thus began the seventy-one-day "Siege of Wounded Knee." Wilson's pronouncement, "AIM will die at Wounded Knee," had become official U.S. policy: Two of the defenders were killed, another dozen were seriously wounded, and at least thirteen supporters disappeared forever while carrying supplies cross-country at night through federal lines.

Still, only when Washington agreed to a meeting with the Lakota elders concerning U.S. obligations under the still-binding 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty did the American Indian Movement lay down its arms. This is the stuff of which legends are made, and the Smith-Warrior account makes for an exciting read.

Unfortunately, the authors neither end their book at this point nor really carry it forward. Instead, they wander off into a ten-page epilogue that is woefully inadequate in summarizing what has transpired in movement circles over the past quarter-century.

They say that "Oglala leader Pedro Bissonette was shot and killed in a shoot-out with BIA police on Pine Ridge in October 1973." This is a wildly inaccurate description. In fact, an unarmed Bissonette was shot several times in the chest at very close range after being stopped at a road block only a few miles from a hospital. His attackers left him to bleed to death for forty-five minutes until an ambulance arrived.

At least Bissonette's death gets a mention. The same cannot be said of the more than sixty other American Indian Movement supporters killed on Pine Ridge during the next thirty months. The victims include not only Bissonette's sister, Jeanette, shot in the back of the head while sitting at a stop sign, but the more celebrated example of Miqmaq activist Anna Mae Aquash, executed pointblank and dumped in a ravine. A federal coroner later listed the cause of her death as "exposure."

Witnesses saw twenty of these murders and each time identified the killers as Wilson's goons. Yet the FBI, which held primary jurisdiction, failed to bring a single case to trial. The reason, as many in the American Indian Movement suspected all along -- and as the goons' second-in-command has since confirmed -- was that the FBI provided the death squads with weapons, munitions, field intelligence, and what amounted to blanket immunity from prosecution in their drive to liquidate Native American opposition. Smith and Warrior say next to nothing about such matters.

In their telling, the federal offensive against the American Indian Movement is thoroughly sanitized, reduced to an "unprecedented legal assault." A "unique feature" of this assault was "the government's decision to bring to trial every possible case it could, without undue concern for convictions."

This prosecutorial onslaught -- which the authors describe as a "brilliant move" -- was neither unprecedented nor unique, much less a "major departure from government practice . . . against other radicals of the era." One need only look to the Revolutionary Action Movement and Black Panther Party during the late 1960s to understand that what happened to the American Indian Movement was really the application of a well-refined technique.

These authors are more interested in assigning responsibility for the American Indian Movement's destruction to "the movement's own internal contradictions and divisions" than to the effects of the federal government's counterinsurgency war against Native American activism. A strong argument could be developed along this line, but Smith and Warrior fail to make it. They add nothing, for instance, to our understanding of why one movement leader, Carter Camp, shot another, Clyde Bellecourt, in 1974. They label as "lame" the contention of American Indian Movement national chair John Trudell that there was federal involvement in the affair. But they do not explain why they arrive at that conclusion.

The authors also note that in 1993, Bellecourt and his brother, Vernon, were brought up on charges by an American Indian Movement internal tribunal. Although Smith and Warrior erroneously state that "both Bellecourts showed up and strenuously contested the charges" -- in fact, only Clyde made an appearance -- they neglect to say what the charges were (drug-dealing, long-term collaboration with the government, and general subversion of the movement). Nor do they mention the result: Both men were permanently banished from the American Indian Movement, and now run a federally and corporately subsidized nonprofit, National AIM, Inc., in Minneapolis.

The epilogue is a most unfortunate, even inexcusable, ending to an otherwise very promising book. Those wishing to come to grips with the phenomenon that was the American Indian Movement should read Like a Hurricane only in conjunction with several other more complete offerings -- all of them conspicuously omitted from the book's notes section. Among these are Bruce Johansen's and Roberto Maestas' Wasi'chu (Monthly Review, 1978), Johanna Brand's The Life and Death of Anna Mae Aquash (Lorimer, 1979), Peter Matthiessen's In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (Viking, second edition, 1991), and Rex Weyler's Blood of the Land (New Society, second edition, 1992).

Ward Churchill is the author, with Jim Vander Wall, of "Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement" (South End Press, 1968).