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MN: Okay, let me go on to Wounded Knee. 1973, the American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee in South Dakota. How did you get involved with that?

Mo N: Well, I was with the Community Workers Collective, and East Wind Revolutionary organization. And we've been doing work and supporting an intertribal recovery program called Redwind, by Grandpa Seimu, led by Grandpa Seimu. And they were being attacked by the white folks, the police department. So we were supporting them trying to find a place to live and stuff, and then one of Grandpa's kids had gone back to Wounded Knee and came back. And then there were demonstrations going on at the federal building, so we were going down to support those demonstrations. But it was our understanding then that when the war in Vietnam had ended, and the war had come home, that's what the struggle at Wounded Knee represented. So there wasn't any word coming out of Wounded Knee. The FBI had just, letting out hardly any kind of information, and the media wasn't carrying it. So we decided to send a relief convoy up to... they were going to try to break the blockade, they were gonna march in, international call put out.

So we were part of that, so we went there, me and another lady comrade, we went up there as advance party, and then the L.A. contingent showed up, there were about twenty, thirty people. And then we rendezvoused over at Crow Dog's Paradise at Pine Ridge. And then we tried to walk into the Knee. That's where my memories are real fuzzy... 'cause we never got in. We never made it in. One of the thoughts that I had is, memories I have is racing down these dirt roads about ninety miles an hour with the FBI chasing us, and me thinking to myself, "Goddamn it, I'm gonna die out here in the middle of nowhere, being chased down by the FBI. But apparently we didn't get caught, we got away. And we decided we were gonna come back, that we had done what we had tried to do, and that we made enough connections so we were gonna be able to put the word out about what was going on up there. But then some really beautiful stories came out of there. Want to hear 'em? [Laughs]

MN: Did it affect you?

Mo N: Huh?

MN: How did these stories affect you?

Mo N: Well, it affected me by letting me know that I was on the right side.

[Interruption]

Mo N: One is at Wounded Knee, on the inside, there was one person killed in there, one major casualty, guy named, brother named Frank Clearwater. And we were on the outside, and someone asked us, we sent some people to go in and bring the body out from Wounded Knee. So a couple of our comrades went in and escorted the body out. So we were at the mortuary when the body came out, and we met the brother's wife, companion, partner, and a sister named Morning Star. She told us their story. She said that they were alcoholics in North Carolina, wasting their lives, when they heard about Wounded Knee. They discussed, talked it over and said, "Shit, let's get the hell out of here and let's go up there, see what's going on." So they hitchhiked from North Carolina all the way up to Rosebud. And this is in the '70s, there's still segregation and still, they're hunting down Indians and blacks and Mexicans and killing them, right? So they're dodging the vigilantes and all of this stuff, hitchhiking all the way across, they make it up into South Dakota and they get in. And then he gets killed. So we're all feeling pretty shitty about that, so we're telling Morning Star, "Oh, man, please accept our condolences," and blah, blah, blah, feeling sorry for her. She looks us in the eye and she says, "If you're feeling sorry for me or Frank," she says, "stop right there." She says, "You know, we struggled and, and almost got wasted coming in here, and we got in, and we were free. We were free. We were on Indian land. And he died as a warrior, defending his nation." Says, "There ain't shit to feel sorry for. Be proud for him. Rejoice in that, that he died a free man." Is that bad?

The other story is almost, just as great. One of our comrades stayed behind, and then she saw this young black woman, thirteen, fourteen years old, and she was already a legend there. They were resupplying the Knee by walking in and out, about twenty, thirty mile walk into the Knee and out again, and they're carrying stuff on their back and walking in. And they're stopping the FBI from going too crazy, ducking the police dogs, the whole works, the radar, everything they used in Vietnam they were trying to use over there, and they were just outwitting them, in and out. This young lady, maybe she weighed a hundred pounds, got a fifty-pound pack, and just trucking in, coming back out. So my comrade asked, "What's the young black woman doing up here?" She says, "My family ancestors are runaway slaves. When Wounded Knee went down, our family had a council, and said, 'We got to do something to support them, and here's the chance for us go give payback.'" But when they went around the room, all the relatives, everybody's working, and here she was, I guess, junior high school, beginning high school, she says, "I'll go. I'm not making any money for the family or doing, toward the welfare of the family." She says, "I'll go." So they talk it over and they said, "Okay." So they get all their nickels and dimes together and they get her a bus ticket and sent her up into Rapid City. From there she joins, she comes to the Com Center and then she starts participating in the walk down the Ho Chi Min Trail. [Laughs] When we got there, all these Asians pull in, and, "Oh, man." Word went out, right? Chairman Mao has sent reinforcements to help us. [Laughs] People flashing the red book and stuff like that, it was cool. [Laughs] But yeah, can you imagine that? Fourteen years old. She was tough. But yeah, those two stories are stories I really like to tell about Wounded Knee.

MN: They're very, very powerful.

Mo N: Yeah, yeah, inspiring.

MN: What were some of the lessons you learned at Wounded Knee?

Mo N: Well, main lesson was the teaching by Henry Crow Dog, Leonard Crow Dog's dad. But he told us that the ceremonies that the Lakota people do, sweat lodge, sun dance, vision quest, all those ceremonies are there to draw the line between the white man's technology and his civilization, what he says is supposed to be so great, and that the ceremonies are to make us strong so that we will know who we are and to know the difference between right and wrong. Like I said, I do the ceremonies, I do three of 'em anyhow. I do the sun dance, I do vision quests, and I do a sweat lodge. And all of those, I remember that when we participate in these ceremonies, that's what we always do. We mind ourselves, and we're caretakers of the Earth Mother, we're not people who come in and just take. And we're there to protect the Earth Mother and protect the people, the children of the Earth Mother. So that our job is just to be, is to make a better world. And capitalism and imperialism definitely are not the way to go.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.