“They were there to make trouble.”
“You’ve got two FBI agents, there to serve a warrant, that they don’t have, on someone who’s not there. It’s pretty thin.”
“In 1972 during the Nixon election we went to DC and we ended up occupying the Bureau of Indian Affairs national headquarters. We kept it for like a week but it was highly embarrassing to the Nixon administration. We had gone too far. It seemed like by January of 1973 that the FBI had sent some people into Pine Ridge to start training the BIA and tribal police on how to deal with subversives or counter-subversive activity, whatever the thing is. They started bringing heavy weapons in. Now this is before the Wounded Knee Occupation…it’s like they had picked this as the grounds to have this stand off.”
“Maybe we broke even. Because it instilled a lot of attention. And to some degree I guess it instilled a lot of pride in the Indian People. And we needed something like that as a people, maybe. But what it did for us as a movement, it was the beginning of the diffusion of the focus because we then got tied up in the courts. And then the hunt became more intense. You know we may be one of the very few organizations in this country that basically every member of the organization was at one point, at one time or another charged with some criminal act.”
“After the occupation of Wounded Knee, between the period of May of 1973 and June of 75 when the firefight happened that was the reign of terror. That was the reign of terror. Ya know and its when, this is when most of the people died.”
“They said that all of the AIM people and the Traditionalists were the enemy for whatever reasons and I never understood how the death squad mentality these people that were called Goons but in reality it was death squads. I never understood how they could justify the Wilson, any of them, could justify what they were doing.”
“The killing had to stop. It had to stop. And you know when you’ve got old people, when your elders live in a climate of total fear and not an unjustified fear and their the targets ya know it’s an intolerable situation something must be done”
“The violent rap we got laid on us. It was all our people that died. You don’t see no long list of feds and death squad members and any of these other people you don’t see a long list of their dead you see a long list of our dead and you look at that list and everyone of them has got an Indian name. Almost exclusively.”
“All through the course of the years of all this, all I did is talk. And they cracked down hard just for that.” ~