The Eagles I Fed Who Did Not Love Me

The two F4-B Phantom jets came in low, very low, at about two hundred feet, probably traveling at somewhere around five hundred miles per hour. Five hundred was just cruising speed for these birds. I had seen them go faster in Vietnam. I had seen them twist and turn and hurl fiery death toward the ground in the form of 250-, 500-, and 1,000-pound bombs. They were, as we say in the Blackfeet, stoonatopsi, dangerous. For the twenty months I had spent as a support combat engineer with the First Marine Air Wing on the outskirts of the Vietnamese city of DaNang, the sleek killing machines had been on my side. Now they were not on my side; now they were hunting me. In 1969, native militants took over the abandoned prison island of Alcatraz to call attention to the destitute conditions of the natives of America. After a year-and-a-half on the island, living in primitive conditions, the natives were forced to leave their watery fortress. A fire had been lighted, however; the protests were just beginning. On 27 February 1973, the American Indian Movement (AIM), in concert with a grassroots political activist group called the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization, took armed control of the village of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Alcatraz was the call to arms. There were other marches, protests, walks across the country to keep the native movement visible, but Wounded Knee was the crucible that formed many of today’s native leaders, whether or not they were at the siege. At Wounded Knee, those who chose to come told white America, “We might not be able to live like our ancestors, but, when push comes to shove, we can still die like our ancestors, die in the Indian way, defending our homeland and our people.