Brando (45 page)

Except for Mark Antony, his friends cheered Brutus.

Using slightly different but equally effective forms of manipulation, Goebbels’s propaganda films bombarded Germans with photographs of Jews, then cut to a crowded warren of rats, the juxtaposition implying:
these are Jews
. We are all victimized by the incessant manipulation of our minds and emotions in church, at political rallies or while watching television commercials. The repetition of anything eventually affects us and becomes a part of us. The Nazis knew this, and employed it to convince Germans that it was perfectly proper to annihilate Jews.

Barely a century ago, American Indians were hunted for sport with Winchester rifles. Their hunters had been conditioned to regard them as less than human, like deer or quail. History is replete with similar crimes: under the cross of
Christianity, the Crusaders swept across the Middle East hacking people to death with swords that fittingly replicated the cross; white settlers slaughtered countless thousands of aborigines in Australia; the Turks slaughtered more than a million Armenians between 1915 and 1918; Stalin exterminated millions of peasants and intellectuals; the Khmer Rouge eradicated millions of Cambodians; during the so-called Cultural Revolution, millions of Chinese heeded appeals by their leaders to kill; and today the Serbs are practicing genocide on the Bosnians. The formula is simple and always the same: make the other group the embodiment of evil, dehumanize it, create an ideology that provides a noble rationale for purging the world of this evil, and seemingly civilized people become enthusiastic killers. Once another group is transformed into something less than human, it is astonishingly easy to arouse—as Hannah Arendt eloquently pointed out in
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
—the “will to follow,” and to convince ordinary people that they are free to commit terrible acts in the name of what has been mythologized as a moral and high-minded cause. It is a reflection of the fortitude, tenacity and resiliency of the human belief system; a man is far more prone to kill you if you threaten his beliefs than if you rape his wife, because his belief system is the foundation of his sanity.

We are what we are taught. Get a child when he’s seven, the Jesuits say, and you’ll have him for life. Once these beliefs are planted solidly in our brains, we will do anything to protect them, no matter what they are. Virtually every religion preaches “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” and that you should sacrifice yourself for the welfare of others. Yet many of the bloodiest wars on our planet have been fought over religion. I’ve always thought it was a form of child abuse to take an impressionable child and hammer into him convictions that, even if right, will torment him all his life. A child is too young to make rational judgments, but many religions do this because
they want to gain control of the child’s mind. It is all about power.

As observed previously, one of the unique characteristics of the human animal is suggestibility. Another is the urge to create and believe myths. The British author and philosopher C.E.M. Joad wrote that people have “an imperative need to believe,” and that the “values of a belief are disproportionate, not to its truth, but to its definiteness. Incapable of either admitting the existence of contrary judgments or of suspending their own, they supply the place of knowledge by turning other men’s conjectures into dogmas.”

In one of the saddest chapters of American history in the twentieth century, the Vietnam War took the lives of 58,000 Americans, and I don’t know why. Our country embraced a litany of myths about the threat of communism, the “domino theory” and the menace of a Sino-Soviet bloc that didn’t exist. None of these threats ever existed. Intelligent people had at their fingertips enormous resources and information that were dead wrong. They weren’t evil men, but until it was too late they could not see through the beliefs that imprisoned them. They were certain they were right, and millions of Americans unblinkingly accepted what they said. We could honestly believe that a people ten thousand miles from our shores were our dangerous enemies—so dangerous, in fact, that we had to lie that an American ship had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin by the North Vietnamese. It took ten or twelve years of a horrific war and tens of thousands of squandered lives to change this perception—though even now I sometimes hear people insist that we made a mistake by withdrawing from Vietnam when we did because we did so without “honor.”

In short, we lose control of reality easily. We treated the American Indians in the same manner that Serbian people are treating the Muslims, that the Turks treated the Armenians and that Hitler treated the Jews. But we refuse to think of ourselves
as a nation that committed genocide. Our paratroopers jump out of airplanes yelling “Geronimo,” and the Pentagon names its helicopters “Navajo” and “Cherokee.” In this perverse fashion, we glorify the American Indian, but the minute he makes justifiable demands, he is ignored by a nation that prides itself on being a champion of human rights, the right of self-determination, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The cavalrymen and settlers who slaughtered the Indians weren’t inherently evil; they were responding to a culture that demonized them. But this does not excuse our country’s refusal to settle a debt that is long overdue. With the exception of the United States, virtually every colonial power that stole land from its indigenous peoples has at least started to give some of it back to its rightful owners—often kicking and screaming because the United States has goaded them into doing so. However, if you ask anybody in our government or a western rancher to give up even a square inch of land to Native Americans, he will look at you in bemusement. I’ve met a lot of these ranchers, and when the topic of the American Indians’ ancestral ownership of the land comes up, they’ll state: “I own this land because my grandfather established this ranch; my father lived here all his life; I’ve lived here all my life; and I intend for my children to live here on their own land.” If I point out that Indians were living on “their” land long before their grandfathers, they always find a way to rationalize it: “Well, maybe, but
I
didn’t take their land, so why blame me for it?” Or “You don’t seriously expect me to get off my land, do you? Maybe it
was
taken from the Indians, but we were the ones who settled it, who built it into something, and who planted the crops. We’ve
earned
this land.”

The rationalizations are unending. One of the strangest government policies is that largely because of the political influence of Jewish interests, our country has invested billions of dollars and many American lives to help Israel reclaim land that they say their ancestors occupied three thousand years ago. But if
anyone tries to apply the same principle to the Native Americans, whose ancestors were here at least fifteen thousand years before the Europeans arrived, the reaction is that it is too late to turn the clock back now. It does no good to be logical about it; people do not respond to logic.

The history of the American Indian Movement—its successes and mistakes and the sordid story of how the FBI harassed and tried to suppress it—is too broad a topic for me to cover in this book, so I will only describe what I saw from the periphery. AIM comprised Indians from many different tribes who were generally more militant than those in other Indian groups seeking redress during the sixties and seventies for centuries of wrongs committed against their people. Many of the other groups had tried logic and conciliation, but got nowhere.

Dennis Banks, a Chippewa Indian, and Russell Means, a large, handsome Sioux who bears a stunning resemblance to Gall, one of the greatest Sioux warriors, are remarkable men. Both left their reservations, abandoning their roots and culture, to try to make a living on the outside; both got into trouble off the reservation and had to take humiliating jobs because it was all they could get. Like other American Indians who left their reservations, they faced a racism that perhaps is the most vicious of all: they encountered not only discrimination in jobs and housing but indifference. In mainstream American culture, they were considered nonentities, and people looked through them as if they didn’t exist. Dennis and Russell met in Minneapolis and discovered that they shared a mutual problem; though they had left their reservations, they were unable to turn their backs on their culture. They did an about-face and decided to reenter it, and with others they started AIM, which soon had chapters all over the country, to press the government to live up to its treaties and promises. The FBI, other federal agencies, ranchers and white vigilantes, who in some cases allied themselves with corrupt tribal officials chosen in rigged elections, launched a war on AIM that was a blend of modern McCarthyism and the kind of armed campaign that had nearly exterminated the American Indian a century before. With SWAT teams, helicopter gunships, armored personnel carriers and an often-biased white judicial apparatus, the government poured all its resources into suppressing AIM. It spent millions to investigate the deaths of whites who were killed during the conflict, but when Native Americans were murdered, the U.S. Justice Department, Bureau of Indian Affairs and local authorities usually ignored it, once again treating the Indians as if they were less than human.

In early 1973, when about two hundred AIM members took over the village of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, all they wanted the government to do was to allow free elections of tribal leaders, to investigate abuses within the Bureau of Indian Affairs and to review all Indian treaties. They occupied the village for seventy-one days before getting a conditional promise that their demands would be met—a promise that was only partly kept. If they had been any other group who held out that long—the Symbionese Liberation Army, black militants or an offbeat religious cult, for example—I believe they would have been attacked and killed. But Hollywood’s fascination with American Indians has had one beneficial effect: thanks to films, they are internationally famous, and I’m sure the government held its fire because it was aware that the world would find one more massacre of Indians abhorrent.

Russell Means asked me to come to Wounded Knee, and I got as far as Denver, where an AIM member was supposed to meet me, but he was suddenly diverted to deal with an emergency elsewhere. So it was too late for me to get inside the reservation, which had already been surrounded by federal agents and other people with guns. I pledged all my resources to defend the Indians indicted at Wounded Knee and did what I could to publicize
the unscrupulous ways in which the FBI and others in the Justice Department were persecuting Indians in a travesty of the legal principles our country supposedly held dear. The pattern was always the same: arrest the Native American leaders on the thinnest evidence (or none at all), take them out of circulation, put them on trial and keep the trial running as long as possible. When the Indians were acquitted, they felt exalted by their victory, but in the interim they had accomplished nothing. It happened over and over. When charges against Russell Means and Dennis Banks were finally dismissed, Judge Fred Nichol said the government had “polluted” the legal system by infiltrating their defense team with informants and had knowingly presented false evidence to the court because the FBI was “determined to get the AIM movement and completely destroy it.” In the meantime, AIM had been deprived of two of its principal leaders for months.

   In early 1975, Dennis Banks asked me to come to Gresham, Wisconsin, where a group of Menominee Indians had taken over an unused Alexian Brothers novitiate, claiming that it was on ground taken illegally from their tribe and demanding its return. When I arrived in Gresham, the novitiate was surrounded by helmeted National Guardsmen along with a ragtag army of local rednecks, rifles poking out the windows of their pickup trucks. Later I learned that some of the latter were in the Ku Klux Klan. I didn’t know how I was going to get into the compound, but Dennis arranged it with the knowledge of the National Guard and the federal marshals. I’ll never know why they let me in, though state officials said they hoped that I and Father James Groppi, a Catholic Maryknoll priest who was also admitted, might be able to end the dispute without bloodshed.

I was smuggled across the military perimeter late at night. Thirty or forty Menominees, two or three of whom had gunshot
wounds, were holed up in the compound; they looked exhausted, but were determined not to surrender. Several wore a motto, “Deed or Death,” on their shirts or tattooed on their arms. I had no doubt that they were willing to die if their demands weren’t met. It was the dead of winter and very cold. The ground was covered with two to three feet of snow, and inside there were no lights, heat or water. The governor had ordered the electricity shut off, the heating system had failed, the pipes were frozen, the toilets wouldn’t work and the stench was terrible. Every so often, there were gunshots—some fired by the rednecks, others by Indians. There was no place to sleep, so I curled up on a windowsill and dozed until someone woke me and led me to a room where there was a lighted fireplace and where an Indian boy who had been shot in the leg was being treated by a doctor who was part Indian. Throughout the night National Guard helicopters circled above us, panning searchlights back and forth in search of stray Indians and, incidentally, give the drunken, trigger-happy rednecks easy targets. Young Indians who called themselves Dog Soldiers—the name of elite groups of warriors among the Plains Indians in the nineteenth century—draped sheets over themselves and ran in and out of the snow, occasionally firing at the rednecks. One night they put the wounded boy on a stretcher, covered him with a sheet and ran out, intending to take him someplace where he could get better medical treatment, but about forty minutes later they returned with the boy still on the stretcher. By standing still and camouflaging themselves with the sheets against the snow, they had avoided being spotted by the helicopters, but while they were stumbling through the snow, the Indian on point looked to his right and saw two squads of armed guardsmen. They turned and ran back with the stretcher; when they were safe inside, one said, “Now I know why they call us AIM; it means ‘Assholes In Movement.’ ” A few minutes later they took off again in another direction and eventually found medical help for the boy.