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The man who caused the American Indian Movement (AIM) to gain national and worldwide attention was an Indian cowboy from Pine Ridge. His name was Raymond Yellow Thunder and we should never forget his name or the abuses his murder revealed. Melvin and Leslie Hare, two Anglo brothers, local thugs, beat Raymond to death in an American Legion bar in Gordon, Nebraska in February 1972. Leslie, 28, and Melvin, 26, were hard drinkers and bar flies.

They had stripped Raymond of his pants and pushed him into the American Legion bar that evening for people to make fun of him. Then they took him outside and beat him to death. They put him in the trunk of their car and drove around Gordon with him. Then they put him into the cab of a pickup truck in a used car lot where he died. Two little boys found his body a week later. He had died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Raymond was 51 years old. Two other young men and a woman had harassed Raymond in the bar. Raymond was clearly drunk. He had been a ranch hand in the local area all his adult life.

Melvin and Leslie were initially charged with assault and battery and released without bail. After AIM protested, the charges were upgraded to second-degree manslaughter. One of the five was never charged with anything. Three of them were charged with manslaughter and the fourth was charged with false imprisonment. But it was two months after the murder, in May of 1972, before any charges were made.

The authorities were not going to charge anybody at first. But after a protest by a caravan of AIM people and people from Pine Ridge, the Hare brothers were charged. They were convicted and sentenced to a year in prison. The local Indian leaders called on AIM to come in to help protect them. The AIM protests over Raymond’s killing and the killing of Wesley Bad Heart Bull led directly to the Indian occupation of Wounded Knee in February 1973. AIM later established the Yellow Thunder Camp in Raymond’s honor.

Murders of Indians had been going on in South Dakota for a hundred years by that time. Before the Hares, allegedly, no white man had ever been arrested, tried, or convicted for killing an Indian. It was as hard to convict a white man of killing an Indian in South Dakota as it was to convict a KKK member for lynching a Black man in Alabama.

The signs in stores, bars, and restaurants that said “No Dogs or Indians Allowed” had started to come down by then. The first time I went to South Dakota in 1966 they were still up. But even though the signs had started to come down, the racist attitudes were still there.

The Nebraska Indian Commission reported in 1975 that there had been 426 arrests in Gordon in the previous year. About 75% of them, a total of 365, were for drinking or some related offense. Almost all the people arrested were Indians. In the county seat of Rushville there had been 101 arrests that year, all of them Indians.

The citizenry beat up Indians and harassed them, occasionally killing them. The police cooperated by using Nazi tactics. They arrested Indians on any pretext, and literally let white people get away with murder. Police almost certainly killed Indians as well.

Cathy Merrill of Panhandle Legal Services in Scotts Bluff in 1975 listed the following as some of the common practices of the Gordon police force:

· Use of excessive force

· Use of verbal threats and conduct

· Selective enforcement of the laws

· Creation and escalation of tension

· Use of authority outside their jurisdiction

· Assaulting prisoners

· General harassment

· Illegal conduct

· Engaging in racist, discriminatory, and prejudicial conduct against the Indian community of Gordon by use of word, attitude, and manner, and acting in violation of civil rights laws, the U. S. Constitution, and human dignity and decency.

Despite protests from the leading AIM activist in Gordon, Bob Yellow Bird, the City Council refused to do anything about the excessive use of force by the police. When he met with them, they referred him to the Gordon human relations council. “The Human Relations Council only exists on paper,” he told them. No one seemed to know who the members were.

A year later, Wesley Bad Heart Bull was also killed in the little town of Hot Springs on January 16, 1973. His crime: he tried to order a drink at the bar. He was 22 years old. Even though he had gone to school in the town, he was not welcome. Darold Schmidt, an Anglo man, was charged with involuntary manslaughter. He and his buddies pulled Wesley out of a bar and beat him to death. Schmidt also stabbed him. The sheriff was not looking into it until Wesley’s mother appealed to AIM. AIM brought a couple of hundred people in to demonstrate.

Schmidt pleaded guilty, was convicted and served one day in prison. Indian life was cheap in South Dakota. Sarah Bad Heart Bull, Wesley’s mother, served five months for protesting Schmidt’s sentence. Indian protest was dear in South Dakota. The cops struck her in the face with a baton when she came to the courthouse and fell on her. “Wild Bill” Janklow was the prosecutor.

They charged Sarah with assaulting a police officer. Russell Means and Dennis Banks of AIM were later charged with a felony in the same “riot.” They were both convicted of inciting a riot.

The murders of Indians were not restricted to South Dakota. Richard Morgan, a YMCA camp director in Sonoma County, California killed the charismatic leader of the Alcatraz occupation, Richard Oakes, on September 21, 1972. Richard was only 30 years old. He shot Richard, who was unarmed, in cold blood. Morgan was charged with involuntary manslaughter. An all-white jury found him not guilty.

Over the next few years, AIM charged that at least 68 Indians were killed in the Pine Ridge area alone. AIM says that right wing tribal chairman Dickie Wilson’s notorious GOON squad killed most of them. And 25 years after the fact, an “official” FBI report said the “facts” were much different. It said most of the Indian people killed had stoves that blew up, were killed in arguments and knife fights, or had unfortunate accidents. Whom do you believe?

A number of recent books have shed light on these events. Robert Warrior and Paul Chaat Smith had their book “Like a Hurricane” published in 1997. It follows the three years following Alcatraz with a recital of three Indian land occupations, protests, and similar actions. There were six dozen land occupations during the next few years, including Fort Lawton, the Pit River Tribe, the Chumash Tribe, D-Q University, the Pomo Tribe at Clear Lake, Chicago, Wounded Knee, the BIA in Washington, DC, and Plymouth Rock.

Stew Magnuson, a Nebraska journalist, published the book “The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder” in 2008. It won medals for its portrayal of the troubled relations between Indians and white people along the border between South Dakota and Nebraska.

Steve Hendricks had his book “The Unquiet Grave” published in 2006. It details the death of Anna Mae Aquash, one of the Wounded Knee occupiers of 1973. This book is very disturbing, and needs to be read by every student of modern Indian history.

Many Indian young people today have never heard of Alcatraz. Does that surprise you activists over 50? It disturbs me every time I run into one of them. We should be using the books on Alcatraz as texts in our schools. The book by Dr. Duane Champagne and the book by Dr. Troy Johnson are excellent. Our Indian young people need to know their history from 300 years ago and from 30 years ago.

Dr. Dean Chavers is Director of Catching the Dream, a Native scholarship organization. His latest books are “Modern American Indian Leaders” published by Mellen Press and “Racism in Indian Country” published by Peter Lang Publishers. Contact him at CTD4DeanChavers@aol.com.