Viet Cong at Wounded Knee: The Trail of a Blackfeet Activist (review)

Woody Kipp's memoir is the story of at least two educations. One is suggested in the title: his education in the racial and political dynamics of America, which included experiences in the Vietnam War, the Trail of Broken Treaties, and Wounded Knee II. Another is perhaps more pervasive than the first: his long, slow, and violent education into the damaging influences of alcohol—in his life and in the lives of those around him. Throughout both, though, Kipp never loses his sense of humor, relating many funny stories (many of them at his own expense) and insisting in the end on looking for a path to health and happiness for himself and his people.

One could say that Kipp begins his memoir in the oral tradition, in that he recounts his ancestry, establishing his connectedness to the community and the land from which he speaks. In the first sentence he declares his right to speak as a Blackfeet, giving us his name in his people's language and an early experience that establishes his membership in that community: "I, Woody Kipp, Natoos Sina (Sun Chief), survived on bull elk meat for a few days when I was two months old" (1). He goes on to describe his adopted family and their experiences in a community in the midst of many changes: "I was adopted into a fighting family, a proud, complicated Blackfeet family that stood with one foot in the old ways and the other in the acculturated American ways" (7).

Kipp says much of his political awareness began in his basic training for the marines. This education was started by two black friends, who taught him the definition of "splib"—Segregated People Living in Brotherhood. His education continued through his encounters with white enlisted men and officers. They asked many innocent but uninformed questions about Kipp's life as a Blackfeet, and he, still naïve about racial dynamics in America and relatively uninformed about his own cultural heritage, was not sure how to answer. Kipp writes that their many questions could be boiled down to one: "Do you fuck, fight, and flagellate against the powers of the world without the benefit of the true way?" (28). Viet Cong at Wounded Knee is the story how his naiveté was removed, how he began to learn effective responses to injustice, and how he found his path to that "true way," albeit with many detours.

As his title suggests, Kipp identified with the Vietnamese people while he was overseas. In retrospect he sees himself in particular as the Viet Cong, the irregular military arm of the North Vietnamese in the South—in other words, he is not just different from the Americans; the Americans perceive him as an enemy. Kipp identified with the Vietnamese people, partly because of physical resemblances he saw between them and American Indians and partly because of cultural similarities. Years later, he understands part of the attraction to the Vietnamese people being based on "their understanding of nature and family, animist beliefs, and Buddhism" (41). In Vietnam he heard racist remarks toward the Vietnamese that echoed the remarks leveled at Indians, and he saw echoes of his ancestors' experiences in the differences between the Americans' advanced, technological weapons and the North Vietnamese's weapons: "I began to more clearly comprehend what my people had faced in the American West when the whites came with the Gatling guns" (47).

Kipp's education in race and politics continued through academics and activism. At the University of Montana he learned that there was much ignorance concerning America's first peoples: "I began to see that much had been written about me and my people, and a lot was utter bullshit" (84). With college came political activism, and Kipp joined AIM and the caravan for the Trail of Broken Treaties, participating in the takeover of the BIA headquarters in Washington, DC. By 1973 he was involved in...