Thunder before the Storm: The Autobiography of Clyde Bellecourt by Clyde Bellecourt and Jon Lurie (review)

FOR ROUGHLY A DECADE BEGINNING IN THE EARLY 1990S, autobiographies of people involved in the American Indian Movement appeared on a regular basis. From Russell Means's expansive Where White Men Fear to Tread (1992) and Mary Brave Bird's (née Crow Dog) Lakota Woman (1991) through Leonard Peltier's My Life Is a Sundance (2000) and Dennis Banks's Ojibwe Warrior (2004), readers have received a variety of perspectives on the movement. In reading the accounts, particularly those by Means and Banks, the reader gets a sense of both the personalities of the movement and the factionalism that divided it. Yet while Banks and Means remained the faces of the organization and published autobiographies, Clyde Bellecourt, one of the original cofounders, remained largely out of the national spotlight. Bellecourt, however, never quit doing "the damn hard work" and has now published an autobiography, The Thunder before the Storm, that expands and enlightens the previous accounts.

Bellecourt's work is significant not only because of his founding role in AIM but because, unlike the others, he largely remained focused on local issues, continuing AIM's original mission of helping the Indigenous people of Minneapolis through a variety of community programs and activist campaigns. Bellecourt's autobiography reflects this as it delves into details about the Little Earth housing project, legal campaigns, and community organizing to a greater degree than the other books, which rely heavily on the major made-for-television protests, such as the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Wounded Knee. Bellecourt also moves past Wounded Knee by the halfway mark in the book and spends the second half on the much less studied period that followed the occupation.

In respect to the infighting that plagued the organization following Wounded Knee, Bellecourt is frank in his opinions, noting that "this is my story" and that others have told theirs (269). He chronicles his skepticism of Ponca activist Carter Camp (who was involved in the shooting of Bellecourt following Wounded Knee) and his belief that Camp had some connections to the FBI. To what degree this is true is hard to determine, but it highlights the level of paranoia within the organization that informers had sowed in the years following Wounded Knee. Bellecourt also devotes a chapter to the many fallings-out with Russell Means. He pays particular attention to the role Means had in getting involved in the Sandinista-Contra conflict in Nicaragua and his associations with Ward Churchill, which culminated in multiple AIM groups forming by the 1990s.

As with any autobiography, the claims within should be taken with a certain level of skepticism. Bellecourt is providing his interpretation of the movement, and it conflicts at times with those laid out by others. Many may also find some of Bellecourt's claims to be excessive, including, for instance, the claims that AIM is responsible for founding Native studies programs across the United States. While historians of AIM and Native activism continue to lack in-depth oral histories of the movement at the local level, The Thunder before the Storm does a service by not only recording Bellecourt's history but also providing at least a narrowly focused look at some of the events that happened outside of the marquee events.

Bellecourt concludes his account by noting that many historians of the American Indian Movement tend to "think the American Indian Movement rolled over in 1973, that Wounded Knee was our final act, after which AIM ceased to exist." Instead, Bellecourt's autobiography reminds us of the "beautiful things" he and others have continued to do in the decades since and reminds us that AIM was more than "just a bunch of militants walking around with rifles" (315). In doing so, Bellecourt returns to the original goals of the movement and provides a helpful prodding to scholars to explore deeper than the narrow history we currently have today. [End Page 212...