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14 “The Original Gangster” The Life and Times of Red Power Activist Madonna Thunder Hawk ELIZABETH CASTLE There are those of us who are content to assimilate or whatever, but there are those of us who want to maintain the culture our ancestors died for. . . . We have the right to be who we are. —Madonna Thunder Hawk, 2008 One surprisingly sunny day during the 1973 American Indian Movement (AIM) occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, Madonna Thunder Hawk, who served as a medic and leader in the community, experienced a powerful moment of clarity about her purpose. She plainly felt the spirit of her ancestors and imagined how they had stood their ground in a losing battle to protect their right to be who they were and to protect the land. Wounded Knee brought that insight and experience of freedom that would stay with her and guide her choices when the real work of moving Red Power beyond powerful rhetoric to meaningful community change occurred in the years to come. For most, the history of the Red Power movement ended with the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. The rather hidden history of the struggle for Indian selfdetermination and revitalization unfolded between 1974 and 1980. During that time, women sustained their families and communities through the endless legal trials following Wounded Knee, the growth of the international indigenous movement , the establishment of alternative schooling for Native children, the fight to protect reproductive health against illegal sterilization, and natural resource pollution by companies exploiting Indian land. The central organizations formed to contend with all of these issues were the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee, the We Will Remember Survival School, the International Indian Treaty Council, Women of All Red Nations, and the Black Hills Alliance. One woman connected all of these South Dakota–based groups: Madonna Thunder Hawk. 267 The history of the Red Power movement has been overly associated with the famous occupations of Alcatraz and Mount Rushmore and the military conflict of Wounded Knee. While these events were vital to showing the world that Native people were still alive and fighting for survival, much of the substantial work of Red Power did not begin until Wounded Knee ended.1 Many women on the front lines of Indian activism in the 1970s could have been featured in historical writing, but it is precisely because Thunder Hawk insists she was “just one of the people” that her story is so emblematic. She is both ordinary, one of countless grassroots activists and community residents, and extraordinary, in that no one else has quite walked her path.2 She may never have given a “chiefly” speech that, one day, will be reduced to a trendy bumper sticker, but her life’s work reflects the greatestkept secret to the world outside of Indian Country: women are the core and the strength of Native society. This is not a modern social phenomenon but one that extends back prior to European invasion. However since contact, unseeing missionary eyes have recorded a history that erased, or made invisible, the most critical elements of balance in gender relations and the central importance of women to tribal societies.3 Native and women’s history has been slow to reveal the historical experiences of the separate but equal gender roles occupied by Native women in most traditional societies. Former principal chief of the Cherokee nation and Red Power activist Wilma Mankiller, a late twentieth-century example of public leadership, assessed the impact and response of Native women to colonization: “From the time of European contact, there had been a concerted attempt to diminish the role of indigenous women. But even with the sustained efforts by the federal government and various religious groups to assimilate them, women continue to play a critical role in many indigenous communities in formal and informal leadership positions in every sector of tribal society and the larger culture around them.”4 As Mankiller points out, the treacherous federal policies administered largely through religious institutions systematically reduced Native’s women’s autonomy and collapsed it into the patriarchal tradition of Euro-America—at least that has been the view from the outside. Native women have consistently remained the backbone of indigenous cultures, and the Red Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s inspired the reclamation of Native identity, spirituality, and traditional gender practices. Therefore, nothing was unusual about Thunder Hawk’s involvement in every major occupation that is typically associated with Red Power activism: Alcatraz Island (1969...

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