Indian Pearl

Russell Means and the American Indian Movement (AIM) came of age at the same time in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Means recounts the story of his life and of the movement in his autobiography Where White Men Fear to Tread. Means is a tall imposing man filled with the charm and self-assurance of a con man or a charismatic leader. His words ring with arrogance and confidence, the necessary ingredients to start and nurture a populist movement. American Indian solidarity had been withering since the 19th century and was revived when along with Dennis Banks and Clyde Mellecourt, Russell Means help found AIM in 1968.

Where White Men Fear to Tread was meant to have the same impact as the Autobiography of Malcolm X. However, a length of over 500 lumbering pages dissipates its force. Malcolm X described his intellectual and moral journey from street con man, through religious conversion, to religious and political leader at a rapid pace that mirrors his impatience with injustice. It is introspective and honest. Means is too self-aggrandizing in seeming to describe every life story from who won particular bar room fights, to what he likes about computer programming, to why he broke up with particular girl friends. I am sure the writing was therapeutic, but his message would have carried more force if it were not lost in gratuitous details.

Where White Men Fear to Tread is full of contradictions that mirror the author's philosophic confusion. In one chapter he repeats with pride his father's stoic admonition that we are all personally responsible for what happens to us. A few pages later, rather than seeing his own contribution to the hearing loss in his left ear, Means rails about poor medical treatment following a drunken binge. In another instance, Means gravely warns against intertribal and interracial marriages because they will attenuate Indian culture, yet his personal life has exhibits no such inhibitions.

The seminal act of AIM was the 1973 takeover of Wounded Knee in protest of government Indian policy. Means' descriptions of the incompetence and malevolence of federal officers reads like a tale of sieges by black helicopters in right-ring militia literature. At Wounded Knee military fighter jets flew over. Means and other American Indians had grown up under the oversight and supervision of federal authorities and have no illusions about how wonderful life is under lethargic and slow-witted magnanimity of a federal bureaucracy.

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