This is Entry 13 of an ongoing serialized memoir.
Start at the beginning → Superpower
In my senior year of high school, I borrowed a book from my brother, Ben’s, shelf. Valedictorian of his high school class and in his second year as a natural science major at Yale, I could always trust to find something good on his shelf.
It was Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. In it, Matthiessen joins his friend, the biologist George Schaler, on a quest through the Tibetan Himalayas to track the rarely witnessed Snow Leopard. For the Matthiessen, reeling from the death of his wife by cancer and somewhat new to Zen meditation which was more his wife’s practice, has been given a koan by her Zen Roshi which he ponders all through the trek. As much inner exploration, as trek into the wilderness, The Snow Leopard whet my appetite for Matthiessen’s Zen exploration leading me to his deepening practice in 9 Headed River Dragon and then the foundational Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by DT Suzuki. I always felt that there was no mistake that Eastern Philosophy landed in the US at the same time that the first psychedelic revolution launched. Meditation… psychedelics - they are both sides doors into Universal Consciousness.
Brother Brian also had a mustard-colored, soft-covered edition of In the Spirit of Crazy Horse — Matthiessen’s 600-page exposition — on his shelf, which I plucked and read. Admittedly, it didn’t capture my interests as much as a trek into the Himalayas and even deeper into the heart of a man’s search for meaning. I remember I skimmed the drier sections of courtroom transcripts but caught the larger themes.
In the late ’60s and early ’70s the United States was fighting a war of ideas within its own borders. The Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Rights Movement, the Vietnam War protests, and the American Indian Movement all pressed against the state. The FBI’s sharpened stick was its Counterintelligence Program, COINTELPRO, designed to infiltrate, discredit, and destroy these movements.
On Pine Ridge Reservation, this national struggle played out locally. A battle raged between Dick Wilson — tribal chairman aligned with federal authorities — and his GOON, Guardians of the Oglala Nation, squad, and the traditional Lakota elders and spiritual leaders defending identity as a sovereign nation. The period became known as the “Reign of Terror”: intimidation, beatings, even killings of those who resisted Wilson’s rule. As many as 60 AIM leaders and Lakota traditionalists were killed or disappeared during that time. AIM came in at the invitation of elders to stand with the people, to offer both protection and solidarity.
It was within this crucible — between assimilationist leadership, federal repression, and grassroots resistance — that the Wounded Knee shootout of 1975 erupted. Two FBI agents and one Native man were killed in the crossfire. Dozens were charged; most acquitted. Before Peltier was tried, two others were tried and exonerated for the same crime. Afterwards, Leonard Peltier was singled out, extradited on coerced testimony, his trial was moved to a less sympathetic part of North Dakota and he was convicted on evidence later shown to be falsified. His continued imprisonment is less about the deaths at Oglala than about the government’s determination to make an example of AIM and to punish Native resistance itself.
Amnesty, Tutu, Mandela — have all recognize him as a political prisoner. and still, nearly 40 years later, he is still in a cell. Coleman Federal Correctional Complex, Florida. One thousand eight hundred miles from my cell near Pine Ridge.
Tail snaps back when I ask him about it.
You think that’s ancient history, Wang? Well, I got news for you, Mr. Passing Through.. We’re still here. Been here long before all those fuckers showed and we’ll be here long after they pack up their broken treaties and leave. Why? Because we are Lakota. We’re born of this land - carved out of this soil and rock. You can steal the land, slap a new name on it, steal what’s underneath it but you can’t unmake what the land itself made. This place is us. Always has been. Always will be.
This has been a quiet process—writing, releasing, and not always knowing where it lands.
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Click there to go to the next installment —> Field Day