Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me Part 14

Diana cried but said she was determined to be in the movie. I took her to the airport and kissed her good-bye, then went home and burned her picture and everything else she had ever given me. After Diana arrived in England, she sent me several telegrams, but I didn't answer them. I was devastated but couldn't let her know it.

My psychiatrist had been away on a long vacation when she left, and when he returned I walked into his office and sat down prepared to spill my guts and tell him how miserable I was. But he said, "You know, I don't think I can help you anymore." I had been his patient for ten or twelve years, and was desperately in need of a.s.sistance, but he rejected me. I had trusted him, but he was just one more a.n.a.lyst who got you hooked, then felt no accountability or responsibility for you. Even most auto mechanics guarantee their work, but not a psychiatrist. I had kept this man in groceries and cars for years, but now he rejected me.

"You can't turn me away," I said. "I have no place else to go." I didn't have enough sense to realize that I would have been better off never having met him. He got out of his chair, circled the room like an absentminded dog, and put his foot in his wastebasket while gazing out the window. The contents spilled all over the floor, but he was so preoccupied that he didn't place the basket right side up. It made me realize that he was as nervous and as frightened as I was, so I left in emotional pain.

Diana kept writing from England saying she missed me and wanted to see me, but I didn't reply. Then I went to London, where I was invited to a party and saw her there. I didn't look at her, but could see peripherally that she was watching me. I tried to get away before we b.u.mped into each other, but when I got on the elevator, there she was. "We've got to stop meeting like this, don't we?" I said and tried to make jokes. In the lobby I went left and she went right, but feeling guilty, I turned, called to her and said, "Diana, I'm sorry things didn't go well this evening." She said something cordial and we each went our own way.

Several months later, when I was making Last Tango in Paris Last Tango in Paris, Diana came to the set with a camera. She was now a photographer, trying on a new career. I said I was glad to see her and gave her a kiss. We were filming a scene at the time, so I suggested that we have dinner that night. We did, and had some laughs and talked about old times. Then we walked to the apartment where I was staying; she came upstairs and took off her clothes, but I went to sleep. I didn't feel anything for her. A few months later, Diana was back in California and called to say that she had a pain in her back and wanted a ma.s.sage. She came over and took her clothes off, and I gave her a full ma.s.sage, then fell asleep again. I didn't even think about making love to her. Once she had left me, I had no feelings left for her.

That Beverly Hills psychiatrist had no real insight about people, though it cost me a substantial amount of money to learn this. Back then, I was overly impressed with sheepskins. It took me a long time to realize that just because someone went to medical school and papered his walls with diplomas, it didn't mean he was a good a.n.a.lyst. It requires a rare and special talent to understand people, and it is hard to find.

A couple of years later I met G. L. Harrington, a wonderful and insightful man who, sadly, is now dead, a victim of liver cancer. It is a disease that usually kills within months but he battled it for five years before it took him. He was crippled in body but not in mind. His hip and one leg had been smashed in a car accident, and because he refused to let doctors amputate the leg, it was two or three inches shorter than the other one. It gave him a lot of pain, but he never complained. He was a handsome, rugged man with a low husky rumble for a voice and a lot of male hormones. In some ways he reminded me of my father. He was the kind of man I thought I would never like. I had always bridled in the presence of masculine men like him and frequently got into fights with them. I felt I had to be aggressive with men like him, that I had to defeat them. Harrington was such a man. He had been a pilot during the war, and to judge by the medals and decorations on his wall, a brave one. But while he had a masculine aura, he was also one of the funniest, wittiest, most creative, sensitive and insightful people I'd ever met. After spending years on couches, I was familiar with a.n.a.lysis when I first went to see him. Whenever I started therapy with a new doctor, I always tried to give him a list of my neurotic dysfunctions, which was what most of them wanted to hear. After a grace period, I decided it was time to give my list to Harrington. My wheelbarrow full of a.n.a.lytic misinformation, I wheeled it up to his door and said, "I want to get into some of the things that happened to me in the past."

"Oh, we'll get to them when the time comes," Harrington said, but we never did; he talked and laughed me out of it. We would discuss anything because he had great curiosity: electricity, airplanes, genetics, evolution, politics, botany and every other subject under the sun. I saw him once a week and always looked forward to it because he made me laugh at myself. Once I told him I had always been fascinated by writers like Kant and Rousseau, and that I gravitated to women with similar tastes, those with whom I had something in common.

With a straight face, Harrington said, "Tell me about this j.a.panese girl you've been seeing..." It was his way of telling me that what I had just said was idiotic: you've got a girlfriend who can't speak English, you have nothing in common with her, and yet you chose her.

Once I told Harrington, "I think I've got a lot of rage because of my father."

"What do you mean 'rage'? Because you're mad at your father?"

"Yes."

"Well, you're not mad now, are you?"

"Well, not right this minute."

He said, "Okay," and that was it, but for some reason it helped disarm my anger.

Another day I walked into his studio, a small room with a desk, table and two chairs, and sat down, and as usual he gave me a cup of coffee. Every morning his wife put a fresh rose on his desk, and on this day I noticed that it was magnificent. Two petals had fallen off and were lying next to it on the desk. I was entranced by it and said, "That's the most beautiful rose I've ever seen." Then I leaned over to smell it and said, "But it doesn't smell."

"I'd be alarmed if it did," he said.

"Why?"

"Because it's a fake."

He had put the two petals beside the artificial rose to convey the illusion of reality and to ill.u.s.trate that everything in life was perception-that just because you a.s.sume something is true, it ain't necessarily so.

My sister Jocelyn also went to Harrington, and the two of us spent a lot of time on the phone comparing notes about our sessions with him. She loved him deeply because he was the father she never had. His wife was also very kind. She was a former concert pianist who sometimes played Rachmaninoff in an adjoining room during our sessions.

Once Dr. Harrington told me about a patient who came to see him; after ten or twelve minutes she stood up, said, "I've learned what I wanted to know, and I want to thank you very much," and then walked out the door. I always remembered this story, and once I asked him, "Why do we always have to talk for an hour? Sometimes I don't want to talk for more than twenty minutes." He agreed, and unless it was an important session that might go on for two hours, I'd get up and leave regardless of the time. One day after about three years I got up and said, "I don't know whether I have to come back here anymore. I'd like to come back and talk to you, but I don't think I need need to." to."

And that was the end of my therapy. I never went back, but I was a different person for having known him. He was a wonderful friend who helped others in my family, too, and through humor he taught me a lot about myself. He simply had a talent for it. Most of all, G. L. Harrington taught me how to forgive-myself and others.

53.

I SUSPECT SOME READERS who have reached this point in the book are asking themselves, "When's Brando going to talk about the Indians? Isn't he who have reached this point in the book are asking themselves, "When's Brando going to talk about the Indians? Isn't he obsessed obsessed with the plight of the American Indian?" I bridle at this, more in exasperation than in anger, because I'm confronted with it over and over again from people who, perhaps to please me, mention "the plight of the American Indian" as if it were something that had happened on another planet in another era-like a drought in equatorial Africa or the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe, as if the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people were some sort of a historical curiosity, even an act of G.o.d, that humankind had nothing to do with and bore no responsibility for. This grates on my soul. with the plight of the American Indian?" I bridle at this, more in exasperation than in anger, because I'm confronted with it over and over again from people who, perhaps to please me, mention "the plight of the American Indian" as if it were something that had happened on another planet in another era-like a drought in equatorial Africa or the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe, as if the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people were some sort of a historical curiosity, even an act of G.o.d, that humankind had nothing to do with and bore no responsibility for. This grates on my soul.

What astonishes me is how ignorant most Americans are about the Indians and how little sympathy and understanding there is for them. It puzzles me that most people don't take seriously the fact that this country was stolen from the Native Americans, and that millions of them were killed in the process. It has been swept from the national consciousness as if it never occurred-or if it did, it was a n.o.ble act in the name of G.o.d, civilization and progress. The number of Indians who died because of what we called Manifest Destiny has always been a subject of debate among scholars, but I believe that the majority of informed historians and anthropologists now agree that between seven million and eighteen million indigenous people were living in what is today the continental United States when Columbus arrived in the New World. By 1924 there were fewer than 240,000 left; their ancestors had been victimized by centuries of disease, starvation and systematic slaughter.

If people acknowledged a similar ignorance about the Holocaust, they would be regarded with amazement. But that's how it is for most of us when it comes to Native Americans. To my mind the killing of Indians was an even larger crime against humanity than the Holocaust: not only did it take more lives, but it was a crime committed over centuries that continues in some ways to this day.

Ever since I helped raise funds for Israel as a young man and learned about the Holocaust, I've been interested in how different societies treat one another; it is one of the enduring interests of my life. In the early sixties I read a book by John Collier, a former U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs who was responsible for giving the Indians a token measure of self-government on their reservations during the 1930s, and I was shocked at how badly we had treated them. Then I read The First Americans The First Americans by a Flathead Indian, anthropologist D'Arcy McNickle, and was moved. The book describes two hundred years of savage warfare by European settlers against the Indians, the ma.s.sacres of native peoples from New England to California and how U.S. military leaders like Lieutenant General Phil Sheridan called for the outright annihilation of the race. Indians who escaped being cut down by such predators were killed by disease imported by European settlers, which was followed by forced marches, deliberate starvation and attempts to destroy their culture. by a Flathead Indian, anthropologist D'Arcy McNickle, and was moved. The book describes two hundred years of savage warfare by European settlers against the Indians, the ma.s.sacres of native peoples from New England to California and how U.S. military leaders like Lieutenant General Phil Sheridan called for the outright annihilation of the race. Indians who escaped being cut down by such predators were killed by disease imported by European settlers, which was followed by forced marches, deliberate starvation and attempts to destroy their culture.

The book was an eye-opener, and I went to Santa Fe to visit D'Arcy McNickle. After we had talked for several hours, I asked him where I could meet some Indians, and he suggested that I get in touch with the National Indian Youth Council. I went to a meeting of the organization and made many friends, a lot of whom I still know today, and thereafter I became absorbed with the world of the Native American.

In the early 1960s, several members of the Indian Youth Council from the Pacific Northwest told me that they had decided to challenge government limits on salmon fis.h.i.+ng by Indians in western Was.h.i.+ngton and along the Columbia River. Century-old treaties guaranteed their tribes the right to fish at their accustomed places in perpetuity-"as long as the mountains stand, the gra.s.s grows and the sun s.h.i.+nes." But sport and commercial salmon fishermen had persuaded state and federal agencies to limit their harvest, blaming the Indians for a drop in their own catch. This was after decades in which white people had built a string of dams on the rivers, often making it impossible for salmon to sp.a.w.n, and after lumber companies had polluted streams and rivers with toxic chemicals and other garbage. The Indians wanted to challenge the restrictions because they clearly violated their legal rights to fish in the streams, and I offered to join them in doing so on the Puyallup Indian Reservation in Was.h.i.+ngton, with the expectation of being arrested and publicizing the "fish-in." I got in a boat with a Native American and a Catholic priest; someone gave us a big salmon we were supposed to have taken out of the river illegally and, sure enough, a game warden soon arrived and arrested us. He took us to a jail near Olympia, but I was released after an hour and half because, I was told, the governor didn't want a movie star's arrest to create more publicity for the Indians' campaign.

Even though I couldn't get arrested for long, my experiences with the Native Americans had given me a sense of brotherhood with them that has lasted to this day. I was introduced to Indian food, Indian humor, Indian religion and the Sun Dance, an intense spiritual experience that the federal government had banned as part of its campaign to break the spirit and cohesiveness of Native Americans until they demanded and won the right to perform it again in the 1960s. One reason I liked being with the Indians was that they didn't give anyone movie-star treatment. They didn't give a d.a.m.n about my movies. Everyone's the same; everyone shares and shares alike. Indians are usually depicted as grumpy people with monochrome moods, but I learned that they have a sardonic sense of humor and that they love to tease. They laugh at anything, especially themselves. If somebody stutters, everybody in the group stutters or pretends to go to sleep while the poor man tries to finish a sentence. But it's an honest humor, not cruel.

There is no doubt that alcohol is the bane of the American Indians; many of them have drinking problems, and a bottle was usually on the table whenever we sat down. I also learned that there's real time and Indian time: if a meeting is supposed to start at nine P.M. P.M. Indians start dribbling in about ten Indians start dribbling in about ten P.M. P.M.

After my first attempt at being arrested failed, we set out again, this time near a different reservation in Was.h.i.+ngton. We spent the night before in an unheated cabin with paper-thin walls, and I came down with a chest cold to end all chest colds. A damp wind blowing through cracks in the walls all night didn't help.

At dawn, when it was time to leave, I was coughing and hacking and had a high temperature. But the Indians looked at me expectantly, and I knew I had to go. I wrapped myself in a blanket and got in the boat while icy waves whipped up by the wind sprayed everyone, and as we left sh.o.r.e I thought, I'm not going to leave this boat alive. I suspected that I had pneumonia, that I was going to die and that my body would be dumped into the river. Hunched over, I told one of my Indian friends, Hank Adams, how awful I felt, and he said, "You know, my grandmother used to say, 'If you smile, you'll feel better.'"

I just looked at him and thought, What in this poor, p.i.s.sed-on world are you talking about? I'm dying, and you're asking me to smile?

We traveled up and down the river for an hour waiting to be arrested, but no game wardens showed up. I don't mind dying, I thought, but to die so senselessly on a freezing river without even being arrested seems absurd. Only later did we learn that we'd been on the wrong river. Patrol boats were looking for us somewhere else; I'd faced death-or so my melodrama let me convince myself-for nothing. One of the Indians' lawyers got me to an airport, and I flew home and entered the hospital with pneumonia, where I swore that someday I would repay Hank Adams.

The fish-ins were important because in many ways they laid the foundation for subsequent Native American campaigns for civil rights. They were important for me as well because they acquainted me with what Indians were up against and how little support they had. I got to know extraordinary people, such as Clyde Warrior, a Ponca Indian with whom I often traveled around the country to Indian Youth Council meetings; he was a man with a sense of dignity I'll never forget, a wonderful sense of humor and great sense of pride in being Indian, and he taught me as much as anyone how much my own view of life was similar to that of the American Indian. There was Vince Deloria, Jr., a brilliant political scientist, writer and Indian historian, who had devoted his life to their support; and Dennis Banks, Russell Means and other young Indians who would later start AIM, the American Indian Movement. I also got involved with such groups as the Congress for the American Indian, Survival of the American Indian and the National Congress for American Indians, and traveled around the country trying to explain to state officials, congressmen and Attorney General Robert Kennedy that American Indians were being unlawfully mistreated.

I also met with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Not many people have intimidated me, but he had such presence and I had such respect for him that when I walked into his office with my briefcase filled with a portfolio of complaints about the treatment of Indians I couldn't say anything.

Douglas sat behind his desk looking kindly and attentive, and said, "Yes?"

I couldn't put three words together. After five minutes of my stuttering and stammering, he said, "Well, I have to go on the bench now. It's been a pleasure to meet you."

I rose and left, hardly able even to say good-bye to the great man.

54.

AS THE NATIVE AMERICANS' civil rights movement spread and gathered momentum in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I supported it in every way I could-emotionally, spiritually and financially. I was outraged by the injustices they had endured; there is simply no other way I can put it. Our government signed almost four hundred treaties with the Indians and broke every one of them. These agreements almost always include this language: "As long as the river shall run, the sun shall s.h.i.+ne and the gra.s.s shall grow, this land will be forever yours, and it will never be taken away from you or sold without your express permission." Yet all of them were broken with the blessing and sanction of our courts. Even when the federal government gave lip service to honoring the treaties, settlers, ranchers and miners ignored them and grabbed the richest valleys, lushest forests and lands with the most minerals. They squatted where they wanted, then persuaded Congress to legitimize the status quo and abandon the treaties that they were unlawfully ignoring. What would happen if Cuba abrogated its treaty granting America the use of Guantanamo Bay, one that can be lawfully annulled only with the consent of both nations? It would be considered an act of war, and smart bombs would rain on Havana. But if Indians even complain about a broken treaty, they are scorned, vilified or put into jail. I don't think anything equals the hypocrisy the United States has exhibited toward the Native American. Our leaders have called for their annihilation in the name of democracy; in the name of Christianity; in the name of the advancement of civilization; in the name of all the principles we have fought wars to uphold. civil rights movement spread and gathered momentum in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I supported it in every way I could-emotionally, spiritually and financially. I was outraged by the injustices they had endured; there is simply no other way I can put it. Our government signed almost four hundred treaties with the Indians and broke every one of them. These agreements almost always include this language: "As long as the river shall run, the sun shall s.h.i.+ne and the gra.s.s shall grow, this land will be forever yours, and it will never be taken away from you or sold without your express permission." Yet all of them were broken with the blessing and sanction of our courts. Even when the federal government gave lip service to honoring the treaties, settlers, ranchers and miners ignored them and grabbed the richest valleys, lushest forests and lands with the most minerals. They squatted where they wanted, then persuaded Congress to legitimize the status quo and abandon the treaties that they were unlawfully ignoring. What would happen if Cuba abrogated its treaty granting America the use of Guantanamo Bay, one that can be lawfully annulled only with the consent of both nations? It would be considered an act of war, and smart bombs would rain on Havana. But if Indians even complain about a broken treaty, they are scorned, vilified or put into jail. I don't think anything equals the hypocrisy the United States has exhibited toward the Native American. Our leaders have called for their annihilation in the name of democracy; in the name of Christianity; in the name of the advancement of civilization; in the name of all the principles we have fought wars to uphold.

From Congress, the White House and human-rights groups, we constantly hear complaints about ill-treatment and genocide against this group or that. But no people has ever been treated worse than Native Americans. Our government intentionally starved the Plains Indians to death by slaughtering the buffalo because it was quicker and easier to kill buffalo than to kill Indians. It denied them food and forced them to sign treaties giving up their land and future. The Indians were rarely defeated militarily; they were starved into submission. In the Orient I once heard a phrase describing nineteenth-century Chinese peasants as "rice Christians." It was an allusion to the way in which Catholic missionaries converted them; if they attended Ma.s.s and religious instruction, they were given rice; if not, they starved. The same was done to subdue the Native Americans. Kit Carson applied a scorched-earth policy that burned the Navajo fruit trees and crops, then chased the Navajos until they were dead or starving. Those who went to reservations and showed any independence were denied food, blankets and medicine, or were given moldy flour and rancid meat that accelerated their annihilation. The government blamed the spoiled food on frontier traders, but while the Indians were being given tainted food and starved to death, the soldiers guarding them were well fed. Starvation was used as a national policy; it was an act of intentional genocide. It is no coincidence, I suspect, that when Hitler was plotting his Final Solution, he ordered a study of America's Indian-reservation system. He admired it and wanted to use it in Europe.

Starved, degraded and emotionally depleted, in the end the Indians had no choice but to submit. As Chief Seattle said when he surrendered his tribal lands to the governor of Was.h.i.+ngton Territory in 1855, "My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain. There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea covered its sh.e.l.l-paved floor, but that time long since pa.s.sed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory...."

Twenty years later, a great leader of the Nez Perce, Chief Joseph, made many accommodations to settlers while trying to preserve his people's culture. But as in so many cases, the government reneged on the treaties it signed with the Nez Perce: first it forced the tribe onto a wasteland that white men didn't want, and then, when gold and other minerals were found there, it ordered the Indians off it. The great warrior took his entire tribe-women, children, teepees and all-and, with another chief, Looking Gla.s.s, led it on a desperate flight of over 1,500 miles toward Canada, pursued by thousands of cavalrymen. En route, there were fourteen major engagements with the cavalry, and Chief Looking Gla.s.s proved himself a brilliant tactician. When they were finally stopped by the army, less than fifty miles from the Canadian border and freedom, Chief Joseph surrendered in a speech that summarized poignantly how a great and proud people had been devastated by the United States: I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Gla.s.s is dead. Toohoolhoolzote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men [Joseph's brother] is dead. It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are-perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.

After their lands were stolen from them, and the ragged survivors of what the writer Helen Jackson called A Century of Dishonor A Century of Dishonor were herded onto reservations, the government sent out missionaries from seven or eight religious denominations who tried to force the Indians to become Christians. It was a clear a.s.sault on their religious beliefs and a culture that had thrived for millennia, as well as a blatant denial of the const.i.tutional guarantee of freedom of religion. Missionaries divided up reservations as if they were a pie. They stole Indian children and sent them to religious academies or to the government school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where the children were beaten if they spoke their own languages. If they ran away, they were subject to severe punishment applied in military fas.h.i.+on. Yet these crimes are almost invisible in our national consciousness. If they give any thought to the Indians, most Americans project a montage of images from the movies; few conjure up anguish, suffering or murder when they think of Native Americans. Indians are simply a vague, colorful chapter in our country's past, deserving no more interest than might be devoted to the building of the Erie Ca.n.a.l or the transcontinental railroad. were herded onto reservations, the government sent out missionaries from seven or eight religious denominations who tried to force the Indians to become Christians. It was a clear a.s.sault on their religious beliefs and a culture that had thrived for millennia, as well as a blatant denial of the const.i.tutional guarantee of freedom of religion. Missionaries divided up reservations as if they were a pie. They stole Indian children and sent them to religious academies or to the government school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where the children were beaten if they spoke their own languages. If they ran away, they were subject to severe punishment applied in military fas.h.i.+on. Yet these crimes are almost invisible in our national consciousness. If they give any thought to the Indians, most Americans project a montage of images from the movies; few conjure up anguish, suffering or murder when they think of Native Americans. Indians are simply a vague, colorful chapter in our country's past, deserving no more interest than might be devoted to the building of the Erie Ca.n.a.l or the transcontinental railroad.

After I became interested in American Indians, I discovered that many people, unconsciously at least, don't even regard them as human beings on the same level as themselves. It has been that way since the beginning; preaching to the Puritans, Cotton Mather compared them to Satan and called it G.o.d's work-and G.o.d's will-to slaughter the heathen savages who stood in the way of Christianity and progress. In the Declaration of Independence proclaiming that all men are created equal, the indigenous peoples of America were called "merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare is an undistinguished Destruction of all Ages, s.e.xes and Conditions." As he aimed his howitzers on an encampment of unarmed Indians at Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864, an army colonel named John M. Chivington, who had once said he believed that the lives of Indian children should not be spared because "nits make lice!" told his officers: "I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under G.o.d's heaven to kill Indians." Hundreds of Indian women, children and old men were slaughtered in the Sand Creek Ma.s.sacre. One officer who was present said later, "Women and children were killed and scalped, children shot at their mothers' b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and all the bodies mutilated in the most horrible manner...the dead bodies of females [were] profaned in such a manner that the recital is sickening...." The troopers cut off the v.u.l.v.as of Indian women, stretched them over their saddle horns, then decorated their hatbands with them; some used the skin of braves' s.c.r.o.t.u.ms and the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of Indian women as tobacco pouches, then showed off these trophies, together with the noses and ears of some of the Indians they had ma.s.sacred, at the Denver Opera House.

The a.s.sault on American Indians continued into the twentieth century, but in different fas.h.i.+on. When I was going to school in the thirties, barely forty years after the army had butchered more than three hundred Oglala Sioux men, women and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, most textbooks dismissed the Indians in two or three paragraphs that depicted them as a race of faceless, ferocious, heathen savages. From dime novels to the movies, popular culture has reinforced our caricatures of American Indians, demonizing and dehumanizing them, and making folk heroes out of Indian killers like Daniel Boone, Andrew Jackson and Kit Carson. From its birth, Hollywood defamed Indians in pictures like The Squaw Man The Squaw Man. John Wayne probably did more damage than General Custer ever did to the Indians, projecting an idiotic image of a brave white man battling the G.o.dless savages of the frontier. Hollywood needed villains, and it made Indians the embodiment of evil.

But our treatment of Native Americans is only a single thread in the tapestry of human depravity. Side by side with man's extraordinary ability to think, there is an irrational aspect of his mind that makes him want to destroy on behalf of what he regards as his own breed. Darwin described an instinctive need of members of all species to protect and perpetuate their own group, but the human being is the only animal I know of that consciously inflicts pain on other members of its own own species. When I was a young man helping to raise money for Israel, I was amazed by what was then a great mystery to me: how it was possible for seemingly ordinary Germans to machine-gun innocent children or herd people into gas chambers by the thousands. It seemed unfathomable that human beings could do such things to one another. But over a lifetime it has become apparent that we are capable of anything on behalf of our own group; the animus is an immutable product of billions of years of evolution. species. When I was a young man helping to raise money for Israel, I was amazed by what was then a great mystery to me: how it was possible for seemingly ordinary Germans to machine-gun innocent children or herd people into gas chambers by the thousands. It seemed unfathomable that human beings could do such things to one another. But over a lifetime it has become apparent that we are capable of anything on behalf of our own group; the animus is an immutable product of billions of years of evolution.

People feel protected and secure in a tribe, as evidenced by the popularity of gangs in cities all over the world. Their members are responding to an atavistic impulse that has nothing to do with current social conditions; it is a part of every person and culture. The Holocaust wasn't unique: what made it different was its scale, which to a large degree was simply a product of technology and organization. From time immemorial people have responded to similar impulses to exterminate other groups; the n.a.z.is were more efficient at it. Nothing has eradicated our fundamental instinct to kill one another, usually under the guise of what is inevitably called a just and n.o.ble cause, religious or secular.

There is a line in John Patrick's play The Teahouse of the August Moon The Teahouse of the August Moon in which the American officer a.s.signed to bring democracy to Okinawa says, in effect, "We're going to create a democracy here even if we have to kill everyone to do so." in which the American officer a.s.signed to bring democracy to Okinawa says, in effect, "We're going to create a democracy here even if we have to kill everyone to do so." Julius Caesar Julius Caesar was a cynical play because it reflected how easily people can be manipulated for a supposedly honorable purpose. Brutus announces why he killed Caesar: was a cynical play because it reflected how easily people can be manipulated for a supposedly honorable purpose. Brutus announces why he killed Caesar: If there be any in this a.s.sembly, any dear friend of Caesar's, to him I say, that Brutus' love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: Not that I lov'd Caesar less, but that I lov'd Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all freemen? As Caesar lov'd me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him, but, as he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears for his love, joy for his fortune; honour for his valour; and death for his ambition....

Except for Mark Antony, his friends cheered Brutus.

Using slightly different but equally effective forms of manipulation, Goebbels's propaganda films bombarded Germans with photographs of Jews, then cut to a crowded warren of rats, the juxtaposition implying: these are Jews these are Jews. We are all victimized by the incessant manipulation of our minds and emotions in church, at political rallies or while watching television commercials. The repet.i.tion of anything eventually affects us and becomes a part of us. The n.a.z.is knew this, and employed it to convince Germans that it was perfectly proper to annihilate Jews.

Barely a century ago, American Indians were hunted for sport with Winchester rifles. Their hunters had been conditioned to regard them as less than human, like deer or quail. History is replete with similar crimes: under the cross of Christianity, the Crusaders swept across the Middle East hacking people to death with swords that fittingly replicated the cross; white settlers slaughtered countless thousands of aborigines in Australia; the Turks slaughtered more than a million Armenians between 1915 and 1918; Stalin exterminated millions of peasants and intellectuals; the Khmer Rouge eradicated millions of Cambodians; during the so-called Cultural Revolution, millions of Chinese heeded appeals by their leaders to kill; and today the Serbs are practicing genocide on the Bosnians. The formula is simple and always the same: make the other group the embodiment of evil, dehumanize it, create an ideology that provides a n.o.ble rationale for purging the world of this evil, and seemingly civilized people become enthusiastic killers. Once another group is transformed into something less than human, it is astonis.h.i.+ngly easy to arouse-as Hannah Arendt eloquently pointed out in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Ba.n.a.lity of Evil Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Ba.n.a.lity of Evil-the "will to follow," and to convince ordinary people that they are free to commit terrible acts in the name of what has been mythologized as a moral and high-minded cause. It is a reflection of the fort.i.tude, tenacity and resiliency of the human belief system; a man is far more p.r.o.ne to kill you if you threaten his beliefs than if you rape his wife, because his belief system is the foundation of his sanity.

We are what we are taught. Get a child when he's seven, the Jesuits say, and you'll have him for life. Once these beliefs are planted solidly in our brains, we will do anything to protect them, no matter what they are. Virtually every religion preaches "Love thy neighbor as thyself," and that you should sacrifice yourself for the welfare of others. Yet many of the bloodiest wars on our planet have been fought over religion. I've always thought it was a form of child abuse to take an impressionable child and hammer into him convictions that, even if right, will torment him all his life. A child is too young to make rational judgments, but many religions do this because they want to gain control of the child's mind. It is all about power.

As observed previously, one of the unique characteristics of the human animal is suggestibility. Another is the urge to create and believe myths. The British author and philosopher C.E.M. Joad wrote that people have "an imperative need to believe," and that the "values of a belief are disproportionate, not to its truth, but to its definiteness. Incapable of either admitting the existence of contrary judgments or of suspending their own, they supply the place of knowledge by turning other men's conjectures into dogmas."

In one of the saddest chapters of American history in the twentieth century, the Vietnam War took the lives of 58,000 Americans, and I don't know why. Our country embraced a litany of myths about the threat of communism, the "domino theory" and the menace of a Sino-Soviet bloc that didn't exist. None of these threats ever existed. Intelligent people had at their fingertips enormous resources and information that were dead wrong. They weren't evil men, but until it was too late they could not see through the beliefs that imprisoned them. They were certain they were right, and millions of Americans unblinkingly accepted what they said. We could honestly believe that a people ten thousand miles from our sh.o.r.es were our dangerous enemies-so dangerous, in fact, that we had to lie that an American s.h.i.+p had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin by the North Vietnamese. It took ten or twelve years of a horrific war and tens of thousands of squandered lives to change this perception-though even now I sometimes hear people insist that we made a mistake by withdrawing from Vietnam when we did because we did so without "honor."

In short, we lose control of reality easily. We treated the American Indians in the same manner that Serbian people are treating the Muslims, that the Turks treated the Armenians and that Hitler treated the Jews. But we refuse to think of ourselves as a nation that committed genocide. Our paratroopers jump out of airplanes yelling "Geronimo," and the Pentagon names its helicopters "Navajo" and "Cherokee." In this perverse fas.h.i.+on, we glorify the American Indian, but the minute he makes justifiable demands, he is ignored by a nation that prides itself on being a champion of human rights, the right of self-determination, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The cavalrymen and settlers who slaughtered the Indians weren't inherently evil; they were responding to a culture that demonized them. But this does not excuse our country's refusal to settle a debt that is long overdue. With the exception of the United States, virtually every colonial power that stole land from its indigenous peoples has at least started to give some of it back to its rightful owners-often kicking and screaming because the United States has goaded them into doing so. However, if you ask anybody in our government or a western rancher to give up even a square inch of land to Native Americans, he will look at you in bemus.e.m.e.nt. I've met a lot of these ranchers, and when the topic of the American Indians' ancestral owners.h.i.+p of the land comes up, they'll state: "I own this land because my grandfather established this ranch; my father lived here all his life; I've lived here all my life; and I intend for my children to live here on their own land." If I point out that Indians were living on "their" land long before their grandfathers, they always find a way to rationalize it: "Well, maybe, but I I didn't take their land, so why blame me for it?" Or "You don't seriously expect me to get off my land, do you? Maybe it didn't take their land, so why blame me for it?" Or "You don't seriously expect me to get off my land, do you? Maybe it was was taken from the Indians, but we were the ones who settled it, who built it into something, and who planted the crops. We've taken from the Indians, but we were the ones who settled it, who built it into something, and who planted the crops. We've earned earned this land." this land."

The rationalizations are unending. One of the strangest government policies is that largely because of the political influence of Jewish interests, our country has invested billions of dollars and many American lives to help Israel reclaim land that they say their ancestors occupied three thousand years ago. But if anyone tries to apply the same principle to the Native Americans, whose ancestors were here at least fifteen thousand years before the Europeans arrived, the reaction is that it is too late to turn the clock back now. It does no good to be logical about it; people do not respond to logic.

The history of the American Indian Movement-its successes and mistakes and the sordid story of how the FBI hara.s.sed and tried to suppress it-is too broad a topic for me to cover in this book, so I will only describe what I saw from the periphery. AIM comprised Indians from many different tribes who were generally more militant than those in other Indian groups seeking redress during the sixties and seventies for centuries of wrongs committed against their people. Many of the other groups had tried logic and conciliation, but got nowhere.

Dennis Banks, a Chippewa Indian, and Russell Means, a large, handsome Sioux who bears a stunning resemblance to Gall, one of the greatest Sioux warriors, are remarkable men. Both left their reservations, abandoning their roots and culture, to try to make a living on the outside; both got into trouble off the reservation and had to take humiliating jobs because it was all they could get. Like other American Indians who left their reservations, they faced a racism that perhaps is the most vicious of all: they encountered not only discrimination in jobs and housing but indifference. In mainstream American culture, they were considered nonent.i.ties, and people looked through them as if they didn't exist. Dennis and Russell met in Minneapolis and discovered that they shared a mutual problem; though they had left their reservations, they were unable to turn their backs on their culture. They did an about-face and decided to reenter it, and with others they started AIM, which soon had chapters all over the country, to press the government to live up to its treaties and promises. The FBI, other federal agencies, ranchers and white vigilantes, who in some cases allied themselves with corrupt tribal officials chosen in rigged elections, launched a war on AIM that was a blend of modern McCarthyism and the kind of armed campaign that had nearly exterminated the American Indian a century before. With SWAT teams, helicopter guns.h.i.+ps, armored personnel carriers and an often-biased white judicial apparatus, the government poured all its resources into suppressing AIM. It spent millions to investigate the deaths of whites who were killed during the conflict, but when Native Americans were murdered, the U.S. Justice Department, Bureau of Indian Affairs and local authorities usually ignored it, once again treating the Indians as if they were less than human.

In early 1973, when about two hundred AIM members took over the village of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, all they wanted the government to do was to allow free elections of tribal leaders, to investigate abuses within the Bureau of Indian Affairs and to review all Indian treaties. They occupied the village for seventy-one days before getting a conditional promise that their demands would be met-a promise that was only partly kept. If they had been any other group who held out that long-the Symbionese Liberation Army, black militants or an offbeat religious cult, for example-I believe they would have been attacked and killed. But Hollywood's fascination with American Indians has had one beneficial effect: thanks to films, they are internationally famous, and I'm sure the government held its fire because it was aware that the world would find one more ma.s.sacre of Indians abhorrent.

Russell Means asked me to come to Wounded Knee, and I got as far as Denver, where an AIM member was supposed to meet me, but he was suddenly diverted to deal with an emergency elsewhere. So it was too late for me to get inside the reservation, which had already been surrounded by federal agents and other people with guns. I pledged all my resources to defend the Indians indicted at Wounded Knee and did what I could to publicize the unscrupulous ways in which the FBI and others in the Justice Department were persecuting Indians in a travesty of the legal principles our country supposedly held dear. The pattern was always the same: arrest the Native American leaders on the thinnest evidence (or none at all), take them out of circulation, put them on trial and keep the trial running as long as possible. When the Indians were acquitted, they felt exalted by their victory, but in the interim they had accomplished nothing. It happened over and over. When charges against Russell Means and Dennis Banks were finally dismissed, Judge Fred Nichol said the government had "polluted" the legal system by infiltrating their defense team with informants and had knowingly presented false evidence to the court because the FBI was "determined to get the AIM movement and completely destroy it." In the meantime, AIM had been deprived of two of its princ.i.p.al leaders for months.

In early 1975, Dennis Banks asked me to come to Gresham, Wisconsin, where a group of Menominee Indians had taken over an unused Alexian Brothers novitiate, claiming that it was on ground taken illegally from their tribe and demanding its return. When I arrived in Gresham, the novitiate was surrounded by helmeted National Guardsmen along with a ragtag army of local rednecks, rifles poking out the windows of their pickup trucks. Later I learned that some of the latter were in the Ku Klux Klan. I didn't know how I was going to get into the compound, but Dennis arranged it with the knowledge of the National Guard and the federal marshals. I'll never know why they let me in, though state officials said they hoped that I and Father James Groppi, a Catholic Maryknoll priest who was also admitted, might be able to end the dispute without bloodshed.

I was smuggled across the military perimeter late at night. Thirty or forty Menominees, two or three of whom had gunshot wounds, were holed up in the compound; they looked exhausted, but were determined not to surrender. Several wore a motto, "Deed or Death," on their s.h.i.+rts or tattooed on their arms. I had no doubt that they were willing to die if their demands weren't met. It was the dead of winter and very cold. The ground was covered with two to three feet of snow, and inside there were no lights, heat or water. The governor had ordered the electricity shut off, the heating system had failed, the pipes were frozen, the toilets wouldn't work and the stench was terrible. Every so often, there were gunshots-some fired by the rednecks, others by Indians. There was no place to sleep, so I curled up on a windowsill and dozed until someone woke me and led me to a room where there was a lighted fireplace and where an Indian boy who had been shot in the leg was being treated by a doctor who was part Indian. Throughout the night National Guard helicopters circled above us, panning searchlights back and forth in search of stray Indians and, incidentally, give the drunken, trigger-happy rednecks easy targets. Young Indians who called themselves Dog Soldiers-the name of elite groups of warriors among the Plains Indians in the nineteenth century-draped sheets over themselves and ran in and out of the snow, occasionally firing at the rednecks. One night they put the wounded boy on a stretcher, covered him with a sheet and ran out, intending to take him someplace where he could get better medical treatment, but about forty minutes later they returned with the boy still on the stretcher. By standing still and camouflaging themselves with the sheets against the snow, they had avoided being spotted by the helicopters, but while they were stumbling through the snow, the Indian on point looked to his right and saw two squads of armed guardsmen. They turned and ran back with the stretcher; when they were safe inside, one said, "Now I know why they call us AIM; it means 'a.s.sholes In Movement.'" A few minutes later they took off again in another direction and eventually found medical help for the boy.

There were constant rumors that the governor had ordered the National Guard to retake the novitiate, which would certainly have meant bloodshed. But like all Indians I've ever met, those in the novitiate under attack joked no matter what the circ.u.mstances were, even when they were being fired on. We talked a great deal, and it was during such moments that I realized how much I related to their philosophy of life and how closely it paralleled my own. In terms of religion or philosophy, I suppose I am closer to what American Indians believe than to any conventional faith. Its essence is a sense of harmony and oneness, a belief that everything on earth-the environment, nature, people, trees, the land, the wind, animals-is interrelated, and that every manifestation of life has a purpose and place. Indians also believe that nothing is inherently bad; we are all in the same cycle of life, and there really is no death, only transformation. They follow what in many ways is a pure form of democracy: major decisions are made collectively by a consensus reached at councils, and chiefs are elected on merit; just because a young brave is the son of a chief, he doesn't succeed his father unless he has earned it.

The shooting continued sporadically day and night while the Dog Soldiers ran into the building to reload, then back into the snow to return the fire of the rednecks, whooping and yelling. It didn't seem real until a rifle bullet smashed into a chimney a few feet from my head on the afternoon of a sunny day. The temperature was up to about thirty-five degrees and I was tired of being penned inside, so I went up to the roof to enjoy a little sun. A second or two later, a brick exploded an arm's length from me. For an instant, I wondered what that was; then I heard the rifle shot, remembered that bullets travel faster than sound, and ran for cover. It was only another bullet, like millions before it, fired indiscriminately in the hope of killing an unimportant Indian.

The next day I was asked to represent the Indians in negotiations with the Alexian Brothers, the religious order that held t.i.tle to the novitiate, in an attempt to end the standoff. I heard through the grapevine-I don't remember how-that the apostolic delegate, the Catholic Church's representative in Was.h.i.+ngton, had sent a message to the pope urging him to apply pressure on the Alexian Brothers to reach a settlement because the Church couldn't allow blood to be spilled in a dispute over real estate. I didn't let on during the negotiations that I knew this, but I told the officers of the Alexian order, who came from their headquarters in Chicago, that the Church had much to account for because of its virtual enslavement of Indians in its early California missions, that the Menominee Indians had originally owned the property which had been taken from them, and that the Church therefore had received stolen property. Our first meeting ended without an agreement, but was followed by others. Finally the Alexian Brothers offered a compromise: they would give the tribe the deed to the property, but the police wouldn't accept their request for amnesty in the takeover, which meant that some Indians would have to go to jail.

With the light of the afternoon sun fading fast, I joined the Indians in the main room of the novitiate to consider the offer. As always, I was impressed by their inherent sense of democracy and respect for the individual. In Indian fas.h.i.+on, they went around the room so that everyone could express his opinion about accepting the offer or fighting on. It was soon apparent that there was a deep division. One group said that they had won the battle and should give up and take their medicine, but some of the younger men wanted to shoot it out with the National Guard. One said, "Let's die as warriors. Our children will be proud of us and remember we were warriors."

They went around the room until one of them said, "Brando?"

I answered with something like this: "Many of you either have a patch on your shoulder or a tattoo on your arms. It does not say, 'Deed and and Death,' it says, 'Deed Death,' it says, 'Deed or or Death.' You've gotten the deed; they made the accommodation. You won what you wanted and have all performed honorably. What you also have is an opportunity to continue fighting for your cause if you live. If you want to die, go outside and start shooting; the Guardsmen will take you at your word, and you'll be dead in a few minutes. But death is an easy way out. What you'll leave behind is a lot of trouble for your children. Who's going to earn money to pay for your family's needs? Besides, you haven't got enough ammunition to last very long. You can die, but you won't add anything to what's already been accomplished. This is a very small piece of land, and there's a lot of other work ahead. It will take a lifetime of dedication to right the wrongs you've suffered for hundreds of years, so I say, 'Take the deed and do the time.'" There were a few murmurs, but n.o.body responded, and then it was somebody else's turn to speak. Death.' You've gotten the deed; they made the accommodation. You won what you wanted and have all performed honorably. What you also have is an opportunity to continue fighting for your cause if you live. If you want to die, go outside and start shooting; the Guardsmen will take you at your word, and you'll be dead in a few minutes. But death is an easy way out. What you'll leave behind is a lot of trouble for your children. Who's going to earn money to pay for your family's needs? Besides, you haven't got enough ammunition to last very long. You can die, but you won't add anything to what's already been accomplished. This is a very small piece of land, and there's a lot of other work ahead. It will take a lifetime of dedication to right the wrongs you've suffered for hundreds of years, so I say, 'Take the deed and do the time.'" There were a few murmurs, but n.o.body responded, and then it was somebody else's turn to speak.

In the end they decided not to fight, and some of them told me afterward that my saying, "It says, 'Deed or or Death,' not 'Deed Death,' not 'Deed and and Death,'" had swayed them. They were arrested and we were all escorted into Gresham by National Guard troops. On the way I tried to talk to one of the guardsmen, but he looked at me as if I were a piece of rotten meat. I'd never seen such hatred in a man's face. I didn't have a ride to Milwaukee, where I wanted to catch a plane, so Father Groppi offered to take me. He also gave me a meal and a bed for the night, for which I was grateful because I hadn't slept or eaten much for several days. The next morning after breakfast, the priest said he was going to pray and asked if I wanted to join him. Sitting in a pew, I suddenly felt a great rush of emotion. I asked him if he would pray for me and give thanks that the standoff had ended without another ma.s.sacre. As he did, I started crying. Tears flooded my face. I was overcome with feeling. I have no idea why. Death,'" had swayed them. They were arrested and we were all escorted into Gresham by National Guard troops. On the way I tried to talk to one of the guardsmen, but he looked at me as if I were a piece of rotten meat. I'd never seen such hatred in a man's face. I didn't have a ride to Milwaukee, where I wanted to catch a plane, so Father Groppi offered to take me. He also gave me a meal and a bed for the night, for which I was grateful because I hadn't slept or eaten much for several days. The next morning after breakfast, the priest said he was going to pray and asked if I wanted to join him. Sitting in a pew, I suddenly felt a great rush of emotion. I asked him if he would pray for me and give thanks that the standoff had ended without another ma.s.sacre. As he did, I started crying. Tears flooded my face. I was overcome with feeling. I have no idea why.

It was all over except for one thing: in the end the Indians went to jail but never got the deed. Once again they had made a treaty with the white man, who had then violated it. The incident at Gresham was one more metaphor for the centuries-old relations.h.i.+p between the white man and the Indian.

Several months later two FBI agents were killed under circ.u.mstances that have always been in dispute, at a place called Jumping Bull on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The FBI called it an ambush; AIM said that the agents had provoked a clash. I don't know the truth. Two nights later seven or eight AIM members, some of whom I knew, showed up at my home in Los Angeles about one A.M A.M. and said they were going underground because they were afraid of being hunted down and killed by the FBI in revenge for the deaths of the agents. After everybody was fed and rested, I let them take a motor home I used when I was on location and gave them radios so that they could talk back and forth on the road. Several months later I saw a television report that a motor home and a station wagon had been stopped by the police in Oregon. The FBI had the vehicles under surveillance and had asked the local police not to intercept them, but apparently a state trooper didn't get the word and tried to stop the Indians, so there was a shoot-out. Five in the station wagon, including Dennis Banks's pregnant wife, Kamook, were arrested, but he and another Indian evaded arrest, he told me later, by jumping out of the moving motor home. As it continued driverless along the highway, the police chased it, ran it into a ditch and opened fire on it while Dennis and his cohort disappeared into the darkness.

Dennis spent a month on my island in Tahiti before returning to California and serving a short jail term for a minor offense unconnected to the deaths of the FBI agents. Later I flew with him to a reservation in Minnesota in a plane flown by a young Indian who said he'd been a marine pilot in Vietnam and wanted to return to his roots. At the reservation we were invited to join a ceremony in the sweat lodge with several men from the tribe. Everyone took off his clothes and sat in a circle, shoulder to shoulder, while a medicine man poured water on a pile of hot stones, making the lodge as hot as a sauna. Then he began singing while we went around the circle and everyone expressed with frankness what was in his heart: worries and disappointments, bad experiences, resentments, hatreds-extraordinary revelations spoken by total strangers. When it was my turn, I said that I was grateful to the American Indians because they had taught me a great deal, and that I was inspired by their stoicism in the face of endless disappointment and shame. Only much later did somebody tell me that the pilot who took us to the reservation and shared our experiences in the sweat lodge was an FBI spy.

There was one more postscript to Dennis's trip in my motor home. The pa.s.sengers in the station wagon included Anna Mae Aquash, a staunch member of AIM whom the FBI suspected of being involved in the deaths of its two agents. About a year after she was arrested and released, a badly decomposed body was found in a gully on a ranch in South Dakota. A Bureau of Indian Affairs pathologist did an autopsy on the corpse and said that it was an unidentified Indian woman who had died from exposure. The FBI cut off her hands, put them in a plastic bag and sent them to Was.h.i.+ngton for fingerprint identification-a barbaric act because they must have known that Indians believe that unless a body is whole, it cannot begin the next stage of its spiritual evolution. When the fingerprint check determined that the body was that of Anna Mae Aquash, her family became suspicious of the original pathology report and exhumed her for another autopsy. A second pathologist found a small-caliber bullet in her head, along with a lot of damage to her brain; she had been murdered, execution style.

When I heard about this, I called the original pathologist, told him who I was, and asked him how it was possible for him to have opened Anna Mae's skull, excised her brain and not noticed the bullet or the damaged brain tissue. "There seems to be a discrepancy between your findings and those of the other forensic expert," I said, "and I was wondering how you account for it. How could you not have seen a hole in the back of her skull?" The man replied that he had seen the second report and had no argument with it, but became indignant with me. "I don't have to answer these questions," he said. I replied, "Indeed you don't, but I'm going on television and people are going to ask me about what happened, so I called because I want to get the story correct." But the pathologist merely repeated exactly what he had said before.

I never got an answer to my questions. Anna Mae was a.s.sa.s.sinated, but to this day no one has ever been tried for her murder; to the federal government, she was just another dead Indian.

The American Indian Movement did much to inspire Native Americans and raise their cultural pride, though it never won many tangible victories in the struggle to redress centuries of wrongs. However, I don't think the story is over. Although Indians who ask for equity are still branded as rabble-rousers and dangerous militants, things are changing; maybe I'm overly optimistic, but history seems to be on the side of native peoples. In Canada the government has begun giving back tracts of land to its indigenous peoples; Australia is doing the same; even in the United States there have been small victories-court rulings that uphold some Indian fis.h.i.+ng rights-and in Hawaii the return of some resources to native people. American Indians say that they realize that the descendants of the European settlers who took their land aren't going to get back on the s.h.i.+ps that brought them here and return to Dublin, Minsk, Naples or wherever they came from; all they want is the return of some some of the stolen native lands to shelter themselves and their chil