Like a Hurricane: The American Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee.

• Author: Churchill, Ward

In February 1972, several hundred people confronted authorities in Gordon, I Nebraska. The police in that town had neglected to prosecute the torture-murderers of a middle-aged Oglala Lakota named Raymond Yellow Thunder. The crowd demanded a trial, and got one.

The guilty parties became the first whites in Nebraska history sent to prison for killing an Indian. Movement members and their leaders, Native American activists Russell and Ted Means, became heroes on the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation. It was a crucial win for the American Indian Movement.

During the early 1970s, the American Indian Movement had "an incredible ride across this country, the likes of which no one has ever taken, before or since," Russell Means has noted. From its 1968 inception in Minneapolis as an indigenous version of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement rose swiftly to international prominence. Then, under an onslaught of federal repression, it declined almost as rapidly into a state of bickering ineffectuality. It has never recovered.

The story of the American Indian Movement is worth studying closely. A small group of insurgents had a substantial impact on American politics during a remarkably short period. The government responded with a range of methods -- everything from disinformation, to mass arrests, bogus trials, false imprisonments, and assassinations. This story says much about what the U.S. government will do to impose its order on rebellious Native Americans.

In a new book, Like a Hurricane: The American Indian Movement From Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, Paul Chaat Smith, a Comanche veteran of the American Indian Movement's crucial years, and Robert Allen Warrior, a younger Osage academic, take up the accomplishments of the American Indian Movement with gusto.

The authors show how several streams of activism -- including the founding of the National Indian Youth Council in the early 1960s, and the fishing-rights struggles in the Pacific Northwest a few years later -- led to the group's formation. They also explain in detail why the 1969-1970 occupation of Alcatraz Island gave the movement the boost it needed.

From there, they trace the events that made the American Indian Movement, however briefly, a force to reckon with. The series of sensational symbolic demonstrations that marked the American Indian Movement's beginnings -- holding an "anti-birthday" party for the atop Mount Rushmore on the Fourth of July, seizing the Mayflower...