'The Government Forced Us to Action'
'The Government Forced Us to Action'
"We're having a fight to get our land back," said Kermit Fraser as he swung a club at a battered picture of the Old West.
Kermit is 9 years old. A Santee Indian from Provo, Utah.
"Guess what I'm doing?" he said as he kicked away some debris that covered the floor of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building. "I'm breaking out windows and knocking things."
Kermit was too late to do any real damage.
It had been done earlier, by older, angrier Indian protesters.
"The destruction you see here is the reflection of the pulse of our people," Vernon Bellecourt told a press conference earleir in the day.
The destruction of the contents appeared to be total. Structural damage was minimal, however, to the three-story building at 19th Street and Constitution Avenue NW that withstood what Bellecourt called "a crucial seven days."
Bellecourt and other spokesman for the American Indian Movement, whose supporters had laid seige to the BIA structure, threw open the building for inspection at 4:30 p.m. yesterday. What remained was a shell of the building.
"It (the damage) is the pulse of many years of suffering. It is a reflection of the anger and frustration of a people abused. It is the feeling of our people, who have come to recognize the crimes that the United States government, the Department of Interior, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the dominant ruling class have committed against the sovereign native people."
A press conference was held in the second-floor office of BIA Commissioner Louis R. Bruce. His desk was strewn with torn letters, crackers, a half-eaten carrot and peanut butter.
The paneled walls were scratched, leather chairs torn, pictures cut from their frames, telephones pulled loose and, as throughout the building, the floor was not visible for papers and other material that littered it.
"I know you guys are going to have a field day on this," Russell Means, an Indian spokesman, told members of "the racist press."
Means placed blame for the damage on the federal government. He said the destruction occurred after an order to vacate the building at 6 p.m. Monday was served on the occupants. (The order later was stayed until 9 p.m. yesterday.)
"The psychology of the federal government forced us to this action," Means said.
"We did not come here for a military operation," Means said, "but the federal government threatened us on four occasions, and only on the fourth time, when the ultimatum came at 6 p.m. Monday, did we prepare the building as you now see it."
Prior to that, "the leadership asked everyone not to rip off or destroy the property," Means said. He added, "We had gone through files and documents (before Monday), getting them on film, or making copies or making notes, but we cleaned up this building every night."
On Saturday, for example, the first-floor auditorium was swept, scrubbed and polished on two separate occasions preceding "general assembly" meetings, Means said.
Many windows were broken early, but early claims by BIA spokesman that damage amounted to $250,000 was called "a gross exaggeration" by Indians.
No one would have called that amount an exaggeration last night.
Wind gusting 35 to 40 miles an hour whipped through broken windows and flapping Venetian blinds, sending thousands of pieces of correspondence and other bureaucratic paperwork swirling throughout the building.
Graffiti scrawled on walls, doors and chalkboards was a history lesson in the rape of the West: Seneca, Arapaho, Tuscarawa Nation, St. Paul Sioux, Tewa Pueblo, Tama, Chocta, Ponca, Osage, Blackfeet.
Slogans too: Custer Died For Your Sins, Remember Wounded Knee, Red Power, Geronimo for President, Indians Are Chosen People, White Slavery Isn't Fun Anymore, We Are Now.
Is Room 209, a map of the United States "depicting Indian land areas" was altered to include all 50 states. A message "to the President and his servant" on the board placed a curse on the government from people "fighting to survive in our own country."
The Rosebud Indian Movement's Department of War had been headquartered in Room 219. Personal belongings and pictures of its former occupants were on the floor, along with a book on client-centered therapy.
A wall on the third floor offered the belief that "BIA Indians Are Sellouts." Inside an office nearby, an empty bottle of blackberry wine shared the floor with a silver, artificial Christmas tree and an empty Santa stocking.
Chairs and desks were stacked against the two elevators in the third floor hallway, beneath a poem that said: We want to be Indians, We want to be Read, We want to be Free or We want to be Dead.
Missing from the slogans were the usual vulgarisms of protest. The closest thing to the common protest rhetoric was contained in an inscription on a drawing of an Indian-head nickel: "This is just about the only Indian you give a damn about."
A sign over the entrance of the auditorium offered this explanation for the havoc:
"Gentlemen: I do not apologize for the ruin nor the so-called destruction of this mausoleum. For in building anew, one must first destroy the old. This is the beginning of a new era of rthe North American native people. When history recalls our efforts here, our descendants will stand with pride, knowing their people were the only ones responsible for the stand taken against tyranny, injustice and the gross inefficiency of this branch of a corrupt and decadent government."
It was signed: The Native American Embassy.