The Occupy Movement and the American Indian

Over the previous weekend and part of the week, I was in Washington, D.C., participating in the Occupy Congress protest. While at the protest, which incidentally became the first to successfully take the steps of the Supreme Court, I couldn't help but think about the earlier protests American Indians conducted, especially the occupation of Wounded Knee.

In the 1970s, a group of American Indians, frustrated with impotent reservation management and callous government treatment, stormed into Wounded Knee. Site of the infamously brutish 1890 Lakota massacre, Wounded Knee still stands as a towering pillar of shame for our nation. The American Indian Movement saw this only conflagrated by the current treatment of the American Indian, and in 1973, began occupying the location. Sound familiar?

Yet despite the basic similarities, the occupation of Wounded Knee and modern, capital-O Occupying are different in several key ways. Most substantially is the level of violence between the two. The AIM had come prepared for confrontation, and was loaded up with what I can only imagine as an all-you-can-eat restaurant of weaponry. Of course, with the arrival of the FBI, the opposition was well-armed as well. Gradually, the two groups drifted together, circling around one other like ants slowly spiraling down a drain. Things came to a head, and bullets were soon in the air. After 70 days of trading bullets with each other, the two forces declared a stand-off.

Occupy has shown no violent proclivities at all, of course. One of the main goals of the protest is nonviolent action. Yet the philosophical goal of the movement-- taking areas that epitomize the corruption and immortality of the government and occupying them-- is the very same as that of the AIM. I can't help but think that, if not for the AIM, Occupy Congress would have never happened.