Russell Charles Means (November 10, 1939 – October 22, 2012) was an Oglala Lakota activist for the rights of American Indian people, libertarian political activist, actor, writer and musician who became a prominent member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) after joining the organization in 1968 and helped organize notable events that attracted national and international media coverage.
Means was active in international issues of indigenous peoples, including working with groups in Central and South America and with the United Nations for recognition of their rights. He was active in politics at his native Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and at the state and national level.
Beginning an acting career in 1992, he appeared on numerous television series and in several films, including The Last of the Mohicans. He published his autobiography Where White Men Fear to Tread in 1995.
At the 10-year memorial of the Battle of Little Bighorn, unidentified Lakota Sioux dance in commemoration of their victory over teh United States 7th Cavalry Regiment (under General George Custer), Montana, 1886.
The photograph was taken by S.T. Fansler, at the battlefield’s dedication ceremony as a national monument.
Men of blood . . .
Even as work on the construction of the Memorial Hall in Philadelphia began in 1874 the Lakota people were alarmed by the Black Hills Expedition, a United States Army expedition led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. The expedition set out on July 2, 1874 from modern day Bismarck, North Dakota, which was then Fort Abraham Lincoln in the Dakota Territory, with orders to travel to the previously uncharted Black Hills of South Dakota. Its mission was to look for suitable locations for a fort, find a route to the southwest, and to investigate the possibility of gold mining.
Early Lakota history is recorded in their Winter counts, pictorial calendars painted on hides or later recorded on paper. The Battiste Good winter count records Lakota history back to 900 CE, when White Buffalo Calf Woman gave the Lakota people the White Buffalo Calf Pipe.
Rapper Magneto Dayo and The Lakota Medicine Men did a tribute song dedicated to Russell Means and Richard Oakes called "The Journey" explaining the story of "The Buffalo Calf Woman" on his album Royalty of the UnderWorld (2016)
The Lakota people as Siouan languages speakers may have originated in the lower Mississippi River region and then migrated to or originated in the Ohio Valley. They were agriculturalists and may have been part of the Mound Builder civilization during the 9th–12th centuries CE.
The various cultures collectively termed "Mound Builders" were inhabitants of North America who, during a circa 5,000-year period, constructed various styles of earthen mounds for religious, ceremonial, burial, and elite residential purposes. Since the 19th century, the prevailing scholarly consensus has been that the mounds were constructed by indigenous peoples of the Americas. Sixteenth-century Spanish explorers met natives living in a number of later Mississippian cities, described their cultures, and left artifacts. Research and study of these cultures and peoples has been based mostly on archaeology and anthropology.
In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Dakota-Lakota speakers lived in the upper Mississippi Region in present-day Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas. Conflicts with Anishnaabe and Cree peoples pushed the Lakota west onto the Great Plains in the mid- to late-17th century.
After 1720, the Lakota branch of the Seven Council Fires split into two major sects, the Saône who moved to the Lake Traverse area on the South Dakota–North Dakota–Minnesota border, and the Oglála-Sičháŋǧu who occupied the James River valley. However, by about 1750 the Saône had moved to the east bank of the Missouri River, followed 10 years later by the Oglála and Brulé (Sičháŋǧu).
Around 1730, Cheyenne people introduced the Lakota to horses, called šuŋkawakaŋ ("dog [of] power/mystery/wonder"). After their adoption of horse culture, Lakota society centered on the buffalo hunt on horseback. The total population of the Sioux (Lakota, Santee, Yankton, and Yanktonai) was estimated at 28,000 by French explorers in 1660. The Lakota population was first estimated at 8,500 in 1805, growing steadily and reaching 16,110 in 1881.
The large and powerful Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa villages had long prevented the Lakota from crossing the Missouri. However, the great smallpox epidemic of 1772–1780 destroyed three-quarters of these tribes. The Lakota crossed the river into the drier, short-grass prairies of the High Plains.
These newcomers were the Saône, well-mounted and increasingly confident, who spread out quickly. In 1765, a Saône exploring and raiding party led by Chief Standing Bear discovered the Black Hills (the Paha Sapa), then the territory of the Cheyenne. Ten years later, the Oglála and Brulé also crossed the river.
The Spirit of '76
In 1776, the Lakota defeated the Cheyenne, who had earlier taken the region from the Kiowa. The Cheyenne then moved west to the Powder River country, and the Lakota made the Black Hills their home.
In this year of '76 the drafting committee presented its work on preparing the Declaration of Independence to the Congress. John Trumbull's famous painting, is often identified as a depiction of the signing of the Unites States Declaration of Independence, but it actually shows the drafting committee presenting its work to the Congress. An engraving of the "signing scene" has been featured on the reverse side of the United States two-dollar bill since 1976, and confirms this misidentification.
The Declaration made by the Second Continental Congress meeting at the Pennsylvania State House on July 4 1776, includes the famous second sentence, beginning:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Further, in the indictment, where King George III's actions are listed, there is a reference to the fact that:
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.These frontiers were about to be expanded, to stretch over the lands of even more merciless Indian Savages, and to a continental scale, with the Louisiana Purchase. Is there an implication embedded in the use of the term "Indian Savages" that the indigenous peoples of North America, and that comprise many "nations", do not fall into the category "All men"?
The Native American name controversy is an ongoing discussion about the changing terminology used by indigenous peoples of the Americas to describe themselves, as well as how they prefer to be referred to by others. Preferred terms vary primarily by region and age. As indigenous people and communities are diverse, there is no consensus on naming, aside from the fact that most people prefer to be referred to by their specific nation
The expansion of the United States
The Kingdom of France controlled the Louisiana territory from 1699 until it was ceded to Spain in 1762. In 1800, Napoleon, then the First Consul of the French Republic, hoping to re-establish an empire in North America, regained ownership of Louisiana.
Battle of Vertières in 1803
So, Napoleon's failure to put down an anti-slavery and anti-colonial insurrection led directly to the opportunity for the United States of America to expand across the North American continent, in what was in fact, but never spoken of, the beginning of an American New World Empire.
The notion of a nation state determined by its inhabitants rather than its conquerors, had shifted several degrees towards "Empire", on both sides of the Atlantic, and by both the American revolutionary and the French revolutionary principles and positions regarding what would be recognised in the 20th century as universal human rights. Many of the leading actors in the American revolution, including Thomas Jefferson, and who attempted to abolish slavery, but were also the owners of slaves.
Napoleon's wife, Josephine, was from a wealthy French Creole family that owned a sugarcane plantation in Martinique and a workforce of slaves transported from Africa. French slave-owners in general were motivated to join the counter-revolution and, through the Whitehall Accord, they threatened to move the French Caribbean colonies from French governance and conduct their business under British control, as Great Britain still allowed slavery. Napoleon Bonaparte decided to re-establish slavery after becoming First Consul. He promulgated the law of 20 May 1802 and sent military governors and troops to the colonies to impose it, even though the French constitution passed in 1795 included in the declaration of the Rights of Man that slavery was abolished.
This successful insurrection, by self-liberated slaves against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue (now the sovereign nation of Haiti, and, long before, part of the Spanish New World Empire, the island of Hispaniola), began on 22 August 1791, and ended in 1804 with the former colony's independence.
It involved blacks, mulattoes, French, Spanish, and British participants—with the ex-slave Toussaint L'Ouverture emerging as Haiti's most charismatic hero. It was the only slave uprising that led to the founding of a state which was both free from slavery, and ruled by non-whites and former captives. It is now widely seen as a defining moment in the history of racism in the Atlantic World.
Its effects on the institution of slavery were felt throughout the Americas. The end of French rule and the abolition of slavery in the former colony was followed by a successful defense of the freedoms they won, and, with the collaboration of free persons of color, their independence from white Europeans.
The insurrection represents the largest slave uprising since Spartacus's unsuccessful revolt against the Roman Republic nearly 1,900 years earlier.
The conduct of the participants in this revolt challenged long-held European beliefs about alleged black inferiority and about enslaved persons' capacity to achieve and maintain their own freedom. The rebels' organizational capacity and tenacity under pressure inspired stories that shocked and frightened slave owners in the hemisphere.
Burn! (Italian: Queimada) is a 1969 Italian-French war drama film directed by Gillo Pontecorvo and starring Marlon Brando, Evaristo Márquez and Renato Salvatori. The music was composed by Ennio Morricone.
The fictional story focuses on the creation of a banana republic in the Caribbean, and the events that follow it. Brando plays a British secret government agent, named after the American filibuster William Walker, who manipulates a slave revolt to serve the interests of the sugar trade. Natalie Zemon Davis reviewed the film from a historian's perspective and gave it high marks, arguing that it merges historical events that took place in Brazil, Cuba, Santo Domingo, Jamaica, and elsewhere. Davis, Natalie Zemon. Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (2002) ch 3
From an article by Amy Taubin
Pontecorvo's blending of cinematic romanticism with an analysis of black revolutionary struggle which is part Marx and part Franz Fanon. Unlike The Battle of Algiers, which made use of a cinema vérité style to tell the story of an actual liberation struggle, Burn! is a political allegory, styled like a costume action-adventure picture. The setting is a fictional sugar cane-producing Caribbean Island named Queimada. In the original script, this fictive island was part of the Spanish empire, which would have been a more accurate historical conceit, since Spain, rather than Portugal, was the dominant European power in the Caribbean. But since Portugal accounts for a considerably smaller share of international box-office receipts than Spain, the producers did the economically expedient thing by making the Portuguese the bad guys.
As we learn in the opening scene, Queimada (which means "burn" in Portuguese) has had a history of conflagration. In the 17th century, the Portuguese put down an uprising of the indigenous population by killing almost everyone and reducing the cane fields to scorched earth. They then rebuilt the labor force with slaves imported from Africa. By the mid-19th century (the point at which Pontecorvo's narrative begins), a slave revolt is brewing. The British see an opportunity to send the Portuguese packing and gain control of the island. Enter Marlon Brando in plantation whites and creams as Sir William Walker, the 19th-century English equivalent of a CIA operative. Walker has been sent by the British government to fan the flames of the insurrection and simultaneously to whisper encouraging words to members of the mixed-race middle-class so that when the Portuguese are routed, they will be ready to seize the reins of power. Not real power, of course, because it is British wealth to which this puppet regime will be permanently indebted.
All this comes to pass in the first half of the film in scenes that are sometimes overly schematic but just as often thrilling. Here, as in The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo is masterful at conjoining camera movement and the choreography of large groups of people so that the screen becomes charged with collective desire. Ennio Morricone's score, similar in its insistence and repetitiveness to the one he composed for The Battle of Algiers, employs the choral harmonies and modalities of Gregorian chants with a syncopated beat that has you just about leaping out of your seat when the victorious slave army, ragtag and radiant, comes dancing and prancing on the backs of plumed horses to claim the prize for their hard-won, bloody rebellion. The prize, of course, will not be theirs. The fork-tongued Walker will convince José Dolores (Evaristo Márquez), the rebel general he has mentored, that he's gone as far as he can go - that blacks cannot govern themselves or trade on the world market. "Who will buy your sugar, José?" he asks, even as the British have imposed a boycott on the island. Part I ends in compromise. Dolores is persuaded to lay down his weapons and take his army back to the cane fields. No longer slaves, they will be paid for their work, and in addition, there will be schools and hospitals - and you know the rest of that line.
Twelve years pass in a few seconds of black screen. The second half of the film is the mirror inverse of the first. Walker is sent back to Queimada to put down the insurgency he once fomented. The British have treated their freed workers no better than the Portuguese did their slaves. Dolores and his men have once again taken up arms and are fighting the government troops from hideouts in the mountains. When he refuses to negotiate with Walker, it's all-out war. As in the 17th century, the island is torched so that the fires of revolution will not spread throughout the Caribbean and beyond. Rather than the triumphant march that climaxed Part I, Pontecorvo gives us an equally riveting set piece, but this time of prolonged horror. Dolores's followers are smoked out of the burning brush. As they are forced into the open, they are slaughtered one by one as Walker watches through his spyglass.
Burn! is such an ambitious film and parts of it are so inspiring that one can't help forgiving its unresolved contradictions, the largest of which is the attempt to fit a dialectical reading of history into the form of an action drama with the opposing forces of colonizer and colonized embodied in the two leading characters. Brando often remarked that he was proudest of his work in Burn!, and certainly it's his performance that makes the film more than just a series of visually spectacular set pieces, and riveting from beginning to end. In terms of Brando's career, one can look at Burn! as a match with Reflections in a Golden Eye, which was made just two years earlier. In both films, Brando plays a member of the ruling elite who is eaten up by self-loathing and fights desperately against his attraction to another man. Reflection is specifically about repressed homosexuality. In Burn!, sexual desire is an undercurrent of the power game between Walker and Dolores.
Brando plants the notion right at the start when we see him looking at Queimada from a boat arriving in the harbor and fingering a lavender scarf flung casually around his throat. Brando knew how to communicate entire subtexts through a prop and the way he handled it. You can bet he didn't choose lavender because it was a pretty color. There is, however, a behind-the-scenes story: Pontecorvo, who was reputed to be highly superstitious, felt about lavender the way John Ashcroft feels about calico cats - that they are signs of the devil. Brando was at war with Pontecorvo throughout the production, and he may have chosen to make that bit of lavender silk the focus of the film's opening shot just to spite him. Nevertheless, a suggestion has been planted in the viewer's mind, and it's reinforced in the scenes that follow where we begin to see that Walker conducts his power games as he would a seduction. Walker seduces Dolores into becoming an outlaw and then the general of an insurgent army; having gotten what he wants, he subsequently abandons him. When he comes back and tries the game a second time, Dolores has become his own man and will have none of it.
And so Walker has to bring him to his knees by killing his followers. But at the last moment, he can't bring himself to kill the opponent he has been so obsessed with. If Dolores dies, he will not only become a martyr for the cause of freedom, he will escape Walker's power. One of the most amazing moments in Brando's performance comes when Walker is preparing himself for a last ditch effort to persuade Dolores to escape hanging by going into exile. Walker is aware that he has already lost the game, and as he tries to pull himself together to confront Dolores, he notices his own belly - a belly that he has most carefully concealed beneath tight pants and jackets buttoned - he knows how power is invested in the presentation of self. It's this belly, now bulging out in the open, that signals his loss of control over his own and Dolores's destiny. And then he makes the most extraordinary decision. Rather than trying to conceal the betrayal of the flesh, he lets it show, perhaps because he has nothing to lose but more likely because he seizes on letting it all hang out - as they were wont to say in 1968 - as the only manipulative strategy left in his arsenal.
