John Trudell is one of the last great outspoken leaders of the Native American tribes of North America, a society that all but dissolved until he and others like him gave it a voice in the late 1960s. Born of mixed tribal blood, his forebears were from tribes of North America and Mexico (his grandfather rode with Poncho Villa). Trudell was not a pacifist--his playbook of solutions for normalizing Caucasian/Indian relations in America and in defending earth against the relentless assault of faceless international corporations had more in common with Malcolm X and the Black Panthers than with Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Interestingly enough the clips in this film seem to emphasize the latter philosophies over the former. Perhaps history is being rewritten a little, or at least fine-tuned in its spin.
John Trudell (Gregory Bayne)
In 1967 Trudell resigned from his uneventful Viet Nam era tour with the US Navy (“I was lucky, Vietnam didn’t have one...”). He settled in the American Southwest and in 1969 found himself drawn to the Indians of All Tribes occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. The monumental federal prison on the island had been closed and the island was declared federal surplus property. Citing a long ignored and untested provision of an obscure Indian treaty, the IAT conducted an extended sit-in of the island and demanded their grievances be heard. If limited in the generation of either money or real estate, the occupation was a gold mine in media exposure. Native Americans everywhere joined in with their counterpart to the black civil rights movement. Trudell was in the middle of it and the more media exposure there was the more of the middle he occupied.
He was more of a poet than an analyst and more of a catalyst than a main ingredient. In lengthy web documentation of the 1973-1976 FBI Reign of Terror on the Pine Ridge reservation and the 1975 shoot-out that left two FBI agents and one Native American dead, AIM leaders and their militant manifesto are mentioned in every line. AIM firebrand Leonard Peltier was sentenced to two life terms for the FBI murders. Although Trudell was chairman of AIM from 1973 to 1979 his name is not mentioned in the exhaustive documentation before, during or after the murder trials and so-called FBI “Reign of Terror” at Pine Ridge.
Nonetheless his poetry still rings with a truth and urgency that is rare and becoming rarer. His comments on the environment have a calm urgency coupled with sly humor: People may succeed in turning earth into a place in which they cannot survive, but they will not destroy earth. Earth will survive...people won’t. And on the USA: “I’m not looking to overthrow the American government, the corporate state already has.” We have certainly seen that point made lately (“The Corporation”--2003).
Having said that, he made his friends and he made his enemies, but Trudell survived where many others died. Nowadays Native American tribes have evolved into some of the most astute and aggressive business organizations in America, first exploiting loopholes in fireworks bans and then moving on to tax-free tobacco products and gambling. Many tribes derive considerable income from royalties from oil and gas pipelines that cross their land and from hunting, fishing and access licenses of all kinds. Contrary to the Trudell philosophy, they have apparently been more successful in joining the white man’s assault on the planet then Trudell was in fighting it. We are lucky there are still people like him speaking out.
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