Ways and [Russell] Means

Ways and Means

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/06/26/ST2008062603088.html

Over four decades, Russell Means has led an insurrection, posed for
Andy Warhol, aspired to be an assassin and been arguably the most
influential public figure in fighting racism against the American
Indian. Now, in his quest to start his own country, the road to
success might run down Embassy Row.

By Bill Donahue
Sunday, June 29, 2008; Page W08

The voice was booming and imperious as it came out of the bathroom,
wafting over the blandly hip decor of the Dupont Circle hotel room.
"If you excuse me a moment," said Russell Means, "I'm going to braid my hair."

I knew that Means was not talking about some quick twist-and-tie
ponytail job, but rather the painstaking culmination of a resplendent
costume. Means is 6-foot-1, with a powerful broad-boned physique. He
is the actor who played the last Mohican in the 1992 film "The Last
of the Mohicans," and he is the onetime leader of the revolutionary
American Indian Movement, or AIM. Arguably the most famous living
Indian activist, he performs his role with panache. Already on this
bright, cold morning in February, he was wearing dangling turquoise
earrings, a crimson wool Navajo vest and black silver-tipped cowboy
boots. His broad, truculent brow was creased with wear.

Means's life has been something like a Johnny Cash song. He has done
prison time for inciting a riot, and has been stabbed, accused of
murder, hit by two bullets and divorced four times. Long ago, he was
a fancy dance champion and a rodeo star. Even now, at age 68, he
remains a forceful presence -- a warrior.

On this visit to the nation's capital, Means was, per usual, fighting
the United States of America. Along with three other Lakota Indians,
he had recently severed his ties with the United States and declared
himself a founding member of a new, autonomous nation -- the Republic
of Lakotah. Unsanctioned by their tribal government, and speaking
only for themselves, the dissidents claimed dominion over more than
93,000 square miles of traditional Lakota territory -- a continuous
chunk of sparsely populated dry land that includes parts of Nebraska,
South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

Means was here in Washington seeking diplomatic recognition from the
world community so that he could ultimately finagle a seat at the
United Nations, whether the U.S. of A. likes it or not. His motto,
borrowed from Gandhi, is, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at
you, then they fight you, then you win."

The plan was to barnstorm Embassy Row. He hoped to visit ambassadors
from several U.S. adversaries (Venezuela and Serbia, for instance) as
well as from a few other countries he deemed likely allies -- for
instance, Bolivia, which has an indigenous president in Evo Morales,
and Finland, which, in Means's view, "appreciates freedom because
it's always been an independent ally of Russia."

It would be a four-day mission, and Means was traveling with an
attache, Lakotah's volunteer attorney general, Jerry Collette. A
Libertarian activist and a paralegal who recently emigrated to
Lakotah from his longtime home in North Carolina, Collette is most
renowned for the intricate, loopholing legal work he did last winter
to enable the supporters of presidential candidate Ron Paul to fly a
campaign blimp up and down the East Coast. Ethnically
French-Canadian, Collette is 56 years old, with long gray hair and a
shaggy gray beard. In contrast to Means, he is a meager physical
presence -- slender and only 5-foot-4. On this road trip, as Means
luxuriated on the hotel's single queen bed, Collette was sleeping on
the floor. "I'm a guerrilla," he explained, "and if you're a
guerrilla, you just don't grumble about little discomforts."

At the moment, Collette was standing outside the bathroom,
valet-like, reporting on the progress he'd made that morning,
canvassing embassies on his cellphone. "I called Iceland," he said,
"and they can't meet with us. They're busy. They said to just drop
off a petition."

"They're busy?" Means asked. "What does Iceland have to be busy about?"

Collette paused a moment, and then, without answering, he said, "But
can we just drop off the petition?"

"We're too busy," Means said, his voice laced with a larksome,
sardonic swagger, and Collette went back to his phone, squaring away
the logistics for a full afternoon of visiting embassies.

After a few minutes, Means emerged. His braids were done, and now he
reached for his sunglasses -- Dolce & Gabbanas.

"Well, then," said Russell Means, "are we ready?"

The first embassy of the day was East Timor, which is actually not on
Embassy Row but rather in a nondescript office building near the Van
Ness-UDC Metro station. Means and Collette took the elevator to the
fifth floor. The Timorese suite was dimly lit and sparsely appointed,
new-smelling. East Timor is a fledgling Southeast Asian nation that
is still adjusting to independence after having been occupied, from
1975 to 1999, by neighboring Indonesia, whose military caused the
death of more than 100,000 Timorese people, or roughly 10 percent of
the population. The ambassador, Constancio Pinto, 45, spent much of
his adolescence running from bombs, sleeping in caves and subsisting
on leaves. A small, dapper man in a black business suit, he greeted
the Lakotans genially. "Welcome," he said. "You are our first
visitors." From Lakotah, he meant.

They went into the conference room, and then Means spoke dryly,
without referring to notes, telling Pinto that the United States is
now occupying Lakota country illegally, in violation of the 1868
Treaty of Fort Laramie, which granted the Lakota control of the Black
Hills in western South Dakota. The treaty was repealed by Congress in
1877, and the Lakota have struggled ever since. "We are the poorest
people in America," Means said, "and we have the shortest life span
in America, too. The life expectancy for Lakota women is 47; for a
man, it's 44. After 155 years of genocide, our way of life is on the
brink of extinction. We have finally decided to withdraw from the
United States and save our people and our lands. Here is our petition."

Means handed Pinto a slim portfolio that consisted of a two-sentence
cover letter followed by many pages of excerpts from the Louisiana
Purchase of 1803, among other documents. For a moment, Pinto read
silently. Means sat with his legs crossed, his chin canted back. His
air was not disrespectful, but it was vaguely proprietary. On the
wall behind him was a framed photo of U.S. soldiers happily drinking
beer in East Timor. This was surprising because, as Means had
reminded me earlier, the United States had generously supported the
Indonesians during the war.

"I know that the U.S. facilitated the genocide of East Timor," Means
said now. "I do understand the complexities of the world, and I
understand the imperialist monster that is the United States of
America." He paused; there was an awkward silence. "But they can't
bomb Lakotah," Means said. "We have too many white people living among us."

Pinto looked up. "Um, as you know," he began, "we are trying to put
the war behind us. It was a very painful process. So many people
died. Eighty-nine percent of our infrastructure was destroyed. Our
whole country was leveled, and now we are trying to rebuild. The U.S.
has been very supportive. Over the past five years, they have been
our biggest donors of aid."

"Really?" said Means. He was shocked.

"Yes, they have given us up to $25 million a year. I will give this
petition to the capitol, in Dili, but" -- Pinto laughed, a bit
nervously -- "I can assure you that my government will not take a position."

There was a minute or two of closing niceties. Outside on the
sidewalk, Means said, "I loved his straightforwardness."

I said it was shocking how many people East Timor lost in the war.

Means sneered at me. "On the continental United States in 1492," he
said, "there was 12 to 14 million people -- Indians. And according to
the 2000 census, there were just 250,000 full bloods left. We've lost
99.6 percent of our population."

His math was a little shaky. For one thing, Census statistics
indicate that in 2000 there were 2.5 million U.S. citizens who
claimed no ancestry other than "American Indian" or "Alaskan Native."
But I said nothing.

We kept walking, and, as Means descended the stairs into the Metro
station, wearing the Dolce & Gabbanas again, a woman passing by did a
double take.

Russell Means became an American icon in 1973. As a telegenic and
quotable front man for AIM, he starred on TV as 250 Native Americans
took over the sole church in tiny Wounded Knee, S.D., and seized
control of the town, which sits amid the desolate brown hills of the
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. For 71 days, even as the National
Guard's armored tanks lurked in the pine trees and federal
helicopters whirred overhead, spraying sniper fire, Means and his
fellow Indians held their ground, bearing but a few old shotguns and
hunting rifles as they burned down Wounded Knee's grocery store and
flew the American flag upside down.

The conflict was a reprise of an earlier, symbolically potent battle
-- an 1890 massacre that saw the U.S. Cavalry kill more than 150
Lakota men, women, and children. Wounded Knee II was a feud over what
it means to be an American Indian. For much of the preceding century,
the nation's indigenous people had been forcibly assimilated. They'd
been legally denied the right to practice their religious rituals --
the sun dance, for instance -- and shepherded into government-run
boarding schools where white administrators cut the students' long
hair and forbade them to speak their native languages.

For some Indians in the early 1970s, the indignities were manageable:
They harbored hope that in time the U.S. system could accommodate
them -- that tribal governments, which answer to the Department of
the Interior, could incrementally improve life for Native Americans.

Other Indians saw no such hope. Taking cues from the Black Panthers,
they decreed that it was time to get radical, to proudly and
violently assert their racial identity. These radicals saw their
assimilationist counterparts as sellouts -- or "half-breeds," as
Means puts it -- and in 1972 they found a target for their ire: Dick
Wilson, the newly elected Pine Ridge tribal chair. A crew-cut Lakota
prone to frothing with hatred for communists, Wilson bore a special
animus for Means. At one point, he threatened, "I, Dick Wilson, will
personally cut his braids off."

In AIM's view, Wilson was a puppet of the U.S. government. In the
early days of his administration, he gave the Feds a large chunk of
the Pine Ridge reservation, Sheep Mountain, that was coveted for its
uranium and molybdenum deposits. In turn, the attorney general's
office sent 65 U.S. marshals to keep the peace on Pine Ridge, by
surrounding the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) building there at gunpoint.

Wounded Knee II was a retort -- a fiery demonstration calling for
Wilson's removal. The U.S. government was there to defend Wilson as
legitimate. Means played a valiant David to the Fed's Goliath. At one
point, he announced to the surrounding forces: "You're going to have
to kill us. I'm going to die for my treaty rights." The press reveled
-- and lingered long on Means's hairy past.

Raised near San Francisco, the oldest child of a physically abusive
Lakota mother and a Lakota father who struggled with alcoholism,
Means burglarized stores and stole wallets from bar patrons before
discovering AIM in 1969. Then, he resolved, as he put it in his 1995
autobiography, Where White Men Fear to Tread, "never again would I
seek personal approval from white society on white terms. Instead É I
would get in the white man's face until he gave me and my people our
just due. With that decision, my whole existence suddenly came into focus."

In 1972, in Washington, Means helped lead 300 AIM affiliates in a
six-day occupation of the BIA building -- a gambit that saw the
Indians smashing the bathrooms and offices, toppling file cabinets
and "repossessing" Indian paintings, pottery and rugs. Soon after
that, he protested the killing of a fellow Lakota by leading hundreds
of Indians to a demonstration at the county courthouse in Custer,
S.D. There, he gouged a police officer in the eye. A nearby chamber
of commerce building burned to the ground.

After the Custer riot, he was out of jail the following day -- "just
in time," as he gloats, "to see national television coverage."

The 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee failed to deliver clear-cut
glory, however. Means fled the battle zone under the cover of night,
and the last of his followers soon surrendered to authorities.

To some Native Americans, the whole campaign was little more than
misguided theater. This February, Tim Giago, founder of the Lakota
Times, a newspaper, wrote that "an entire village was pillaged and
destroyed" without AIM ever spending "a single dollar" to repair the wreckage.

But Wounded Knee had a ripple effect. It brought anti-Indian racism
into the newspapers and prompted a measure of social change.
Sixty-six-year-old Lorraine White Face, who lives on Pine Ridge,
says: "Before Russell Means took over Wounded Knee, the stores in
[nearby] Nebraska would have signs on them saying, 'No Indians
Allowed.' You couldn't go to the movies or a cafe. After Wounded
Knee, all that changed."

America's romance with Indians surged, and, in his defiance, Means
seemed like a reincarnation of such Lakota legends as Sitting Bull,
Rain in the Face, Gall and Crazy Horse. When Means went to court in
the wake of the Wounded Knee mayhem, Marlon Brando and Harry
Belafonte showed up, voicing support. (Means was found not guilty of
burglary and larceny charges.)

Then, in 1976, Andy Warhol invited Means to New York to sit for a
portrait. In Warhol's silk-screen, Means is fierce, staring straight
out of the frame. He wears a white bone neck choker and what looks
like a brown leather rawhide robe. An imaginative viewer can almost
hear buffalo thundering away out on the Plains. But still in Warhol's
silk-screen there is something fake and disquieting about Means's
face. It's a mask-like splash of tan paint. The image is reminiscent
of the cheap coloration in long-ago Sunday comics pages. The caption,
Warhol seems to be telling us with a wink, could read, "Wild Indian,
Authentic."

At our first interview, over breakfast, Means was surly from the
get-go. Within five minutes of shaking my hand, he accosted me for my
"[expletive] white racist arrogance. There's only one reason you
people came to this continent," he said. "Greed! We Indians have our
spirituality. We have our land, but Americans have no culture except greed."

I changed the subject, asking Means how many Lakota backed his
independence claim. "That's not germane," he barked. "In all my years
of international relations, not once has anybody ever questioned my
sovereignty. Even if I am only speaking for myself and my brother,
and I'm not, my sovereignty exists. It's spelled out in the treaties."

Eventually, I'd learn that Means has only six or eight active Lakota
supporters scattered throughout North and South Dakota. Many other
Lakota quietly share his contempt for the U.S. government; some even
long for a return to the hallowed days of Lakota independence. And,
while Means won 46 percent of the vote when he ran unsuccessfully for
Pine Ridge tribal chair in 2004, he has not endeared himself with his
desperado-style secession.

"I'm a little frustrated that he just went ahead and went to
Washington," says Alex White Plume, a bison rancher who serves on the
Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council, which fights for Indians'
land rights. "It's not like he came up with a brand-new idea. We've
talked about separating from the U.S. at treaty council meetings. No
traditional Lakota wants to be colonized, and actually I wanted to
bring a group to Washington myself. But I wanted to bring thousands.
Russell didn't build that kind of consensus. He never even sat down
with our traditional elders."

"Russell didn't do the protocol," echoes Floyd Hand, also on the
treaty council. "What I do is, I make people welcome at a meeting. I
buy everybody some meat and vegetables and fry bread. Russell went solo."

AIM is more severe in its critique of Means. In a press release, it
has called him "clownish" and has taken pains to note that Means has
"resigned from the American Indian Movement at least six (6) times,
the latest on January 8, 1988." No one from AIM would comment for
this article.

But, for Means, the burned bridges behind him simply show that he's
nobody's lackey. He's free, and freedom is his foremost priority. He
calls his republic the "epitome of liberty," promising that, once
it's up and running (and that could take decades, he says), it would
issue its own licenses and passports as it allowed its citizens a
tax-free existence. There would be no police and no jails. The
economy would be based on wind power.

"We get enough wind in our country to power the entire United States
24 hours a day, seven days a week," he told me. "We've formed an LLC,
legal under U.S. law, and we're going to join with large coal
companies. We'll go to individual landowners, both Lakota and
non-Lakota, and lease their land and put windmills on them. We have a
business plan."

Means refused to share it, though. He was more interested in talking
about Lakotah's government, which, he said, would be matriarchal. "A
lot of people think that just means that women run everything, but
that isn't right," said Means, who is, technically speaking, the
chief facilitator for Lakotah's provisional government. "Matriarchy
is where you celebrate the strengths of each sex. Both men and women
know their roles. People get along."

Lakotah would not be a democracy but rather a consensus-based system.
"Individual liberty through community control," is how Means
described it. "Everybody has a right to be racist, but their behavior
is regulated by the posse comitatus."

Means argued that American Indians flourished for centuries in
matriarchal societies. "I quote," he said, holding a single index
finger aloft, "the great Indian scholar Vine Deloria Jr.: 'The
disagreement between Indian nations was largely without the spilling
of much blood. It was about as dangerous as a professional football
game.' We lived, from the top of the Arctic down to Tierra del Fuego,
in harmony, without any disease. It was Heaven on Earth. Then you
guys ruined it."

There was a bit of the thespian about Means, and I kept thinking of
perhaps his most cerebral Indian foe -- Chippewa novelist and critic
Gerald Vizenor, who has written: "We're all invented as Indians.
We're invented from traditional static standards, and we are stuck in
coins and words like artifacts." Vizenor holds that, even as they
live in contemporary society, playing bingo and using computers,
Indians find their identity shaped (and limited) by what white
Americans think Indians should be -- that is, savage, and appointed
with cool moccasins and colorful headdresses.

There's a timeworn tradition of Indians capitalizing on the white
man's fascination -- Sitting Bull and Gall signed on as part of
Buffalo Bill Cody's traveling "Wild West" show in the late 19th
century. Vizenor sees Means as the new standard-bearer for this sort
of hokum. Means, he says, is "the media man, a master of simulations,
a comical spectacle."

A large question seemed to hang over Means's visit to Washington. Was
this jaunt down Embassy Row in earnest? Or was it just a little
performance art -- a trick to kick up a rhetorical dust storm?

Means didn't answer the question, but he relished it. "What did
Shakespeare say?" he asked, his face alight with a grin as he spread
his arms wide. "All the world's a stage."

The meeting with Venezuela was promising. I was not allowed to
attend, but afterward Collette emerged burbling: "They're ready to
invest. They just want to see a business plan so they can arrange
something with Citgo to start developing alternative energy out in Lakotah."

Bolivia was, by the Lakotans' lights, a smashing success. Ambassador
Gustavo Guzman, who is suave and lean, with his long hair pulled back
into a ponytail, wore bluejeans and greeted Means as an old friend.
Alone among nations, the Bolivians had sent a delegation to support
Means when he and fellow secessionists announced their declaration of
independence in Washington last December. (Bolivian President Evo
Morales is Indian, as is roughly 55 percent of the Bolivian
population.) "We respect the rights of Indians everywhere," Guzman
told me, "even though we cannot take an official position on the
Republic of Lakotah."

Uruguay's ambassador to the United States, Carlos Gianelli, was a
regal older gentleman with a crocodilian smile; his office was finely
appointed with burgundy leather chairs and a mahogany desk. When
Means proffered him the petition, he said: "Fine, then, we'll study
this and send it to Montevideo. We don't have many indigenous people
in Uruguay, as you know, but we are hopeful for cultural exchanges."

Means was elated. "Now that's what I call sophisticated," he said in
the elevator.

But the visit to the Finnish Embassy was doomed from the moment Means
entered the building, a glass, steel and concrete minimalist
masterpiece known as the "Jewelry Box" of Embassy Row. It was early
morning. A cold gray light bore down through the bounteous
windowpanes. The ambassador was out. Means met instead with the
second secretary of political affairs, a young woman named Soile
Kauranen. Perhaps because it was early, Means was in particularly
testy form. "I could care less who recognizes us," he told Kauranen.
"Whether Finland recognizes us or not, we're already free."

Kauranen, who wore a light charcoal pantsuit and modish, clear-framed
eyeglasses, spent much of the time assiduously scribbling notes on a
legal pad. Her posture was erect, and her questions shimmered as
small, pointillist pricks at Means's reeling monologue. "And, uh, how
many people in your country?" she asked. "And how many hectares is it?"

When Means and Collette had answered to Kauranen's satisfaction, she
said, "Thank you, gentlemen," and ushered them out. They began moving
down Massachusetts Avenue on foot, eventually coming upon a grand
plaster-faced building adorned with a blue cupola. This was once the
Iranian Embassy, but now it was vacant and dilapidated, with cracks
in the walkway and weeds everywhere in the yard.

"Look at that," Colette thrilled. "We could discover it -- you know,
the doctrine of discovery!"

Means stood on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets as he surveyed the
property. "It could use a front lawn," he said.

They pressed on, and a few moments later Means shouted at Collette:
"Will you stop walking right in front of me? God!"

Collette moved to the side -- and then, as we continued toward Dupont
Circle, he delivered portfolios to various embassies while Means
waited at the curb. They hit Brazil, South Africa and Lithuania.

I wondered what, beyond mere recognition, Means wanted from this odd
and sundry collection of countries. Was it aid?

"No," he said. "You saw that guy from East Timor. He can't say a word
because the U.S. is greasing him. We don't want aid. Does the United
States get aid? Does Germany or Japan? No. The U.S. has been throwing
Indians aid for over a century, and it's killing us. What we need is
investments. We want to open things up, so that companies from all
over the world can do business with us, without having to comply with
the onerous laws of the United States of America."

For many observers, Russell Means's current rhetoric calls to mind
another aging warrior -- King Lear. Means's harshest critics hold
that he's now just fulminating delusionally -- and that in fact he's
been an ineffectual figure for more than 30 years now. "Ever since
Wounded Knee, Russell has seemed more and more like a blind man with
a Rubik's Cube," Laura Waterman Wittstock, a Seneca Indian and
Minneapolis-based journalist, has said. "The older he's gotten, the
less coherent his career seems. He's been frantically hunting around
for a new identity and saying, 'Is this it? Is this it? How about this?' "

Means has wandered most in the realm of politics. In 1984, when
Hustler publisher Larry Flynt attempted to run for president on the
Republican ticket, Means joined him as the vice presidential
candidate. That same year, he traveled to Libya to cultivate an
alliance with Moammar Gaddafi. He befriended Louis Farrakhan,
eventually, and became so enamored of Sun Myung Moon's Unification
Church and its evasion of the IRS that he did a lecture tour on the
church's behalf. In 1988, he ran for president himself, as a
Libertarian, narrowly losing the party's nomination to Ron Paul.
Meanwhile, he built his cinematic r{Zcaron}sum{Zcaron}.

After appearing with Daniel Day-Lewis in "The Last of the Mohicans,"
Means played a Navajo medicine man in Oliver Stone's "Natural Born
Killers." Then he provided the voice of a sage elder, Powhatan, in
the Disney animated film "Pocahontas." He kept his hand in Lakota
issues. He helped found a community-funded health clinic on the Pine
Ridge reservation. Twice, he tried, unsuccessfully, to get himself
elected tribal chair.

But then in 2006, he says, his life attained focus as he was driving
near his home on Pine Ridge. On a whim, he collared five young
pedestrians -- 20-somethings -- and asked them to define the word "freedom."

"I sat down on the ground, and I listened to them," Means said. "And
none of them -- not one -- could define freedom. And the only thing
they knew about me was from the movies. That absolutely scared the
hell out of me. When I came to the reservation in 1972, everyone
spoke Lakota. They knew about their ancestors. In 36 years, we've
gone from a Lakota way of life to a poverty way of life. I started to
wonder: 'How do we save ourselves? How can I leave behind a
meaningful legacy?' "

Means retreated to the mountain home of his fifth (and current) wife,
Pearl, in New Mexico, to meditate on the "state of Indian affairs"
with four friends. And there he kept circling back to what his
great-uncle -- Matthew King, or Noble Red Man to the Lakota -- had
told him decades before: "We must never forget that we were once a
free people." Means began talking about taking Lakota country back to
its roots as a free nation.

"But what are we going to do about all the white people?" one friend asked.

"We'll figure it out," said Means.

On the third morning in Washington, Means was brooding and silent
when we met. "I've become convinced," he said finally, "that what
you're writing is a hatchet job. I'm so fed up with white people and
their broken promises. When you go home and write your hatchet job,
make sure you say how angry I am."

All militants are angry, of course, but Means's temper tantrums have
been so baroque they seem fresh -- dazzling, even.

In 1974, as he was standing trial for the 1972 Custer courthouse
riot, Means refused to stand up for the judge. Riot police swarmed
the courtroom. A melee broke out, and, Means wrote: "a cop came at me
with a raised club. Rather than getting hit, I smashed his face mask
and watched his nose twist and flatten against the plastic." The
outburst put Means behind bars for a year.

Later, in 1991, Means's rage crested. Amid the tumult of his fourth
marriage, which saw his wife, Gloria Grant, file charges of spousal
abuse, Means began to wonder "if my life meant anything at all."

"I began," he writes in his autobiography, "to edge across the hazy
line between reason and madness." He decided to become an assassin,
and he composed a list of more than 100 people he wanted to kill. "In
one column were white people," he told me. "In the other column,
Indians. And you know what the difference was? The Indian list was
longer. I wanted to rub out as many sellouts as I could. I was
insane. I had a lot of anger, which I used to cover up my low self-esteem."

Means underwent therapy, but in 1997, while living on Navajo land, he
got into a scuffle with his wife's father. Leon Grant was in his 70s;
he had a prosthetic arm. Navajo police alleged that Means battered
him, but Means fought the charge vociferously, arguing that, under
the terms of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the Navajo had no right
to prosecute an Indian who did not belong to their nation.
Ultimately, even after Leon Grant withdrew his accusation, Means
persisted with his sovereignty case against the Navajo Nation, taking
it all the way to the Supreme Court, which two years ago refused to hear it.

In Washington, I wondered how Collette handled working with Means.
He'd just spent two months living at Means's house, squeezed amid
building supplies and crashing on the floor in a spare bedroom under
remodeling. "There are times when Russell can be a little insistent,"
he told me, choosing his words carefully. "But I've done a lot of
healing work around my issues with insistent people, and this
experience is enabling me to do a little more healing."

Besides being a paralegal, Collette is a registered minister,
training with the Heartland Aramaic Mission, based in Missouri, but
he does not preach. Rather, he specializes in counseling spiritual
seekers online. He is the mastermind behind an interactive self-help
Web site, Innerpeace.org. He also promotes the use of rice hulls, an
agricultural byproduct, as an eco-friendly building material.

Always inclined toward Libertarian views, Collette became an activist
after watching the Berlin Wall fall in 1989. Suddenly, he felt that
"maybe individuals can make a difference." Since then, he has let
"guidance" dictate how he puts his talent to work for the cause.
"Basically," explained Collette, who's spent much of the past 20
years moving about the United States, "I'm here until I'm guided to
go be somewhere else."

Last Christmas Day, Collette found himself direly in need of
guidance. He was camped in Washington, under the Ron Paul blimp in
his Astro van, and he was at a crossroads in his life. "I had three
choices," he recalls. "I could have gone south with the blimp. I
could have stayed still, or I could have gone north to help Ron Paul
in the New Hampshire primary."

That morning, another option presented itself: Collette read a short
news piece about Lakotah's declaration of independence. "All these
years I'd been living in the United States because I couldn't imagine
any place having more freedom," he said. "And now here was a country
that actually had the potential to be freer."

Within two days, Collette was driving cross-country to start his new
life in Lakotah.

At a deli on P Street NW, Means and Collette happened upon an
Eritrean cabdriver named Woldeab Kelati, and Means told him of his
quest for Lakota liberty.

"This is not an easy thing," said Kelati, nibbling his sandwich.

"Gaining freedom is never easy," said Means. "Eritrea knows that."

"But you don't have a boundary," said Kelati. "You are in the center
of the United States."

Means explained the Lakota's treaty claims. Kelati shook his head.
"You have a difficult task," he pronounced. "Good luck."

Means and Collette walked down Connecticut Avenue and came upon some
petitioners for Greenpeace, two 20-ish women standing outside the
Starbucks near Dupont Circle, crying, "Save the whales!" When they
saw Means, one canvasser changed her tune, chanting, "Help Mother Earth!"

Means sidled toward them obligingly. "I can't sign," he said. "I'm
not a citizen of this country."

"But we're international!"

Means signed but refused to give money. "You think indigenous people
are a danger to the environment," he explained.

"No, no, I think we're all on this Earth together!"

"You have tried to stop the traditional whale hunts of the Makah
Indians in the Puget Sound of the Pacific Northwest," Means said.
"That is why I cannot become a member."

"Okay! Thanks for talking to us!"

Soon, Means and Collette took a cab to the Watergate, to visit the
headquarters of the Libertarian Party. Means has high standing there.
Executive director Shane Cory, 33, listened attentively to Means's
pitch and said: "What you've done is very bold. I'm afraid of bold
action by our government. But I respect what you're doing. I'm Potawatomi."

The Potawatomi are an Indian nation with branches in Oklahoma and the
upper Midwest, and, when Means heard the word, he all but leapt from
his seat, delighted. "You are?" he exclaimed. Earlier, in a dark
mood, he'd soliloquized on the truth of a slogan he'd seen once, on
the butt of a gun owned by an indigenous freedom fighter in
Nicaragua: "Only Indians help Indians."

Cory is from Oklahoma, where the chairman of Citizen Potawatomi
Nation, John Barrett, has spent the past three decades wildly growing
the Potawatomi economy. Once headquartered in a beat-up trailer, with
only $550 in assets, by 2006 the tribe had $350 million in assets.
"We have our own power grid," Cory said. "We have the largest
geothermally heated building in the state of Oklahoma. We have the
largest tribal bank in the country, and I don't have to pay capital
gains taxes."

These details were all news to Means, so Cory gave him a starter kit
for launching an international bank. "Have you talked to Bernard von
NotHaus?" he asked, referring to the father of the Liberty Dollar, a
legal, alternative currency now circulating in the United States.
"What about the Cato Institute?"

It was the only time I saw anyone offer the Lakotans such detailed
advice, and afterward, out in the hallway, Means shouted, "Yes!" Then
he leapt toward Collette and hugged him.

Weeks passed. Collette, I learned, was arranging to mint two coins
for a gold-and silver-based Lakotah currency system -- the
dollar-like tonka and also another coin worth roughly two cents, the
mato. Means was readying to make one more bid, this November, to
become tribal chair on Pine Ridge. "I'm going to run on the freedom
ticket," he said, describing an ultra-Libertarian scheme. "If I win,
I will not have a job. I'll do nothing. But I think the U.S.
government will see that we have a constituency, and they'll listen to us."

Means hadn't done a whit of campaigning, though, and he depicted the
whole endeavor of wooing Pine Ridge voters as almost absurd. People
are poor on the reservation, he told me. "They don't have phones. And
do you think I'm going to just walk around this whole goddamned
reservation and get unanimous support?"

I asked him if he'd done any follow-up on his Washington visit. "No,"
he said flatly. Later, Bolivia would call to discuss a possible
Washington visit between Means and Evo Morales. Beyond that, though,
the whole journey down Embassy Row seemed almost like vanished
history. Not a single other nation got back to Means on his petition.

To make matters worse, Means's young nation was already riven with
conflict. The tension focused on a Lakota activist named Duane Martin
Sr., who'd come to Washington with Means in December for the
declaration of independence.

Martin, 42, is heavyset, with thick, powerful forearms and long black
hair drawn back in a ponytail. He is the leader of a sort of
paramilitary force, the Strongheart Warrior Society, which, he said,
responds to crime problems on or near Pine Ridge, "day or night. It
don't matter. Me and my 27 warriors, we're there because the tribal
police, they do nothing. Nothing." In recent years, he's joined Means
in protesting the flow of alcohol onto Pine Ridge from liquor stores
in neighboring Whiteclay, Neb., and also coordinated meetings on gang
violence. He has appeared as a guest on a talk-radio show Means used
to host on Pine Ridge and helped Means in his campaigns for tribal
chair. He came to Washington with a longtime ally -- a white activist
named Naomi Archer, who describes Martin in spiritual terms, as her "brother."

Archer, who lives in North Carolina, is a male-to-female transsexual.
She'd created the Republic of Lakotah's Web site and was here to help
the Lakota garner media coverage. But she and Means locked horns.
Archer insisted that the Lakotans needed to pray before each meeting
they held. Means wrote her off as a meddlesome white person -- and
soon he stripped Archer's ability to update the site. That act so
angered Martin that he stopped working with Means and launched his
own breakaway nation -- Lakota, it's called, sans the "h." Never mind
that it is the same territory as Lakotah.

All this was on the table when Means and I were in Washington, and he
discussed it calmly, saying: "Duane's a free person. He's free to
start his own country." But the situation was more tense than Means
cared to get into. For soon a banner headline appeared on the Web
site. "Duane Martin, Sr.," it read, "represents ONLY himself and is
known for soliciting funds for himself. He is not affiliated with
Republic of Lakotah."

This spring, Duane Martin met me by the roadside on the Pine Ridge
reservation. It was cold outside, but he was wearing an immense pair
of gray shorts and a droopy red T-shirt. His voice was a raspy,
bellowing yell, and, as he sucked at the chewing tobacco lumped in
his lower lip, he vowed to show me the "real reservation. I'll let
you see things that Russell Means don't even know about," he said.

We climbed into my rental car -- and then, when I buckled my seat
belt, Martin erupted in protest. "Leave that buckle alone!" he said.
"Stop acting like a white man! All these constraints, all these
rules. Be free, be free!"

We drove, unbelted, and Martin complained that Means is a "movie
star. He doesn't know what life is like for everyday Indians."

The gripe may be rooted in jealousy. Means is a local celebrity,
recognized wherever he goes on Pine Ridge. But, then again, Martin's
revolutionary propaganda is more populist than Means's. The very name
of his Web site -- lakotaoyate.net -- invokes an Indian word meaning
"people." As designed by Archer, it announces itself as "a place for
all the oyate -- Elders, mothers, fathers, and children."

Martin is already issuing Lakota ID cards, and he claims to have
given out more than 150. He showed me his own. The front bore a
menacing photo of Martin wearing dark sunglasses. On the back, it
gave the cardholder a sense of omnipotence, bearing a disjointed list
of privileges. It read, "a. Diplomat; b. Passport; c. Driving; d.
Hunting; e. Fishing; f. All of the Above."

As I wrote these words down, Martin cackled with glee, rejoicing over
how his card gave Indians a free pass to ignore white society's
niggling rules.

"See," he said. "I'm not [expletive] around, am I?"

We drove on, through a public housing community, Evergreen, in
Means's own town of Porcupine, S.D. The 100 or so houses there, built
in the '70s, were spattered with graffiti, their barren yards awash
in old beer cans and vodka bottles -- all contraband on the dry reservation.

"There are 13 bootleggers in here," Martin said, "and seven dope
dealers. And see all them kids there?" He pointed to a pack of boys
roughly 10 years old. "That's who they sell it to. Them's the kids
who are running around breaking windows. We asked Russell Means to
come to a community meeting here, and he said, 'I've got no time for
that.'?" (Means denies saying this, and says that Martin never
invited him to the meeting.)

Martin had spent months trying to organize Evergreen residents
against the thugs in their midst. This afternoon, he was getting
crime reports from locals. He stopped to chat with a woman named Rose
Never Missed a Shot, and she complained of a neighbor who was selling
vodka to her 17-year-old son. "He got real drunk," she said. "Then,
the people who was selling him the alcohol, they beat my son up,
broke his jaw. When they're drunk like that, I stay up all night."

We went into her small house to look at an X-ray of the fractured
jaw. Sixteen family members lived inside. The interior walls were
pocked with holes. The furnace did not work. The sole source of heat
was the stove, and there was a bucket in the living room to catch the
water that came in through the roof when it rained. A 19-year-old
woman named Tammy Iron Shell was playing with her baby. I asked her
if she supported Means's claim of independence. "Russell Means is
just an old guy who's been in a bunch of movies," she said. "He's
never done nothing for us."

"Tell him to put us on 'Oprah,' " said her sister, Wendy Wallowing
Bull. "Tell him to put us on 'Extreme Makeover.' "

Russell Means lives at a remove from the squalor afflicting most of
Pine Ridge. He owns a large wood-frame house that sits on his own
140-acre horse ranch. The place was built, he says, in 1917 for the
white BIA agent charged with overseeing Pine Ridge. But it's more
dilapidated than palatial. The paint is sun-worn, and there's a
wealth of construction material lying around amid a decade-long
remodeling project.

Still, it is the headquarters of the Republic of Lakotah. I drove up
the long driveway, past the sign warning of video surveillance.

When I arrived, Pearl Means was on the phone. She is a 48-year-old
Navajo who works as a real estate broker. I heard her saying, "Russ
thinks it's going to be a hatchet job."

Means himself was at the kitchen table, glowering. Though Pine Ridge
is larger than Delaware, it functions more like a small town. Means
had received detailed reports on my movements, and he did not like it
that I'd tapped Duane Martin as a tour guide.

Tentatively, I noted that Means seemed to have some detractors.

"There is no employment here," he thundered, "and no businesses.
There is nothing on this reservation. It's like a prison. And what do
you think people in prison start doing? They can't fight against the
authorities oppressing them. The only way they can get out their
frustration is by fighting each other. So yes, there's division here,
but look at your own [expletive] country."

When Means calmed down, he began discussing how, over a lifetime, a
traditional Lakota accrues four names, the last coming when he is
recognized as an elder. "Your own people decide who you are," he
said. "My first name was Brave Eagle, and I tried to live up to it. I
took dares; I wasn't afraid to fight. Then I was Ci--, which is a
male bird out on the Plains, and I was a fancy dance champion. Then,
in 1972, I became Works for the People. I tried to live up to that.
But my fourth name? I'm still waiting for that, and I'm one of the
oldest guys out here. I've outlived almost everybody, but my people
haven't accepted me as an elder."

Eventually, Means wanted to show off one of his proudest achievements
-- the Porcupine Health Clinic, which he helped start, with no help
from the tribal government. We drove into the center of town and met
with the clinic's acting administrator, Floyd White Eyes. Means told
him that he could help out over the summer by staffing the ambulance
with Lakota supporters -- EMTs who'd phoned him from Denver. "You'll
have ambulance service for at least eight weeks," he said. "I can
promise you that."

"That would be great, Russ," said White Eyes. "That'd really help us out."

When we came out of the conference room, there were a few people
sitting in the waiting area -- a young mother with her baby, an old
man, an obese young woman in shorts and a dirty sweatshirt. Means
began moving around the room. Without saying a word, he presumed to
shake the hand of everyone present.

Was he planting campaign seeds, despite himself, or was he simply
exercising a little noblesse oblige? It was unclear, but the moment
seemed expertly scripted. It was as though the film had suddenly
slowed and the sound had been cut, leaving only an essence: Here was
a large man looming unvanquished above the oyate, playing the part of
a stormy, unpredictable king. There was nothing warm or neighborly
about what he was doing, but the performance dominated the room. Each
person there received Means's hand silently and solemnly. The old man
rose to his feet, astonished, as though he was beholding a hurricane.

And then Russell Means said goodbye and walked away into the hills,
up Crazy Horse Drive, toward home.
--

Bill Donahue is a writer living in Portland, Ore. He can be reached
at 20071@washpost.com. He will be fielding questions and comments
about this article Monday at noon .

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