Kalle Benallie
ICT
Stephanie Autumn was 18 years old when she arrived in March 1973 at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. She would turn 19 later that month.
Assigned to the so-called security shack for the American Indian Movement leaders who had occupied the town, she would pray and remember the ceremonies when the firefights erupted.
“To be in a situation where the United States government was firing upon us with artillery, with automatic weaponry, with gas, you can’t describe it,” she said. “It’s like an altered state, that you are at war … And all you could do is just pray and follow instructions and wait for the gunfire to end.”
Autumn, who is White and Hopi, was one of hundreds of women involved in Wounded Knee and more than a dozen behind the lines with the occupation, which started Feb. 27, 1973, and continued for 71 days before ending on May 8, 1973.
She said she was encouraged to go to Wounded Knee by a mentor while she was a student at California State University Northridge in Los Angeles.
“He told me I could always get my education, but this was an opportunity to understand why Creator gave me my life and put me on Earth,” she said.
Today, Autumn, now 68, director of the Tribal Youth Resource Center based in the St. Paul-Minneapolis area, is hoping to attend an anniversary exhibit on the women at Wounded Knee, curated by the Warrior Women Project.
The project will be featured at an all-day event on Saturday, Feb. 25, at Pahin Sinte Owayawa School in Porcupine, South Dakota. It is part of the 50th anniversary commemorations of the occupation, which the project website describes as “this most epic act of resistance that launched the global movement for Indigenous rights.”
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Starting at 11 a.m. Saturday, the project will host an interactive exhibit honoring the women of Wounded Knee, provide live-streamed discussions and presentations, and will continue gathering oral histories. Lunch will be provided by the families of Faith Traversie and Theodora Means.
Project Director Elizabeth Castle, of Shawnee descent, said people have been contacting the project with documents of their grandmothers since the Warrior Women Project announced its involvement in the Wounded Knee anniversary. They are hoping others will reach out as well with their stories.
“We’re not bringing up an exhibit and saying, ‘Here’s the story,’ Castle said. “We’re saying, ‘Based on a lot of research over time that’s been accountable to a community, here’s a part of a story. What else can we add to this story that makes it more complete?’”
The event will also include excerpts from the 2018 film, “Warrior Women,” directed by Castle and Christina D. King, Creek/Seminole, that features Madonna Thunder Hawk and her daughter, Marcy Gilbert.
“It’s very exciting, because to do something like this is quite different,” Castle said. “Normally people install an exhibit in a museum that no one has any say over.”
‘Taking a stand’
After deciding to join the occupation in 1973, Autumn said she packed up her best jewelry and beadwork into a duffel bag, jumped in a car with a couple of people and arrived four days later.
“It was like everyone knew something was happening that was going to change the course of history,” she said. “It was like you felt that people were taking a stand for the land, the people.”
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Autumn had grown up in foster homes in California’s San Fernando Valley and knew some of her father’s family from their visits, but she said felt an immediate sense of belonging. She realized later she felt complete freedom from the U.S. government at Wounded Knee.
“I was part of something I never felt in my whole life,” she said. “And so watching things like Martin Luther King be murdered and civil rights, watching what was going on with the Black Panthers, it just underscored that this was our time.”
She said it was the most meaningful and honorable time in her life.
“There were men and women in the bunkers, men and women in the security shack, men and women going out at night through [the] FBI, U.S. Army perimeters, trying to get food, trying to get supplies,” she said. “I was surrounded by the very best.”
Some of the women there she admired included Geraldine Janis, Ellen Moves Camp, Gladys Bissonette, Lorelei Means and Madonna Thunder Hawk.
“They were frontline hardcore, had a voice, didn’t back down,” she said. “Getting to be in their presence was something.”
A matriarchal presence
Thunder Hawk,of the Oohenumpa band of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, said there wasn’t a conscious effort to make women part of Wounded Knee – they were just there. It was instinctive to be part of the movement.
She said tribal leadership back then was predominantly male because of a colonized way of thinking, but having a strong matriarchal presence was simply tradition and culture.
“Anything that happens in community all revolves around the strong families and the matriarchs,” said Thunder Hawk, now 83. “That’s the way it is.”
Thunder Hawk joined AIM in 1968 and participated in the occupations at Alcatraz, which ended in 1971, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, D.C., in 1972. She also participated in the protests at the Custer County Courthouse in South Dakota in early 1973 and the occupation of Wounded Knee a few weeks later, and she joined the Standing Rock pipeline protests starting in 2016.
Thunder Hawk served as a medic during the Wounded Knee occupation, and would crawl each night out to the bunkers to be there in case anyone was injured.
She has served as a narrator and advisor for the Warrior Women project, as has her daughter.
“Many of the women’s interviews and voices in the archives, they passed on; they’re gone,” she said in a statement on the project website. “And if it wasn’t for the archives, a lot of their stories wouldn’t be known.”
Opening the conversations
The idea for the project has been in the making since November but stems from 25 years of work, when Castle started interviewing important women in the Red Power Movement and the American Indian Movement as part of her doctoral degree from the University of Cambridge.
She was initially interested in how women who didn’t have much social, economic or political power were able to go to the United Nations and enact change – the women who were on the ground, trying to overthrow the Oglala Sioux government and losing their jobs because of it.
“It’s such a big responsibility to have asked for and received the stories of women, especially community-based people,” she said.
Early on in the interviews, Castle said she would ask them about what was written or said about them, and they would be confused.
“We’d start this conversation that really helped generate this way in which people can have a much more active role in their legacy and how important that is,” Castle said.
The collection is made up of approximately 65 individual interviews ranging from two hours to 14 hours per person. Castle said there are still some group interviews in places like Mt. Rushmore, Alcatraz Island and Wounded Knee that are still being processed due to the time length.
The project is encouraging families to share photos or video footage to be archived for future generations.
Among the women interviewed for the project are Regina Brave. A photo of Brave taken during the occupation, showing her sitting outside a building holding a rifle, became one of the iconic photos of the protest.
Brave couldn’t be reached for comment by ICT, but she told the project that she had stepped up to hold a male warrior’s rifle when he went inside the building. The occupation rules prevented anyone from carrying a loaded weapon inside a building, she said.
It was at that point that a news photographer approached her and took her picture. It appeared on front pages across the nation.
“My son, Charles, looked at the picture and said, ‘Mom’s alright. She’s got a gun,’” she said.
The project was made possible by support from NDN Collective and the Mellon Foundation.
Reawakening the spirit
After the occupation ended, Autumn was arrested because there were firearms in the car she was in. She was charged with federal arms violations, but the charges were later dropped.
The occupation changed her outlook on life, she said. Before the occupation, she had thought of teaching, being an interior decorator or a marine biologist, but instead she has spent her life working as an advocate for social and criminal justice and prison reform. She also represented the International Treaty Council and other human rights organizations at the United Nations.
“My life has been dedicated to what I felt was imprinted on me at Wounded Knee,” she said.
Autumn said passing down knowledge through families will help younger generations be informed. It’s a continual work of decolonization.
“Movement is in our mind; a movement is in our action,” she said. “And that action has to be kept alive.”
Autumn said she knows there are a variety of opinions about the American Indian Movement but she sees the value in how Indigenous people are now appearing at the United Nations in New York and in Geneva, Switzerland, at human rights conferences around the world. It was something that didn’t happen until after Wounded Knee in 1973, with the founding of the International Indian Treaty Council almost a year later at the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota.
She also took notice of how Standing Rock “kind of reawakened that spirit again in terms of our people never backed down. Our people are not afraid to stand when they need to stand.”
Autumn’s family continues to fight for change. Some of her grandchildren, her daughter, her youngest son and his father were at Standing Rock.
“My children grew up as American Indian Movement children, teenagers and as adults,” she said. “They don’t know how to look at the world in a different way. It’s a way of how they see their role in terms of fighting for what they can and the way that fits them.”
Autumn occasionally goes back to ceremonies and plans to be at Wounded Knee for its 50th anniversary if weather permits.
“I’ve talked to a couple of Wounded Knee vets and we know we’re not gonna be around for the 75th,” she said. “We know that we need to be really mindful and really intentional leading up to the anniversary because this is it for us, the 50th, in terms of a significant anniversary.”
More info
For more information about the Warrior Women Project, visit the project website. To share your story of Wounded Knee, contact oralhistory@warriorwomen.org.
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