"I Am An American Indian Patriot"
Russell Means - R.I.P. November 10, 1939 - October 22, 2012
Amir Payam (AP).
Russell Means (RM).
RM: I am an American Indian Patriot. We live in a prisoner of war camp, that’s why they call it Reservation. Everything the military, the U.S. military occupies, is a called a reservation. That’s why the solders, when they left their camp in Iraq, they would say were going to the reservation. That’s the mindset, they’re still playing Cowboys and Indians, the military of the United Sates; nothing more than retarded children.
At any rate, ah, with my activism as an American Indian patriot, sometimes it had to be militant – it was always in self-defense. But I fought against the capitalists, the United States of America armed struggle, and I fought against the communists, I fought against the Sandinistas with the Indian people of Nicaragua, ok. I go up and down this hemisphere looking for a Nation of Indian people who want to be free, and guess what I found, it’s my people who wanted to be free.
AP’s Question:
RM: Oh no, the native children’s life is worse. That’s why we have to be free. My mother and father were forced into boarding school. Their hair was cut ,and they had to be put into uniforms and march with everyone else, all the time. They were physically punished and sexually taken advantage of. I know my mother was, and I didn’t find that out until after she died, but the traumatic experience of over eighty years, almost a century, of what they called boarding schools. Tens of thousands of children were starved to death and diseased to death by these boarding schools; were disappeared.
My job, until we are free, will never be over, and that’s what we are in the process of approaching the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to validate our treaties as international documents. Then we are going to be sponsored by a country in this hemisphere, to the world court. United States is not a part of the World Court; it’s an outlaw country. It always has been an outlaw country. It’s evil, to it’s own people, and they don’t see it – it’s pathetic.
AP’s Question:
RM: We are prisoners of war. Legally, that’s what we are. They won’t tell you that. But in order for them to continually violate their constitution and their treaties with us, we have to be prisoners of war, Ok? So the whole idea of what Guantanamo and Bagram comes from the Indian reservations, just like the Nazi, ah, what Hitler called labour camp’s. He wrote the United States of America has a great idea. Apartheid in South Africa, that came here. The West Bank, the whole strategy of the Israeli comes from America.
AP’s Question:
RM: Ha, well it’s very easy when you understand the methodology of the United States of America. Like I’ve always said, we are the Palestinians of America, and the Palestinians are the American Indians of the Middle East; we suffer the same strategy.
AP’s Question:
RM: America has no culture. That’s why it’s greedy. That’s why it’s by itself. That’s why it’s hated. It has no culture. Everyone that comes here comes for one reason – greed. That’s the only reason they come here, and they leave everything behind. Everything! Their land, their culture, their family, their relations, it’s pathetic.
AP’s Question:
RM: Listen, everyone in the international community that has the least bit of sophistication, they, the American people are a joke, a bad joke. Just to go back a few years, twelve years, to the year 2000 when Bush was selected, he wasn’t elected, you know, as, their you go right their, everyone just laughed at the United States. If some other country had done what they did, they would call it a coup and march in their marines.
AP’s Question:
RM: You know, we have a word in our language for the United States of America that stems from an ancient belief of the 'Iktomi', someone who lives backwards, you know. The Iktomi is our devil. We call them the Iktomi, because he is a tricksters, he is not evil; he likes to trick you to make mistakes in life. Well, United States is a devil.
Obama receives the Nobel Peace Prize, and his whole speech is about justifying war - his acceptance speech. I mean “hello”, the world can see Obama for what he is.
{Note on the word “Iktomi” – Iktomi is the trickster figure of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Sioux tribes. The name "Iktomi" literally means "spider," and he is sometimes called Spider or Spider-Man in English, but he is usually depicted as a human man in Sioux legends. Like many Plains Indian trickster figures, Iktomi is a negative role model who behaves as socially inappropriately as possible by Sioux standards. Most Sioux stories about Iktomi are consequently very funny, ranging from light-hearted fables about buffoonish behavior to ribald jokes. But sometimes Iktomi's misbehavior is more serious and violent, and the stories become cautionary tales about the dangers of the world. http://www.native-languages.org/iktomi.htm }
AP’s Question:
RM: It’s only gotten worse, we have no voice. We are a people out of sight, out of mind; Ok! Only when we stand up for ourselves do people begin to hear and listen. Now, I know the history of the white man, I know it from his very beginnings when he was put in Europe, Ok? And I know how he built his country, his America. It’s an insidious evil country based on death, all for corporate greed.
AP’s Question:
RM: The facts are in America history. The United States of America is the only country in the history of the world that’s been at war every year of its existence, Ok. Every year of its existence; a hundred and thirty six years - every year, it’s been at war, sometimes multiple wars.
AP’s Question:
RM: The republic of Lakota, the provisional government that I had, we are promising our people nothing. Our people have been promised everything by Christian missionaries, they’ve been promised everything by government agents, they’ve been promised everything by everyone that wants to make money off of our backs – and we get nothing. So, when we withdrew from our treaties with the United States, we said we are not going to promise our people anything, we’re going to do! We’re going to be an example. And also we want to convince white people who want to be free, and might want to move here, cause there’s white people here. We tell them you have to rule by consensus. You cannot protect individual rights with the majority; cause there’s always a minority. You have to rule by consensus, now you can do it small or you can do it large, but as long as it’s by consensus.
AP’s Question:
RM: Oh, we faced death. We have the lowest life expectancy on earth, on earth - man! We’re worse off than Haiti - health wise and poverty wise. Our men only live to 43.9 years. Now if you take out Aids, take Aids out, and all the other sicknesses. Only eight countries have shorter life spans, and those are all in Africa. So that’s how bad off we are, and in Canada. I mean they feed us filth, that’s all we get to eat. I don’t know, you’ve been on this reservation; we have one grocery store for 1,500 square miles or, about eleven/twelve hundred hectors.
AP’s Question:
RM: Listen, we’re not allowed to run our lives. The Bureau of Indian Affairs of United States Government runs our land and runs are lives. Only twenty-two families control our land, you know, the eleven hundred hectors – just twenty-two families. The rest of us are poor. Those twenty-two families are mostly white people.
AP’s Question:
RM: What I want to do is save our language with the young. We’re trying to establish Lakota only schools, no English allowed. Because as you know, and everyone that knows another language, the English language is very primitive. You cannot adequately translate any language into English because it’s so primitive.
What I have to say to people all over the world is, because I live in the belly of the monster, you have to stay home; you have to improve your world until it’s in balance. And, I don’t understand, I do not understand any religion that condones violence. I just don’t understand that. I know the patriarchal world loves violence. The United States is the perfect example.
