Fuckhead student blames Native Elder; repug rep Massie "proud" of racist assholes

What else did you expect?

Entitled little shit spews lies:

A statement has been issued by a student who said he was the youth “confronted by a Native American protestor” in a widely circulated video that provoked intense criticism of Covington Catholic High School over students’ treatment of the elder American Indian.

The backlash against the school was severe and continued Sunday. The Covington Diocese and the school have condemned the students’ behavior, apologized to the Native American and said they were investigating. The incident occurred in Washington D.C. where the students had traveled for a rally.

Nathan Phillips, the Native American standing opposite Sandmann in the video, gave his own account of the events in an interview with the Associated Press. 

The following is the complete statement issued by Nick Sandmann, a junior at Covington Catholic:

I am providing this factual account of what happened on Friday afternoon at the Lincoln Memorial to correct misinformation and outright lies being spread about my family and me. 

I am the student in the video who was confronted by the Native American protestor.

And it gets worse.  Definitely auditioning for the Pumpkin Traitor's next Supreme Court appointment.

Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article224846990.html#storylink=cpy

Billionaire shit shows own racist ass:

Rep. Thomas Massie came to the defense Sunday evening of the students from Covington Catholic High School who were involved in a confrontation with a Native American man this weekend in Washington, D.C.

The Kentucky's 4th District representative, which includes Northern Kentucky where Covington Catholic is located, tweeted that after watching "over an hour" of video on the incident, he believed the students were there participate in the March for Life and got a "brutal lesson in the unjust court of public opinion and social media mobs."

"I urge everyone to watch the other videos before passing judgement. Would you have remained that composed at that age under those circumstances?" he said on Twitter.

Massie added that it was his honor "to represent them."

Of course the MAGA bully was "composed"; he was the one committing the intimidation.

Catlick Pieces of Shit From KY Show Their Racist Asses in D.C.

UPDATE Below.

Yeah, tell me again what a positive force in the world is religion. 

From Crooks and Liars:

So yesterday this happened at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. MAGA-wearing prep school boys taunting a Native Elder is pretty much symbolic of this entire disgusting era of Trump.

(Also the continuation of 500 years of Catlick abuse of Native people worldwide.)

Shameful.

Details are unclear, but it appears that an entire class from a private, all male boys school (Covington Catholic High School in Covington, Kentucky) were the culprits. Apparently they were bussed in to attend the March for Life event, the same thing the Pences attended.

Source: Indian Country Today

Native Twitter has gone ablaze as a Native American elder singing the AIM Song in Washington DC during the Indigenous Peoples March was ridiculed, taunted and mocked by a group of non-Native youth.

The video, which was posted by YouTube account holder KC NOLAND, was also screen captured and shared on other social media accounts with views shortly gaining tens of thousands of views.

The elder is Nathan Phillips, an Omaha elder who is also a Vietnam Veteran and former director of the Native Youth Alliance. He is also a keeper of a sacred pipe and holds an annual ceremony honoring Native American veterans in the Arlington National Cemetery.

 Click over to watch the disgusting videos.

UPDATE: Apologies and expulsions, my ass.  This is nowhere near enough.

“the behavior is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person.”

Are you FUCKING kidding me?  Those kids were there for the "March for Life."  You know, the one that advocates forced birth because uterine tumors are more important than the adult women who want to be free of them. The school took them there to teach them that women are just incubators.  Not really fully human.

Just like the Native they abused.

Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/news/local/article224806590.html#storylink=cpy

Thanksgiving Funny/Sad

Via Wonkette  Commenter Memzilla:

Murder at Standing Rock

Of course the cavalry is torturing indians to death.  That's what they've always done and always will do to people standing in the way of corporate profits.

PZ Myers:

It’s definitely winter up here in the upper Midwest. The temperature is right around freezing, there’s at least 15cm of snow on the ground, and the roads and sidewalks are slick with hard-packed ice. And they’re using water cannons on protesters at Standing Rock.

This is not just cruel — it’s dangerous. I’m sure residents of the Dakotas are just as conscious of the risks of getting wet outside in frigid weather as we are here in the slightly more urban state of Minnesota. You just don’t do that. You can kill people in this weather.

And of course they’re using rubber bullets and tear gas, and roughing up protesters and throwing them in dog kennels.

She told me that they were arrested at a prayer ceremony lead by camp elders, and that she had been slammed to the ground by uniformed officers with shields and helmets that kept her from distinguishing whether they were law enforcement or national guard.

“It was three against one, that’s their strategy,” she said, “there’s tear gas in the air everywhere. They didn’t fire it directly at me, but it’s everywhere.”

I was told that when they were arrested, they weren’t read their rights until after they spent a day in jail.

Her description of the arrest matched my student’s description. She told me they were bussed to a facility where they were kept in dog cages with urine stains on the floor, pictures of dogs hung on the walls. Women were separated from men with chain link fencing and a tarp.

They said their phones and money were confiscated, the money seized and turned into procurement cards and calling cards, allegedly without consent. The balance was not returned upon release, she said.

The state of the jail uniforms made the women feel vulnerable, she said, and the tarp separating the women from the view of the camp’s men exacerbated that feeling. She went on to tell me they were strip-searched.

“It was just turn your head and cough, just spread your cheeks and cough, but they didn’t tell us what they were going to, so when the woman approached me with rubber gloves on, I braced for a body cavity search. It’s worse not knowing, you know?”

America! This is what we’re like before the orange fascist takes power. What’s it going to be like next year?

You can still donate to the Standing Rock Sioux, and they’re going to need it. It takes courage and dedication to confront this kind of oppression.

 Update from Democracy for America:

 Last night, the brave leaders and protesters fighting for Native American rights against the Dakota Access Pipeline came under a brutal and violent attack by local police. We need your help right now to get President Obama to step in and stop these horrible attacks.

Police attacked the protest camp near Standing Rock with tear gas, rubber bullets, concussion grenades, and even water cannons. Using water cannons in below-freezing temperatures puts people at risk of hypothermia. Hundreds of protesters were hospitalized, with several in serious condition.

President Obama has less than 60 days left in office -- that means time is running out to get him to stop these police attacks, and stop the pipeline. People across the country are calling the White House today -- will you join them and call President Obama right now?

YES, I will call President Obama at (202) 456-1111 -- and tell him to step in to stop the attacks on protesters and stop the pipeline. (Click here to report the results of your call)

No, I can't call (or I got a busy signal) -- but I will contribute directly to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe's Dakota Access Pipeline Donation Fund.

The Dakota Access Pipeline is a $3 billion pipeline designed to carry fracked oil from North Dakota to Illinois -- meaning it would cross underneath the Missouri River, the longest river on the continent. A leak in the pipeline would have the potential to destroy the drinking water supply for millions of people who live downstream.

Time and time again, the U.S. government has disrespected and disregarded the treaties it made with native communities. We cannot let them get away with it again. And not only would the Dakota Access Pipeline violate sacred lands, it would open up the entire region to a rapid expansion of fracking activities, with potentially catastrophic results for the indigenous people who live there.

Bold, inspiring protests led by the Standing Rock Sioux and other indigenous communities have managed to successfully stall the pipeline for months. The Obama administration and the Army Corps of Engineers put it on pause for more review. But local police have decided they won't wait, and have unleashed a brutal assault on the protesters, native land and our environment.

Enough is enough. We need to stand with the Standing Rock Sioux and the #NoDAPL protesters until the threat of this pipeline has been completely eliminated. Will you call President Obama?

Verdicts A Whiter Shade of Pale

Charlie Pierce:

There is a cruel, stupid irony about living in a country when, on the same day, a bunch of gun-toting rubes who have less understanding of the Constitution than a wombat does of nuclear fusion get acquitted after an armed takeover of federal property in Oregon while, half a country away, peaceful protesters doing nothing but praying on land to which they have a right guaranteed by treaty get rousted, roughed up, and hauled away by a militarized police force acting largely at the behest of a private company. For those of you who are sorry you missed the last Gilded Age, hang in there. You're going to get your wish fairly soon.

The white privilege embedded in the two competing narratives is almost too garish to contemplate, and it is beyond argument.

"Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because, more than any other, it is uniquely American"

In other words, Mr. President, the gold-seekers in Jamestown and the god-botherers at Plymouth were the original undocumented immigrants.



Full transcript here:

Slice the Mythology Out of Thanksgiving

Not happy feasters eager to share and be friends, but invaders bent on genocide.

Tim Weed at TPM:

It’s what might be called the Thanksgiving Myth — and it’s not wildly off base as far as it goes. But some important context is missing. This is a problem, because a nation’s foundational mythology determines its self-image and deeply affects the behavior of its government and citizenry.

From 1616 to 1619, a series of virgin-soil epidemics spread by European trading vessels ravaged the New England seaboard, wiping out up to 95 percent of the Algonkian-speaking native population from Maine to Narragansett Bay. The coast was a vast killing zone of abandoned agricultural fields and decimated villages littered with piles of bones and skulls. This is what the Pilgrims encountered when they landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. Not a pristine wilderness, but the devastated ruins of a once-thriving culture, a haunting boneyard which English libertine Thomas Morton later described as a “newfound Golgotha.”

Between the freakazoid Puritans who viewed the natives as demons, and the slightly later thieves desperate for land, what Native Americans remained to assert ownership quickly became a convenient enemy.

In May of 1637, colonists from Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay, with a group of their Indian allies, set fire to a fortified Pequot stronghold on the Mystic River. An estimated 700 Pequots perished, mostly women and children, and the few survivors were shipped to Bermuda and sold into slavery. On the heels of the virgin-soil epidemics that had decimated the native population, the ghastly specter of genocide had reached the shores of America. In 1675, bloody King Phillip’s War put the finishing touches on what was more or less the total extermination of the eastern woodland Indians.

It is an inescapable fact, therefore, that this proud country was born in the aftermath of a shameful ethnic cleansing that is largely absent from the collective memory. It behooves us to refresh that memory. How would the current debate over immigration change, for example, if it were to be conducted in the light of a more honest consideration of our own deepest origins? Would self-righteous distinctions about “legal” vs. “illegal” immigrants have the same emotional currency? Recent popular histories such as Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower and Jill Lepore’s The Name of War have taken us some distance in this process of revision, but we need to keep telling ourselves the true story until it is enshrined in our national consciousness. It’s high time we updated the Thanksgiving Myth.

Rosebud Lakota to XL Pipeline: You. Shall. Not. Pass.

A: They're Lakota, not "Sioux."

B: They're not fucking around.

The Guardian:

A Native American tribe in South Dakota has called a congressional vote to approve the Keystone XL pipeline an “act of war” and vowed to close the reservation’s borders if the US government tries to install a pipeline there.

The prospective route for the pipeline, which would connect Canadian tar sands fields to the Gulf coast, runs through the 922,759-acre (1,442 sq mi) Rosebud Sioux reservation in south-central South Dakota. The House of Representatives voted 252-161 on Friday to approve the pipeline.

“I pledge my life to stop these people from harming our children and our grandchildren and our way of life and our culture and our religion here,” the tribe president, Cyril Scott, said on Monday. He represents one of nine tribal governments in the state.

Scott said he will close the reservation’s borders if the government goes through with the deal, which is scheduled to come up for a Senate vote on Tuesday.

SNIP

Scott said the creation of the pipeline would violate the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, an agreement between the Sioux and the US government allocating parts of the Dakota territory to the Sioux. He also said he has not been consulted by the US government or TransCanada, the Canadian company behind the 1,700-mile pipeline.

“Did I declare war on our government? No I did not,” said Scott. “Did I declare war on the Keystone XL pipeline? Hell yeah I did.”

Happy Just Another Monday

Because enough with this shit.

Like Wild Salmon? Thank Billy Frank.

Not that it kept the despoiling motherfuckers from fighting any dirtier, but I remember when the leadership of Native American activists brought instant gravity, passion and attention to overlooked local issues.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Billy Frank, Jr., the Nisqually fishing rights advocate, has died at the age of 83. Frank was a key figure in pressing Native American fishing claims in Washington during the 1960s and 1970s. This was a time with plummeting salmon runs thanks to industrialization, stream bed and water degradation, and massive overfishing. Of course, the region’s native peoples had absolutely no responsibility for any of this. But as has often happened in American history, hunting laws punished the poor and people of color for subsistence hunting off a population in decline because of white overharvesting. By the 1970s, increased white liberal support for Native American rights led to a lot of real gains, including fishing rights in the Northwest. Frank was a central figure in this history and deserves to be remembered.

QOTD

Alex Ruthrauff, at Wonkette, re the Nevada asshole who thinks he's entitled to steal forage from government land:

The unhouseled spirits of Native Americans and African slaves, robbed and murdered by the uncountable millions, could not be reached for comment.

This Happened. In the Year 2014.

I can't even ....

Charles Pierce:

...the latest assault on religious liberty in that state's "government schools."

An Oklahoma high school suspended a 15-year-old student after accusing her of casting a magic spell that caused a teacher to become sick, lawyers for the student said on Friday.The American Civil Liberties Union said it had filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on behalf of student Brandi Blackbear, charging that the assistant principal of Union Intermediate High School in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, suspended her for 15 days last December for supposedly casting a spell. The suit also charged the Tulsa-area Union Public Schools with repeatedly violating Blackbear's civil rights by seizing notebooks she used to write horror stories and barring her from drawing or wearing signs of the pagan religion Wicca. "It's hard for me to believe that in the year 2000 I am walking into court to defend my daughter against charges of witchcraft brought by her own school," said Timothy Blackbear, Brandi's father...Joann Bell, executive director of the ACLU's Oklahoma chapter, said the "outlandish accusations" had made Blackbear's life at school unbearable. "I, for one, would like to see the so-called evidence this school has that a 15-year-old girl made a grown man sick by casting a magic spell," Bell said.

For the sake of hope for the future of humanity, I'm going to assume that the accusation of - are you fucking kidding me - witchcraft is really a bullshit cover for getting rid of a Native American In Possession of a Vagina who persisted in non-conformist behavior.

Otherwise, we really are doomed, and the final global warming catastrophe can't happen soon enough.

December 29, 1890

Shame on me for missing this yesterday.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

123 years ago today, on December 29, 1890, the United States Army massacred between 150 and 300 Lakota at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, effectively ending the active military engagements of the wars of American conquest. We might not even call Wounded Knee a military engagement given that this was Lakota (and other Plains tribes) resistance as apocalyptic religious movement rather than warfare. But some Lakota did have guns and about 25 U.S. soldiers were killed.

Of course, that was hardly the last violence committed against Native Americans, including the allotment of their land, corruption at the BIA, Indian schools and the suppression of native religions and languages, the stealing of natural resources, and termination in the 1950s. Take a moment to remember how our nation was built on the wanton murder of indigenous peoples.

When I was in high school, it was a rite of passage to read Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, especially after the AIM takeover of the site 40 years ago. If you haven't read it, do it now. Drone strikes and the NSA spying will not seem so surprising afterwards.

Apartheid Worse Than South Africa's Still Thrives in Australia

Although this reminds me not so much of South Africa as of the continuing genocide of Native Americans.

John Pilger at Counterpunch:

Today, Aboriginal children are again being stolen from their families. The bureaucratic words are “removed” for “child protection”. By July 2012, there were 13,299 Aboriginal children in institutions or handed over to white families. Today, the theft of these children is now higher than at any time during the last century. I have interviewed numerous specialists in child care who regard this as a second stolen generation. “Many of the kids never see their mothers and communities again,” Olga Havnen, the author of a report for the Northern Territory government, told me. “In the Northern Territory, $80 million was spent on surveillance and removing kids, and less than $500,000 on supporting these impoverished families. Families are often given no warning and have no idea where their children are being taken. The reason given is neglect  – which means poverty. This is destroying Aboriginal culture and is racist. If apartheid South Africa had done this, there would have been an uproar.”

In the town of Wilcannia, New South Wales, the life expectancy of Aborigines is 37 – lower than the Central African Republic, perhaps the poorest country on earth, currently racked by civil war. Wilcannia’s other distinction is that the Cuban government runs a literacy programme there, teaching young Aboriginal children to read and write. This is what the Cubans are famous for – in the world’s poorest countries. Australia is one of the world’s richest countries.

I filmed similar conditions 28 years ago when I made my first film about indigenous Australia, The Secret Country. Vince Forrester, an Aboriginal elder I interviewed then, appears in my new film, Utopia. He guided me through a house in Mutitjulu where 32 people lived, mostly children, many of them suffering from otitis media, an infectious, entirely preventable disease that impairs hearing and speech. “Seventy per cent of the children in this house are partially deaf,” he said. Turning straight to my camera, he said, “Australians, this is what we call an abuse of human rights.”

The majority of Australians are rarely confronted with their nation’s dirtiest secret.  In 2009, the respected United Nations Special Rapporteur, Professor James Anaya, witnessed similar conditions and described government “intervention” policies as racist. The then Minister for Indigenous Health, Tony Abbott, told him to “get a life” and stop listening to “the victim brigade”.  Abbott is now the prime minister of Australia.

In Western Australia, minerals are being dug up from Aboriginal land and shipped to China for a profit of a billion dollars a week. In this, the richest, “booming” state, the prisons bulge with stricken Aboriginal people, including juveniles whose mothers stand at the prison gates, pleading for their release.  The incarceration of black Australians here is eight times that of black South Africans during the last decade of apartheid.

When Nelson Mandela was buried this week, his struggle against apartheid was duly celebrated in Australia, though the irony was missing. Apartheid was defeated largely by a global campaign from which the South African regime never recovered. Similar opprobrium has seldom found its mark in Australia, principally because the Aboriginal population is so small and Australian governments have been successful in dividing and co-opting a disparate leadership with gestures and vacuous promises.  That may well be changing. A resistance is growing, yet again, in the Aboriginal heartland, especially among the young. Unlike the US, Canada and New Zealand, which have made treaties with their first people, Australia has offered gestures often wrapped in the law. However, in the 21^st century the outside world is starting to pay attention. The specter of Mandela’s South Africa is a warning.

Despite Obamacare Success, Kentucky Still Infested With Elected Conservatards in Possession of Twitter Accounts

Do they not realize that reporters can read their twits? Or are they genuinely proud of twatted crap like this?

Joe Sonka last week at Fat Lip:

We’re rapidly approaching the Thanksgiving holiday, and with that in mind, state Rep. Brian Linder, R-Dry Ridge, decided to share his thoughts on the season via Twitter:

Wait… Did he really… No…

After a brief Twitter firestorm, Linder deleted the tweet, giving me this explanation:

Uh huh. So it had nothing to do with Pilgrims defending themselves from — or genocidal elimination of — Native Americans, rather how “gun control” advocates want to ban turkey hunting? I’ve heard of legislation to make background checks stronger to prevent violent felons and people on terrorist watch lists from purchasing guns, and I’ve heard of legislation banning the sales of assault weapons and large capacity clips, but I’ve never actually heard of legislation to confiscate shotguns and outlaw turkey hunting, I must say.

LEO spoke with state Rep. Reginald Meeks, D-Louisville, who is of Native American ancestry, about Linder’s comments. Meeks says that he is “flabbergasted,” but hopes that it will provide a “teachable moment” about American history:

“Let’s take this as a teachable moment. The fact of the matter is, it wasn’t guns or weapons that ensured the survival of the Pilgrims. It was the fact that native people taught them how to hunt, taught them what to hunt, taught them how to plant, what to plant, when to harvest, what to harvest, how to build shelters. All of those survival skills they needed were taught to them by Native Americans. From the native standpoint – he said if they had gun control we wouldn’t have Thanksgiving – the fact of the matter is, if native people had better immigration policies, we wouldn’t have Thanksgiving…

So let’s take this as a teachable moment, and hopefully this representative, and others who share that ideology that guns and the use of guns will solve all problems, let’s hope they will take this as a moment to learn the facts and the truth. And that’s the only way we can take something as arrogant and misinformed as that statement and try to make it a teachable moment…

He’s just reflecting an attitude that exists in this country that believes pro-gun ideology is the solution to every problem. And as long as this country has that ideology, we will continue to come into conflict with ourselves and others on the outside of this country. And it’s just amazing that here we are in 2013, and those ideas are still pervasive.”

A Real American Immigration Policy

I have two things to say about the immigration debate:

1)  If you can get any part of your body across the border and you want to be a citizen, done. You're a citizen.  This is the immigration policy that built this country, the immigration policy under which the ancestors of most Americans entered the country, and the only immigration policy that is both humane and sensible.

2) If you disagree with the above policy approach and you are not a 100 percent full-blooded Native American Indian, shut the fuck up.

Precisely

Indian Country Today:

Beware pissed-off Indians—especially the ones pushing strollers.

At a rally in Tucson, protesters who were apparently voicing their disdain for illegal immigants got an earful from a Native who may just have reached his breaking point. In the video below, a man with a child in a stroller engages the crowd, and doesn't mince his words:

"You're all fucking illegal!" he says.

"We didn't invite none of you here," he continues. "Get on with your bogus argument."

He also points to the American flag and says it "stands for all the Native Americans you killed to plant your houses here."

Click for video.

Via Firedoglake.

Repugs Just Can't Get Enough Rape

And when even white society starts to frown on raping the white wimmins and the colored wimmins and even the messican wimmins ... well, there's only one place left real men can go to show the squaws who's boss.

This is everywhere, but marindenver at Rumproast has the best take.

The failure of Congress to renew the Violence Against Women Act or VAWA has kind of dropped off the radar but is getting some attention again as it will expire at the end of the month otherwise.

As you may recall the Senate passed the bill routinely (which is something to remember as it’s one of the few they have lately) but the Rethuglicans in the House are hung up on the fact that the bill has additional provisions for women who are traditionally more at risk for being assaulted - undocumented immigrants, lesbian women and Native American women.  Which is charming of them but, sad to say, not a surprise in today’s political climate.

Apparently Joe Biden, one of the authors of the original bill, has been working quietly with Eric Cantor, House Majority Leader, to try and resolve the issue.  That some progress is actually being made in these negotiations is probably less to do with Repubs really caring that these women risk violence in their lives on a regular basis and more to do with starting to realize that they are being rejected by pretty much every constituency except middle aged white guys.

And maybe that’s part of the explanation for the final hang-up. 

But two sources familiar with negotiations on VAWA, both of whom requested anonymity given the sensitive nature of talks, have told HuffPost that Cantor is refusing to accept any added protections for Native American women that would give expanded jurisdiction to tribes, and is pressuring Democrats to concede on that front. There does seem to be room to negotiate with Cantor on the other two provisions relating to LGBT and undocumented immigrant protections, the sources say.

Cantor’s spokespeeps deny this but Senator Patrick Leahy, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee has a different story.

Meanwhile, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the author of the Senate VAWA bill, went to the Senate floor on Thursday and plainly announced that House Republican leaders are blocking his bill “because of their objections to [the] ... tribal provision.”

Leahy explained the provision, probably the least understood of the three additions in the Senate bill: It gives tribal courts limited jurisdiction to oversee domestic violence offenses committed against Native American women by non-Native American men on tribal lands. Currently, federal and state law enforcement have jurisdiction over domestic violence on tribal lands, but in many cases, they are hours away and lack the resources to respond to those cases. Tribal courts, meanwhile, are on site and familiar with tribal laws, but lack the jurisdiction to address domestic violence on tribal lands when it is carried out by a non-Native American individual.

That means non-Native American men who abuse Native American women on tribal lands are essentially “immune from the law, and they know it,” Leahy said.

SNIP

So there you have it.  The official position of the Republican party is that violence against Native American women does not count as a crime when the attacker is a white guy.  And no white guy should have to be tried in a tribal court.

SNIP

 I don’t know, each time I think Republicans have hit rock bottom as human beings they manage to chisel their way down a little deeper.

Your mistake there, mar, is starting with the assumption that they are human beings.

See also Wonkette and Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

SNAP

Another bulls-eye from Divine Irony:

RIP, Russell Means

Criminal lawyers have a standard response to character attacks on their witnesses: priests and nuns rarely witness violent crimes. 

 

In the same way, leaders of civil and human rights movements are rarely polite, soft-spoken, diplomatic types.

 

The disgraceful treatment of Native Americans in the 1960s demanded someone loud, rude and willing to at least threaten violence.

 

It demanded Russell Means.  

From the Boston Globe:

Russell Means never shunned attention. Whether leading Native Americans in railing against broken federal treaties, appearing in a Hollywood blockbuster or advocating a sovereign American Indian nation within U.S. borders, the activist who helped lead the 1973 uprising at Wounded Knee reveled in the spotlight. 

But it was only on his terms. Openly critical of mainstream media, the onetime leader of the American Indian Movement often refused interviews and verbally blasted journalists who showed up to cover his public appearances. Instead, he chose to speak to his fan base through YouTube videos and blog posts on his personal website.

When he did speak out publicly, he remained steadfast in his defense of AIM. He found himself dogged for decades by questions about the group’s alleged involvement in the slaying of a tribe member and the several gun battles with federal officers during the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee, but denied the group ever promoted violence.

‘‘You people who want to continue to put AIM in this certain pocket of illegality, I can’t stand you people,’’ Means said, lashing out an at audience member question during an April gathering commemorating the uprising’s 40th anniversary. ‘‘I wish I was a little bit healthier and a little bit younger, because I wouldn’t just talk.’’

Means, who announced in August 2011 that he had developed inoperable throat cancer but told The Associated Press he was forgoing mainstream medical treatments in favor of traditional American Indian remedies, died early Monday at his ranch in in Porcupine, S.D., Oglala Sioux Tribe spokeswoman Donna Salomon said. He was 72.

Read the whole thing.