An Angry Young Man No More : Now 55, Indian Activist/Actor Russell Means Has Turned From Seething Rage to Teaching Serenity

It may be symbolic of our age that Russell Means, one of the biggest, baddest, meanest, angriest, most famous American Indian activists of the late 20th century--a man who with other warriors faced off federal agents at Wounded Knee, S.D., during a 71-day siege in 1973; who helped take over the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in Washington a year earlier; and who once climbed Mount Rushmore to pee on George Washington’s stone face--is now the voice of Chief Powhatan in the animated Disney adventure “Pocahontas.”

The voice is deep and reassuring, full of reason, temperance and wisdom--all qualities few ever expected from Russell Means.

Now he’s touring Europe for Disney; emceeing Mother Earth’s Day at the Anne Arundel County Fairgrounds; singing “There Ain’t No Prison for a Corporation” and other songs on CDs.

At 55, Means seems to be moving briskly down new trails.

“I’m on my way to Elderhood,” he says with a somewhat cheerful grin during a visit here to promote his autobiography, “Where White Men Fear to Tread” ( St. Martin’s Press”), written with Marvin J. Wolf.

“My life has been a life of passion, and I’m still a voice for traditional Indian people, for freedom-seeking Indian people. [But] I love being the age I am; you become so liberated from the misconceptions of youth.”

In the past few years, Means says, he’s been enjoying genuine “self-esteem” and “inner peace.” He sees that “there is goodness in the world, not just evil,” and he hopes to inspire his people with a new sense of serenity. Perhaps most astonishingly, Means now says he feels genuine sympathy for modern white people, who he thinks suffer from an immense “spiritual void.”

“I was surprised to see that some of those rich people and executives could remember meeting their grandparents only once or twice. Others didn’t know their great-grandparents’ names,” he writes of his 30-day stint in a residential anger recovery program at Cottonwood de Tucson in 1991 (he lives in Chinle, Ariz., and Porcupine, S.D.).

“I came to understand that life is not about race or culture or pigmentation or bone structure,” says Means. “It’s about feelings. That’s what makes us human beings.”

His transformation to tranquillity, if that’s what it is, came just in time. He’d been dangerously full of “silent, seething anger,” he told a rapt audience at a Washington, D.C., bookstore.

“I could feel it coming out of every pore,” he said. “I knew I’d have a fiery death and be a martyr for my people.”

He’d even made a list, included in the book, of those he planned to slaughter: “chairmen of tribal governments who had collaborated in the BIA’s dirty work . . . tribal judges and BIA police. I planned to kill a few rednecks at random, too, just the way they have butchered South Dakota Indians for generations. Most of the whites I wanted dead were U.S. congressmen, senators, federal and state appellate judges--the most visible proponents of the institutionalized racism . . . I even developed scenarios for each killing.”

But the Great Mystery intervened, as it often had in his life, to bring good out of insanity: This time it was in the form of a therapist, a Catholic nun whom his wife was seeing for their marital problems. The therapist urged him to get help--not just to save his marriage to Gloria, but for himself.

“I reasoned that since I had a white man’s kind of problem,” he writes, “maybe I should try a white man’s kind of solution.”

Apparently it worked; now Means believes he’s found a powerful new weapon in his lifelong struggle.

“With honesty and with therapy,” he writes, “my people can be made whole again.”

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In person, Means still projects that sheer dangerous physicality of the big, angry man. You can hear him breathing, the way you often can with big guys even when they’re at rest.

Means is still plenty angry about the breaking of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 by the white man; the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 by U.S. Army troops firing Hotchkiss machine guns at unarmed men, women and children; and all the ensuing depredations and broken promises down the decades.

Means, the first national director of the American Indian Movement (AIM), has no interest in being a cigar store Indian, a “hang-around-the-fort Indian,” as he likes to say.

To this day, he relates, “women--never men--come up to me when I’m wearing braid ties and grab my braids. . . . That’s a violation of my person, and I have learned a way to stop it. When a woman grabs my braid and says, ‘Oh, how cute!’ I grab her breast and say, ‘Oh, how cute!’ ”

Means’ interactions with women are extensively detailed in his book. We learn that he has 13 children, 18 grandchildren and has had Lord only knows how many wives and mistresses. When he first met Gloria, an Omaha-Navajo, at a dance, Means instantly proposed.

“I’m already married!” she replied.

“I don’t care,” Means told her. “He’s only a white man.”

It worked.

The book may not measure up to “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” as St. Martin’s Press had hoped, but the author’s effort at honesty seems sincere.

Born an Oglala/Lakota on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota to an alcoholic father and a mother who subjected him to “relentless beatings,” he was raised there and in California and soon took to a life of shiftless boozing, drugging, womanizing and crime.

“I was a bum,” he writes.

His transformation into a radical activist and thence into his current supposedly spiritually awakened state as an aspiring movie star--he got his start when a casting director called him out of the blue for the role of Chingachgook in “The Last of the Mohicans” in 1991, appealing to his childhood fantasy of making “movies where the Indians win”--are chronicled in excruciating and occasionally delightful detail for 554 pages. Yet the question still lingers: Is Means in fact a saint-in-progress, or a hustler by new means?

“I look at Russell as being one of those pivotal Indian figures who’s been able to bring far more visibility to Native American issues and problems, and for that act alone all of us in the Indian community are in his debt,” says W. Richard West Jr., director of the National Museum of the American Indian.

If this seems circumspect, West is quick to say he doesn’t know Means personally but admires his accomplishments from afar. “For the first time in our long history,” West says, “he began bringing focus to the issues of 2 million Native Americans living in urban areas.”

Tim Giago, the Rapid City editor and publisher of Indian Country Today, the largest American Indian newspaper in the nation, knows Means personally and is definitely not an admirer.

“I was just having a staff meeting,” Giago says by phone, “and we were talking about whether any of us knew of any very strong militant of another race who had stopped being a militant and become an actor . . . I think Russell has used his notoriety to benefit himself on more than one occasion.”

Giago, who was born and raised on the Pine Ridge reservation, also thinks Means “brought himself into situations where there was no problem and became the problem. . . . They took over [Wounded Knee], where I used to live as a boy, where my father worked as a butcher, where 25 homes housed Lakota people, and the village and trading post were completely destroyed.”

Suzan Shown Harjo, president of the Morning Star Institute, a native peoples culture and arts organization, has given some thought to balancing the bitterness, which Giago is not alone in feeling, against Means’s accomplishments.

“Russell gave visibility and heart to a lot of Indian people at a time when that was sorely needed,” she says, “at a time when he was very new to the world of broader Indian issues, and it was a sacrifice for him, and he made many errors, but not a whole lot of fouls.”

She is, in short, sympathetic.

And realistic: “One of the great sadnesses for Russell is that he never enjoyed the trust of the people. . . . He wasn’t in tribal government. Russell is a media-made figure. He was the available warrior poster boy for that time, when much of America needed that Indian who looked that way--to love and to hate, but mostly to fear.”

She thinks his political abilities “as a performer and projector and articulator” have helped him as an actor.

Means tends to agree. The movies, he writes, offer him “a better way to get messages about my people to the world. Ours is a celebrity-driven society. . . . After my decades of devotion to my people, the Great Mystery had led me to a place where what I had to say would have more credibility.”

*

“When I was a boy, the Missouri ran wild and free,” Means writes in one of the sweeping romantic passages that mark his autobiography. “My mother’s father told me then that in his grandfather’s time, our people were as free as the Missouri. On a sea of rolling grassland stretching a thousand miles east to west and another thousand north to south, we roamed as we pleased, raising our children, living our lives in total harmony with nature, a sovereign people worshiping Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery, who created everything and put us here to live on our Grandmother, the earth.”

Freedom has always been Means’ war cry--freedom from political oppression by what he terms the white man’s “fascist government,” from economic exploitation and the despoliation of nature, from cultural stereotypes that have portrayed his people as less than human.

Yet until he entered treatment at Cottonwood, Means had scarcely imagined that his ultimate liberation would be from himself and the anger that imprisoned him.

“I was ill-tempered, impatient, filled with rage, a demanding perfectionist who always sought control,” he writes. “I was a liar, a fake. I was undependable.”

He talks happily about his painful experiences, about how working through his defects and understanding his “family of origin” led to an unexpected “peace of mind, the exhilaration of freedom, the bursting of bonds. It felt so good!”

As he faces the mature years of life, he’s planning to carry the message home by establishing a school and a therapeutic treatment center on his father’s land back at Pine Ridge.

The school, to be called University of the Universe, will teach Lakota culture and science along the lines of Yellow Thunder Camp, a spiritual youth camp that Means founded in the Black Hills in 1980.

“I know my future is to reestablish the family system of the Lakota on the reservation,” he says. “Reinstating self-dignity and self-pride, that’s the legacy I want to leave.”