“They were all up on the [Highway] 99 bridge, with rifles, and we could see their rifles kicking, and you could feel the bullets going by; there is nowhere you can go,” said Bennett.
“Your face burned,” remembered Alison Bridges, recalling the tear gas. “It felt like someone put a lighter up to your face. It burned the inside of the mouth [and] the inside of my nose. Once they realized they were able to come in, they came in, and started clubbing everybody.”
“If anyone lays a hand on that net they’re going to get shot,” yelled Bennett.
By the confrontation’s end, roughly sixty people had been arrested. A bridge was charred black. A number of Indians and supporters were recovering from tear gas and beatings. Demonstrators from New York, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and British Columbia were apprehended, but the charges against them were ultimately dropped. Questions of jurisdiction and the size of the Puyallup Reservation remained until a federal court decision in 1974 “fully settled the reservation existence question in favor of the Tribe.”
Nine days after the dramatic raid, Stan Pitkin, U.S. Attorney for Western Washington, filed a complaint at the U.S. courthouse. The federal government, on behalf of Billy and Indians from various tribes, was suing the state of Washington for violating treaties.
The violence on the Puyallup did not cease. In the winter of 1971, vigilantes approached Hank Adams and Mike Hunt, a fisherman, as they tended net near a railroad trestle that crosses the Puyallup River. Adams told police that one assailant shot him at point-blank range. The bullet struck his abdomen at an angle and exited without piercing the stomach cavity. “You . . . Indians think you own everything,” the perpetrator growled.
Hunt, a short distance away, heard the blast from a small caliber rifle. As he ran toward Adams, he saw two white men escaping the scene on foot. “I can’t identify him,” Adams said of the gunman, “but hell, I’ve seen him before. In a thousand taverns, in a thousand churches, on a thousand juries.” Adams eventually sued, accusing authorities of depriving him of his civil rights, failing to aggressively investigate, and spreading false rumors about the crime. Police never arrested Adams’s attackers. Adams moved to dismiss the case, seeking other remedies.
Across the country, tribes continued to unite. In 1972, the newly minted American Indian Movement issued a twenty-point proposal, authored by Adams in Minneapolis. The list of demands called for a new life and a new future for Indian people: “If America has maintained faith with its original spirit, or may recognize it now, we should not be denied.” The demands included “restoration of constitutional treaty-making authority and establishment of a treaty commission to make new treaties.”
Soon afterward, on October 6, 1972, hundreds of Indians left reservations mired in poverty and other problems, in search of solutions and government accountability. They called their cross-country trek to Washington, D.C., the Trail of Broken Treaties.
The idea for the Trail of Broken Treaties was born at the funeral of Richard Oakes, a Mohawk Indian who had occupied Alcatraz Island. Demonstrators pushed for increased funding and more effective Indian programs that would keep pace with the times. The bia, in their view, had become a “dumping ground for incompetent government workers” and was insensitive to the very Indian affairs it promised to protect and serve.
The trek was timed with the last leg of the presidential campaign, the race between Richard Nixon, Republican, and George McGovern, Democrat, which ended in a landslide victory for Nixon. The journey originated in Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco with support from churches—primarily Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Methodists.
At the end of the journey, November 1972, activists chose to occupy the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Adams, organizer and lead negotiator, says the decision to invade was actually made by elders—women living in rat-infested quarters that were offered to the Native Americans. Emotions had ratcheted up among the demonstrators. Adams relates the story: “‘What should we do? What should we do?’—rejecting everything until they said, ‘Let’s take over the Bureau.’ ‘Oh yeah!’”
“First,” Ramona Bennett agrees, “there was never any intent for us to occupy anything [early on]. We were actually told to wait at the bureau building. The Department of Commerce was clearing an auditorium and a gymnasium for us, bringing in military kitchens, shower units and all of that . . . We were told to wait at the bia building and we were attacked by gsa [General Service Administration] guards while we were waiting. We were attacked and then barricaded ourselves in.”
Calling the BIA the Native American Embassy of Washington, demonstrators broke into the building, inverted American flags and destroyed computers. They posted signs—“Aim for Unity. Custer died for your sins.”
They refused to leave, even though two-thirds of the occupants were women and children. “The worst thing the police can tell you is send out the women and children,” Adams says. “The women particularly feel that they can’t go out. If they leave, all these guys will be slaughtered. That’s the best way to assure a standoff, to send out the women and children. The women won’t leave, I’ll tell you that. They wouldn’t leave Wounded Knee, and they wouldn’t leave the BIA building.”
“Them things are direct action things,” Billy says of the occupation. “All of that in that time was direct action. But it was for a cause that got us to where we want to be.”
Adams relates the story from inside the occupation. As he negotiated living arrangements for activists, and a possible exit from the bureau, Indians “prepared the second floor for burning.” A court decision came down that allowed occupants to be removed from the BIA by force, unleashing mayhem.
