Black Hills

By J.D. Reed

IN THE SPIRIT OF CRAZY HORSE by Peter Matthiessen Viking; 628 pages; $20.95

For more than 20 years, Novelist and Naturalist Peter Matthiessen has been a powerful voice crying in, and about, the wilderness. With unruffled grace he has defended threatened species such as the African rhino (Sand Rivers) and a Stone Age tribe in New Guinea (Under the Mountain Wall), whose territory is being claimed by industrialized societies. In his 15th book, however, the author explores a tragedy closer to home. The territory is the Great Plains, and the endangered species is the American Indian.

The threat to the first Americans demands something more than mere polemic. Unfortunately, that is chiefly what Matthiessen offers. According to In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, the Indians, who have been exploited since the white man's arrival, are currently being manipulated by "huge energy consortiums" with everything from lavish handouts to hushed-up homicides for mineral rights to reservation land.

Mining has always added to the misery of reservation life. When gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1874, for instance, authorities looked away while prospectors dug on land owned by the Sioux. The sculptures of Mount Rushmore still speak with forked tongues to the large Indian population of the area. The late Lakota Chief John Fire Lame Deer claimed that the stone faces say, "Because we like the tourist dollars we have made your sacred Black Hills into one vast Disneyland . . ."

A century of legal skirmishing solved nothing; the spirits rose again at South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation in June 1975 when militant leaders of the American Indian Movement and federal authorities faced off. It began when agents arrived to arrest a young man for the theft of a pair of boots. But the FBI, claims Matthiessen, saw AIM as a conspiracy against the Government, and matters accelerated beyond reason. In came a "large force of sweating, nervous men in new battle fatigues. After all the smoke and gas had blown away, there was only this solitary Indian, killed much earlier in the day."

But there was more: the bodies of two FBI agents, apparently executed at close range. Leonard Peltier, a leader of AIM, was convicted of the murders on circumstantial evidence. Employing trial transcripts and FBI documents secured under the Freedom of Information Act, Matthiessen argues that the authorities were out to get Peltier long before the crime and that the FBI infiltrated the movement and provoked anti-AIM sentiment among the majority of law-abiding Indians.

Matthiessen makes Peltier's trial something very like a 1960s-style conspiracy drama. He rehashes an "ambush theory" advanced by the defense and makes too much of the negligent autopsy of a former AIM member. Finally, the author drops all pretense of impartiality: "From the Indian's viewpoint--and increasingly from my own--any talk of innocence or guilt was beside the point."

But in any murder case, culpability is never irrelevant. In his angry righteousness Matthiessen has also discarded his gifts for observation and organization. What is left is an angry and naive John Ford western reversed with mirrors. Here the courageous braves fight the savage cavalry in vivid black and white. The author's defense of the violent in the name of justice is as unthinking as the authorities he attacks. The Lakotas deserve more than inflamed or patronizing words from either side. Instead, readers might consider the recollection of Good Fox, a Lakota brave. That survivor of the Little Big Horn concluded, "Hundreds of books have been written about this battle by people who weren't there. I was there, but all I remember is one big cloud of dust." In the complicated matter of the American Indian, Matthiessen should have cleared the air. Here, he merely adds to the haze.

--By J.D. Reed This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.