Word: matthiessen
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...SPIRIT OF CRAZY HORSE by Peter Matthiessen Viking; 628 pages...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...