Twin Stalemates

The few hundred Indian militants who seized the trading post of Wounded Knee, S. Dak., may have been impelled by contradictory objectives and muddled moralities, but their guerrilla tactics and resolve have proved effective enough. Three weeks after they first took several residents hostage, they were still holding at bay 125 federal marshals, 150 FBI agents and 15 armored personnel carriers. Public sympathy, first with the militants, was slowly drying up. Yet their prime objective had been achieved. National attention had been focused, if fleetingly, on the plight of the Indian in much the same way that it focused on black grievances during civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s.

By last week, Wounded Knee had become nothing short of an insurrection city under siege. Six Indian women cut and stitched old sweaters into socks and headgear for border patrol guards. A pot of herbal medicine cooked on the stove at a makeshift clinic. Carpenters, using an old cash register as a sawhorse, cut lumber to fashion housing cubicles. For the most part, the enclave had taken on a grim look, with trenches, fortifications and garbage all about.

The leaders of the American Indian Movement declared that the 4-sq.-mi. area had seceded from the U.S. The new Oglala nation, they decreed, was on a "war footing" with its mother country. In a burst of ill-considered bravado, AIM Leader Russell Means called for a national pilgrimage of 300,000 outsiders to the area by Easter.

With the free publicity that his statement received, Wounded Knee was threatened by a flood of immigrants--rucksack revolutionaries, Viet Nam veterans and trigger-happy soldiers of misfortune.

Means quickly withdrew the invitation and set quotas on those allowed into the village. So far, only 32 whites and 15 Chicanos have qualified under AIM'S provisions--no freaks, no lazies, no pot smokers, no drinkers. There were no similar quotas or restrictions, however, on journalists; they continued to find themselves uncomfortably welcome in the new nation. Some wondered aloud whether the media were not providing much of AIM'S momentum, for better or worse (see THE PRESS).

Federal agents vacillated between leniency and harshness. In hopes that the Indians would decamp, they lifted their blockades around the area. Few Indians left; instead, several postal inspectors, who had moved in to assess damage to post office facilities, were marched out at gunpoint. The next day, after militants shot an FBI agent in the wrist, the blockades were reimposed, and the situation remained a stalemate. A ground assault by marshals seemed unlikely, with well-armed Indians holed up on a strategic hill. An airborne assault, though more effective, would surely play even more into the Indians' dramatic, martyrizing script.

A solution might have been reached early last week were it not for another stalemate in Washington. This one was between the Justice Department, which had been called in because of possible federal law violations, and the Interior Department, which runs the Bureau of Indian Affairs. That agency is in many ways the core of AIM'S grievances. Justice Department officials and AIM last week reached a tentative agreement, whereby the Indians would lay down their arms and walk out of the camp, if a top Interior Department official would show up at Wounded Knee the following day to negotiate a list of AIM grievances.

Rift. Incredibly, the Interior Department balked. In a state of confusion since the firing of several BIA officials and the illness of Secretary Rogers Morton, who is being treated for prostate cancer, Interior had reacted to the entire Wounded Knee affair with stubbornness. Marvin Franklin, the acting director of the BIA and himself an Indian, said that he would rather quit than talk with AIM leaders. "This is strictly a law-enforcement problem, a Justice Department matter," he told TIME Correspondent David Beckwith. "How can you deal with criminals? How can you handle revolutionaries?"

As the rift between Justice and Interior grew, White House officials became more and more impatient. At week's end they took charge of the Wounded Knee affair for the first time and accepted Assistant Attorney General Harlington Wood's plea that Interior officials be forced to take some action. Franklin was ordered to fly to South Dakota to deal with the Indian leaders. As negotiations progressed, a settlement seemed nearer. But no one was quite as optimistic as Franklin, who declared rather cavalierly before flying from Washington that the situation was "not as serious as those Wild West movies on television would have you believe. All those people on the reservation are related, you see. and they all have a lot of fun."

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