Rapid City Journal Aug 18 2011
PORCUPINE – Russell Means has looked death in the face before.

The former American Indian Movement leader counts nine assassination attempts on his life. He has survived danger, violence and numerous encounters with mortality — from the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation to guerilla wars in Nicaragua — in what he calls his “72 winters” of life.

But these days, the fiery 71-year-old activist turned actor is fighting a new and deadly foe with a different face: cancer of the throat — or esophageal cancer — that has spread to his tongue, lungs and lymph nodes. Doctors told Means last month that the cancer is too advanced for surgery.

Even if surgery had been an option, he would not have chosen it, Means said, since it meant removing his tongue and losing the ability to speak.

There are, he says, some things worse than death. Russell Means without the ability to voice his opinion may be one of them, he said.

He dismissed other treatments offered by mainstream medicine as well — heavy doses of radiation and chemotherapy that would also leave him unable to taste, speak or swallow normally.

“I’m not going to hang on to life under those conditions. No way am I going to hang on for that,” he said during a recent interview in the front yard of his ranch home near Porcupine. Those medical realities along, with other side effects — being fed through a tube and being confined to a wheelchair by extreme fatigue — were “unacceptable options,” he said. “To me, either way that’s a death sentence, or at least a torture sentence.”

One month after his dire diagnosis at a University of California medical center on July 18, Means is turning to the indigenous medicines and spiritual healing ceremonies found throughout the North American Native American culture — the same culture that he has spent a lifetime trying to preserve.

Means said he will battle the disease with traditional Native remedies. Herbal teas and other plants with cancer-fighting properties have come to him from tribes as far away as Guadalajara, Mexico, and as close as the Ojibwe tribe in Minnesota. He is also receiving cancer treatments that are approved in Europe and Canada but not in the United States at an alternative cancer center in Scottsdale, Ariz.

The charismatic and controversial Means never shrank from a political fight, but he is taking a philosophical approach to the grim news about his health. He knows his prognosis isn’t good, and he has made his peace with that.

“I’m not going to argue with the Great Mystery,” he said. “Lakota belief is that death is a change of worlds. And I believe like my dad believed. When it’s my time to go, it’s my time to go.”

The toll the cancer has taken on his body is evident in his speech, which is increasingly subdued and more difficult to understand. The man who drew media attention around the world and Hollywood acclaim for his role in the film version of “The Last of the Mohicans,” has been replaced by a shorter, slighter man who struggles to keep weight on.

Gone, too, are the signature braids that hung in parallel tracks down his chest and marked Means as a modern-day Lakota warrior, who is loved by many and vilified by others. But in every media photograph taken of him since he and Dennis Banks burst onto the national scene as the public face of AIM back in the 1970s, the braids are there.

The Lakota believe that hair holds memories. People in mourning often cut their hair as a way to release those memories and the people in them to the spirit world. Means cut his braids off shortly before he knew he had cancer, as a symbolic gesture to show that he was in mourning for his people.

“That’s the first irony here. I cut it because my people are dying — they’re dying as a culturally distinct people,” he said.

But whether his hair is worn in long straight braids or short, curly and covered — as it is on a recent sunny afternoon in a stylish straw fedora — one thing has not changed in Russell Means’ world. His devotion to his causes and his passion in promoting them is in no way diminished.

Means doesn’t hesitate when asked what the most important accomplishment of his life has been: The founding of the Republic of Lakotah, he says, and the “re-establishment of our freedom to be responsible” as a sovereign nation inside the borders of the United States. His efforts to have his proposed country recognized by the international community continue at the United Nations, he said, even as it is ignored by tribal governments closer to home, including his own Oglala Sioux Tribe.

“I live in the belly of the beast,” Means says, midway through one of his enthusiastic political polemics about the economic, moral and constitutional collapse of the United States.

Always a polarizing presence for the U.S. government, Means plans to remain so, perhaps even after his death.

“I’ve told people after I die, I’m coming back as lightning,” he said. “When it zaps the White House, they’ll know it’s me.”

As part of his vision to create Lakotah, Means started the Treaty School, an immersion-language school for young children in a three-story prototype of an oversized Lakota tipi on his property. The structure remains unfinished, and the school never grew beyond a handful of students.

“Because of our poverty, that ultimately failed,” he said.

People couldn’t afford gas to bring their children to school, much less tuition, he said.

“We’re losing our language, and nobody cares,” he said of a cultural reality that he sees as the biggest disappointment of his life.

His advocacy and acting have taken him to every continent except Antarctica — a place he has no interest in seeing, he said, despite his love of South Dakota’s winter weather.

“A South Dakota winter is my favorite season,” he said. “My people are energized in the winter. I am energized by it. You have to be to go out in it.”

Now, he said, he’s content to enjoy his home on the Pine Ridge Reservation. It sits at the end of a deeply rutted dirt road outside the village of Porcupine, just a few miles from the site of the Wounded Knee occupation, where his reputation as a law-breaking champion for Native American treaties and indigenous people’s rights was cemented.

He bought the acreage 11 years ago with money earned mostly from an acting career that included more than 30 films and television appearances. He shares it with his wife of 12 years, Pearl, 15 or 20 horses and an abundance of wildlife.

“It’s beautiful, as you can see. Very peaceful. This place is a game refuge,” he said.

After rumors of his health problems surfaced on the social network site Facebook, Means opted to confirm the reports in a video that has been posted to YouTube. Response to that video has been overwhelming, he said, as people call or email from all over the world to tell him they are praying for him.

“So, if I kick cancer, it’s going to be because of prayers and indigenous medicines — and some German/Canadian alternative treatments,” he said.

One of those prayers comes from his old friend and fellow AIM member Dennis Banks.

“He just called me. We’re going to get together in a couple of weeks,” he said.

Means suspects his detractors and critics, of whom there are plenty both on and off the reservation, will “rejoice” at news of his health problems.

Criticized by some of his fellow Native Americans for self-promotion, he is viewed with disdain by many law enforcement agents and others for the violence that often followed his protests.

He hasn’t bothered to write his own epitaph, and he doesn’t care what people say about him.

“If I cared what people said about me, I wouldn’t be who I am,” he said.

He chuckles, though, recalling a Los Angeles Times story that described him as “the most famous Indian since Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse.”

“I thought Jim Thorpe was,” he said with a grin. “Jim Thorpe was my hero.”

Russell Means: A look back

1970s

• Becomes a national media spokesman for the fledgling American Indian Movement by confronting costumed Pilgrims during a Thanksgiving re-enactment in Plymouth, Mass.
• Organizes a protest rally in Gordon, Neb., over the death of Raymond Yellow Thunder, which resulted in manslaughter indictments against two men.
• Is arrested along with 80 other people in the 1973 Custer County Courthouse riot, eventually serving one month in jail for his role in it.
• Organizes the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation with Dennis Banks and Leonard Peltier, a 10-week siege which made AIM a household word in America. A judge dismisses federal charges against him during a lengthy trial.
• Is acquitted of murder charges in the 1975 death of a man in a barroom brawl.
• Loses a close election for the presidency of the Oglala Sioux Tribe to Dick Wilson.

1980s

• Joins a U.S.-backed indigenous tribe in Nicaragua in its war against the communist Sandinista government, causing Means to quip, “I fought the capitalists and I fought the communists.”

1990s

• Launches a successful acting career with his role in “The Last of the Mohicans,” eventually appearing in at least 32 movies and television shows, including Disney’s “Pocohontas” and Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers,” as well as “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
• Publishes his autobiography, “Where White Men Fear to Tread.”
• Releases two albums of original music.

2000s

• Ran unsuccessfully for president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, losing to Theresa Two Bulls.
• Launched the Republic of Lakotah, an attempt to reassert the original land claims of the sovereign Sioux Nation by withdrawing from the 1851 and 1868 treaties with the United States.