The Tragic Life Of John Trudell.
His goal was very simple, to communicate the human experience at a level that human beings can recognize and relate to. John Trudell was an American Indian activist, poet, writer, actor, and musician.
I wish I could have met this man in my lifetime, he seemed to have the power in his words to change the world. Was he born with this gift to put a powerful way of thinking into people’s minds? Let’s find out more about The Tragic Life Of John Trudell.
Contents
Early Life.
John Trudell was born in Omaha, Nebraska on February 15, 1946, and was the son of a Santee Dakota father and a Mexican mother. He grew up in small towns near the Santee Sioux Reservation in northern Nebraska near the southeast corner of South Dakota. He was educated in local schools and also in Santee Dakota culture.
Growing up he and his family lived in poverty and struggled to make ends meet. His mother died when he was just 6 years old. He later developed a disliking to god and wondered why he let so many bad things happen but later reconnected to his spiritually.
In high school the teachers told him that he had great potential and told him that he would have to study hard in order to make something of himself. It was then he decided to quit school as just 17 because he believed that he was already something.
The next day after he quit high school he went to the navy recruiting office and signed himself up to enlist. He said the only reason he volunteered to go into the military was that “he needed to get away from where he was at”, also for his survival.
He was then stationed on a destroyer and did 2 WestPac tours in Vietnam. He said that he made the right choice because the Vietnamese didn’t have a navy. He was homeported out of the long beach and it was then that he met his first wife Fenicia “Lou” Ordonez.
Afterward, he attended San Bernardino Valley College for two-year’s at a community college in San Bernardino, California, studying radio and broadcasting. He then decided to work through political activism.
Joining A.I.M
After leaving the military, John Trudell had become involved in Indian activism. In 1969, he became the spokesperson for the United Indians of All Tribes’ occupation of Alcatraz Island. The group occupied the island in the name of the Fort Laramie 1868 treaty. This group was made mostly of student-members that had developed in San Francisco.
Trudell went to Alcatraz Island one week after the occupation started. He used his background knowledge in broadcasting and ran a radio station from the island through an arrangement made with students at the University of California, Berkeley, broadcasting at night over the Berkeley FM station.
The show was called Radio Free Alcatraz. He discussed the cause of the occupation and Native American issues and also played traditional Native American music.
He often criticized how “the system today is only geared toward the needs of white people”. He also spoke for the many Indians who believed they did not “fit in” with the then majority European-American population of the nation. He became a spokesperson for the occupation specifically and for the Alcatraz “Red Power Movement”. Trudell was the spokesman for the nearly 2 year-long occupations. Until the group was unexpectedly and forcibly removed on June 11, 1971.
After the failure of the federal government to meet the demands of the protesters and getting forcibly removed from the Alcatraz, Trudell then joined the American Indian Movement (AIM). It had been established in 1968 in Minneapolis among urban American Indians, first to deal with the alleged police harassment and injustice from the law enforcement system.
71 Day Siege of Wounded Knee
On February 27, 1973 the Wounded Knee Occupation occurred when approximately 200 Oglala Lakota people and followers of the American Indian Movement (AIM) seized and occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Paul Manhart S.J. and 10 other residents of the area were apprehended at gunpoint and taken hostage.
The day after the Wounded Knee occupation began, AIM members traded gunfire with some of the federal marshals surrounding the settlement. They then fired on automobiles and low-flying planes that dared come within the range of the rifles. Russell Means the leader of AIM at the time began making negotiations for the release of the hostages.
AIM demanded that the U.S. Senate must launch an investigation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and all Sioux reservations in South Dakota. Also, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hold hearings on the scores of Indian treaties broken by the U.S. government.
The occupation of Wounded Knee lasted a total of 71 days, during which time 2 Lakota Sioux men were shot dead, and 2 FBI agents were also killed.
Several more were wounded but on May 8, the AIM leaders and their followers surrendered after government officials promised to them they would investigate their complaints. Russell Means and Dennis Banks were arrested, but on September 16, 1973, the charges against them were dismissed by a federal judge because of the U.S. government’s unlawful handling of witnesses and evidence.
However violence continued on the Pine Ridge Reservation throughout the rest of the 1970s, with several more AIM members and supporters losing their lives in confrontations with the United States government.
John Trudell took the position of national chairman for AIM from 1973 until 1979 after the first chairman, Carter Camp, was convicted for actions related to a protest and was then sentenced to jail.
In 1975 John Trudell was arrested for assault, felonious assault, and assault with a deadly weapon. He had gone to a reservation trading post to try to get some better food for senior residents. He then tried to pay using food stamps, but the trading post did not accept the food stamps. The police report said that he then fired a shot inside the store.
The Trial Of Leonard Peltier
On June 26 1975, two FBI agents and a Native man were killed in a shoot-out between some federal agents and AIM members along with local residents.
In the court trial that followed, AIM member Leonard Peltier was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison. With an all-white jury and judge who was known to be racist many people still feel Peltier was imprisoned unjustly.
Leonard Peltier remains in prison, although efforts to win him pardon continue.
Becoming AIM’s National Chairman he then attended the trail of A.I.M. activist Leonard Peltier in 1978, where he was busted by the F.B.I. for “resisting arrest” after an alleged struggle in the hall outside of the courtroom. John Trudell did two weeks in jail and was warned to “watch his mouth”. On February 11, 1979 after his release, he led a march as an act of protest for the treatment of Native American people to F.B.I. headquarters in Washington D.C., where he burned an American flag.
Loss Of His Family In A House Fire.
On February 12, 1979, John Trudell’s wife Tina Manning, his 4 children, one being in the womb and his mother-in-law Leah Hicks-Manning passed away in a suspicious house fire at the home of his in-law’s on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Nevada.
His father-in-law Arthur Manning survived. He was a member of the Duck Valley Shoshone Paiute ‘s Tribal Council who was at the time working for treaty rights. Opponents included the local tribal police chief and the BIA superintendent, John Artichoker. Leah coordinated social services at the Duck Valley Indian reservation.
Tina had been working for tribal water rights at the Wildhorse Reservoir. Opponents of her campaign included officials of the local BIA, Elko County and Nevada state officials, members of the water recreation industry, and also local white ranchers.
Activists have speculated and assumed that there was government involvement behind the tragedy. The tragic house fire that killed John Trudell’s family happened within 24 hours of him burning the US flag on the steps of the FBI building in Washington D.C. for the protest of the government’s treatment towards the Native Americans and the Sioux Nation.
Trudell believed that the house fire was a way to threaten and silence him and his wife, who were both activists. Trudell firmly believed that the fire was arson, but the BIA police investigation claimed that it was accidental. In numerous interviews, he expressed distrust for the federal government and especially the FBI.
After Tragedy.
Devastated, John Trudell withdrew from public life. He concluded that maintaining AIM as a formal national organization was accomplishing little beyond providing a kind of list of preselected targets for government repression.
He began the abolition of all national titles, beginning with his own chairmanship, and the termination of the national office in Minneapolis. Afterward the movement was continued solely on the basis of local, self-governing initiatives.
After the tremendous loss of his family, to help get through the profound heartache, John Trudell then traveled 100,000 miles over the next 3 years. His creative spirit blossomed as he discovered his gift for potery.
“My poetry was born out of the rage of losing my family, but also out of pain, clarity, and confusion. My whole life experience. When bad things happened, poetry exploded out of me. I’ve been told people perceive anger in my work. I don’t have a problem with that anger. Fear and courage are part of the natural process. I didn’t discover my poetic gift, it discovered me.” He once stated.
What was initially just self-therapy became something larger, as he began using poetry into his speaking engagements. As he rearranged his life after AIM, John Trudell became involved with environmentalists who were opposing nuclear energy.
Trudell recorded an album, “A.K.A Grafitti Man” in 1986 with Jesse Ed Davis.
Jesse Ed Davis a Kiowa native known for recording with musicians such as Taj Mahal, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, John Lennon, and Conway Twitty. This re-recording was moved among the Native communities by cassette as was common in the community at the time.
Then In 1992, John Trudell remade and re-released “A.K.A Grafitti Man” as a CD. Trudell went on to become the most well-known Native American rock and roll poet, with early fans such as Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson helping him with encouragement and ongoing support.
Over time, he refined his amazing performance delivery and style.
He appeared on stage on both Midnight Oil and Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD tours. Between 1993 and 2015 he appeared on 15 albums and toured extensively with his multicultural band named Bad Dog. His music drew from his own poetry and a variety of musical genres, rock, blues, and native beats, and political protest songs. His uniqueness earned him fans from all around the world.
He authored 2 books by the names of Living in Reality: Songs Called Poems, Society of the People Struggling to be Free, and Stickman: Poems, Lyrics, Talks.
During the 1990s and 2000s, John Trudell acted in a variety of films, including Thunderheart, Powwow Highway, Some Say Phoenix Arizona, Extreme Measures, On Deadly Ground, and Smoke Signals.
Passing Into The Spirit World.
Sadly On December 15, 2015 John Trudell passed onto the spirit world from cancer at his Santa Clara County home, surrounded by friends and family.
Before passing away to meet with his family and ancestors in the spirit world, he said: “My ride showed up. Celebrate Love. Celebrate Life.
