Russell Means: The European Ancestry of a Militant Indian

By Helene E. Hagan

This book examines the origin of many Plains Indian families, which began with the union of French trappers and traders with young Indian women in the early days of contact between Europeans and American Indians of the Dakota territory and the Sioux Indian territory of Nebraska.

The famous Indian activist Russell Means, who made a name for himself through the activities of the American Indian Movement, the 1973 occupation of the Village of Wounded Knee, an unsuccessful political life, and a more successful Hollywood movie career, is at the core of the book. Though he proclaimed he was an Oglala Lakota patriot, Russell Means was in reality a European descendant of mostly French-Indian intermarriages on both paternal and maternal sides of his family. Indeed, he was more French than Indian, as documented in the carefully researched genealogy presented by French Moroccan anthropologist Hélène E. Hagan.

The genealogy presented in this book dispels the fictitious claims advanced by Russell C. Means about his father’s and mother’s family surnames in the autobiographical account he wrote with the help of independent author Marvin J. Wolf, Where White Men Fear to Tread (St. Martin’s Press, 1996). The book also addresses the unfortunate use of fictitious material attributed to Chief Seattle for the publication of a small book purportedly on ancestral Indian spirituality, If You’ve Forgotten the Names of the Clouds, You Lost Your Way, published under his name shortly before he succumbed to a fatal cancer in 2012.

In addition, the author evokes her fieldwork among the Oglala Lakota people of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the 1980s, the research she conducted with traditional elders as a volunteer with the archives of the Oglala Lakota College in her reservation-wide photo project covering years 1890 to World War II of the history of Pine Ridge families and her involvement with the Yellow Thunder Camp in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The last part of the book describes her later collaboration with the American Indian activist for the Public Access Television series of The Russell Means Show, which she conceived and produced in Los Angeles from 1999 to 2003.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984547705

Helene E. Hagan

Born in Rabat, Morocco, Helene E. Hagan received her early education in Morocco and at Bordeaux University, France, where she earned a Licence-ès-Lettres in British and American Studies. She also holds two Master’s Degrees from Stanford University. California, one in French and Education, and the other in Cultural and Psychological Anthropology. After conducting fieldwork among the Oglala Lakota people of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, she worked as Associate Professor at the JFK University Graduate School of Psychology in Orinda, California, and owned an American Indian art gallery in Marin County. She has served as President of a non-profit educational organization, The Tazzla Institute for Cultural Diversity, since 1993. Helene Hagan is a lifetime Associate Curator of the Paul Radin Collection at Marquette University Special Archives. In 2007, Helene E. Hagan was a guest Professor for the First Berber Institute held at the University of Oregon, Corvallis. In 2008, she created an annual Amazigh Film Festival to screen North African Berber and Tuareg films and documentaries in Los Angeles, with sister venues in New York and Boston. Helene Hagan’s books published by XLibris: The Shining Ones: Etymological Essay on the Amazigh Roots of Ancient Egyptian Civilization (2000) Tuareg Jewelry: Traditional Patterns and Symbols (2006) Tazz’unt: Ecology, Ritual and Social Order in the Tessawt Valley of the High Atlas of Morocco (2011) Fifty Years in America, A Book of Essays (2013) Russell Means, The European Ancestry of a Militant Indian (2018) Sixty Years in America, Anthropological Essays (2019)

Book preview

Copyright © 2018 by Helene E. Hagan. 783594

ISBN:             Softcover               978-1-9845-4771-2

                       EBook                    978-1-9845-4770-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 09/06/2018

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

Dedicated to Zona Fills the Pipe, Nellie Red Owl, and all the traditional elders of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota, men and women, who participated to my research among them for the identification of hundreds of photos in 1983-1985, and so generously gave of their time and humor.

This research and work were authorized by Elgin Bad Wound, President of Oglala Lakota College at the time, and conducted throughout the reservation with the help of Joe Whiting of Kyle, S.D.

I owe profound thanks and recognition to the many extraordinary friends I made during that work.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter I. -    A Few Details

Chapter II. -    French Indians Of America

Chapter III. -    Genealogy Of Russell Charles Means (1939-2012)

Chapter IV. -    Paternal Ancestry Of R.c. Means

Chapter V. -    Yellow Thunder Camp

Conclusion

Appendix:

Notes

The Russell Means Show

Glossary

ILLUSTRATIONS

Russell C. Means at YTC, 1982

Pine Ridge reservation, 1984

rapid City Article on V.I.P

Michelle Vignes

Nellie Red Owl

The Trapper’s Bride

Fort Laramie. Painting by Alfred Jacob Miller

Theophile Bruguiere

Chief Feather in His Ear (1818-1900)

Chief Struck by the Ree (1804-1888)

Chief War Eagle. Santee Dakota

Joseph Bissonette

Charles Wesley Allen

Emma Hawkins Allen

Shari Means and Smokey White Bull

Smokey’s Artwork

Entrance to Yellow Thunder Camp

Helene Hagan - Homage to Black Elk

Bill Means and friends, Pine Ridge (1985)

Zona Fills the Pipe at home

Front Cover V.I.P. Brochure

Verso front cover V.I.P Brochure

H. Hagan with traditional Pine Ridge elder

Circles - Panel

Circles - Sally Sherlock

Circles - Sacheen Littlefeather

Circles - We’re still Here

Marin Baylands Forum

Marin Baylands Forum

Tamazgha, Berber Land of Morocco

Atlas Trek I - Tamazgha

Final Credits -Show

Russell Means , Host

Credits

Means interviews Littlefeather (Show No. 1)

Kateri Walker , Guest (Show No. 2)

Means interviews Red Bone (Show No. 3)

Greg Harris, Guest

Means interviews Greg Harris (Show No. 4)

Means, Commentary No 1 - (Show No. 5)

Russell Means and Pat Vegas

R. Means , Commentary No 2. (Show No. 6)

Mother Jones Cover

Story, 1980:

I am not a leader. I am an Oglala Lakota Patriot, that is all I want and all I need to be. And I am very comfortable with who I am

Russell C. Means

p6russytc_V2.tif

Photograph of Russell Means taken by Helene E. Hagan in 1982 at Yellow Thunder Camp, Black Hills, S.D.

INTRODUCTION

I n the eyes of Leo Wilcox, a respected Oglala Lakota man who was a Marine Corps Veteran and a Tribal Council member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Russell Means was an urban outsider trying to capitalize on the name of the Oglala people and their fame. In the course of a radio program of March 1973, during the Wounded Knee occupation by A.I.M., Mr. Wilcox evoked the names of true warriors and ancestral figures of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, such as Crazy Horse, and discounted the grand standing of a young urban Indian man named Russell Means as that of a Toka, a non-Oglala, an outsider, stating that he and his band of renegades (A.I.M.) should be expelled from the Pine Ridge Reservation. The charred remains of Leo Wilcox were found in his torched car the following night, on the highway to Rapid City, and many are those who suspected the American Indian Movement of this murder. To this day, the death of Leo Wilcox has remained un unsolved case still under investigation.

The Lakota term toka was purposefully pejorative, as it opposed the reality of true Oglala Lakota Indians of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to the swagger of urban Indians with partly fictional ancestry as was the case for Russell Means. The view held by Leo Wilcox was expressed to me by full blood traditional Oglala elders a number of times during the months that I worked on the reservation on a photo project under a grant from the State of South Dakota in the 1980’s. The distinction between traditional Lakota/Nakota/Dakota speakers and progressive was then a part of everyday vocabulary on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, just as much as the clear division between full blooded Indians and mixed bloods who were the descendants of mixed marriages between Sioux people and European fur trappers and traders. Among those early settlers of the Sioux Indian Territory of Nebraska/Wyoming region, or of the Dakota Territory north of the Missouri River, many were of French origin, having migrated directly from Europe, or having settled first in Canada where they found employment with Canadian fur companies which moved their trade into the Great Plains. These French fur trappers and traders began to dwell in the Plains, more specifically in the Dakota Territory, as early as the mid seventeenth century.

Curiously enough, my project was to identify by name Lakota women and children photographed from the time of the original Wounded Knee Massacre (1890) to World War II, and thus to honor and respect certain ancestors. I titled the project Visual Identification Project (V.I.P.)