PORCUPINE, SOUTH DAKOTA –– Russell Means may well be facing the toughest adversary in all of his almost 72 years on this earth: cancer.
As announced in a personal video posed on his Russell Means: Freedom website, the political activist, actor, writer, producer, and sometimes musician was recently diagnosed with terminal esophageal, or throat, cancer and has decided against aggressive and standardized medical procedures that could optimally prolong his life – choosing instead to face this “white man’s disease” through the spiritual connectedness held with his Lakota people, both past and present.
The man the Los Angeles Times once described as the “most famous American Indian since Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse,” is steeling himself for the fight of his life. And Means intends to put up a good fight in the remaining few months his doctors have prognosticated [or predicted] he has left.
In a candid interview via telephone from his ranch near Porcupine, Means – with his voice now affected and made husky by his affliction – spoke proudly of his people and of his most cherished accomplishments in life including the founding of a Lakota immersion school; the co-founding of both a community health clinic and a radio station; his instrumental and continued involvement in the Republic of Lakotah; and his most recent filmmaking endeavors.
Means was not inclined to make mention of his former leadership involvement in the initially militant American Indian Movement, of which he is no longer a widely recognized or accepted member of or substantially affiliated with, having resigned from the organization an unprecedented six times since 1974, according to AIM’s website.
His final resignation came in 1988, amid allegations that he had assaulted his one-time father-in-law. Means is best-known for calling to national – as well as international – attention the plight of indigenous peoples in the United States throughout the late ‘60s and early ‘70s as a prominent fixture of AIM.
Means recounted his initial struggle, in 1997, to secure adequate funding and, therefore, active community support for his philanthropic total Lakota language and culture immersion school for young children residing on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
“I put what funding I could into the project, which was not enough so I searched elsewhere, but I could not get enough interest in the project in America. There were no foundations willing to donate substantial amounts of money for the school,” Means recalled. “The people on the reservation did not have the gas money to drive their children to the school.” The school is located on his ranch near Porcupine.
As a result of such apathy on the part of American charitable institutions, the pilot project failed, forcing Means to look to humanitarian organizations outside of the U.S., primarily in Europe. Money to effectively and successfully operate the T.R.E.A.T.Y. School, as it is formally referred to, has been slowly trickling in from European nations, both renewing Means’s faith in his fellow human beings and reenergizing his hope for a brighter and culturally and linguistically relevant future for the Lakota people.
Means upholds that language is important to the survival of the Lakota culture.
“Our language teaches us to live in balance. It is the essence of who we are; it is who we are!” he exclaimed with authority.
The school is named after his multimedia production company which is based in Santa Monica, Calif., though it is unclear as to what the acronym actually stands for.
Means takes further pride in helping to establish both the Porcupine Health Clinic and the KILI radio station near Porcupine in the late 1970s. Both institutions provide vital services to residents of the Pine Ridge Reservation. “I am very happy to have been a co-founder of both the clinic and the radio station,” Means said. “It is important to take care of the people.”
Referencing his part in organizing the Republic of Lakotah– a small delegation of Lakota activists who have denounced and declared to be not legally binding all treaties enacted by the federal government – Means said, “I am surprised by the support the group has received from the people. I am finding out that more Lakota people agree with what we represent than I ever thought.”
The Republic of Lakotah was founded at the end of 2007 and asserts itself to be a sovereign nation, much along the lines of already federally recognized indigenous tribes. The U.S. government has yet to formally recognize the organization as an autonomous entity.
Neither the Rosebud nor the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribes recognize Means’ plan to renounce all treaties with the United States. Means proclaimed the Republic of Lakotah to be his “crowning glory,” and further stated that federal “Indian policies are by design genocidal.”
As an actor, Means had a starring role in the 1992 remake of The Last of the Mohicans. The movie is based on James Fennimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757, which was set during the French and Indian War and originally published in 1826.
During his early years with AIM, Means spoke negatively of the novel as he believed it to be a misrepresentation of American Indians, according to the AIM website. In 1995, Means voiced the character of Chief Powhatan in Walt Disney’s animated version of the story of Pocahontas. He eventually referred to both movies as the “two greatest films ever made about Indian people,” also from AIM’s website.
Whatever his stance on either film, Means currently focuses on producing substantial and culturally accurate and relevant film shorts and documentaries. He spoke passionately of Looks Twice, a short feature film co-written with Bayard Johnson that won a past award at the International Cherokee Film Festival in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
“The film is a contemporized version of an ancient children’s story,” Means stated. Looks Twice tells the story of the Americanization of the world, according to the Russell Means website.
When Means’s autobiography, Where White Men Fear to Tread, was published in 1995, the Washington Post called him “one of the biggest, baddest, meanest, angriest, most famous American Indian activists of the late twentieth century.” Indeed, this may very well be how posterity remembers him.
(Contact Jesse Abernathy at staffwriter@nsweekly.com)
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