Sitting Bull's death brought Red Cloud and Big Foot together and the cavalry chased them to a meeting with death at Wounded Knee. The seventh cavalry captured the two chiefs at Porcupine, ten miles northeast of Wounded Knee. Four Hotchkiss cannons were mounted on the hills, and the Indians were asked to give up their arms the next morning.

As they did so, someone fired a shot, and the four Hotchkiss guns wiped out over 200 Indians. The guns also destroyed the morale of the Oglala people.

Today, the Indians on the Pine Ridge reservation are still demoralized. The reservation, which occupies 2500 square miles, stands as one of the most impoverished areas in the country. Only a few houses dot the otherwise desolate landscape, and less Indians inhabit the land now than lived on it in 1890.

Of the reservation's 11,353 resident Indians, only 2787 are considered capable of holding a job. Forty-two per cent of those are unemployed, and if seasonal jobs are calculated, the unemployment figure leaps to 64 per cent.

Most of the employed Indians work for the Federal government, or farm. The soil there is almost worthless-much of it is clay-and the land is used primarily for grazing. The remainder of the Indian workforce labors at the moccasin factory, a depressing blue building located outside Pine Ridge.

Sunbell Corporation, an Albuquerque, N.M., company, owns the moccasin factory. White men own most of the businesses here, leasing the land at cheap prices from the Indians. Most of the land has been leased, so the Oglala have little control over the reservation's 2,778,000 acres.

Indian land rights are a complex issue. These rights are defined in the Wheeler-Howard Act-better known as the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act-the same set of laws that provides the Indian tribes with self-government.

The Wheeler-Howard Act, written under the auspices of John Collier '23, then Commissioner of Indian Affairs, gave the tribes the right to organize and to adopt a constitution. Most tribes, including the Oglala Sioux, drafted a constitution, but some tribes decided not to ratify the Act.

Unfortunately, the Act stipulated that any tribes that refused to ratify the agreement within one year would be deprived of the rights accorded under the Act. Today, some of the Indian tribes still function without the benefit of the 1934 law.

The Oglala tribe adopted its constitution in 1936. Felix Cohen, a white attorney for the Department of the Interior, drew up the by-laws for the tribe. The constitutional government seems to have had little effect on Indian life at Pine Ridge. It is a white man's system, and few Oglalas acknowledge its existence.

The constitution sets up a 20-member tribal council, spread throughout eight districts, and provides for the election of a tribal president. Tribal Council President Wilson, in response to AIM's demand that he resign, says that he was democratically elected by the Oglala people. When Wilson ran for office 11 months ago, 2684 people voted out of a reservation population of 11,353.

The actual powers of the Oglala Council are limited. The Interior Department must approve all tribal resolutions, as it did when Wilson attempted to remove a National Council of Churches representative from the reservation during the third week of the Wounded Knee siege.

Wilson's office, located in a brick house behind the BIA building in Pine Ridge, resembles a typical corporation. Secretaries and clerks sit behind desks shuffling papers, and a Xerox machine hums continually in a back room.

Out on the reservation, the full-blooded Oglala Sioux know little of Wilson's work or of the Council. These people support neither AIM nor the Council, and do not understand the struggle between these two groups. They only fear that now that AIM has packed its bags and left Wounded Knee, the already difficult battle for survival will be made tougher by a governmental backlash.

The press has emphasized the factionalism between mixed bloods and full bloods, and although the Indian question is deeper than that division, the division does exist. Most of the AIM leaders are mixed bloods, raised in the cities. Wilson considers AIM to be outsiders, or "urban" Indians, who have no real comprehension of reservation problems.