Thesis Writing in Progress

Loud Hawk: The United States versus the American Indian Movement. By Kenneth S. Stern. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. 359 pp. ISBN: 0-8061-3439.)

Kenneth Stern has produced this very readable firsthand account of the criminal case United States v. Kenneth Loud Hawk.

    The book begins after the occupation of Wounded Knee. In November of 1975, outside of Ontario, Oregon, a state trooper, reacting from an all-points-bulletin from the FBI, pulls over a motor home and station wagon. Anna Mae Aquash, KaMook Banks, Kenneth Loud Hawk, and Russ Redner are arrested while two others, Dennis Banks and Leonard Peltier, dramatically escape from the scene. Eventually all six face charges of illegal weapons and possession of dynamite.

    Kenneth Stern is an idealistic first-year law student fed up with insipid law classes. He learns of the arrest and volunteers to help the defense. He takes us through the thirteen-year-long case with great detail, starting in 1976 until Dennis Banks's plea bargain in 1988. A major focus is on the federal government's unethical behavior in their effort to try the Indian defendents. Such behavior includes destroying, manufacturing, and hiding evidence; spying on lawyer's meetings; intimidating supporters, and prejudicing potential jurors. Stern illustrates the lawyer-client relations and has an admirable devotion to his clients. His clients become friends to him, and he spends exhausive hours working on their cases. His skill at elucidating complex judicial processes make it easy to follow events as they unfold. In spite of his strong support of AIM, he preserves enough objectivity to recognize the imperfections of his clients and avoids any shrill anti-government rhetoric.

    Unfortunately, the book hints at a romantic, self-serving autobiography. Since Stern was their legal advocate, he tends to focus on his clients' good side rather than criticize their actions. In certain accounts of historical events, such as Wounded Knee in 1890, he uses only one source (in this case, Dee Brown's none-too-carefully written Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee). Like Peter Matthiessen's In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Stern seems to take everything said by the Indians as fact, such as the events that occured at the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.

    The book would perhaps suplement Peter Matthiessen's In the Spirit of Crazy Horse and Paul Chaat Smith & Robert Allen Warrior's Like a Hurricane. Overall, the book is worth the read for anybody interested in a one-sided account of the events that followed the Wounded Knee occupation.

Jason Heppler
South Dakota State University
Brookings, SD