Clyde Bellecourt: Thunder fills his works and words

 

 

By Paul Levy

Star Tribune

 

      In the tradition of great native storytellers, this is the chapter of his family's history that Clyde Bellecourt repeats most often these days, the nightmare that he says explains his rocky involvement with the American Indian Movement and his need "to speak for all Indian people, whether they like it or not."

      It is a story he probably will tell Friday at the Minneapolis Convention Center, where Mayor R.T. Rybak will laud Bellecourt for his "commitment to improve conditions for Native peoples in every aspect of our community life," and where Bellecourt will be feted by singer Bonnie Raitt and honored with a scholarship fund established in his name at the first Spirit of Education Scholarship Awards dinner.

      For years, his mother blamed the weather when her knees swelled with pain. But months before she died, Angeline Bellecourt told her son about the boarding school that social workers sent her to as a girl, where she was to be assimilated into white culture.

      As punishment for speaking the Ojibwe language she learned on Minnesota's White Earth Reservation, she was forced to scrub floors with a toothbrush, socks filled with marbles tied tightly around both knees.

      "I remember the night she told me, I was so angry and hurt so bad," Bellecourt said. "Mom would say, 'Forget about the past and think about the future.' But if we forget about our past, we'll have no future. I had to change that history."

      Bellecourt, 68, has embarked on his own journey, "with rarely a concern about whether the response will be positive or negative," said Lisa Bellanger, a postsecondary school specialist whose mother has worked with AIM since the beginning.

      Bellecourt's Ojibwe name translates to "Thunder Before the Storm." His thunderous path has taken him from White Earth to AIM's 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee, S.D., in 1973 to federal prison and back to Franklin Avenue. He helped create AIM, Heart of the Earth Survival School, the American Indian Opportunities Industrialization Center, the Elaine M. Stately Peacemaker Center, the Native American Community Clinic and the Women of Nations Eagle Nest Shelter.

      "A wonderful human being," said U.S. District Judge Michael Davis, who worked with Bellecourt at the Legal Rights Center of Minneapolis in 1971.

      "He gave frank answers and showed a fire and passion," recalled Hennepin County District Judge Pamela Alexander.

      But critics fault AIM's longtime national director for that same passion, calling Bellecourt a militant and a bully. "Vindictive," Bill Lawrence, publisher of the Ojibwe News, calls him.

      An AIM tribunal in California condemned Bellecourt 11 years ago for crimes that included drug use and trafficking. Bellecourt speaks candidly of his drug and alcohol addictions in the mid-1980s but claimed entrapment after pleading guilty in 1986 to selling LSD to undercover agents. He served 22 months in federal prison.

      "The drug thing is unforgivable," said Gerald Vizenor, a White Earth enrollee from Minneapolis and professor of Indian studies at the University of New Mexico. Vizenor calls Bellecourt "an arrogant man who has become a gentle demagogue when it's appealing."

      Peggy Bellecourt, Clyde's partner of 46 years, says her husband "hasn't a penny." He holds no elective office, yet he remains one of the nation's most influential Indian leaders.

      In March, he generated national headlines after castigating President Bush for not responding immediately to the Red Lake shootings. In April, he led protests of Indian mascots in Cleveland at the major-league baseball opener there.

      "His brother [Chuck] had the makings of a champion boxer, but Clyde had a fighter's heart," said W. Harry Davis, 82, the civil rights leader who was Bellecourt's Golden Gloves coach at the Phyllis Wheatley Center.

      AIM cofounder Dennis Banks was one of dozens of young Indian people taken off the streets of Minneapolis by Bellecourt's mother and often fed at the Bellecourts' tenement home on Portland Avenue.

      "We ate, and she'd talk," Banks said. "She'd tell us, 'You think it's tough now? You should have seen what it was like when I was a kid.'

      "She talked very forcefully. I think Clyde gets a lot of that from his mom.

     

At White Earth

      The White Earth upbringing that Bellecourt and his seven sisters and four brothers experienced didn't seem tough to them at the time. It included baptism in the Catholic Church and fishing for walleye, trapping muskrats and beavers for food, hauling water, cutting wood and picking blueberries. Rivers were so thick with wild rice that "you couldn't see the water," Bellecourt said.

      "Every day was Thanksgiving, the happiest time of my life," he said. "I didn't know about poverty until I came to Minneapolis."

      But he knew heartache. Bellecourt's father, originally from White Earth, was placed in a boarding school in Carlisle, Pa., a place Charles James Bellecourt wanted so badly to leave that he enlisted in the Marines at 15, Bellecourt said. World War I ended for the young Marine of French and Ojibwe descent when he was severely injured by machine-gun fire, his son said.

      He'd nearly given his life for his country, yet was not granted citizenship until 1924 -- six years after World War I ended -- when Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act, granting citizenship to all Indians born in the United States.

      "He was at war all his life," said Bellecourt, whose father died at 54. "I remember watching my father sitting by the window during a storm, then ducking the second there was thunder and lightning."

      When a teacher showed 11-year-old Clyde and his classmates a picture of George Washington and called him "the father of our country," Bellecourt said he responded, "That doesn't look like my father. You telling me that some guy in white stockings with rouge on his cheeks is the father of our country?"

      He stopped going to school. When he was 12, Bellecourt spent his first night in Becker County jail, for repeated truancy. A judge offered him a choice: school or the juvenile detention center in Red Wing. A string of truancies and burglaries ultimately decided his fate.

      "The judge said I was incorrigible," he said.

      Harry Davis saw the 6-foot-1 and (then) 178-pound Bellecourt differently: "An ambitious, bright young man, who knew how to talk to people."

      There was a defiance to Bellecourt's words that rallied AIM in its infancy, but served as ammunition for AIM's foes.

      "You flex your muscles when you're growing up," Banks said. "Then you mature, grow a little wiser and realize flexing your muscles is not any answer."

     

Time of change

      Clyde Bellecourt has never tried to bury his past at Wounded Knee. But he claims to have undergone a religious conversion in Sandstone federal prison in 1987.

      A guard told him he looked terrible. He was taken for tests and told he'd had two, possibly three, heart attacks that night.

      "I thought I was going to die right there," he said. "After Wounded Knee, they'd probably like that to happen."

      He says he'd given up alcohol already, but vowed in prison to stop using drugs. He says he's clean and hasn't even smoked cigarettes in 18 years.

      Vernon Bellecourt said his brother has inspired young people to give up violence, drugs and alcohol and embrace a more spiritual way of life.

      So Clyde Bellecourt speaks, often and everywhere. And "a lot of times I speak, I hear: 'Aw, that Clyde Bellecourt, he's militant, he's radical. He doesn't speak for me.' "

      Said Lawrence: "I recognize that he's done some good. But how many Indians has he really helped?"

      Tens of thousands, Rybak says in his proclamation. According to Rybak, 40,000 poor people of color have had legal representation through the Legal Rights Center since 1970; the American Indian OIC has helped 18,000 Indian people move from welfare to work, and the Native American Community Clinic has provided medical care to 18,361 since opening its doors two years ago.

      Peggy Bellecourt bristles at criticism of her husband.

      "People accuse him of putting money in his pocket, but we're not wealthy people," she said. "And people who talk about him and drugs and alcohol are living way in the past.

      "You know what's bad about Clyde? He wants to take care of everybody. He's in Cleveland right now for [baseball's] opening day. Cleveland! Just like last year. And the year before."