Summer is always relentless on the northern plains, and nowhere is that more true than on the sun-baked spit of scrub grass and cottonwoods that stretches along the border between the Badlands of South Dakota and the endless prairies of northern Nebraska. There's something about the place, a kind of parched-mud melancholy that even the occasional prairie flower or the call of a passing bird can't soften. Mercilessly hot in summer, cold as death in winter, it's the kind of place where the sun seems to burn its brand into the hide of the land, and where things don't so much grow as seethe. It's the kind of place where, if you go long enough without water and squint hard enough into the torturing sun, you can almost believe you see the ghosts, the victims of the Wounded Knee massacre and all the others who have suffered since doing a ghost dance at the edge of the horizon.

Maybe it's always been that way.

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Maybe that's why, even in the heyday of the frontier, when pilgrims and settlers, farmers and speculators seemed to claim every rock and blade of grass west of the Mississippi, no one seemed to want much to do with the forlorn landscape that would become the Pine Ridge Reservation. Maybe that's why the federal government herded the Lakota there at the end of the 19^th Century, as punishment perhaps for what they and their allies did to Custer, and why they machine-gunned them by the hundreds a generation later when they tried to leave.

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The first weeks of the summer of 1975 were no different, really. It began, as summer always begins there, as a standoff with the sun. Of course, that year, there was something else in the air. For almost three years, a group of young traditionalists, Indian activists who had formed an organization called the American Indian Movement, or AIM, had been locked in a kind of cold war with both the U.S. government and the tribal chairman at Pine Ridge, Dick Wilson, who, it has been alleged, tried to intimidate AIM with his security force, the Guardians of the Oglala Nation — "GOONs" for short.

Those tensions first erupted in February 1973, when 200 AIM activists launched a 72-day occupation of Wounded Knee to protest living conditions at the reservation. They took 11 hostages and, according to an FBI report on the incident, "burglarized the Wounded Knee trading post." The occupation ended when the protest was put down by state and local authorities, the FBI, police from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and soldiers of the United States Army, under the command of General Alexander Haig.

Russell Means

Though the operation had ended the siege of Wounded Knee, it had done nothing to ease the underlying tensions. In the immediate aftermath of the siege, two key AIM leaders, Dennis Banks and Russell Means, were tried for their part in the uprising. The prosecution's case, said lawyer Jennifer Harbury, writing on a pro-AIM Web site, was based almost entirely on one key witness who lied, and the charges against Means and Banks were dismissed.

As Harbury put it, "throughout the next three years, long referred to by local Native Americans as the 'Reign of Terror,' the FBI carried out intensive local surveillance, as well as the repeated arrests, harassment and bad-faith legal proceedings against AIM leaders and supporters. The FBI also closely collaborated with and supported the local tribal chairperson, Dick Wilson, and his selected vigilantes."

During this "Reign of Terror," Harbury writes, violence was constant. AIM leaders have long argued that the tensions may have been a factor in some or perhaps even many of the 64 homicides reported among Indians on the reservation during this period, and hundreds more "were harassed, beaten or otherwise abused," Harbury writes. "Virtually all of the victims were either affiliated with AIM or their allies, the traditional tribe members. The FBI had jurisdiction to investigate major crimes, yet these deaths were never adequately investigated or resolved. Nor did the FBI agents take any measures to curb the violence of GOONs, with whom they were closely collaborating."

In the spring of 1975, the FBI was already preparing for the next major eruption of mayhem. As early as May, the agency had already begun beefing up its force near the reservation, and FBI officials had drawn up an internal memo discussing the possible chain of command in the event that a military-style assault had to be launched to crush a potential insurrection on the reservation.

On June 26, the 99^th anniversary of the Custer massacre, either by a caprice of fate, or, as some have suggested, by design, the violence the agency had prepared for erupted.

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