5th Anniversary Feature Cover
photo courtesy of www.floydredcrowwesterman.com

Floyd Red Crow Westerman

By David Robb

Floyd Red Crow Westerman was standing at the ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport a few years ago when a woman came up to him and asked if he’d say hello to her two young sons. Her boys, she said, “had never met a real Indian.”

Floyd gets that a lot.

“People say I look like the Indian on the nickel,” he says with a laugh. “People come up to me all the time and ask me if I’m an Indian.”

Floyd agreed to meet the little boys. He went over and said hello and shook their hands. And then the older boy, who was only about eight years old, looked up at Floyd in wide-eyed wonder and asked, “Do you still kill?”

For Floyd Westerman, the story is illustrative of the damaging and corrosive effect that Hollywood’s portrayal of Indians has had on the minds of children; of the dangers posed when one culture paints a picture of another, when the war criminals tell the story of their victims.

“They’d watched too many western movies,” he says. “All they see are movies of Indians attacking settlers, but the reality was that the settlers invaded Indian land, and the Indians defended their land.”

For Floyd Westerman, Hollywood’s portrayal of Indians is not unlike the way Nazi filmmakers portrayed the Jews – with the Jews always cast as the bad guys.

Floyd has been trying to set the record straight for all of his adult life. He did it with his stirring songs during the early days of the American Indian Movement; he did it as an actor with his honest and moving portrayals of Indian characters; and he’s doing it now with his musical tribute to legendary singer Johnny Cash (one-quarter Cherokee), with his powerful bronze sculptures of Indian heroes, and with a six-part documentary series he’s writing, directing, producing and narrating about the American genocide of the Indian people.

In his Lakota language, there is a word – Eyapaha. It means ‘messenger’ or ‘camp crier’ – the one who calls the people to action. Floyd Westerman is a modern day Eyapaha.

Floyd was born on the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota Sioux reservation in South Dakota on Aug. 17, 1936.  

“Reservations were nothing but concentration camps,” he says. “When I was born, they were just coming out of the lockdown. From 1890 to 1930, all the Plains Indians were in lockdown – you couldn’t leave the reservation. Indians had fought in WW I, but the country still hadn’t faced up to the fact that there were Indians in concentration camps. Indians couldn’t vote. We were considered wards of the government.”

Floyd was born into a world in turmoil. America was still mired in the depths of The Great Depression, and another great war was looming on the horizon. In Germany, Adolf Hitler was in power, and he’d just put on a show of the Third Reich’s power at the 1936 Olympics games in Berlin. Often called ‘The Nazi Olympics,’ they ended on Aug. 16, 1936 – the day before Floyd was born.

And behind the scenes, Nazi concentration camps were just getting started. On July 12, 1936 – a month before Floyd was born – the first German Gypsies were arrested and deported to the concentration camp at Dachau. Millions of Jews would soon follow.

Life was hard in America during The Great Depression, but it was immeasurably harder on Indian reservations. Even so, children sometimes have a way of finding joy in a joyless world.

“When we were kids, we were happy,” Floyd recalls. “I didn’t know yet that our people had gone through a holocaust.”

One of his greatest joys as a child was riding in the family’s horse-drawn wagon.

“The only way we could get around was by horse and wagon,” he says, “and the only way you could get a horse and wagon was to become a Christian. If you joined the church, they gave you tools to make a garden, and they gave you a horse and wagon. So we became Christians. That was the only way to survive. We rode across the reservation in our wagon with our grandfather and grandmothers. It was a lot of fun.”

In those days, Floyd says, “The government didn’t want the young people to learn the Indian songs or the dances. There was a time when only those over 50 could dance Indian – but when we visited each other, no one would dare to stop Indian dancing. My father was a very good traditional drummer and a great singer, and I would dance for all the relatives in the family.”

Floyd was especially close to his mother, Emily Adams Westerman, was very protective of him and his six siblings – brother Chris, half-brother Cecil, and sisters Philomena, Bertha, Cynthia and Clementine.

“Mother was a beautiful Indian woman,” Floyd recalls. “So many people who knew her said she was always made up in a beautiful way.”

Floyd’s father, Christian Westerman, was a laborer and sharecropper. He was a hard-worker and a hard drinker.

“Alcoholism is handed down from one generation to another,” Floyd says. “It’s what I call Post-Traumatic Stress Holocaust Syndrome.”

“Father would go away to powwows for days at a time,” Floyd recalls, “and when he sang, he drank, and he would come home and beat up my mother.”

“He’d be gone drinking,” Floyd remembers, “and when he came home drunk, she would take blankets and hide us in the woods, and leave us food and water. We could hear her getting beat up and the noise of all that. We could hear it, but we couldn’t go in there. She protected us by keeping us out there.”

But as bad as things were then, they were about to get a lot worse.

One day, when Floyd was two or three years old, he found a box of matches in the family living room and started playing with them. A spark from one of the matches set the whole box on fire. “The matches set the rug on fire, and then the couch and the chair, and then the whole house,” Floyd recalls ruefully. “I burned the family house down.”

Young Floyd survived the flames unscathed, but his family never let him forget it. “I still get the blame for that,” he says.

With their humble dwelling reduced to ashes, Floyd’s father left the family, and Floyd’s mother moved her kids from one friend’s home to another.

“She would take us from family to family,” he recalls. “We would sleep on the floor in front of a wood stove.”

Then, in 1942, when Floyd was six years old, he and his brothers and sisters were sent to government boarding schools. Floyd and Chris, who was two years older than Floyd, were sent off the reservation to live at the Wahpeton Indian School.

“I was forcibly taken from my family,” he recalls. “That was the first step to break up the family and Indian culture.”

And the conditions at the school were worse than in any Dickens novel.

“It’s a story often told,” Floyd says with a sigh. “We weren’t allowed to speak our language. They cut our hair. And on the first day, they gave us a towel to hold over our eyes and they sprayed us with DDT. It was a white powder sprayed out of a can. You got caked with it. Looking back, it was a chemical poisoning.”

Life there, he says, “was hard in a militaristic way. We had to march everywhere – to our meals, to our classrooms. They taught us to read and write, but if you spoke your language, they’d wash your mouth with soap. And if you persisted, the treatment would get harsher, with a lot of beatings. I saw it. They had what they called ‘the hot line,’ where you would have to run through this line of kids and be beaten by your own classmates with sticks.”

The school also imposed a foreign religion on the children.

“Here were 500 Indian children,” Floyd recalls, “and the missionaries said, ‘You hundred will be Catholic, and you hundred will be Episcopal, and you hundred will be Protestant.’ One year I was a Catholic, and the next year I was Episcopal. It was quite ridiculous. First they cut your hair and told you to believe in Christ, and then when you open the bible, you see a picture of these guys sitting at the Last Supper with long hair!”

One of Floyd’s classmates would become a lifelong friend – and a leader of the American Indian Movement. The kid’s name was Dennis Banks.

“We were friends from third grade to eighth grade,” Floyd recalls. “We graduated in the same class.”

Looking back, Floyd can see the leadership qualities in Banks that led him to co-found AIM in 1968.

“He was what they would call a gang leader today,” says Floyd. “He had an outspoken personality, and he was always doing something that was either one foot over the line, or way over the line – but mostly it was just one foot over the line.”

In 1973, the two old friends – by then grown men – would end up together at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation during the 71-day standoff at Wounded Knee.

During his second year at the Wahpeton Indian School, doctors discovered that young Floyd had contracted tuberculosis.

“They put me on a regimen of devastating antibiotics,” Floyd remembers. “It knocked it out and I lived a normal life.”

For the next six years, Floyd would only see his family on rare occasions.

“Most of the kids were sent from broken homes and probably never saw their families again until they returned,” he recalls. “I saw my mother once when she came to the school. Another time my mother had gotten back with my father and they tried to make a go of it. I was allowed to go home, but it didn’t work, so I went back to school.”

High school was better than the government boarding school. “It was more like a minimum security prison,” Floyd laughs. And it was at the Flandreau Indian High School, near Sioux Falls, that Floyd found his first true loves – girls and guitars.

“I first picked up a guitar in grade school, but I couldn’t play it,” Floyd says. “But in high school I started learning to play. There were 500 students, and three of them had guitars. I would hang around and watch how they played – where they’d place their fingers to play certain chords. And I realized that for the average song, there were only three chords. So I learned those three cords.”

The boys’ dorm was right next to the girls’ dorm, and on warm nights, some of the boys would play their guitars and serenade the girls.

“They would play and the girls would applaud from the windows of their dorm rooms,” Floyd laughs.

Floyd didn’t want to ask anyone for lessons, so he learned on the sly, when no one was around.

“Every Saturday we got to leave the campus and walk to downtown, which was about a mile away,” he recalls. “We’d go to the movies and be with our girlfriends. But sometimes, when they went down there, I would stay behind, and when they were all gone, I would sneak into one of the rooms with the guitars and pull out their guitar and try those three cords and sing my first country song, which was a Hank Williams song. I did that until I had it down pat, and then one night, when the other boys were playing and singing to the girls, I sat down and sang a song. And it went pretty good.”

And on that warm spring night in 1951, with the applause of young Indian girls raining down on him, a star was born.

Despite his experience with tuberculosis, Floyd became an athlete in high school, running the 100-yard low hurdles and quarterbacking the football team. But Floyd was no Jim Thorpe. His team lost nearly every game.

“I was the quarterback,” he laughs, “and I had on my team Ojibway, Shoshone, Sioux, Blackfoot and Crow. We didn’t like each other that much, and we rarely talked to each other. Some were traditional enemies, in a sense, so I had to become Mr. Public Relations as quarterback on the football team. We had to pull a team together in three weeks and play white farmer teams who had been practicing all summer. Most of our runners could out-run them, and we had more stamina, but we weren’t coordinated together like they were.”

For Floyd, seeing first-hand what disarray among Indians can do in the face of a united adversary would serve as a valuable life lesson.

Off the field, Floyd formed many high school friendships that would last a lifetime.

“We have a reunion every year,” he says. And Floyd still keeps in touch with many of his old friends from Flandreau High, including Harvey DeFoe, a retired highline electrician, and Jerry Smith, a retired master plumber in San Francisco, and Chuck Archambault, a civil engineer in Montana.

Floyd also learned the value of a good mentor – and that not all teachers are prison guards.

“Cornelius Teer was our social studies teacher,” Floyd recalls. “He is a black man, and he was like a friend to all of us kids. He was so friendly. Sometimes, he would take us fishing. And when he talked to us, he would say, ‘Always think about the future.’ That was his approach. He made social studies interesting. He would have us read the newspaper everyday and talk about it in class. He made us all aware of what was going on in the world. He was a very big influence. I have great fond memories of him.”

Mr. Teer is retired now and lives in South Carolina, where many of his old students still come to visit him.

Floyd graduated from high school in 1955, and then had a decision to make.

“In those days, most young Indian men went into the military after high school,” Floyd recalls. “But since boarding school, I felt that all my life was in the military. I didn’t want any more prison, so I went to college.”

Floyd enrolled at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota, where he was one of only a handful of Indian students. He majored in art, and later, in theater arts, and took classes in journalism.

“I had good counseling and good teachers,” he says. “It was like being out of prison. For the first time, I had a personal sense of freedom.”

By this time, he was good enough on the guitar to land an occasional gig at a local steakhouse; singing and playing the guitar while folks ate their food.

Floyd was practicing the guitar in his dorm room one afternoon during that first year in college when he got a call from a hospital administrator in Wagner, South Dakota.

“The hospital got a hold of me through Bureau of Indian Affairs,” Floyd recalls. “They told me my father was dying.”

Floyd hadn’t seen or talked to him in years. He died of cancer a few days later at the age of 56.

The death of a father, even one who beats his wife and abandons his family, is hard. But the greatest tragedy in Floyd’s was just around the corner.

In 1957, during his second year at Northern State, Floyd was planning to move out of the dorm and into an apartment so that his mother could come live with him. By this time, she had remarried a man named Amos Gongie and was living on the reservation. That’s when he got the second phone call that would change his life. It was the Bureau of Indian Affairs, calling to tell him that his stepfather had murdered his mother.

“We are very sorry to have to give you this information,” the BIA man told young Floyd on the other end of the line.

Floyd’s stepfather, a man he barely knew, had shot and killed her when she tried to leave him. She was 52 years old.

Floyd’s stepfather would be found guilty of murder, and would serve 15 years in prison. After he got out, he moved back onto the reservation and “died from a pretty hard life of alcohol,” Floyd says. “I never did want to know him.”

The death of his mother changed Floyd forever.

“It was a crushing blow,” he remembers. “My dad had passed away the year before, and now her. It was very difficult, naturally, to never see her again. And I thought that I would never know that thing called family again. I was filled with a lonely, empty feeling.”

Depressed, Floyd stopped studying.

“I flunked out after my mother passed away,” he says. “In my third year, I lost all interest.”

Free now from everything – from home, family and school – there was only one place left for Floyd to go – back to prison.

“I ended up in the Marine Corps,” Floyd laughs.

The dean of his college told him that if he showed he had discipline, he would be allowed to come back to school. So after a few odd jobs as a night watchman at a warehouse, and as a machine operator at a Green Giant food canning plant, Floyd was off to boot camp at Perris Island, South Carolina.

It was 1959. The war in Korea was over, and the war in Vietnam had yet to begin.

And for the first time, Floyd was in the Deep South – the segregated South.

“They had signs on the restrooms down there that said, ‘Coloreds Only,’” Floyd recalls. “I went in with the black guys, because I’m colored.”

After boot camp, Floyd was assigned to a helicopter squadron in Jacksonville, Florida, where he trained as part of a rescue team. Floyd regrets that he never got to rescue anyone, but he’s also grateful that he never had to shoot anyone.

In the Marines, he met a buddy who he still calls friend today.

“In the Marine Corps I met a young guy named Thomas Morrison,” Floyd says. “He came from a rich family. They owned Cargill Grain, which was the largest grain company in America. They basically controlled the grain market. Thomas was a real party boy in those days. His father sent him to the Marines to discipline him. We became friends and we’re still friends today.”

When Floyd finished his one-year enlistment, the Morrison’s invited him to come stay at their home in Minnetonka, Minnesota.”

To Floyd, their place was a palace.

“They were a nice family,” Floyd recalls. “When I would wake up in the morning, there was a cord beside the bed that you would pull and it rang a bell in the kitchen, and a servant would bring breakfast and serve you in bed. I wasn’t used to that. They took me out on the lake water-skiing, and they got me a job as a grain inspector in Minneapolis.”

But after inspecting mercury-levels in grain for a few months, Floyd decided it was time to go back to school. He said good-bye to the Morrisons and headed back to his old college in South Dakota.

Only this time, he would graduate.

Inspired by his beloved high school teacher, Floyd took courses towards a teaching degree so that he could become a high school teacher. But he also took some sculpting classes, and developed a lifelong passion for the art. He also took some acting classes, and landed roles in several college productions, including a part in Eugene Ionesco’s avant-gard anti-Nazi play, “Rhinoceros.”

“That was my first taste of acting,” he recalls. “I’d been singing a few years already, so it was no problem for me getting up there.”

After receiving his degree in secondary education, Floyd hit the road, and by 1962, with the folk music movement in full swing, he was living in Denver and making a regular – if not terribly prosperous – living as a singer and guitar player in folk clubs and bars.

Then one night, at a local dive called The Lair Lounge, he met a young writer and activist who would change his life – and the way the world would view Indian people. His name was Vine Deloria, and he was writing a book.

One night after Floyd’s set, the two young men started talking.

“He said he was writing a book about the Indian situation in America – the Indian experience,” Floyd recalls. “He told me the name of the book. He was going to call it Custer Died for Your Sins. I was kind of confused because it was a reference to God. ‘Why the title that way?’ I asked. He said, ‘Americans have forgotten so long ago about Christ, so they have to find a new sacrifice. So the Indians made Custer the sacrifice.’”

“He said there should be songs about the genocide of the Indian people, and about the institutions that destroyed our culture; and about the anthropologists who steal out history, and a song about the missionaries, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” Floyd recalls.

Three years later, in 1965, Deloria published his landmark book, Custer Died for Your Sins. The book, a brilliant and witty look at American history and culture from the Indian point of view, rankled the institutions of anthropology, history and Christianity.

“With that book, he set forth a manifesto for this country, to help this country understand the American Indian condition,” Floyd says. “He was a great intellect and a great human. He had a biting wit that had obliqueness to it: it didn’t come straight at you, it kind of came from the side, but it hit you straight between the eyes.”

A few years after the book was published, Floyd, Deloria and Native American songwriter Jimmy Curtiss collaborated on an album that would put Deloria’s manifesto to music.

“We started writing it after the book came out,” Floyd recalls. “It was a reflection of the book. I wanted to express the Indian point of view through songs, so we lifted songs out of the chapters of Vine’s book.”

Floyd’s first album and its title-track, “Custer Died for Your Sins,” was released in 1969, and became the anthem for the newly formed American Indian Movement, of which Floyd was a early member.

The lyrics go like this:

For the lies that were spoken

For the blood that we have spilled

For the treaties that were broken

For the leaders you have stilled.

Custer died for your sins,

Custer died for your sins.

Now a new day must begin.

For the tribes you terminated

For the myths you keep alive

For the land you confiscated

For a freedom you deprived.

Custer died for your sins…

Now the truths that you pollute

And for the life you have cost

For the good you prostitute

And all that we have lost.

Custer died for your sins.

The album put Floyd in the national spotlight. And when his old boarding school friend Dennis Banks and AIM were holed up at the Pine Ridge Reservation during the Siege of Wounded Knee in 1973, Floyd sang the songs at fundraisers, and then snuck onto the reservation past armed federal troops to personally delivered the money to his friends inside.

Wounded Knee had been the site of the 1890 massacre of nearly 300 Lakota men, women and children who were killed by Army troops who had been called in by local white officials to enforce their ban on Ghost Dancing on Lakota reservations.

In 1973, AIM gathered at the Pine Ridge Reservation to rally against broken treaties – and against the tribal chairman’s use of Indian lands to line his own pockets.

“The chairman was selling land for uranium and gas exploration,” Floyd recalls. “He was very corrupt. Our land was being sold out from under us, under the table, so we decided to go to Wounded Knee to make a demonstration. But the chairman didn’t want us to be there. We presented a danger to him. And as soon as we got there, the tribal chairman brought in his goons. And then they brought in federal agents – FBI and the BIA – and paratroopers from Georgia, and armored personnel carriers with 50-calibre machine guns. They surrounded everybody in there.”

During the 71-day standoff, several ferocious gun battles erupted, leaving two Indians dead, and one U.S. Marshall paralyzed for life.

Wounded Knee, already the symbol of American genocide, became a new symbol of Indian protest.

“During Wounded Knee, a lot of this started getting into high gear,” Floyd recalls. “We had a lot of support groups for AIM, and the Green Party in Europe supported us, so I went over there and raised a lot of money for AIM.”

Floyd traveled the country, singing in concert halls, at protests and at powwows to raise money for, and consciousness about, Indian rights.

His second album, “The Land is Your Mother,” was released in 1982, and the next year, he toured Germany with Harry Bellefonte to raise money for the anti-nuclear movement. In Germany, Floyd became friends with Petra Kelly, the peace and environmental activist who’d founded the German Green Party. She was murdered nine years later.

In 1989, Floyd, British rocker Sting, and Brazilian Indian leader Raoni Metuktir went on a 45-day world speaking tour to raise awareness about the destruction of the rainforests and the forests’ indigenous people.

“We went down to Brazil and lived in the jungle for a week-and-a-half,” Floyd says.
”We saw how terrible the destruction of the jungle is, and how terrible the destruction is of the living space for the Indians. I could see that what happened to us 150 years ago during the Gold Rush was what is happening to them now.”

Over the years, Floyd has met kings and queens, presidents and popes, but like Tom Joad, the character played by young Henry Fonda in “The Grapes of Wrath,” Floyd was always there when the people needed him. As Tom Joad tells his Ma in the film’s heart-breaking farewell scene, “A fella ain’t got a soul of his own; just a little piece of a big soul. One big soul that belongs to everybody…I’ll be around in the dark – I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look – wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be there in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be there in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when people are eatin’ the stuff they raised, and livin’ in the houses they built. I’ll be there, too.”

In a very real sense, Floyd Red Crow Westerman is a modern-day Tom Joad.

Floyd Westerman is also often compared to Woody Guthrie, the great American singer and social conscious of the generation of The Great Depression.

“Woody Guthrie was an artist and thinker who used his music to express and support people who were the underdogs of his time,” actor and activist Max Gail, Floyd’s longtime friend, said in an interview for this story. “Woody Guthrie used his music to bring hope and attention to injustice. In that way, Floyd has been expressing the way Indian people were treated, and the way they saw things.

“Vine Deloria once said to him, ‘Sometimes you gotta reach out and grab a little bit of destiny,’ and that’s what Floyd did. He made a real commitment and he stuck with it: A commitment to spiritual growth and to helping his people, honoring his ancestors.

“Floyd has a keen social intelligence, and many times he was able to help the movement when people were on collision courses over strategies. His main role as an artist is to express a dimension that includes art and society. In a way, he’s like a medicine helper.

“Floyd has played a really significant role in the movement. He’s been a kind of navigator and helmsman for the movement, in terms of what the key things were for people to be thinking about. He would help people find what was essential. And he’s done it all through times of not having significant economic support, and health problems. He’s been an inspiration.”

Gail, who has appeared in more than 100 films, TV shows and stage productions, but who is perhaps best know for his portrayal of Det. Stan 'Wojo' Wojciehowicz in the Barney Miller” TV series, says that “One of the reasons for Floyd’s longevity is that he has continued to grow. As an actor and a storyteller, somehow you transcend yourself and keep on growing beyond yourself, and I see Floyd continuing to do that. There is something universal about storytellers, and there is something universal about Floyd.”

Floyd got his first break in the film and TV industry through the generosity of legendary actor and activist Will Sampson, whose films include “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” “The White Buffalo,” “Fish Hawk” and “Poltergeist II,” among many others.

Floyd had known Sampson for 20 years.

“I traveled around the country and the world singing songs, and he was on the same venues, speaking,” Floyd recalls. “He was the Indian actor in Hollywood, following in the footsteps of Chief Dan George.”

Floyd and his buddy, Max Gail, visited Sampson often at his ranch in Pasadena, where they rode horses through the hills and old river bottoms. But in 1987, Sampson’s health began to fail.

“One time I could tell he was sick,” Floyd recalls. “He had oxygen tanks. Max and I went over to see him and he was in bed. He was that ill.”

Sampson had an appointment later that week at Paramount Studios in Hollywood to audition for an episode of the “MacGyver” TV series, but he was too weak to get out of bed.

“He asked me, ‘I wonder if you’d go read for me?’” Floyd recalls. “He said, ‘I can get you an appointment. I know the director. I can call him now. I know you’d do a good job.’ At that time, I knew he was dying. And here was a brother on his dying bed, reaching out to give another brother a job. He said, ‘You go for me.’”

As it turned out, Sampson was very ill. He needed a heart and lung transplant, which was a rare and risky procedure in those days.

A few days later, Floyd went on the audition, as Will had asked him to.

“They had my name at the gate, just like Will said,” Floyd recalls. “They were doing screen tests. I got the job, and two days later, I was flying to Vancouver for my first role in Hollywood. It was a pretty good job, a principal role in a ‘MacGyver’ episode.”

Doctors in Houston, meanwhile, had found a heart and lung that might be a suitable match for Will Sampson. The Screen Actors Guild’s insurance would pay for the operation, but getting him there would be expensive, and SAG’s insurance didn’t cover that.

“Max Gail and a few other actors – Martin Sheen and Jack Nicholson, I think – chipped in for an air ambulance and sent him from LA to Houston for the transplant,” Floyd recalls.

The operation was a success, but Sampson died of post-operative complication six weeks later, on June 3, 1987. It was a terrible loss to Floyd and to all Indian people.

Several small film and TV roles followed Floyd’s first role on the “MacGyver” episode, including parts in “Renegades” and “Powwow Highway.” But Floyd’s big break came two years later when Kevin Costner cast him in the pivotal role of Ten Bears in “Dances With Wolves.”

“That would be my calling card in Hollywood,” Floyd says.

“I met with Kevin and he liked my voice and everything else, so he cast me,” Floyd says.

The film, produced and directed by Costner, is an epic tale of a white soldier’s close encounter with Native Americans in the Old West.

The film won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, Best Editing and Best Sound. But it almost didn’t get made.

“None of the studios supported him,” Floyd says. “Kevin took it to all of them – Sony, Universal, Warner Bros., all of them. They didn’t want to touch a three-hour movie, because they didn’t think they could make money in theaters with a three-hour movie. And much of it was in the Lakota language, and that required subtitles, and American audiences aren’t accustomed to seeing subtitles. So those were the drawbacks, and he didn’t get any money from the studios. But Kevin had a great determination about doing it. And in the end, a German company put up the bulk of the money, and the movie got made for $17 million.” (Which is peanuts by today’s standards.)

“It was a break-through film in many ways,” Floyd says. “It showed the Indian people as human beings, who laughed and loved their families. The human side was portrayed in a very caring, affectionate way. And in the voice-overs, when Kevin’s character was writing in his journal about the Indians, we hear him say that ‘these people are not the bogeymen they are made out to be. They have a keen sense of family, they care for their children, and they can move together like one great army.’”

And where it was once the norm in Hollywood to “paint-down” non-Indians and cast them in Indian roles, Coster cast Indian actors for all the Indian roles.

Floyd has nothing but respect for Costner and the film, but he still thinks that Hollywood can do better.

“They used the Indian language and they showed history in a proper way,” he says. “But it was still a white man, like Tarzan, out there among the Indians.”

For Floyd, more than 30 film and TV roles would follow over the next 15 years, including featured roles in such TV shows as “LA Law,” “Northern Exposure,” “Judging Amy,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Dharma & Greg,” “Roseanne,” “Millennium,” “Walker, Texas Ranger,” a four-part “X-Files,” and ironically, the 1994 TV movie, “Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee,” in which Floyd played the grandfather of a girl who in 1973 gets swept up into the struggle for Indian rights that culminates in an armed standoff with U.S. government forces at the site of the 1890 massacre.

Numerous feature film roles also followed, including “The Brave” (1997), “Naturally Native” (1998), “Grey Owl” (1999), “The Tillamook Treasure” (2006), and in 1991, Oliver Stone’s “The Doors,” in which Floyd played the spiritual guide to rock legend Jim Morrison.

Floyd and Oliver Stone hit it off at their first meeting.

“We interviewed a little and he gave me the job right away,” Floyd says with a laugh.

The shoot was not an easy one, however. Some of the location shots took the cast and crew out into the desert near Needles, California, and it was very hot.

“I ran a ceremony for the project out in the desert,” Floyd recalls. “We had some Indian grandmothers from Pine Ridge, and we stood in a circle, the cast and crew, and I offered some tobacco in a little fire so that it would go well.”

And it did.

“They say Oliver’s tough and everything,” Floyd laughs, “but to me he’s like a friend.”

And the feeling’s mutual.

“Floyd helped us enormously on ‘The Doors,’” Stone commented for this story. “He opened up a world to me of American Indian spirit that I didn’t know ran parallel to our contemporary culture.”

Today, Floyd Red Crow Westerman continues to open peoples’ eyes. For the past few years, he’s been writing, producing, directing and raising funds for a six-part documentary film series about the genocide of the Indian people called Exterminate Them! America’s War on Indian Nations. Floyd has completed the first part of the series. It’s called The California Story, and it tells the heart-breaking saga of the near extermination of the Indian people in “The Golden State.”

The California Story is an honest, factual and shocking indictment of America’s treatment of its native people. Making it, however, wasn’t easy.

Last year, Floyd had to have a lung transplant to save his life. The tuberculosis that he’d contracted as a child began to take a toll on his health. His lungs, scarred by the childhood disease, began to fail. Not long after he finished filming “Dances With Wolves,” he came down with pneumonia. Then he came down with it again; and again, and again. The last time, in 1995, the pneumonia was complicated by the Bird Virus, a cousin of the Bird Flu that epidemiologists fear may be about to spread into a global epidemic.

At first, doctors didn’t know what was wrong with him

“I almost died because they couldn’t find what it was,” he says. “They tapped my spine to see if I had bone marrow cancer. I lost 35 pounds in three weeks. I was down to skin and bones.”

Finally, doctors detected the virus and put Floyd on a regimen of Cipro, a powerful antibiotic, and his health began to improve. But over the next ten years, taking a breath would become more and more difficult, and doctors finally recommended a lung transplant as a last resort. For Floyd, it was a eerie reminder of the final days of his old friend, Will Sampson, who died nearly 20 years earlier after undergoing a heart and lung transplant.

Floyd had his transplant last year at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, and he’s made a complete recovery, although he still has to take 21 anti-rejection pills a day.

He is thankful for the doctors at Cedars-Sinai who saved his life.

“I hate hospitals,” he laughs, “but they’re great.”

He’s also thankful for having Screen Actors Guild health insurance.

“I was so fortunate that I had SAG insurance,” he says. “SAG covered everything. SAG is probably the best insurance in America.”

So in a sense, acting literally saved his life.

And Floyd is also grateful to his wife Rosie, who has stuck with him in sickness and in health.

Rosie, who imports trained German Shepherds, is actually Floyd’s fifth wife. He has five children – daughters Jennifer, Chante, Shenoa, and Nikuaqua, and son Richard – and six grandchildren, by his four previous marriages.

“I met Rosie in 1985,” Floyd remembers. “She was attending the American Indian film festival in San Francisco with a Navajo friend of hers named Sandra. I introduced myself, and when I got back to L.A., we had a benefit for Leonard Peltier at the Comedy Store, and Rosie and Sandra were there again. We went out to dinner and started seeing each other. I knew her for four years before we decided to get married in 1989.

“All I had was a suitcase and a guitar until I met her. She is a real stabilizer for a guy’s who’s been on the road his whole life.”

Today, they live on a lovely little home on a tree-lined street in Marina del Rey, California.

But tragedy, it seems, is always just around the corner. Last year, not long after Floyd had his transplant, his dear friend, Vine Deloria, died suddenly from an aortic aneurysm. He was 72.

In 2004, Time Magazine named Deloria one of the 10 most influential thinkers of the 20^th Century. And just a few months before his death, the editorial committee of Indian Country Today, the nation’s leading Indian newspaper, named him the recipient of their American Indian Visionary Award for 2005. On receiving word of the award, Deloria told the newspaper, “You should have given it to Floyd.”

“In our time, we could replace the passing of a political leader,” Floyd says solemnly. “The community would find another person to take the lead. But Vine was such a unique intellect, philosopher and theologian. You can’t replace anybody like that.”

Today, Floyd Westerman is more determined than ever to carry on the work that he and Vine began so many years ago – to tell the truth about America and its native people. And now that he has his health back, he’s eager to finish his documentary series about the American holocaust.

“In the movement,” Floyd says, “if we found a brother in bed sleeping, we’d say, ‘What the hell are you doing in bed? There’s a war going on.’ Well, it’s still going on. There is a war against ignorance in our culture, and we have to keep fighting it.”

Floyd’s documentary is a major battle in that war.

In The California Story, Floyd interviews numerous history professors, scholars and Indian elders and activists to paint the true picture of the genocide that was waged on California’s Indians; first by Spanish missionaries, then by Gold Rush invaders, vigilantes and officials of the new state, who were eager to clear Indians off the land.

The documentary details how, beginning in 1760, the missionaries treated Indians as slaves, and gave them no more food than was provided to Jews in Nazi concentration camps.

“They’re working ‘em to death and they’re starving ‘em to death,” says David Stannard, professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii, in his interview for the film. “In the final year or so of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Nazi Germany…there have been calculations of the amount of core intake that the inmates received. It was around 600 to 700 calories a day. That’s something like a cup of milk and a piece of bread. That is what the people in missions were getting, year after year after year; decade after decade after decade. They were literally being starved to death.”

And when gold was discovered in California in 1848, things got even worse for the Indians.

“100,000 Indians died in the first two years of the Gold Rush,” says Dr. Edward Castillo, Cahuilla/Luiseño Professor of History, in the documentary. “Nothing like this happened anywhere else in North America. Nothing like this was comparable to the loss of life and the utter chaos and violence of the Gold Rush.”

And when the gold played out, Floyd says in the documentary, “the slaughter continued as attention shifted to ownership of the land.”

This, Floyd points out in the film, was echoed in “the sentiment of the public” – and in the newspapers of the day, which “called for the extermination of the Red Man.”

As the Yreke Herald said in an Aug. 7, 1853, editorial: “Extermination is no longer a question of time – the work has commenced and let the first man that says treaty or peace be regarded as a traitor.”

And as the Chico Courant said in a July 28, 1866, editorial: “It is a mercy to the red devils to exterminate them, and a saving of many white lives…there is only one kind of treaty that is effective – cold lead.”

“What happened to the indigenous people of this country is much like the Jewish Holocaust,” Floyd says at the beginning of the documentary. “Only America’s ethnic cleansing was at the hands of people who would later claim innocent in the name of God, freedom and democracy. Historians have been reluctant to use the word ‘holocaust’ to describe the taking of the land and the shaping of America. Instead, they use rhetoric like ‘The New Frontier,’ or claim that the Indians were ‘savage’ after all, or describe it as ‘Manifest Destiny.’ Manifest Destiny means that the taking of the land was not only justified, but ordained by God. Most schools in America still teach this feel-good version of history. ‘America’s War on Indian Nations’ tells another side of the story. This series will tell the truth about gross injustices and rampant human rights violations inflicted upon an entire culture.”

In The California Story, Floyd quotes Thomas Jefferson, the acclaimed proponent of freedom and democracy and the author of the Constitution, stating that the United States government was obliged “To pursue Indians to extermination, or to drive them to new seats beyond our reach.”

George Washington, the revered Father of the Country, is quoted describing Indians as “wolves and beasts who deserve nothing from the whites but total ruin.”

Andrew Jackson, who Floyd calls “the greatest Indian killer of all American presidents,” is quoted urging United States army troops “...to root out from their dens and kill Indian women and their whelps.”

In the film, Peter Burnett, California’s first governor, is quoted saying, “A war of extermination will be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct.”

The documentary tells how the government paid militia groups to murder Indian men, women and children, and makes a compelling case for the allegation that America employed the most insidious weapon of all to destroy the Indian people – smallpox.

“Early-day Europeans who came to America were commissioned to look for gold,” Floyd says in The California Story. “With gold the objective, nothing would stand in their way. State by state, various tools of genocide were employed in what became a systematic clearing of the land. The first of these tools was the bullet. The bullet was used to kill many millions of my people. Another tool of genocide was the smallpox-infected blanket. To Indians, the blanket was a dominant trade item. To give a blanket was a gesture of respect. Knowing this, early Americans distributed smallpox blankets in order to exterminate and eradicate the existing population. Those who survived this early form of biological warfare were removed by organized, government-funded militias – and more bullets.

“Imagine being in your home having dinner with your family, when suddenly armed intruders break in and shoot your parents, take your children, burn your house, the children to be later used as servants and sex slaves; and if you survive that, to be rounded up like cattle and put on death marches to remote locations far from your homeland, and put on reservations – a nicer term for what they really were: concentration camps.

“This horrific scenario is what happened to thousands and thousands, if not millions, of Indian people. For my ancestors, the Dakota, Lakota and Nakota, this policy of concentration camp lifestyle was in effect from 1890 to 1930. For 40 years, my people were prohibited by law from leaving the reservations. The ethnic cleansing was effective. It is estimated that when Columbus arrived, there were approximately 20 million Indians in America. By the end of World War II, only 500,000 remained. This means that complete extermination was nearly accomplished.”

The California Story ends with a powerful indictment of America – and a comparison to the justice that was meted out to the Nazis after World War II that could just as easily be applied to the crimes against humanity committed right here in America against the Indian people.

“In the aftermath of the Nazi holocaust and World War II,” Floyd narrates, “German political leaders, military officers and the German people were put on trial before the Nuremberg Tribunal. All were charged with war crimes, high crimes against humanity. Military officers said they were only following orders. Political leaders and the German people proclaimed innocence by saying they had no idea what was going on in the concentration camps. To their protests of innocence, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was the chief U.S. Prosecutor at Nuremberg, responded to their protest of innocence by saying, ‘Certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether Germany commits them, or whether the United States commits them. We are not prepared to impose a code of criminal conduct against others that we would not be willing to have invoked against us.’”

And despite knowing all this, and having lived all this, Floyd Red Crow Westerman is not a bitter man. The role of the Eyapaha is not to accuse, but to teach: to tell the truth, and by so doing, to heal.

As he says in the documentary: “In order to heal, we first must accept our past.”

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