"The brutality and violence on the reservations is going to stop right now." AIM spokesman Ted Means warned.  Since the BIA, the FBI, and U.S. Attorney William Clayton had all ignored AIM's requests for help, the movement would "take the necessary steps to protect Indian people on the reservation."  Later that spring Ted's wife Lorelei said "We can deal with Wilson.  Maybe he'll get assassinated or maybe one of us will get assassinated.  We can fight like this, but what has got to change is the system of government on the reservation.  People are ready to die for for making that change.  The hard core will probably get killed off, but I think it's going to happen.  Hell, we're struggling for our life.  We're struggling to survive as a people."  Whether Jeanette Bisonette had been killed by AIM hit men out gunning for Jim Wilson, near whose property she had been killed (as the FBI suggested), or by goons out gunning for Ellen Moves Camp, who drove a similar blue car, (as the traditionals believe), it was clear that the traditionals were starting to shoot back:  Two goons were among the the dead during that bloody March of 1975.

This new determination of the traditionals to defend themselves was not lost on the authorities.  (Mattiessen, ibid, p. 132.)  "I'm fed up with the violence," announced state Attorney General Janklow, the man who had promised those who voted for him the year before to put "all AIM members in jail or under it."  [Question: Why wasn't it violence to be fed up with previously, when it was only traditionals dying - and before they started shooting back?]  Janklow declared he hated to answer the telephone for fear it would bring news of a race war.  On April 24, the FBI circulated a six-page confidential document called "The Use of Special Agents of the FBI in a Paramilitary Law Enforcement Operation in Indian Country."  Protesting orders from the U.S. Attorney General's office at the time of Wounded Knee that they were to "aim to wound rather than kill" - not to mention the failure of other government agencies to submit to FBI authority in the Wounded Knee operation - the report made it clear that in any future confrontation "the FBI will insist on taking charge from the outset."  Appearing two years after Wounded Knee, this document, (signed by SAC Richard G. Held, the new head of the FBI's Internal Security Section and a longtime COINTELPRO specialist) suggests that some future confrontation was expected.

In early May, the federal government announced that it was strengthening its investigative and prosecution teams on the Pine Ridge Reservation.  The U.S. Attorney's office in South Dakota would have seven more prosecutors, and the FBI would station additional agents near the reservation, in such towns as Gordon and Rushville, Nebraska.  On May 10, the FBI began training a team of BIA police in Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) to compliment its own SWAT team in Rapid City.  By the end of May, about sixty agents were posted in the Pine Ridge area, as opposed to three before the time of Wounded Knee.  In addition, one thousand National Guardsmen commenced training in the Black Hills.  "There are pockets of Indian population which consist almost exclusively of American Indian Movement (AIM) members and their supporters on the Reservation.  It is significant [that] in some of these AIM centers the residents have built bunkers which would literally require military assault forces if it were necessary to overcome resistance emanating from the bunkers."  On June 16, the Bureau called for additional agents, which supports the Indian's suspicions that an "incident" of the sort twice mentioned in Held's report was now expected.  In late May, at a small rodeo in Oglala, an excited young Indian threatened a Wilson sympathizer with a gun  The traditionals in the outlying communities - at Oglala, Porcupine, and Wanblee in particular - had had enough and were spoiling for a fight.  But soon a whole column of goon pickup trucks arrived and a number of traditionals were badly beaten, including a young woman teacher identified by the goons as an AIM sympathizer.  In Dick Wilson's view, this was "law and order" of the finest kind.  Asked what had taken place, Wilson said "People were shooting, so a bunch of the boys went up there and stomped hell out of 'em."