ANNA MAE AQUASH 19/PRESIDENT WILSON

All excepts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.

Today nearly every school child can tell you something of the black civil rights movement; maybe one in a thousand can speak of the red.

Before the Trail of Broken Treaties the Oglala voted in a new president Dick Wilson. He is quite a controversial character. He was accused of taking money from white businessmen, paying for votes, buying tribal land at a quite a discount, stealing and selling a tribal truck, taking money from the tribe under the table, nepotism, not keeping the tribal accounting books, forging his secretary’s name on $69,000 dollars in checks.

Because he was anti-AIM he had the full support of the BIA.

Wilson…illegally ran most of the tribes affairs through a small executive committee under his control. One of the executive committee’s more notorious acts was to outlaw the assembly of three or more people withe the means to riot. So broadly worded was the statute that “means to riot” included vocal chords.

In November 1972, as the Trail of Broken Treaties came to an end, Wilson ordered all tribal employees to Billy Mills Hall… Wilson announced that the Trailers were bound for Pine Ridge, that they meant to hold a victory dance at Billy Mills, but that the dance was a Trojan horse, that AIM’S true end was the sacking of the tribal and BIA headquarters. The crowd was appropriately riled, an the tribal council, which Wilson called briefly into session, passed an ordinance 72-55 was supposed to do no more. But when 72-55 appeared in the statute book, it empowered Wilson to throw anyone who supported AIM off the reservation or out of a tribal job.”Wilson had the people of Pine Ridge so paranoid,” said Dave Long, the vice president of the tribe and one of the few dissidents on the council,”that when a few AIM members were seen in Rushville, over the Nebraska line, the tribal buildings in Pine Ridge were evacuated.”

True to his word Wilson arrested Russell means and Dennis Banks and other AIMers whose had spent their entire lives on Pine Ridge. He also fired the dissenting Vice President Long..

…without pay or due process, even though by law Long was removable only by impeachment. Means and long filed a complaint witht the prosecutiors of the U.S. attorney’s office in Rapid City, noting that Wilson’s despotisms were expressly forbidden by the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968. They asked that Wilson be charged with violating their civil rights. The prosecutors said they would give the matter consideration, which is all they gave it.

If the prosecutors were disinclined to let so trivial a thing as an act of Congress stand in the way of Wilson’s harassment of AIM, perhaps it because the Justice Department, of which the U.S. Attorney’s Office was a subsidiary, had just asked the FBI,  in the aftermath of the Trail of Broken Treaties, to step up its monitoring and infiltration of AIM.

Then Wilson brought about the goon squad…Google goon squad Pine Ridge and it comes up with a lot. You can read further here,  here,  here and then I found this refuting many of the deaths on Pine Ridge were by goons or the FBI, it also says there were no investigations….how were the findings made??

Wilson asked to put the goons on the federal payroll, and Stan Lyman, the BIA superintendent on Pine Ridge, thought the idea capital. So too Lyman’s boss, BIA director Wyman Babby. In November or thereabouts, $60,000 was forwarded to Wilson.

The federalized goons were to be deputized by the BIA police on Pine Ridge, but the scheme ran afoul of Richard Colhoff, the BIA’s chief of Police on Pine Ridge. Colhoff said the goons were a public nuisance. In fact, they were the source of most of the trouble on the reservation, and even had they been upstanding citizens, Colhoff said that deputizing a group of untrained men for riot control was madness.

So of course Wilson whined and the director Wyman Babby  found Richard Colhoff a job on another reservation.

With Colhoff gone, Wilson ordered every able-bodied man employed by the tribe to Billy Mills Hall for riot training. some came willingly, others out of fear of losing their jobs. There were brief tutorial in judo and the use of nightsticks, followed by the distribution of paychecks. More tutorial and pay checks followed.

Long accustomed to abuse and fearful of the goons, the Ogalalas of Pine Ridge were slow to chafe. But by
the end of 1972, six of the reservation’s eight district councils, which functioned as neighborhood councils do in a large city, called on Wilson and Lyman to resign. come January 1973, when Wilson again refused to call the tribal council into session, several councilmen circulated a petition for his impeachment.