ANNA MAE AQUASH 54/MAINSTREAM MEDIA IGNORES THE CONTINUING RACISM AND GENOCIDE OF NATIVE AMERICANS

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

It has been almost a week since I have done an Anna Mae post. For various ways…I have to consider that Monica is right about spirits and that everything is happening for a reason. Some dark things are being exposed to light..that is always a good thing eventually, even if there is pain and turmoil involved. We may not recognize the good because we may not be the recipients.

When I last posted on this book the government had pushed AIM leaders to the brink…our government and justice and political system is not fair…it is outrageous in its overt racism…but to become what the colonizer has taught will not and has never worked. Having said that and watching what has been going on in Iraq I wonder if some revolution is necessary for change. Americans are too weak and afraid of their government to protest on that level. I once attended a Wobblies meeting and there was a man from Denmark visiting he said that Americans will rise up when they have fallen far enough. It gave me great hope but then when you read about North Korea….maybe not so much.

Five days after Anderson (a reporter) started raising questions-two months after the beating-U.S. Attorney General Edward Levi announced that Dick Wilson and six of his goons (including Brewer and Dick Wilson Jr.) would be indicted.

In the year before the beating, twenty-six people had been murdered in South Dakota, twenty-three of them had been on Pine Ridge, and nearly all of the victims had been Indians. The murder rate on the reservation was eight times that of Detroit, then America’s most homicidal city.

Yet the national press almost entirely ignored the story.

WKLDOC tried to interest reporters in the more sensational murders, like the case of the Eagle Hawk family, whose care was rammed by goons, killing the mother, her four month-old daughter,and three-year-old nephew. Goons threatened the survivors in the hospital, and the authorities declared the murder a routine auto accident.

But reporters didn’t bite. A few dead Indians in an out-of-the-way corner of an out-of-the-way state didn’t count for much individually, and collectively they were not seen as the alarming result of systemic racism.

The reporters and editors who hastened Jim Crow to his grave would not do the same for bigotry against Indians.

Here is a link to a site called OUR FREEDOM it is about the John Graham/Richard Marshall farce trial. They have written a Chronology of Oppression at Pine Ridge.

Here is a “book” on a pdf file called FREE JOHN GRAHAM it has his story …Anna Mae’s…pictures and letters of support including one written by Monica Charles!