ANNA MAE AQUASH 58/JANCITA EAGLE DEER MEETS ex-GOVERNOR BILL JANKLOW (PART I)

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

I had to make another attempt to tell the story of Jancita Eagle Deer only all together instead of spread out over several chapters and without interruptions. Also without anger in my heart.

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Jancita  who lived on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. Indian reservations were created by very greedy white men and the greedy women who choose to sleep with them. As Americans we know the story of the Brady Bunch isn’t true…childhood is full of pain and hurt, wounds and scars, sprinkled between moments of carefree and wonderful moments. I think that Indians on Pine Ridge lived the Brady Bunch Negative Extreme…instead of families coming together the bad greedy white men rip them apart. Stole their children and sent them to houses of horror  called boarding schools. If you can imagine Satan running a boarding school….well it is probably worse than your imagination. Mothers and Father’s are helpless as greedy men and women kidnap their children re-name them in the name of Christianity (although Christ himself  would have nothing to do with the insanity of such loveless actions) subjected to all manner of abuse, readily scorned and attempts  made to scour their memory of who they really were.

Young Jancita attended one of these little houses of horror and on

“Saturday night in January 1967, Jancita Eagle Deer was checked out of her dormitory at the Rosebud Boarding School in Mission, South Dakota, by Bill Janklow. Eagle Deer was a full-blooded Lakota with bobbed hair of pitch, eyelashes of a length other girls would sell fingers for, a full cheeked smile, and a frame of pleasing proportions. She was fifteen. Her parents had been unable to care for her, owing to the same alcoholism and despair that had cleaved Anna Mae Aquash from her parents she had been placed with foster parents, John and Yvonne Arcoren, With the help of attorneyJanklow, the Arcorens were in the process of adopting Eagle Deer. Janklow had also helped Eagle Deer gain admittance to the BIA boarding school in Mission where he lived, and since the Arcorens lived twenty miles away in St. Francis, Janklow assumed an avuncular posture toward the girl. On that Saturday night, her brought her home for dinner with his family, after which she was to go to a dance. At five minutes before eight-the time would assume some importance- Janklow drove her the half-mile downtown, but the dance hall was unlit: they were too early.

“We might as well drive around until the dance starts,” Janklow said.

“Can I go to a movie?” Eagle Deer said.

He replied, in her version of the story, “Wouldn’t you rather drink with me?”

“I’d rather go to the dance.”

They may have briefly driven around the town, a sprinkling of bruised buildings and rutted streets that would not have sustained much driving, but soon they headed west into the countryside on U.S. Highway 18. A few miles from town, he turned the car north on a dirt section-line track and in the story Eagle Deer told-allof which Janklow has repeatedly and vehemently denied- drove until he reached a small rise where a gate blocked their progress…..

He reached across her seat, pushed a lever, and as the seat fell back pushed her back with it. She tried to get up but he held her down.

“The first time I saw you in my office, I was crazy about you,” he said. “And I have been ever since.” He asked her to come away with him.

She said he had a wife and children.

“To hell with them. I’ll get a divorce.”

Not knowing what else to say, she said his wife was nice and he shouldn’t divorce her, but he was unbuttoning her blouse and seemed not to hear. She hit him and said she wanted to go back to town, but he kept unbuttoning, so she kept hitting.

“Goddamn, what are you so frightened about?” he said. “I won’t hurt you.”

Funny how men think that rape will not hurt a girl….this is common among child molesters and rapists.

he got her blouse unbuttoned, unbuckled his belt, and unzipped his pants. He raised her skirt and tried to pull down her underwear. She was flailing, and it took some doing to get the underwear off, but at last he mounted her. The rape, according to Jancita Eagle Deer of the eighth grade, lasted about ten minutes. What she felt or thought, whether she  continued to struggle or went limp, what precisely her assailant was alleged to have done-the sounds and smells and touch of her particular hell-is nowhere recorded.

When Janklow was sated, he got off her and told her to put her underwear on. She did and pulled her skirt back down and buttoned her blouse. He reassembled himself, put the car in gear, and started back to town. The dashboard clock read 8:50

They were silent until Janklow took three dollar bills from his wallet and geve them to her. She wouldn’t tell anyone, would she?

She took the money without comment.

He said he was going to Denver on Wednesday and asked if she would come along.

“If I could take one of my girlfriends,” she said.

“Forget it.”

They drove on in silence.

“What if I wanted to check you out of the dorm. What would you do?”

“I don’t know.”

When they arrived downtown, he let her out at the dance hall and told her to come back home after the dance. She did not. Next morning, he saw her on the street with friends, ordered her into his car, and drove her home. He sent his wife to the store (?? can you imagine??? that’s why I’m not married!!!) and yelled at Eagle Deer for staying out all night. She asked him to take her back to school. At one o’clock on Sunday afternoon he did, and she went directly to a dormitory matron, Catherine Bordeaux, who could see she had been crying. Eagle Deer said she had been raped and told the foregoing story.

“Are you sure what you’re saying is true?” Bordeaux said when Eagle Deer had finished. “A false statement could get you in a lot of trouble.”

“He took advantage of me,” Eagle Deer said. “And I have proof.”

She unbuttoned her shirt, revealing what Bordeaux described as a nickel-sized “discoloration of the skin” on her upper left breast. Another hickey was visible on the right side of her neck. Eagle Deer credited both to Janklow.

While they were talking, the phone rang. It was Janklow, and he asked to talk to Eagle Deer, but Bordeaux said the girl was distraught and didn’t want to speak with him. She hung up and went to tell her supervisor, (Today she should have immediately called the police. And then notified her supervisor.) Kaye Lord, about Eagle Deer’s claim. while Lord and Bordeaux were talking, an aide rushed up to them and said that Janklow had stormed into the office where Eagle Deer was waiting and that it sounded “like big trouble in there”- the girl crying, the man hollering. Lord went in to the office and sent Eagle Deer out. (Should have sent him out) When the tearful girl emerged, she told Bordeaux in the hallway, “Mr. Janklow told me not to get him into trouble. He said he would buy me everything I wanted.”

Inside the office, Kay Lord found janklow pacing. She said, “I think you had better tell me your side of the story.”

He agreed. He said the night before, Eagle Deer had had supper with his family, after which she had asked to have a couple of drinks. He had said no. A little before eight, she asked if she could go to the dance, and a few minutes later he drove her downtown. Because the dance hall was darkened, he wouldn’t let her out of the car. She asked if he would buy her peppermint schnapps, and he said, “Of course not.” They drove for maybe thirty-five minutes.At about ten minutes to nine, he let her off at  the dance hall and told her to come home by a quarter of two. She didn’t, and he picked her up in Mission the next morning. In the afternoon he dropped her at her dormitory. That was it. He asked to see Eagle Deer.

Lord said it would be too upsetting and suggested he leave. After he did, she called Eagle Deer back into the office and asked to hear her side. Eagle Deer told the same story she had told Bordeaux and showed Lord the hickey on her breast. Lord called Eagle Deer’s stepparents and the school’s principal, but not for several hours did she call the BIA police, and not until Monday morning, thirty-six hours after the alleged rape, did a doctor at the Rosebud Hospital examine Eagle Deer.(That is so heartbreaking that adults running the boarding school could choose hour after hour to take the wrong action.)

On that Monday an investigator of the BIA, Peter Pitchlynn began an inquiry, and on Wednesday he made a report to the FBI. The FBI made its own investigation and made a report to the U.S. attorney. A month later, an assistant U.S. attorney wrote the FBI that “there is insufficient evidence to support the allegations. of the victims, and said allegations. are unfounded.” Janklow was not prosecuted.

to be continued…..

July 18, 2009 | Categories: ABUSE, Anna Mae Aquash, Indians | Tags: Anna Mae Aquash, Bill Janklow, books, Catherine Bordeaux, FBI, Indian boarding schools, Indians, Jancita Eagle Deer, Kaye Lord, Peter Pitchlynn, rape, Rosebud Boarding School, sexual assault, statutary rape, Steve Hendricks, THE UNQUIET GRAVE | Leave A Comment »