I GOT MY NEW TRACKING BOOK!!!
When I first got into hiking and photography in Oregon I was hanging out at this book store and I did a double take when I saw the name Rezendes because that is Portuguese and it is my mother’s maiden name. It was called THE WILD WITHIN it was a book not so much about tracking as it was about how to look at the forest…how to be present in the forest. His sort of autobiography and how he came to love the outdoors. I purchased it because I thought he was a distant relative. But he’s not.
I can’t scan the book because I loaned it out. But Paul Rezendes used to be the head of a biker gang called the Devils Deciples and they were based in Fall River, Massachusetts. Fall River is where most of my Portuguese relatives live. Anyway, he got a clue after getting arrested, studied Krishnamurti and started an Ashram. He turned to the woods and started a tracking school and became a photographer here is his website PAUL REZENDES PHOTOGRAPHY
Here is the book I got
He has updated the cover but being the destitute person I am I opted for the used copy on Amazon. And I think he has one of those $20,000 camera’s while I just bought a Canon Rebel film camera for $100. That’s Catholicism talking I feel guilty about everything….buying used books!!!!! I wish he would write a book about how to get rid of guilt!!!
I told the story about the bear shit on Whisky Creek trail….
but I was in the Redwoods hiking by myself of the Boy Scout trail when I ran into this couple and the man was shocked to see me hiking alone and said as much. I replied I’m not scared to be in the woods alone. He said did you see the cougar tracks back there it wouldn’t matter if you were a man…you are food! So on the way back I finally noticed the cougar tracks but didn’t see a cougar.
THIS IS THE BOY SCOUT TREE WITH MY BACK PACK FOR SIZE REFERENCE.
THE SIGN NAILED TO THE BOYSCOUT TREE
I still wasn’t convinced but then I would read about cougar and bear attacks in the woods. Each story instilled a bit more fear. One day I was on Mill Creek in the Redwoods and stopped on Mill Creek to eat my lunch. It is so beautiful….then I saw this
CLAW MARKS BY MILL CREEK
They were big! But according to Paul Rezendes I need to start carrying a tape measure. To the right of the big claw marks it looks like smaller tracks. But I couldn’t find any more tracks leading to the claw marks but they were right next to the water.
The shadow in the picture is the log I sat on to eat lunch.
MY FEET WHILE EATING LUNCH ON THE LOG
and a view of the creek
MILL CREEK
MILL CREEK
I can’t wait to start tracking bears and cougars….they won’t have to exert them selves tracking ME down. I’ll track them so they will have an easy meal!!!
Later I gotta go write my will.
MY FAVORITE POEM BY SHERMAN ALEXIE
THE SUMMER OF BLACK WIDOWS
The spiders appeared suddenly
after that summer rainstorm.
Some people still insist the spiders fell with the rain
while others believe the spiders grew from the damp soil like weeds
with eight thin roots.
The elders knew the spiders
carried stories in their stomachs.
We tucked our pants into our boots when we walked through fields
of fallow stories.
An Indian girl opened the closet door and a story fell into her hair.
We lived in the shadow of a story trapped in the ceiling lamp.
The husk of a story museumed on the windowsill.
Before sleep, we shook our blankets and stories fell to the floor.
A story floated in a glass of water left on the kitchen table.
We opened doors slowly and listened for stories.
The stories rose on hind legs and offered their red bellies to the most
beautiful Indians.
Stories in our cereal boxes.
Stories in our firewood.
Stories in the pocket of our coats.
We captured stories and offered them to the ants, who carried the
stories back to their queen.
A dozen stories per acre.
We poisoned the stories and gathered their remains with broom and
pan.
The spiders disappeared suddenly
after that summer lightning storm…..
I can hear the sound of Mr. Alexi’s lawyer typing up a cease and desist order….. You can read the rest on Amazon. It’s the second poem in his book.
And what a poem! Seriously I don’t know what it is about that poem the spiders coming down with the rain and bringing stories in their stomachs… You could read that poem to me on my death bed and everything would be alright!!! It is so imaginative and I almost fell out of my chair the first time I read it there was such joy and delight in my heart!
I took a poetry class about 25 years ago and while I got an A, I can’t write worth a damn and it pretty much ruined me for poetry until I read THE SUMMER OF BLACK WIDOWS on Amazon. The poetry class was filled with people that would slice, dice, twist and other wise disembowel a poem until it was dead and stripped of any magic…..and don’t get me started on FUCKING IAMBIC PENTAMETER!!! Once I spot it a poem is dead to me.
I love black widows! My mom used to own the black widow motel that is where I fell in love with them. She lives in the Nevada desert and she had this old Jeep Cherokee sitting in her driveway for years, at night they would all come out. There must have been 20 nests and those were just the ones you could see! My brother hated them and would deliberately walk 20 feet around it imagining that they would grab him and drag him under. Me?? I was naming them. My poor mother made the mistake of killing one of them in front of me…I yelled and accused her of black widow murder. I wish I had taken a picture of them!
I didn’t buy it used either so no guilt there!!!
The cover art is great too!
Also here is Sherman Alexie’s website he has a link to some of his newer poems and he also posts stuff that he is currently reading. That is how I got into all of these great Indian writers. He has good taste in books.
INDIAN PIPE/MONOTROPA UNIFLORA
I have a book called RIVER-WALKING SONGBIRDS & SINGING COYOTES by Patricia K. Lichen. It tells about things in the Pacific Northwest in a way that makes it interesting…I have field guides but a bad memory but Patricia talks about nature in a story manner which is more conducive to my learning style!
Anyway she had a chapter on Indian Pipe
Description: To ten inches high; a cluster of stems, each ending with a bell -shaped flower; close, scale like leaves; white overall occasionally pink tinged, turning black as it ages. Shaped like a shepherd’s hook until seed development, when the plant stands erect.
There’s something vaguely creepy about Indian Pipe. Maybe that is due to the plant’s waxy, nearly translucent whiteness. Or because it is clammy and cold to the touch, within a few hours of being picked, it turns black
I grew up near forest and stream and didn’t remember anything of that description. And looked whenever I was hiking for the last two years .Then one day not long ago I was hiking and happened to look down.
I am guessing that these are the Indian Pipes just hatching! Of course I haven’t gone back there but will try to next week they might be black no though as the area I found them is getting cold at night.
The author of the book is not overly fond of these flowers but I was quite excited to see them…I don’t know if they are cold to the touch because I didn’t touch them. The plants have lost all of their ability to feed themselves and live off mostly Douglas fir but through a third party fungus! This is what the author does not like!
To one who can read the faces of the flowers, as it were, it stands a branded sinner. Doubtless its ancestors were industrious, honest creatures seeking their food in the soil, and digesting it with the help of leaves filled with good green matter (chlorophyll) on which virtuous vegetable life depends; but some ancestral knave elected to live by piracy, to drain the already digested food of its neighbors, so the Indians Pipe gradually lost the use of parts for which it had need no longer, until we find it today without color and its leaves degenerated into mere scaly bracts….No wonder this degenerate hangs its head: no wonder it grows black with shame on being picked, as if its wickedness were only just then discovered!
See what I mean? She makes things interesting and like me I am sure you will never forget this flower! I don’t judge it quite as harshly but I do think she has a sense of humor
Here is a photo of them all grown up from WILDFLOWERS FOUND IN OREGON on PAUL AND BERNICE NOLL’S WINDOW ON THE WORLD (an interesting site I just discovered).
BOOKS I AM READING NOW
I almost always read two books at one time, one is the book I keep by my bedside almost always fiction and the other is non-fiction that I keep in my car and read at lunch or when I am stuck in construction…waiting for whatever reason.
THE DEATH OF JIM LONEY by James Welch
Jim Loney didn’t know how long he had been asleep, but when he awoke it was close to 4 A.M. Outside, the wind swirled and blew snow like grains of sand against the kitchen window. He looked down at this dog and his dog was looking up at him.
“How you doing, old man?”
Swipesy twisted his head.
“You don’t even hear me, but I think you understand everything about life. And you know that you’re a good old boy, don’t you? Yes, you’re good old dog. You live clean and you never abuse yourself. You’re an example to me, Swipesy. I just wish I was as smart as you. I used to be. I was as smart as anybody.”
Swipesy sat up and pushed his nose against Loney’s knee.
“That was before I realized I didn’t know anything. Not one damn thing that was worth knowing. Dy you understand that? Do I understand that? Loney allowed himself a rueful smile that had nothing to do with the dog.
It’s not a book to read if you are looking for sunshine happiness! But James Welch is a good writer and this book covers the pain or rather the numbing of pain of an alcoholic mixed blood white/Indian.
Now RENEGADE TRIBE is about the Palouse Indians.
Like most history between whites and Indians the Palouse were welcoming and helpful when first encountering white people. White people move in; greed, savagery,narcissism and paranoia are inflicted on the Indians. Indians begin to chafe under white attempts to dominate…conflict ensues. I’m only on starting Chapter 4
It really bothers me that real history is not taught in school…well I’m not sure about now. When I was in school it was all from the colonizer point of view.
SWEET MEDICINE BY DAVID SEALS
I finally finished another book!! This has not been the summer for reading…more of the summer of a few paragraphs and then fall asleep!! That I kept falling asleep is not a reflection of the author but on my state of mind this summer.
SWEET MEDICINE is a continuation of POW WOW HIGHWAY the earlier book by David Seals. Like POW WOW HIGHWAY, SWEET MEDICINE has scenes that will have you laughing out loud and scenes that will sober you up.
I haven’t been expressing myself well lately so am including a link to THE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW of SWEET MEDICINE.
NORTH TO YONTOCKET III
Yontocket is anglicized for Yon’ takit. I was a bit surprised when I arrived to find the sign at the cemetery to have the anglicized version. The wind was strong and the gate was rattling but I thought it was probably disrespectful for me to enter.
From my new THE HIKER’S hip pocket GUIDE to the HUMBOLDT COAST book by Bob Lorentzen:
The Tolowa and their neighbors considered the Tolowa village of Yontaket, which was located at the north end of this hike, to be the center of the world, the place where the First People created this world. Every year Yurok from the south and Chetco and Tututnu from the north would journey to Yontakit for a ten-day world renewal ceremony, believed essential for the continuance of the cycle of life. During one of these ceremonies in 1853, a tragic slaughter occured at Yontakit. White vigilantes came at the height of the ceremony, setting the village on fire and massacring hundreds of residents and visitors.
The fenced cemetery on the right marks the site of the 1853 massacre of hundreds of Tolowa by vigilante settlers, another tragic cataclysm in the conquering of California.
there were old fake flowers on every side of the fence but on the western side there were rocks or bits of broken china placed at almost every post.
views of and surrounding the cemetary.
A bench east of the cemetary surveys the magical land where river and ancient dunes meet.
ANNA MAE AQUASH 61/ JANCITA EAGLE DEER MEETS exGOVERNOR BILL JANKLOW part IV
All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
On the night of Friday, April 4th, 1975, two weeks after(Doug) Durham was unmasked(by AIM as an FBI informant), two teenagers in a Pontiac GTO were careening across the southern Nebraska plain when they collided with a woman on foot. A suitcase she was carrying was impaled on the bumper of their car, the rest of her belongings were scattered across 70 feet, and her body was thrown 150 feet from the point of impact. When deputy sheriffs arrived, they found Jancita Eagle Deer lying partly across the road, perpendicular to traffic, and had badly mangled-dead beyond question. The boys who hit her said she was standing in the middle of their driving land and appeared to be weaving and disheveled. They hit her, they said, at fifty or fifty-five miles per hour and did not stop to see whether she was alive or dead, or even to move her out of traffic. Instead they continued to a nearby farmhouse and called the police. The deputies believed the boys’ general story but did not find the details convincing. Their survey of the accident scene suggested that Eagle Deer had been standing not in the middle of the lane but much closer to the shoulder and that the boys had been driving much faster than fifty-five. They had hit her because they were driving recklessly. The officers, however, did not issue so much as a written warning to the driver. Coincidentally or not, the driver belonged to one of the more prosperous families of the nearby town of Aurora and, unlike his victim, was white.
A few months later AIM’s Paula Giese made a more thorough investigation. She apparently spoke with the boys, who said that Eagle Deer had been “trying to flag them down. They assumed she had been pushed from a car by ‘some guy she wouldn’t put out for’ and had a few laughs about this. As they sped toward her, they expected her to jump out of the way, but they struck her.” Giese concluded that the boys had been criminally reckless but did not kill Eagle Deer intentionally.
She wondered, however, about Doug Durham . During her investigation, Giese learned that on Eagle Deer’s final afternoon, she had left South Dakota’s Rosebud Reservation for Des Moines with a dark-haired man in a late-sixties blue Chevrolet. The two of them were last seen in Valentine, Nebraska just south of Rosebud. The logical route from Valentine to DesMoines passed a hundred miles north of where Eagle Deer was killed. no one could explain her presence outside Aurora. Giese suspected that the dark-haired man was Durham and that if Eagle Deer had indeed been unsteady and disheveled just before her death, it was because Durham had beaten her and kicked her out of his car, perhaps while it was moving.
Giese had reason for her suspicions: eight months before her end, Durham had taken Eagle Deer for a lover and had quickly become her batterer.
The two had met in the summer of 1974. When Johnny cake came to AIM that July with his story about the rape of Eagle Deer, it was Durham whom Dennis Banks sent to investigate the claim. By coincidence, Durham and Eagle Deer both lived in Des Moines at the time.
Durham brought Eagle Deer to the AIM office in St. Paul, seducing her en route.
“About fifteen seconds after I first laid eyes on her,” Paula Giese wrote, “Jancita blurted out to me the story of the rape, the fact, as she saw it, that she was going to marry Durham, a few facts about his twenty-thousand-dollar a year salary in AIM, which caused my jaw to drop even further, and some facts about the near-fatal illness for which she was going to help him get cured. I felt it was hopeless to enlighten her, although in seven months of working ‘under’ Durham at the AIM house, I already knew he was a rotten character so far as women are concerned and I also knew he didn’t have leukemia, although he had for a while conned me into excusing a lot on the grounds that he’d soon be dead.”
Eagle Deer told AIM the story of the rape, and AIM declined at first to press it. when Eagle Deer dropped out of sight, Giese assumed Durham had taken her back to Des Moines. In fact, he had set her up in a Twin Cities apartment. “She was kept drunk,” Giese later claimed, “and a few Indian women became aware that Durham was, in effect, pimping for her.” He was also beating her. Once, when she threatened to leave him, he said if she did so, AIM would take her daughter and raise her “as an Indian” on a reservation.
Eagle Deer stayed put.
Three months after Eagle Deer was killed, Paula Giese received a call at the AIM office from a man who would not give his name but whose stiff manner and diction made her think he was a lawman.
“I understand you are interested in Doug Durham and are investigating the death of a young Indian girl, Jancita Eagle Deer,” the man said. “You might like to know that the license of the car that picked her up on the afternoon of April 4″-the day of her death-”was checked. the car belongs to Durham’s father.”
The man did not explain how a license plate number had been found for the car, nor did he say anything else before hanging up.
…the Sheldahls, (Jancita’s relatives) told Giese that when the Nebraska police gave them Eagle Deer’s personal effects, her address book was missing. Eagle Deer had always kept the book with her and, according to one witness, had it when she left rosebud on the day of ther death. The Sheldahls said the FBI had questioned them more than once about the adderss book’s whereabouts. They also said that not long after Eagle Deer’s death, their house was broken into. Nothing of value was taken, but Eagle Deer’s papers had been gone through and some may have been removed. The Sheldahls were certain that Durham or his colleagues were responsible for the break-in. “But what can we do?” one of the Sheldahls said. “Those people have so much power.”
ANNA MAE AQUASH 60/JANCITA EAGLE DEER MEETS ex GOVERNOR BILL JANKLOW part III
All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
Previously a young Jancita Eagle Deer alleges that Bill Janklow raped her. The investigation, like many rape investigations on reservations at the time (I hope things have gotten better),is poorly conducted with adults hesitating, unwilling to do their jobs. Years later she attends a press conference publicly stating that she was victimized. The press conference does not end well for her and she is accused of making up the story by Bill Janklow”s lawyer Jeremiah Murphy.
The story continues…
The reporters never asked how Jeremiah Murphy had seen the papers he said he had seen, papers like Eagle Deer’s school and medical records. these were personal documents, protected by law from prying eyes like Murphy’s, as any lawyer would have known. ….
Nor, above all, did reporters investigate the truth or falsity of the competing stories told by Murphy and Eagle Deer. They simply decreed Eagle Deer wrong.
A few days later, the Court of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, Judge Mario Gonzales presiding, convened to hear evidence In re disbarment of William Janklow. The only reporter in attendance was Minnesota freelancer Kevin McKiernan. Janklow did not attend either, though Gonzalez had ordered him to appear and show cause why he should not be disbarred. Gonzalez had also ordered a BIA police officer to bring the BIA’s file on the alleged rape, but the officer’s superiors ordered him not to give Gonzalez the “confidential” file.This was a large insult. Virtually every court in the nation was entitled to review police records when relevant to a case at hand. For the BIA to say that Judge Gonzalez could not see the records was tantamount to saying that his court was no court.
There was irony in this turn of events because tribal courts had been created a century before by the Indian Bureau to strip traditional chiefs of power and give it to Indian Judges who could be kept servile.
Gonzalez answered the BIA’s insult by jailing the officer who refused to hand over the file and promising the same for his superiors if they set foot on the reservation. Judge Bogue immediately reversed Gonzalez and, more insult to injury, misspelled his name.
Dennis Banks proceeded with his case, calling twenty witnesses against Janklow.
Eagle Deer testified, in Gonzalez’s words, “in obvious discomfort at reliving old horrors.” He found her testimony entirely credible. Kaye Lord and others recounted the rape as Eagle Deer had told them, and eagle Deer’s medical records, unlike her police file, were produced by the hospital. Contrary to the press-conference claim of Jeremiah Murphy, the records contained evidence of some kind, not made explicit by Judge Gonzalez, that was consistent with a claim of sexual assault.
“Furthermore,” Gonzalez wrote, “the evidence indicates that an obstruction of justice followed the rape. When a complaint was being made to the Bureau of Indian Affairs Special Officer, Janklow was there. No relief or representation was possible through the Legal Services Program since Mr. Janklow ran it…..testimony indicates that as recently as two months ago, Mr. Janklow offered Miss Eagledeer’s grandfather money after inquiring about her. The depth of the suffering which Miss Eagledeer conveyed in her testimony cannot be reproduced through words on paper. Feeling shame, she left the Rosebud Reservation and returned only once until today. Her foster parents testified that her grades and interest in school fell after she was raped. She still feels frightened and inhibited by the beastly act committed against her by Mr. Janklow. It can only be hoped that she will come to realize that she should hold her head up proud for she has not guilt. She is a victim.”
Gonzalez disbarred Janklow from tribal court, then went one better and issued a warrant for his arrest.
The newspapers of the state might have been expected o give at least a few paragraph to the warrant, to the disbarment , or to the finding that Janklow had raped Eagle Deer.
They did not.
ANNA MAE 56/Grrrrrr!!!
As some of you know I have been on vacation of the road trip sort….It was good to get away from the Anna Mae story, the posts were getting short because I would get pissed off…outraged. When I was young grown-ups would tell me that I was too ideal and that the world was not ideal….they said I would change. I didn’t. In fact as an adult and encountering opportunities to further my career, money or social status in exchange for a bit of corruption….found I could not live with myself. Having faced the choice….I am even more adamant in my beliefs…there is a whole process when it comes to choosing between the right thing and the wrong thing.
I used to worry the trial would be over long before I was halfway through the book after being in the desert for a week I had the thought that it was all waiting for me. How is that for ego??
What I need to say is how terribly wrong all of this is.
All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
CHAPTER 9
Grrrrr. Chapter 9 is about Bill Janklow….not sure that man’s name should even be uttered on my blog ever again. One time I was listening to G.Gordon Liddy and he was on a tangent because Ted Turner had made some statement that the TEN COMMANDMENTS didn’t mean anything anymore…G. Gordon Liddy in that correct, precise, enunciation of the English language of his said something to the effect of…”Well, I guess if you have broken all ten commandments they would not mean anything to you”. Kind of reminds me of BJ (interesting initials).
Soooo President Ford nominates this accused rapist and future murderer to the board of directors of Legal Services Corporation. By the way my Dad drank and drove every single day of my life growing up…never ran over anyone. Didn’t drive like a fucking idiot like this BJ. My Dad was courteous and would pull over if a car wanted to pass him….I still do that (pull over not drink and drive!).
This position requires Senate confirmation and when he was called for questioning he had disappeared. Apparently he flew home..
He told them he had left the hearing room when a network television crew arrived because he did not care for his past to be debated before the entire nation.” (Waaaahhhh! Is this a Republican or South Dakota trait?? Send that man a crying towel.)
Jimmie Durham , who ran a group called the International Indian Treaty Council (an offshoot of AIM that worked for indigenous rights worldwide)…..told the Senate that Janklow had raped Eagle Deer (Jancita) and had committed other crimes as enumerated in Judge Gonzalez’s Rosebud courtroom. Durham also said that since becoming attorney general, Janklow had sent eighty state troopers to assault a pork plant that was seized by Indians on the Yankton Reservation. The assault was illegal because only the federal and tribal governments had jurisdiction over reservation crimes. Janklow’s troopers had no more authority to quell a disturbance on Yankton than in Omaha.
Grrrrrr. You might think that his cowardly actions would raise some suspicions but the FBI had already investigated him and found the rape charges baseless….now the White House turned to the FBI again (too fucking tired to rant about that!
GUESS WHAT??? Those corrupt fucks at the FBI said
…”these allegations are simply unfounded”
Senator Jacob Javits of New York….declared the exoneration of Republican Janklow by a Democrat-controlled Senate (Yet another reason to be a Socialist!) “a vindication of your system….We all can be very proud (Apparently Jacob Javits has very low standards) that this was the result, and you should take satisfaction from it rather than laboring under any feeling that you have been harassed. (Jacob Javis did it ever occur to you that bj felt harassed because he was….guilty???) You have really proved something very, very useful and important to our country.” (INDEED YOU HAVE PROVEN THE SENATE TO BE FULL OF IDIOTS AND THAT THE FBI IS CORRUPT…THAT OUR SYSTEM IS NOT WORKING!!!)
So much for Peace and harmony!!
HERE IS YET ANOTHER ACCOUNT OF JANCITA EAGLE DEER this pisses me off more than Anna Mae’s story…Anna Mae was older and stronger with more of a sense of who she was…Janklow probably robbed Jancita of that right.
FROM SAND CREEK BY SIMON J. ORITZ PART II
COVER
Simon J. Oritz arranged this book so that on the left page was an observation, thought or fact and on the right hand side was a poem.
Excerpts from the left pages:
The people were at peace. This was expressed two months before by Black Kettle, one of the principal elders of the Cheyennes, in Denver to Governor John Evans and Colonel John W. Chivington, head of the Colorado Volunteers. “I want you to give all these chiefs of the soldiers here to understand that we are for peace, and that we have made peace, that we may not be mistaken for enemies.” The reverend Colonel Chivington and his Volunteers and Fort Lyon troops, numbering more than 700 heavily armed men, slaughtered 105 women and children and 28 men.
A U.S. flag resented by President Lincoln in 1863 to Black Kettle in Washington, D.C. flew from a pole above the elder’s lodge on that gray dawn. The people had been assure they would be protected by the flag…
Repression works like shadow, clouding memory and sometimes even to blind, and when it is on a national scale, it is just not good.
Buffalo were dark rich clouds moving upon the rolling hills and plains of America. And then the flashing steel came upon bone and flesh.
Conquest reached Nevada: a warrior chief was assassinated by the cavalry, cut into stewing pieces, fed to other chiefs, and a Treaty was signed.
That’ll show ‘em. Ask the Paiutes.
Is that true??
Who stole the hearts and minds of the humble hard-working folk until
they too became moralistic and self-righteous: senators, bishops,
presidents, missionaries, corporation presidents?
Here are excerpts from the poems on the right side pages. I am only a little over the halfway point…its too much to digest in a short period of time.
from page 13
…He is impossible
to talk with then.
His frozen tongue
is frantic
with prayer;
he wants to trust.
VA doctors tell him
not to worry.
That’s his problem.
From page 27
You
ought to have
heard them cry
singing
summoning eternity,
the fools.
Singing
longing,
reluctance.
Flowers are delicate,
they are,
these generations
still sing forth,
crying…..
From page 33
Don’t fret now.
Songs are useless
to exculpate sorrow.
That’s not their intent anyway…
From page 45
They try to frighten us
with their madness
but we know better.
Billy wasn’t always alien.
Finally, he listens.
Look Billy, stories
are reliable as those river stones.
They were fierce, Billy,
atrocious, shiny blades glistening
in the cold sun,
you could smell their sour sweat.
FROM SAND CREEK BY SIMON J.ORITZ
SCAN OF BOOK
Here is an excerpt from the Preface
As far as our Native cultural philosophy was concerned, we were a part of human culture and society no matter what anyone said or thought. But there was a problem with that when the human culture and society the human culture we were part of was the United States. Because ti was the same United States that was guilty of mass destruction and oppression as a result of the the “civilizing” and “winning” of the West. And it was the same United States that was guilty of countless instances of thievery and genocidal killing, including the massacre of Cheyennes and Arapahoes at Sand Creek in 1864.
We were a major and vital part of U.S. history, but were we a part of the history of something atrocious like that? Obviously, it’s tough to be faced with something like that. Most people prefer not to face it and deal with it. In fact, U.S. society really doesn’t face it or deal with it. Instead, the United States insulates itself within an amnesia that doesn’t acknowledge that kind of history. The victors (discoverers, settlers, real estate developers, government leaders, etc.) can afford that, it seems, as long as they maintain control and feel that they don’t have to face the truth…
At this point in history, Indians are still not accepted as full participants in and members of world human cultural society. If they choose to, they can accept that severly restricted role, but then they will have to tolerate that role’s social, political, and cultural limitations. Or they can be who they are, absolutely and completely
Leaves a person with much to think of
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!
ANNA MAE AQUASH 53/ELEPHANTS…YEAH IT’S OFF THE PATH
All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
The FBI did a lackadaisical job of investigating the beating of the WKLDOCkers. The one thing that they turned up was an incident that was a prologue to the beating.
Earlier that afternoon Dick Marshall, an Oglala and low-level AIM leader, had an appearance in tribal court on a charge of disorderly conduct. (Marshal said he had only been resisting a goon attack, for which he was charged with a trumped-up crime.) Marshall came to court with a vanful of friends including Russell Means, and demanded a trial by jury rather than by one of Wilson’s judges.
The judge closed the court apparently intimidated by the show of support for Dick Marshall. There was a group of police and goons gathered in the parking lot in anticipation of a caravan from AIM two days before the second anniversary of Wounded Knee. Duane Brewer began challenging members of AIM to fight and they all declined until he smashed Russel Means in the face with his fist.
The van that AIM was using drove away the BIA police captain Joseph Jacobs…
…radioed ahead for other goons to stop the van because when the AIMers neared the airport, a few miles to the east, a car emerged from the parking lot of the tribal planning building and blocked the highway.
“Let’s ram that sucker!” Means said, and the driver of the van, Tom Poor Bear, jammed the accelerator. The goons in the car reversed their makeshift roadblock off the highway in a hurry, and as the van passed, the AIMers threw open the sliding door and emptied their shotguns at the car….
Within the hour, the planeload of WKLDOCkers landed at Pine Ridge Airport, completely ignorant of these events.
In the meantime, Brewer returned to tribal headquarters and blackened the eyes of a court officer who had held him back when he was attacking the AIMers.
Now is the point where AIM starts acting like the FBI, the colonizers…I understand the frustrations that would lead to such actions but they will never work against the United States government….It didn’t before there were tanks, and planes, and machine guns…there is a never ending supply of men that are all to0 eager and willing to do the dirty work for the government.
AIM started firing potshots at people who drove by the mass grave of Wounded Knee and they set up a road block in Porcupine and threatened the townspeople.
The FBI continued its half- hearted investigation of the incident…when all was said and done Russel Means, and Dick Marshall, and Tom Poor Bear were indicted for firing on the goons from their van. Wilson and his goons walked.
This all reminds me of a show I watched many years ago on elephants. Colonizers removed the children…demoralized the adults and elders so they could be repressed continued this for a few century out of fear that minorities that they had wronged for so long would rise up and retaliate and now it has also spread to the colonizers…parents get divorced don’t have time to raise their children…too many single mothers…the effect on society is devastating. The show is sliced and diced into 3 minutes but after an hour of searching it was all I could find. If you ever have the opportunity to watch the whole thing it is well worth it!
Well behaved elders are so very important to our future generations.
ANNA MAE AQUASH 52/SO FAR THE FBI HAS TOLD MULTIBLE LIES IN A COURT OF LAW, IGNORED A CHILD SHOT IN THE EYE, A TEENAGE BOY GIVEN LIQUOR, A FIFTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL THAT WAS RAPED, MULTITUDES OF INDIANS BEING BEATEN, AND NOW WHITE LAWYERS FOR AIM(my apologies for anyone I have missed…it is too much for me to remember. I was thinking of turning it into a song to the tune of the Twelve Days of Christmas…only I have a real sick feeling that it will exceed twelve.
All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
It has been a while since I have been in a funk for this long….they usually only last a few hours these days.
I finally finished reading POWWOW HIGHWAY. (Way better than the movie!!!) I read a few chapters ahead of THE UNQUIET GRAVE because I wanted to see if Steve Hendricks wrote more about Jancita Eagle Deer. He did….and a lot of other things that did not help me to get out of this mood I have been in.
In Chapter 8 a team from WKLDOC was looking to fly out of Pine Ridge airport when they got to their plane it hsd rounds of shot in it damaging
the fuselage, cabin, engine compartment and wings, making it unfit to fly.
While on of the team snapped hurried photographs of the damage, the other moved legal files from the plane to the car. As they did so, they noticed cars whipping in and out of the parking lot of the nearby tribal planning building..
The six WKLDOCkers squeezed back intoFinzel’s convertible and made for the exit, but before they could reach it they were cut off by a dozen cares that raced off the nearby highway and into the airport parking lot. Dick Wilson’s car was in the lead. He stuck an arm out the window and pointed to the convertible, and the following cars encircled it and came to a halt. Out stepped twenty-five or thirty goons. One sat on a pickup fender with a pump-action shotgun leveled at the convertible’s windshield. The WCKLDOCers rolled up windows and punched door locks, as the goons tried the handles without luck. Because it was winter, the roof of the convertible was on. A tall, muscled specimen walked up to the driver’s side of the car and yelled at the WCKLDOCkers to get out. Finzel knew him as Duane Brewer, an expoliceman and Vietnam veteran who ran the tribe’s highway safety program.
Finzel answered Brewer that the WKLDOCkers were just fine where they were.
“I can’t hear you through the window!” Brewer shouted.
“I can hear you fine!” Finzel shouted back.
This opinion wrought bedlam. Brewer kicked at the window, and the rest of the goons, as if on cue, swarmed over the hood and trunk and stomped out the windshield and rear glass. One of them struck a knife in the convertibles roof and ripped a hole above Ginzel’s head. Hands rushed through, one tugging Finzel’s hair, another punching his face. A second gash was made over the backseat, and Bernard Escamilla, the Wounded Knee defendant whose case the WKLDOCkers had come to investigate, was pounded with fists and boots. the car was rocked wildly, glass began to shatter. Brewer yelled something about Finzel having been involved in an incident at the tribal court house.
“There must be a mistake !” Finzel screamed. “Get Dick Wilson! He knows I wasn’t there!”
Dick Wilson came for ward and the goons asked him what he wanted them to do with the WKLDOCkers
“Stomp ‘em,” he said. “I want you to stomp ‘em.”
The goons then resumed the beating of the WKLDOCkers. Some of the WCKLDOCkers decided it best to leave the vehicle.
William Rossmoore, the lawyer who had piloted the plane left…
He made it twenty or thirty yards before being beaten into the ice and muck of a nearby ditch. Each time he rose, a boot crashed into his ribs or calves and down he went again. Eventually he stopped trying to get up, but the boots kept coming all the same.
I have to interrupt this because I was trying to imagine what it is like to be that ruthless….to just pound and kick someone and then have to live with it, what lies you tell yourself….the excuses for your animal behavior. Then I had a thought that this was brought on by someone who once felt powerless in life. Instead of remembering the pain in his life and choosing not to commit the crimes that were committed against him he chose to worship the worst of his life. A lot of this stuff with AIM was about full bloods vs. half bloods. It goes on today but imagine back then what it must have been like growing up on a reservation with insults being hurled like rocks at the young ones growing up…each side thinking they were better…these adults can’t figure it out and then they bemoan that another generation is lost to gangs, drugs and alcohol…it goes on in every minority. I just ran into a man who married an Indian (from India) and her parents have banned her from their lives…they talk to the white husband but the daughter has to stay in the car. This is 2009 and people still care about that shit. Imagine how bad their children are going to feel and with the mother banned will it have a reverse effect? Will the children grow up ashamed their mother is from India? Since she is the one banned? Kind of like white people adopting babies….never mind all of the black children that need to be adopted..can’t have a dark skinned baby…gotta go to Romania and then China, and Vietnamese, Mexico….Only since Angelina Jolie adopted African children has it become more fashionable with Madonna following the trend.
Seriously because of our actions as adults we make the next generation feel bad about them selves…this is no different than standing them before you and throwing mud on them. And then you have white people that are plagued with self hatred like Ward Churchill…a white person who says he is an Indian…what sort of message is that? Why not just say you are a white person that follows Indian ways because they make more sense to you…where did that shame and hatred come from? I certainly hate the actions that whites have taken part in but I’m not about to hate myself for being born white. (I was raised to hate myself for other reasons but not for being white!!!) If you are half white and half something else and you hate the white side…what you are teaching your children or your nephews and nieces is how to hate….themselves. But as I have observed many parents love their hate more than they love their children. White people are masters at this we use the bible, race, income, beliefs, divorce any excuse to hate…..we mostly love our hate more than we love our children. But things have gotten a lot better in many ways but we also see extreme religions that are putting girls back into servitude or treated as property and then we see other parents completely ignoring their children…treating them like adults long before they are ready. Parents who let their young children watch anything on tv. As if they have never heard of age appropriate. They let them make adult decisions when they are still children.
Good Lord I have written a novel!! I will conclude this by saying that children watch how adults behave and treat each other. That is where they learn their future…never mind the past.
O.K….getting back to the story. THE WKLDOCkers are getting the shit kicked out of them by the goons. Finzel is beat until he loses consciousness..
Bernard Escamilla, who had been well-battered even before leaving the car, was thrashed to the asphalt on emerging and kicked mercilessly int he gut, he rolled over to protect himself but succeeded only in transferring the kicks to his back. He managed to stagger up once, but a fist smashed his skull and he wilted.
The two women WKLDOCkers remained in the car held at knife point by a goon. The beatings finally stopped and the goons threatened them to leave and never come back or they would be killed. They called the U.S. Marshals Service in rapid City to ask for help and the Marshals told them to call the BIA. Now that breaks my heart…
They did call the BIA and who of course were no help. So they turned to the FBI….that of course was a joke. Then they tried to call friends on Pine Ridge and were told that the goons had set up road blocks and that they had attacked Severt Young Bear(I have heard of him somewhere….) and Marvin Ghost Bear who were Wilson critics.
Someone finally lent the WKLDOCkers a car and thy went to St. John’s Hospital in Rapid City…
Rossmoore, Gordon, Finzel, and Escamilla were treated for multiple contusions. three doctors and two dozen X rays were required to rule out broken bones in Finzel’s head, neck, chest, back, and legs, all of which were badly contused. Several of his muscles had been ripped from his bones, and cartilage in his ribcage had been ruptured. Escamilla had a broken arm, and his viscera wee bruised and possibly bleeding. He was kept in the hospital for two days to make sure none of his organs gave out. Rossmoore had sprains that took months to heal. Gordon suffered from knifed hands.
ANNA MAE AQUASH 49/THE FBI PROTECTS THE RAPIST OF A TEENAGE GIRL
All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
Back to the trial of Banks and Means which had been going on for almost a year. The prosecution had one final witness by the name of Louie Moves Camp. His Mother was in the court…
When her son walked into the courtroom in St. Paul, she jumped to her feet and screamed, “Louie! What are you doing? Judge Nichol had to order her dragged from the court, whereupon she fainted.
…the prosecutors asked Louie Moves Camp a series of questions designed to pin banks and Means to the many charges against them. Over two days, he testified that the preparations to seize Wounded Knee were not spontaneous but a long-planned conspiracy led by Banks and Means, that both defendants had stolen $1,000 from the trading post, and that they had ordered hostages taken, bunkers built, Molotov cocktails made, and federal troops fired upon. By the end of Moves Camp’s direct examination, he had tied Banks and Means to virtually every count against them.
On cross-examination the defense asked Moves Camp why witnesses said he was in California for most of the 71-day occupation while Moves Camp claimed he was in Wounded Knee for nearly all of the siege.
Of course he said the witness were lying and the defense proved him wrong with a photograph of him in a newspaper at the time of the Wounded Knee occupation. The defense and the judge wanted to know how the prosecution failed to uncover this before they put him on the stand.
Moves Camp had just seemed like a reliable guy, so everyone had taken him at his word. Hurd’s claim was undermined, however, when he admitted that he had asked the FBI to give Moves Camp a lie detector test and Joseph Trimbach had refused.
I wonder if Richard Two Elks has taken a lie detector test….
“Since when,” Judge Nichol asked , “does the head of the (regional) FBI start telling the prosecution that they can’t have a lie detector test if they want to?
Sounds like the FBI gets to do pretty much what they want because no one will hold them accountable…
Moves camp’s wife was called to the stand, and she testified that Louie had told her that in return for testifying he would be given lots of money and a new house, and his many criminal charges-which allegedly included armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, and assault causing bodily harm-would be dismissed.
Sounds like the Arlo Looking Cloud trial….pay people to testify…Or Richard Two Elks who admits killing someone and has never been charged..thats why this whole thing is so crazy if you kill someone its o.k. as long as you are willing to fabricate something for the ever so corrupt FBI.
Wait, wait, wait, there’s even more to the story…
…Rachel Tilsen, wife of Ken, received a call from a woman who lived in Wisconsin, just across the state line from St. Paul. The woman said Moves Camp had been in Wisconsin a few days earlier and while there had been accused of rape. the charges had been hushed up by the FBI. Rachel Tilsen, asked the woman how she knew this, and the woman said she was the wife of the county attorney. Her husband was furious because the FBI had spirited Moves Camp to Minnesota to protect him from indictment. her husband was keeping mum about the incident, but she was not. She said she felt for the girl who had been raped and thought the whole thing an outrage.
Indeed it is an outrage. Like I said before Trimbach and his cheerleaders have absolutely no concern for women what so ever….Anna Mae is just another Indian woman being used…If Anna Mae was the woman who was raped byMoves Camp….we wouldn’t know her name. And Moves Camp would be living in his house with lots of money given to him by the FBI.
Poor Lizzy is going to have heart failure…Moves Camp was out on the town with FBI agent Price who was supposed to be watching him and who had downed five drinks. And left him with the underage girl….MY GOD THEY SHOULD ALL BE IN PRISON!!
Then the county attorney waffles and said that he has no idea why his wife would have called him and he throws the teenage girl under the bus saying that their were witnesses who saw them having consensual sex…If I was his wife we would be divorced.
No wonder Monica Charles hates law enforcement..you can’t even really be upset with these types because they simply have no conscience to speak of….I simply could not live with myself under those circumstances….the funny thing is they probably cannot understand someone like me…I really couldn’t be them….EVER.
DO YOU GET MY POINT BY DAVID L.SPRUILL
SCAN OF COVER
The Exxon Valdez keeps popping up in my life some 20 years after the incident (DID I JUST SAY 20 YEARS??? FEELS LIKE FIVE!)
This book was written by a local Southern Oregonian. It isn’t a very long book and much of it is dedicated to various rants more appropriate to a blog. FOR FREE!
Having said that David Spruill was actually one of the fishermen in Alaska who helped with the cleanup. Unfortunately he does not elaborate enough on that and assumes us nonfisherpersons know what he is talking about.He needed to spell it out for us and explain more about fishing and the cleanup techniques. …He needed an editor to give him direction. He does give us enough information so that we will want to read more about it from another source.
Here is an example of what he writes that would make you want to learn more about what really happened.
Why would you steer outside of an intersection to miss a dog in the intersection and chance piling it up into a building when all you have to do is slow down? My point being the EXXON Valdez could have meandered through the ice ahead slowly, in and out of gear, rather than to choose to veer outside of the shipping lane and imminently pile her up on Blight Reef which is clearly marked on their GPS Plotter, there is also a lighted navigational marker to warn you of the reef’s presence.
Did you know that upon grounding, eight of the eleven storage tanks were ripped open? Did you know that the number of the gallons spilled was determined and reported to the Coast Guard by EXXON? The EXXON Valdez holds 53 million gallons, but their figure came out to be about 20% of that, or 10.7 million gallons. Volumetrically, if those eleven storage compartments were the same size, then rupturing eight of the eleven storage compartments would yield about two-thirds of the cargo loss in question or more like 38.5 million gallons.
Expedient deployment with oil spill response equipment that they were required to have was the only edge to be had, but at beginning of the year they had cut their required amount of response equipment in half to save money, which left them incapable to respond to a spill of this magnitude….
…it is written that any ship spilling more than one million gallons will be banned from the waters of Prince William Sound. since the spill, the Hell Ship EXXON Valdez was repaired and renamed the SEA RIVER MEDITERRANEAN.
Spruill goes on to tell about the clean up (mind you this is all by page 10! like I said it is more like a blog post and not a book he relates how a fisherman named Kelly found a way to fill his boat with 7,500 gallons of oil and that EXXON became upset because they had already told the press that they had cleaned up most of the oil.
The fishermen were halted from the cleanup and…
sorties flown by a C-130…..(once again he only spends one paragraph explaining this in an erratic fashion that doesn’t make a lot of sense)…we found a rip which consisted of what seemed to be an emulsion of oil, water and foam with little white granules, w(h)ere did all of the oil go? It was at that moment we were sure that they had been using that c-130 to sink as much of the spilled oil to the bottom without any spectators, out of sight and out of mind? Damn you EXXON! You wiped out our beautiful spotted prawns and our crab too.
What is a rip? What was the white granules did anyone take a sample? Apparently the white granules caused chemical burns on the people trying to do clean up..but once again no elaboration and all of this information is contained in 14 pages…that should be the length of a forward to a book!
The book includes pictures of the clean up effort by the fishermen and they are to be commended. The rest of the book is about how EXXON got out of paying for the damage to the environment or to the fishermen for their loss of work. The subject is outrageous and people should be boycotting EXXON and the politicians who support them or who are supported by them. The book includes many letters and rants
Sounds like racketeering to me, but what do I know? I’m just a “Red White and Blue” “Tried and True” “Human Being”. What is your faction? The PLO? “Political Lies and Oil?” Did you know that “tic” is the middle word in politician? You blood suckers!
Now, where I come from, if you continue to do your job incorrectly, you are terminated, fired! Now call me crazy if you want to but I think that I’m not the only person who feels this way. Every single person that I know or talk to seems to feel the exactly the same way. I think they call that unanimous, but I don’t expect you to understand that because of your denial of the facts and the fact that this is really going to affect where you sleep at night. It won’t be the country club or Camp Snoopy! Do You Get My Point?
It goes on and on and and on…He does have two plans one is for everyone to bring their pennies to the VFW so they can break the Guiness Book of World Records, and to show our undying gratitude, to request the government to discontinue use of the penny and to melt them all down for money? I’m not sure what that has to do with the EXXON spill. He also has a second project HANDS ACROSS AMERICA from the East Coast to the West Coast.
David Spruill is certainly passionate about his causes and I wish him all of the success with them. He is more than welcome to my penny jar! He says he has a website under construction but I couldn’t find it. He can get a free blog up on WordPress.com and this book has a Copyright of 7/23/08 today is 6/5/09 more than enough time to get a website up. He should have not announced it in a book until it was up. Why should people have to keep looking for his website? He wants people to send money for his Hands Across America project….he can’t even get a site up!!!
RAGE TENDS TO DISORIENT ONES THOUGHTS AND ACTIONS. I’m not giving up on David Spruill yet I think he has something going.
My sane Uncle Vic was one of the GAO investigators concerning the EXXON Valdez spill. Here is VICTOR REZENDES GAO TESTIMONY. I was hoping to find him on Youtube I think he was on 60 MINUTES too. People need to get with the program Youtube is one of the greatest things invented for us bloggers!!!
I would love to read a book that was a cross between David Spruill and a GAO document filled with emotion and lots of information that I can follow and pictures. I wish the government would dumb things down a little for me!!!
Here are some videos I found on the EXXON VALDEZ
Here is Governor Palin’s response to the Supreme Court letting Exxon off the hook for most of the punitive damages
Here is a very good piece by Journeyman Pictures
Americans need to start reading our History. Native Americans could have told you about our corrupt government 200 years ago… there is no difference between the theft of the lands we promised to Native American. Yellow gold, black gold its all the same when it comes to greed and American policy….now that it is affecting white people they are waking up and saying this is not fair! It’s funny in an awful, horrible sort of way but the white people affected by the Valdez still get off a lot better than the Indians did.
ANNA MAE AQUASH 48/THE GOVERNMENT VIOLATES THE POSSE COMITATUS ACT AT WOUNDED KNEE….TOO BAD
All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
The testimony about the senate report led to the release of more documents. The documents related examinations on the stand showed that Army Vice Chief of Staff Alexander Haig had ordered two colonels to Wouned Knee to oversee the siege and to do so in civilian garb-the latter an order they had never been given in their long military careers.
Colonels testified about how much ammunition and supplies were sent
16 ARMORED PERSONNEL CARRIERS
400,000 ROUNDS OF AMMUNITON
120 SNIPER RIFLES
20 GRENADE LAUNCHERS
1 PHANTOM JET
3 HELICOPTERS
AND A CHEMICAL WARFARE TEAM WTF??? Did they think the Viet Cong had invaded??
Confronted with this evidence, the prosecution shifted its argument: “The Pentagon had no role at Wounded Knee” became “The Pentagon had no real role at Wounded Knee”.
It turned out the FBI’s Joseph Trimbach had lobbied the army to invade the village with 2,000 GI’s. He was apparently undeterred by the certain knowledge that scores-maybe hundreds-of the combatants would die. His scheme was vetoed by Colonel Warner.
…the government shifted its arguement again: the Pentagon was really involved, but it was only by an oversight that neither the president nor Congress had publicly authorized the Pentagon’s involvement. And since it was plain that the president wanted the military there it hardly mattered that he had not issued a public order.
Judge Nichol was of the same mind. he concluded that the armed forces had been used illegally at Wounded Knee, but he also concluded that the case of U.S. v. Banks and Means afforded no remedy against the government for this crime-save for dismissing the charges against Banks and Means, which he still was not prepared to do. if AIM wanted to hold the Pentagon accountable, Nichol said, it would have to file a separate suit.
WKLDOC did, naming as defendants General Haig, Attorney General Kleindienst, Colonel Warner, and other men of war.
WKLDOC filed its claim in Washington, D.C., but a federal judge there ruled that the case should have been filed in South Dakota.
It took seven years after the first suite was filed….
(Judge) Porter held that even if government officials had violated the Posse Comitatus Act at Wounded Knee, they could not be sued because the act did not specifically authorize suits in cases where the law was broken.
There’s lots of twists and turns and legal wrangling…basically as United States Citizens….
WERE ALL FUCKED….as is evidenced by the erosion of our CIVIL LIBERTIES. I think the white people running everything back then were saying to themselves who cares its just a bunch of commie Indians…see where the sins of the previous generations have led us to
I found this video of Jesse Ventura at the RNC he actually says American citizens have the right to have weapons so if they don’t like the government they can bear arms and change the government….maybe I should send him a video of the governments firepower at Wounded Knee II!
SECRETS FROM THE CENTER OF THE WORLD
I bought two Joy Harjo books off of the internet. The other one is SHE HAD SOME HORSES but my brother picked it up when he was here and stole it from me. STOP!!! THIEF!! Actually he will read it much faster than I will and since Joy Harjo is a girl….her writing will be less significant to him than a man’s…easier to dismiss. That should properly get his attention!
SCAN OF COVER
The book is filled with beautiful monotonous at first glance landscapes but if you have ever been to the desert you know that there is magic in them thar hills. A magic in the desolation so poweful you either become enlightened or numb….you either worship the expanse as it rips you open or you shut the door in an attempt to hide. It’s not for sissies! I personally prefer the forests but a visit to the desert has a magical effect on the soul.
This land is a poem of ochre and burnt sand I could never write,
unless paper were the sacrament of sky, and ink the broken line
of wild horses staggering the horizon several miles away. Even
then, does anything written ever matter to the earth, wind, and
sky?
And then there is this:
This earth has dreamed me to stand on the rise of this highway,
to admire who she has become.
and this:
I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of
meaning, of the fierce magic emerging here. I am witness to flexible eternity,
the evolving past, and I know we will live forever,
as dust or breath in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of
winds.
AMEN!
ANNA MAE AQUASH 47/YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK
All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
Prosecutor R.D. Hurd was also quizzed by judge and defendants about what and when he had known of the wiretap papers. Hurd admitted that he had first seen Trimbach’s affidavit months before but had not given it to the defense as required by law. He also admitted that he hadn’t bothered to correct Trimbach when Trimbach testified under oath that he knew nothing about the wiretap.
…(the) Justice Department memo was released saying that the FBI knew the tap was illegal but had decided to keep it in place anyway.
The newly found memo did, however, give the defense a chance to summon to the stand the number-two man at the FBI, Mark Felt. Decades later Felt would be revealed-and lionized-as Deep Throat, the shadowy source who helped Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein expose Watergate….he freely admitted it was and said he saw nothing wrong with the wiretap, which perhaps explained why his men int he field saw nothing wrong with it either.
But then when the white politicians began to be illegally wiretapped…..by golly lets stand up for what is right!!! Sorry for the sarcasm I’m guilty of it too…we don’t concern ourselves with the plight of others until we are in the same plight…and even then many people do not “get” the correlation.
At any rate here is an interesting piece about Mark Felt apparently he had been convicted under the Carter Administration and pardoned under the Nixon administration for his complacency in “black bag” break ins against the Weather Underground. Nixon passed him up for promotion and so in retaliation he outed Nixon’s own break ins…..you can read about it here.
Banks and Means tried to make a citizens arrest of the lying wiretappers but the judge was not having any of it! Those guys must have been hysterical in the courtroom….I would have been dismissed from the jury for laughing too hard!!!
Far more grave than wiretapping was the defendants’ charge that the government secretly-and illegally-used the U.S.Army and Air Force at Wounded Knee. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 forbade the president from sending federal troops against citizens unless he or Congress explicitly and publicly ordered the forces sent.
During Wounded Knee neither the president nor congress had ordered the armed forces deployed yet, if AIM was right, they had come to Wounded Knee all the same.
The government said it was the National guard and not the Army and Air Force which was legal.
…a reporter called WKLDOC’s Ken Tilsen to ask if he had seen a certain senate report about Wounded Knee. Tilsen said he knew of the report-the prosecution had given him a copy-but he had seen nothing of interest. The reporter was surprised: what about the section discussing the Pentagon’s involvement at Wounded Knee? Tilsen said his copy of the report said nothing of the kind. The reporter sent Tilsen his copy, where-upon Tilsen learned that the copy the prosecution had given him had been doctored: the section discussing the Pentagon’s role at Wounded Knee-a role that had been quietly approved by the White House-had been excised. the reporter had chanced across the uncensored copy when a secretary in the prosecutors’ office sent it to him by mistake.
Judge Nichol, so apprised, asked what the prosecution had to say for itself. R.D. Hurd said he had no idea how Tilsen could have been given a doctored version because his office had only one version-the true and correct one. But when the same questionwas put to one of Hurd’s assistants, the assistant said there were two versions in the office: one with and one without the section on the Pentagon. Asked why only the shorter version was given to Tilsen, the assistant speculated that there had been a copying error.
Better yet why not ask them why a doctored copy even existed…
What most Americans fail to realize is that every single one of these actions was a nail in the coffin of the future generations. The willingness of the everyday citizens working for these government organizations making the choice to commit crimes, to lie, and the tolerance of those who participating in these crimes, are all a part of how we got into the current financial and civil rights meltdown of our society.
“This is about the most bizarre explanation I’ve heard,” Judge Nichol said, noting that only “the grossest kind of a fluke” had brought the document to light.
“Aren’t you getting kind of tired,” he asked Hurd, “of explaining your own negligence in some of these matters?”
“No, Judge,” Hurd said. “I’m getting used to it, as a matter of fact.”
BAILOUT NATION HAS ARRIVED
I am so far behind posting on books…It will be book week!!!
BAILOUT NATION finally arrived from Amazon
MY COPY OF BAILOUT NATION
The first chapter is called
A BRIEF HISTORY OF BAILOUTS
and underneath is a quote..(I’d scan it but I know Mr. Ritholtz can afford attorneys…
“The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.”- Herbert Spencer, English philosopher
Just what I need another book to raise my blood pressure…I can tell by looking through it that I am going to be mad with rage or hysterical with hopelessness….
ANNA MAE AQUASH 46/TRIMBACH LIES UNDER OATH…AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN….
All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
See??? I’m writing another post finally! Funny how things grab you and don’t let go…the stuff over at Pudgy Indian was keeping me up. I sleep much better now that I have been writing about the threats….Some people its the opposite they get scared and can’t sleep until they hide…me I get scared and can’t sleep until I understand or confront it. Although the new series is twice as popular as the Anna Mae Posts…I think she resides in all of them!
When I last posted on Anna Mae Dennis Banks and Russel Means were on trial and the FBI had forged some documents..
…prosecution called Special Agent in Charge Joseph Trimbach to the stand, and WKLDOC took the opportunity to ask him whether the FBI had wiretapped the sole phone line that had been left running into Wounded Knee. The line was used only for negotiations between the besiegers and the besieged and for privileged conversations between the besieged and their attorneys. A tap on the phone would have been illegal without a court order, which the FBI did hot have. Trimbach testified there had been no tap.
Wow Joseph Trimbach and the FBI hold themselves above the United States courts….But as any intelligent human being understands the FBI was never about protecting democracy…which has never really existed in this country anyway.
…he was followed by Joe Pourier, a lineman from Bison State, the phone company that served Pine ridge. “He was a goon,” WKLDOC’s Sand Brim remembered of Pourier. “But he had been a childhood friend of Pedro Bissonette, and when Pedro was killed, Joe Pourier, like Poker Joe Merrival, flipped.
Pourier testified that he had set up a phone at one of the government roadblocks and tied it into the phone line that came out of wounded Knee so that the occupiers and the government could speak directly. That much was perfectly legal. But Pourier also rigged the government’s phone to work as a party line, a line the government could pick up and, anytime the occupiers were talking to their attorneys, eavesdrop on the conversation. It was a low-tech wiretap, but it was a wiretap all the same-and, without a court order, illegal.
When the defendants asked the government to produce the records for Pourier’s work, the government said the records had been destroyed….One of the FBI reports acknowledged that the FBI did not have a court order for the tap but said it hoped to get one soon. It never did. When Banks and Means asked why they had not been given the documents to begin with, the prosecutors said they had meant no harm; it was just that they had so many papers, they didn’t know these particular ones existed.
“You see, that’s the disturbing thing, ” Judge Nichol said. “We’re always finding out that the head of the bureau of the guy at the top never seem to know anything.
Joseph Trimbach was called back to the stand and asked why he had said the FBI had not wiretapped the defendants when it most assuredly had. Did he know about the tap at the time, or were his subordinates running amok?
Trimbach said he must have known at the time, only to have forgotten about it later.
Trimbach replied that while he may have technically authorized the withholding of the papers, he hadn’t really made the decision. His aides see, were forever sticking papers under his nose, and he didn’t always read them before signing them..
Before dismissing Trimbach, the defense asked whether he was aware that it was illegal to run a wiretap without a court order.
… he never thought of the party line as a wiretap. had he known it was considered a tap, why naturally he would have gotten a court order before letting it be installed.
…WKLDOC pried another paper loose from the FBI, this one an affidavit in which the affiant, whose name had been doctored out, formally requested that a judge legalize the wiretap. That is, the FBI’s affiant acknowledged that it needed a judge’s approval to listen in on the party line. Nichol forced the government to release an undoctored copy of the affidavit, and the affiant turned out to be none other than Joseph Trimbach. Once more Trimbach was called back to the stand.
Had he known about his own affidavit, the defense asked…
Trimbach answered that he must have read it-only he couldn’t recall a single thing about the affidavit.
The defense asked why the affadavit that Trimbach originally released to Banks and Means was missing the pat of the page that bore his name and signature.
Trimbach said he had no idea.
What a surprise…and does anyone wonder why Indians call it the “just us” system???
ANNA MAE AQUASH 44/ THE FBI CONTINUES IT’S CAMPAIGN OF HARASSMENT4
All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
I finally watched the video produced by and starring Richard Two Elks (watch it here )it is a response to the PBS documentary WE SHALL REMAIN the WOUNDED KNEE segment. There are so many people involved in this case with so many opinions I am continually amazed at how many people are upset some houses are burned down and not concerned about a little girl being shot in the eye or a teenage boy being given alcohol and a moving vehicle by the tribal president. I detest people that step into public office or in a position of authority over other people and fail to set a good example whether it is popular or not. Your job as an adult is to set a good example to the younger generation. Period.
Getting back to the video Two Elks claims to be a professional but the video is poorly produced. If he were just a hobbyist I would say “It’s great!” In the video he is wearing a hat. Maybe that is an Indian thing but men should take their hats off while indoors much less while you are on camera. The hat is covering most of his face and he doesn’t really look in the camera….he is reading from something written that he is holding. Most professionals would have a teleprompter or someone holding up large cards so he could read the script. I say script because he does not seem to be familiar with the subject he is just reading something that someone wrote. This should be a subject that he knows so well that he can speak with authority, conviction and without having to write it down. It also lacks any passion for the victims of Wounded Knee it seems their purpose is only to further their propaganda. I mean are these victims of Wounded Knee sleeping on the ground? Or in a cardboard box? It has been over 30 years. I have heard nothing of any organization that either Trimbach or Two Elks has started to help these supposed victims. The video says nothing about their plight now or what you need to send them to get them back on their feet. The trading post didn’t have insurance??? What state lets you own a business without insurance? Even then. Like I said my impression is that neither Two Elks or Trimbach gives a damn about these victims because in the big picture it is a non issue. But once again why the continued outrage from so many about some possessions…take my house and everything I own…burn it to the ground…I would rather have my eye! Not one word about the little girl who was shot in the eye!!! People these days do not have their priorities straight. Children first! It is the only way our civilization will begin to heal from the cycle of abuse of any color.
Richard Two Elks has come forward and admitted that he murdered a person by beating him to death at Wounded Knee but he has never been charged or spent a day in jail. I think that under the circumstances none of the participants at Wounded Knee should be convicted it was a painful era in the history of our country. AIM and its members were understandably expressing their grief over the genocide and annihilation of their people for a few hundred years. Frustration and the feeling of powerlessness often lead to people going to extreme measures as evidenced by the rise in school shootings. On the other hand Richard Two Elks also claims to work tirelessly on the sexual abuse of children yet he continually taunts a woman who was sexually abused by her father on a native discussion group. The former FBI agent Joseph Trimbach apparently approves of this behavior as he remains silent about this behavior and whole heartedly supports everything Richard Two Elks does. As much as I admire and respect Anna Mae Aquash I am in no way as upset about her death as I am about a little girl getting shot in the eye. Right or wrong politics aside Anna Mae went to Wounded Knee knowing that involving herself in the situation could very well result in her death. She made a choice and should be admired for doing so.
The story of Anna Mae continues…
The harassment of the WKLDOC by the FBI did not end there, hours after the release of Feiten and Davies they ran into the FBI in the hotel lobby. the FBI agents commenced with harassment and the lawyers tried to put the FBI agents under citizens arrest the altercation moved to the street and when the police arrived they actually arrested one of the FBI agents.
...both agents were soon released, but three days later the city attorney charged Pearson with assault and issued a warrant for his re-arrest. Pearson left town the same day.
Joseph Trimbach, the FBI agent in charge of the Dakotas and Minnesota, said Pearson’s departure from Rapid City was just a coincidence; he was not fleeing an arrest warrant, only being rotated back to his home office in California. When reporters asked if the FBI would return Pearson to Rapid City to face the charge, Trimbach scoffed at the idea. “This is a trumped-up charge,” he said. “There is no basis for it….It is absurd on its face that FBI agents would harass the militant Indians or their representatives”. He denied that his men had been put under citizen’s arrest, although they most certainly had, and he added that the arrests of Davies and Feiten had been “valid arrests,” although they most certainly had not.
WKLDOC then began to experience mail being delivered late or not at all anonymous threats over the phone, and other such goings on. They assumed that they were under surveillance of the FBI
WKLDOC filed suit against the FBI for creating a climate that scared its clients from meeting with their lawyers: the FBI cast a pall over the constitutional right to a fair defense.
The case was heard by the ever so corrupt and racist Judge Bogue…
“It might be noted,” Bogue opined, “that many of the acts complained of by the Plaintiffs seem to have been occasioned by the activities of the Plaintiffs themselves. The incidents, occurring while investigating F.B.I. automobiles, photographing agents, and investigating the Defendants’ housing, seem to have occurred when the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense committee was taking the action to the Defendants. It appears that many of these incidents may have been avoidable by Plaintiffs.” It was the same logic that held a woman need not fear being beaten by her husband if she did not raise her voice.
Bogue dismissed the case.
ANNA MAE AQUASH 43/A PARANOID GOVERNMENT
All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
I finally watched the Wounded Knee segment of WE SHALL REMAIN on the computer…now I see why Trimbach and his cheerleaders are upset. I was laughing through a lot of it because I had never seen any footage. Sometimes when I laugh it seems inappropriate but when the truth is exposed the world rejoices and no matter how bad the truth is it has been set free which brings me great joy….It is the lies that are causing so much damage.
The thing that struck me was the uproar the government gets its self into. You would think that Brezhnev himself had landed in America and taken over Wounded Knee their paranoia is so great!! Can you imagine living with such unfounded fears every single day?? This could have been settled by simply listening to the Indians no need for guns. They just wanted to be heard…to have their very valid complaints addressed. There was so much wrong about the whole thing. I think it must be like the mass hysteria that can sometimes be experienced by a crowd only it is stretched over a few generations….some fear that what they have done is going to be done to them. I am also reading a book called FBI SECRETS An FBI Agent’s Expose’ by M.Wesley Swearingdon. You know he was a Hoover guy like G.Gordon Liddy he turns his first name into an initial!
They could have easily done a five part series on just the occupation of Wounded Knee. There is so much that was left out. Somewhere on alt.native I think there was a thread with Richard Two Elks response and something about why they didn’t interview him…I will try to get to that on the next post. My time management is lacking these days! Also I need to watch the program again because one woman was talking about the Commission on Civil Rights which is the subject today but I was trying to clean my kitchen so I didn’t quite get what everybody had to say and who they were.
…the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded its investigation and reported that there had been “massive irregularities” during the election, that nearly all of WKLDOC’s charges could be confirmed, and that in no way could the election be considered valid. USCCR heaped blame on the bureau of Indian affairs, which by law was required to supervise the elections but which steadfastly refused to do so.
…the BIA….said they had read USCCR’s report but declined to make a single counterargument and declared the election would stand.
WKLDOC appealed Bogue’s decision first to an unsympathetic panel of the Eighth circuit and then to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1976 declined to hear the case.
That the Oglala people might deserve a judicial accounting for the stolen election, or that those who might deserve a judicial accounting for the stolen election, or that those who stole it and those who let it be stolen should be held answerable for their deeds did not, apparently, impress the justices of America’s highest court.
Funny how our government only upholds laws on reservations when it benefits the governments cause…otherwise the Indians are left to their own devices…which is what Wounded Knee was all about to begin with.
WKLDOC prepared the defense of its clients from and office out of the spare rooms of a fraternity house of the National College of Business in Rapid City.
WKLDOCers noticed that their comings and goings at the frat house were being scrutinized by clean-cut men…Jeanne Davies and Fritz Feiten, spotted one of the unmarked cars. It was empty of occupants but had a two way, police-style radio inside, so Feiten wrote down the car’s license plate number. As he did so, two men stepped out of a car across the street and walked up to him and Davies. they flashed FBI badges. “H-u-g-h-e-s,” Davies copied into a notebook and started to write his badge number, but Agent Hughes detracted the badge, snatched Davies’s paper, and ordered them to put their hands on the car. The WKLDOCkers asked if they were under arrest.
More agents arrived.
When the WKLDOCkers refused to give any information beyond their names, the questions turned to taunts, then to arrests.
WKLDOC had them bailed out soon enough, but on their way out the door the FBI added a federal charge-interfering with witnesses to a judicial proceeding-and the pair were re-arrested. no federal witnesses had been involved in the incident on the street, save the FBI agents themselves,
and they were not the sort of witnesses the law contemplated. But because it was Saturday night and a federal magistrate was unavailable to review the complaint, Davies and Feiten were kept locked up over the weekend, which was the real motive behind the complaint. Come Monday, the magistrate immediately dismissed the federal charge, and the city attorney did the same with the municipal public-nuisance charge. The FBI never received a reprimand for what was clearly harassment of legal workers..
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