YOUR FBI $$$’s HARD AT WORK???
WOW! Is this an example of our Federal dollars at work? Not sure who SNAPPLE is but since he came to my house uninvited supporting Special Agent Joseph Trimbach. As a courtesy I put up a video that he thinks is relevant to the John Graham/Richard Marshall debacle trial. I think the trial is tearing apart Indian country but mostly the mainstream media does not report on it…another example of how the United States continues their ongoing history of racist beliefs and actions against the indigenous people population of this beautiful land.
Although I posted the video late last night with his name in caps he cannot seem to find it even though I also linked the post to his own blog LEGEND OF PINE RIDGE. Snapple is upset not only because he thinks I did not put up Two Elks video but because he mistakenly wrote on a previous post “the FBI is against Indians” He corrected himself but apparently he has no sense of humor. SNAPPLE claims I was making fun at his expense and that he is “older”…not sure what that means…at any rate he is an “older” person who quickly resorts to insults and tantrums when he thinks he has not gotten his way. On top of that I specifically told him that I would post it sometime…I was going to wait until the weekend but stayed up last night..
Mr. Snapple you need to read RULES FOR COMMENTING ON MY BLOG.
Here is one of several comments he left on my blog…I am responding in parenthesis
You are obviously a stupid little idiot who is not able to argue honestly if you choose to make something of an older person’s typing error. And lazy and dishonest not to post TWo Elk’s recent video.
I have given you the youtube link a few times.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbkm1lMI0DU
Monica and Anna Mae both were both reportedly in a relationship to Dennis Banks, although he was married to Ka-Mook.(Noo….Monica Charles says she was not in a relationship with Dennis Banks and what is your source to such a claim? Do you just throw that stuff out there hoping a sex scandal will spice things up? You sound like the NATIONAL ENQUIRER!)
Monica’s brother (where do you get your information??? Do you think everybody with the last name of Charles is Monicas brother???) Norman was allegedly with Peltier when the FBI agents were shot.
Monica is pretty much at ground zero and spends a lot of time discrediting Indians such as Richard Two Elk and Ka-Mook, who have told the authorities what they witnessed so that there would be evidence to take to court.(Didn’t Ka-Mook get paid 49,000 for her testimony? She basically testified heresay and seven months later married one of the governments lead investigators in the Anna Mae Aquash case. From what I understand Richard Two Elk’s testimony is so bad and he has put out so many conflicting stories that he is not taken too seriously on the stand….or by PBS.)
Here is something Two Elk said about what Dennis Banks ordered boys to do during the occupation:
“I was there, at Wounded Knee. At the age of 19, I backpacked weapons and supplies into the village with my AIM brothers. I remember it was near Easter, because that’s when our leader, Dennis Banks, ordered us to ‘take care’ of a young white guy, suspected of being an informant. We knew what that meant. We strung him up on a cross in a mock crucifixion, and beat him. After we took him down, they led him away and I don’t think he was ever heard from again.”(Richard Two Elk has apparently written several different versions of this incident…If this is true why have the FBI not prosecuted him for murder???)
http://www.expertclick.com/NewsReleaseWire/ReleaseDetails.aspx?ID=26541
Agnes Gildersleeve testified that Indian people were held in a church and threatened with guns. AIM took over a disabled man’s trailer and other people’s homes.
Agnes recounts:
“[AIM] took complete control of the telephone service and local residents were not permitted to answer any of the phones. When my phone would ring, an armed guard would immediately answer the phone and direct the call over to [disabled Wilber Reigert's stolen] trailer house where Banks, Means, and Bellecourt were located…” (Trimbach p. 88) (The Gildersleeves were well known for taking advantage of Native Americans at their trading post…selling objects offensive to Native Americans. Here is Steve Hendricks talking about the Gildersleeves:
Tim Giago writes that I unfairly impugned the honor of the late Clive and Agnes Gildersleeve. The Gildersleeves owned the trading post at Wounded Knee, which was looted by militants who had seized the village to protest oppression on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and beyond. Sloppily lumping my book The Unquiet Grave with Peter Matthiessen’s In The Spirit of Crazy Horse, Giago writes, “In [the two books], you will read about a ‘white man’ and a woman often referred to as a ‘white woman,’ although Agnes Gildersleeve was an Ojibwa woman, who ‘ripped off’ the local Lakota people. This apparently justifies the attacks upon them and the destruction of their business.”
I did not write that Ms. Gildersleeve was white, did not use the words “ripped off” (though they are not far from the truth), and did not excuse the attack on them or their business. I did explain why many Indians hated the business:
“Its owners, the Gildersleeve and Czywczynski families, had strewn billboards for seventy-five miles that announced, SEE THE WOUNDED KNEE MASSACRE SITE, VISIT THE MASS GRAVE. POSTCARDS, CURIOS, DON’T MISS IT! The postcards showed slaughtered Indians, including Chief Big Foot, frozen in the 1890 snow. The traders enlivened their commerce with beadwork, quilts, and other curios bought low from Oglalas and sold high. A Catholic priest once watched Mrs. Czywczynski barter a beader to a stingy $3.50 for an exquisite work, then turn around and sell it for $12.00. The traders doubled as creditors, lending their Indian patrons $10 at humble interest of $2.25 a week. As village postmasters, they also offered a rudimentary auto-payment–opening the mail of customers who had run tabs, cashing their checks without asking, paying their bills at the post, and calling other shopkeepers across the reservation to see if debts were owed them too. There had been calls to boycott the post, but none had worked. The post was the only store for a dozen miles, and the many carless Oglalas of Wounded Knee had no choice but to buy groceries and other wares at its inflated prices. Years later Clive Gildersleeve was called to testify about his business practices, and he invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself ninety-nine times.”
Giago goes on to paint me as an apologist for the American Indian Movement, which led the Indian rights struggle of the 1970s. This is rank distortion. Mine was the first book to describe AIM’s secret killing inside Wounded Knee of an activist named Ray Robinson, and the book’s centerpiece was AIM’s infamous execution of Anna Mae Aquash two years later. As Giago well knows, I condemned AIM sharply for these and lesser brutalities, and more than one AIM leader has threatened me for my pains. What riles Giago is that I also praised AIM (the overwhelming majority of whose members were peaceful) for fighting oppression, and I denuded the oppressors, from small-timers like the Gildersleeves to big-timers like the FBI, the latter of which persistently goaded AIM to just the sort of violence it committed. In Indian Country, the haves like Giago have long fought to keep the have-nots in their place. It is one reason the have-nots are still so multitudinous.
RICHARD TWO ELK FOR SNAPPLE
I have posted on this before. I thought maybe it was something new…Richard Two Elk the man who wrote the forward to AMERICAN INDIAN MAFIA also makes videos. This is being put up again for SNAPPLE who runs the THE LEGEND OF PINE RIDGE blog. After watching it again I still have the same opinion….after the video…
I have several problems with this video…Richard Two Elks supposedly owns and produces videos yet he doesn’t know not to wear a hat on camera…indoors either as far as I am concerned. I was raised that it is disrespectful. Another thing that bothers me is that Richard Two Elks never speaks confidently into the camera…he hides his face and is always looking down at a prepared statement he also mumbles and slurs. It was a bizarre video the first time I watched it and still is. Richard Two Elks was at Wounded Knee II he knows who everyone is and the history….I still get names confused…but I can tell you what I know and believe….looking you in the eye confident that I am true to my feelings and in my beliefs based on what I know…But as I said this might be a difference between whites and Indians?? I am not trying to be mean but the video lacks passion and conviction for the subject never mind that I do not agree with all that is in the video….
Because I have read many other things by Richard Two Elk….I have a hard time believing that these are his words…this is how Richard Two Elks usually writes in some weird voice. This is a comment to me for posting the SNAPPLE post on alt.native
so…why da hill ya postin it hear?…
not nuff room onyer Clog, i meanz…blog…?
please refrain from redundant posting of content which may be read
elsewhere, in it’s entirety, IF anyone should want…DUH!
and this
da mistake ya repeatedly recycle IS…ya seem to bleev we all wanna
play yer stoopid pre-adolescent games witya…
AxeUWally…we find sum sick entertainment in watchin you flop
roundabout…pass dat Popcorn puleez…
and this from another post
if’n ya kickout 9 or 10 o yer C&Pz dat outta move yer last act o
IDIOCY off da Front Page anywhoz…den ya kin maka neu face til Sizzle catch up witya N Cookya agin…
Dang…me Know ya Gotta B havin Bic Phun messin witus, eh?
Like I said it may be a difference between whites and Indians…but Monica Charles doesn’t speak like that…its weird like he has to create another personality for???
I could be wrong but I was raised in a very conservative home and while I am quite liberal in my political views…I mostly carry quite conservative values and this man really bothers me…
One of the other things that bothers me about Richard Two Elks is that he admits to hanging a man on a cross and beating him…I know he was young but he was never charged by the FBI and speaks of the incident in the forward he wrote(?) to Special Agent Joseph Trimabach’s book AMERICAN INDIAN MAFIA. I am a huge believer that all laws should be for all people….while I may not be happy with the prison system in the United States…I believe that run correctly it should be a place where people are held accountable for their actions…I think it is a necessary step to healing all parties involved.I think that people either rise to the occasion or remain unable to confront the horror of what they have done and thus are never able to be totally free. I do not believe that informers involved in crimes should get lesser sentences than those they have informed on…I do think that it should be a consideration after remorseful behavior and parole is being considered. Richard Two Elk reminds me of someone who is not proud of who he has become.
There are a lot of accusations flung about on alt.native and I try not to pay attention to the ones that are just insults being flung around…there are a lot….one of the accusations being hurled around for awhile was that the “real victims” of Wounded Knees were those whose homes were destroyed and that the occupiers of Wounded Knee should sew blankets. Some write like the people are living in cardboard boxes not with no blankets or food….Wounded Knee seems to be a very emotional and sacred site, there was a movement of Indians who were being repressed by the government State and Federal….they thought quite mistakenly that a group of individuals with a few rifles were a match for for the United States government…and like Japan-they were wrong.
The appropriate response after Wounded Knee would have been for the governor at the time to declare an emergency ask for Federal money in order for the owners to rebuild….if this was not done? Shame should be on our government.
The video is very one sided and while Richard Two Elk claims PBS neglected to tell the death of a black supporter at Wounded Knee.. he fails to mention that he hung someone on a cross and beat them to death…this person has disappeared and apparently he changes his story…AIM took him….the FBI took him…??? This is a man who the FBI has chosen as their spokes person on AIM and Wounded Knee. Further more this video fails to mention the abuse and murder of Indian children on Pine Ridge…a little girls eye was shot out. Houses and cars were routinely shot up….even some of the lawyers for the occupiers were beaten. A young woman named Jancita Eagle Deer was raped by the future Governor…He was disbarred by the tribal courts…but the FBI was so racist against Indians that they did not consider the tribal judge to be legitamate….because he was Indian?? There are so many twists and turns to this story I encourage all of you who are interested to read THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks. He seems to be unbiased and often criticizes or praises both the FBI and AIM.
The fact of the matter is PBS could do a five part series on Wounded Knee II and never be able to cover all of the finger pointing and accusations. The murder of Anna Mae Aquash alone has more whodunnit theories than CARTERS HAS LIVER PILLS!
My solution to all of this is to either let it drop or to put every single person under sodium penethol or hook them up to lie detector tests…every FBI agent, BIA workers…all of the major characters on Pine Ridge…in AIM…FBI informants…even with all of that peoples faulty memories probably still wouldn’t be enough to find out what really happened.
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 AQUASH 57/ JANCITA EAGLE DEER/ANATOMY OF A THREAT
All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
I have been avoiding these posts because of this chapter on Bill Janklow and Jancita Eagle Deer. It’s like I want to crawl out of my skin….turn myself inside out rip my heart out. It drives me crazy.. I wish I could copy and paste this part of the story because I want it to be over…but I have to read and type because I can’t find a good version of what happened.
I wrote the above early yesterday morning and had to quit…the story of Jancita Eagle Deer is so sad and filled with despair…one of the many reasons that Joseph Trimbach and his FBI colleagues should be in jail along with some goons, Bill Janklow, probably half of the United States government…Monica probably thinks it should be more! (finally I made myself laugh this morning)
There seems to be little support or concern for Indian women…the men of AIM beat their chests and congratulate themselves….they seem to be more concerned with a power struggle and prestige…titles. Things the white government has taught. It is the same for all women…we have lost much of the ground during the eight years of the Bush administration…but in America today it seems that Indian women are so strong and the most abused and looked down upon.
I think the two stories have been merging on me as of late…injustice for women continues. You can read more about Anatomy of a Threat on THE ABUSE PAPERS
Strong women
Here is a picture of Jancita Eagle Deer and a link to her story here and here and here.
Other strong and beautiful women I have encountered surrounding this and the issue of abuse are
Monica Charles who got me involved in this
Martha Alvarez a young woman who speaks with such conviction against her abuser…she has inspired bloggers to confront the issue.
Anna Mae Aquash who through her spirit is working tirelessly as ever.(There are no sites that I know of that are non-biased about Anna Mae Aquash…they all seem to have an agenda. Everyone has an opinion and everyone thinks that they are right. While I am reading The Unquiet Grave, I have formed no opinion on who did it. I do have a strong opinion that the FBI was grossly negligent and incompetent in their duties to American citizens.
Shusli of Spring Thunder blog who was one of the original supporters of Martha Alvarez’s right to speak against her abuser.
Mary Ann Little Bear a little girl who had her eye shot out and the FBI and BIA police couldn’t be bothered to investigate. I truly hope she is doing well now.
Ellen Moves Camp...who had the courage to ask “Where are all our men?”
I have encountered some good men, the most graceful and humble Jumpybird on alt.native he probably does not know that his example does have a profound effect on some.Then there is brave Eugene Johnson from Pudgy Indian 2….Having a hard time coming up with more will add them later if I can think of any.
Peace to all..
and my prayers to Runningwolf in this difficult time she is experiencing.
Much love to Ordinary Sparrow who is a constant reminder that there is another way.
AMEN!
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 45/BANKS AND MEANS ON TRIAL/THE FBI FALSIFIES DOCUMENTS
All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
The saga of Pudgy Indian continues and I really have to wonder if this wasn’t a good thing. Light coming to a dark subject is always a good thing. I wonder if Autonomous AIM really supports the inappropriate behavior of some of their members or if there are just some overly enthusiastic people who are acting without thinking the issue through….you know take your friends side blindly. Apparently one of the leaders of Portland AIM was appointed by Dennis Banks himself. I don’t know Dennis Banks or that much about him…but it seems to me while reading THE UNQUIET GRAVE that he has probably figured out that this nonsense is just that….non sense. There are a lot of comments about what a bad person he is or was with the drinking and womanizing. Being a woman I get frustrated at the AIM leaders who do not protect women…the stuff about his sex life and his children beating up women while horrific is really no different than Paul McCartney. Jimmy Page was the worst carrying around a special suitcase of whips to beat his groupies…I don’t think that Dennis Banks was abusing women for gratuitous reasons like Jimmy Page was. I think it is more conducive to someone who was ripped away from his family and thrown in a boarding school….it takes a tremendous effort to overcome the cycle of abuse. When you consider the resources that have been historically available to the Native population it is a miracle and a blessing when just ONE Indian can stop the cycle of abuse. It is not easy and to blame men for all of the ills is too easy. I myself am guilty of it…as evidenced by some of my rants on the blog. Sort of like the poll WKLDOC took in this installment, it is easy to answer by pointing your finger at the obvious scapegoat. Right or wrong. The problem is more complex than that. Its just that women are brainwashed from the day that we are born that men will take care of us. That men are in some way superior….that we should hold them to above us. And of course our society reinforces this by denigrating the importance of stay at home mothers, unequal pay etc.. So by the time I figured out that I had been lied to….I was pissed off. Sort of like being pissed off about the quality of teachers in the schools teaching American History!! My whole existence as an American is a lie. The history of the country I grew up in is just an empty lie. And I believed every word of it!!!
Here is the PORTLAND AIM WEBSITE. I used the search to look up Bernard Red Cherries and Eugene Johnson and came up with nothing. So either they have nothing to do with the nonsense going on or their website is like a false store front in a ghost town. In which case the movement that may have started out with good intentions is already insignificant…they just haven’t figured it out yet. The moment AIM became insignificant in the previous decades was the moment they allowed fear to creep into their minds and they started hiding their actions which started a chain of paranoia. It is the history of every revolutionary group. DIVIDE AND CONQUER!! It doesn’t matter how many times the government does it….people fall for it every single time. WE NEED TO STOP LETTING THE GOVERNMENT DIVIDE US. And the care and safety of children should be put above all else.
This is an excellent song that is done much better by Lucinda Williams but I couldn’t find her version of this song. I do own it though.
The song starts out…
Well let’s start by
Making it clear
Who is the enemy, here
And we’ll show them
That it’s not them
Who is superior
The video contains disturbing images….
Dennis Banks and Russell Means were the first of the Wounded Knee defendants to be tried for the takeover. They asked Bogue to recuse himself for blatant bias, and much to their surprise he did.
The case fell to Fred Nichol, a prairie moderate, former prosecutor, and chief federal judge for South Dakota. Nichol intended to try the case in the state until WKLDOC commissioned a survey of bias among South Dakotans. the the question “What should be done about Indian militants, American Indian Movement members, and other Indians who demonstrate claiming they haven’t been given equal rights?” the most common answers were “Jail ‘em” and “Shoot ‘em”. Judge Nichol moved the trial to St. Paul. It started in January 1974.
People give answers to polls like that without giving it any consideration because it does not effect them…..who cares abut Indians getting a fair trial? If only they would play the game and get in line….Now I’ll bet if you polled white South Dakotans standing in line waiting to pass through airport security with their shampoo and nail clippers….
Banks and Means served as their won co-counsel, backed by some of the country’s most accomplished trial lawyers. These including the gifted embellisher Mark Lane, the meticulous Ken Tilsen, and the wild-haired, brass-tongued Bill Kunstler, whose clientele included Martin Luther King Jr., Black Panther Stokely Carmichael, the Chicago Seven from the 1968 Democratic Convention, and the antiwar Berrigan brothers.
Hurd and Geinapp agrgued a straightforward criminal case; Banks and Means had conspired to riot, seize, and hold Wounded Knee and then had done so, along the way destroying property, taking hostages, and firing on officers of the law.
The defendants denied everything…
Every time the Oglalas and their allies in AIM tried to right the reservation’s many wrongs, federal and tribal governments blocked them with duplicity, persecution, and terror. The Indians had been left no choice but to break the law.
The key to this defense lay in destroying the government’s credibility and Banks and Means caught a break early when the prosecution called a witness to disparage a petition signed by 70 percent of the permanent residents of Wounded Knee.
the copy the government produced at trial was doctored to seem weaker. On cross examination, the defense proved that the FBI had had custody of the petition at the time it was doctored. An FBI agent was called to the stand to explain how the document had been altered. The agent was at a loss. He said the FBI had a lot of files on Wounded Knee and it was hard to keep them all straight. Perhaps there had been a clerical error.
Judge Nichol declared himself “greatly disturbed” by this answer. “I used to think the FBI was one of the greatest bureaus that ever cam down the pike. I think it’s deteriorated, and I don’t care how may FBI agents are here in court listening to me.
…Judge Nichol to ask exactly how many the FBI had on Wounded Knee. He was astounded to learn 315,000. WKLDOC was astounded too. the government was bound by law to give the defense nearly all of its files that might help exonerate the defendants, but Banks and Means had not received anything approaching 315,000. they asked Judge Nichol to find out whether all appropriate files had been handed over, and Nichol forced the prosecution to give the defense 200 of the unseen files as a test. Half of the 200 files turned out to be relevant to the defense and should have been handed over months earlier.
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..
ANNA MAE AQUASH 34/ PEDRO BISSONETTE 2
All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
Much has been going on in the saga of the Graham/Marshall trial. Monica e-mailed me a news item yesterday that the feds dropped a charge against Graham because he and Anna Mae are Canadian Indians not American Indians and feds only have jurisdiction on certain issues over American Indians. Not being an American Indian they would have to be prosecuted like any other person. The more important thing is that it shows that the feds will go to any lengths to prosecute this crime. Why the hell wouldn’t they and their lawyers know something so obvious? Then again maybe the Canadian and American governments have merged and now they have let the cat out of the bag!! You would think Alex Jones would have that on his website!!! But it might be that Americans are so self centered and arrogant that we just presume that other Indian tribes in other countries should be subject to our laws!! Fairly easy and effortless to do as our arrogance knows no boundaries. Kind of funny if you see it for what it is!!
Anyway here is the link Monica Charles sent to me from the RAPID CITY JOURNAL be sure to read the comments at the bottom.
I even went on alt.native this evening and was glad to see that David Seals had put up some good posts…
THELMA RIOS FINGERS DAVID HILL this is very interesting yet another theory of who killed Anna Mae.
The story continues…
…while most of the story as the BIA told it was true, the crucial point-that Bissonette had fired on police-was almost certainly not. the hitchhiker, for one, told the FBI later that although Bisonette did step ou of the car at the homestead with a rifle, he neither pointed it at the police nor fired it. The radio log of the BIA police supports the hitcher’s account…
After Bissonette was shot, AIM called on supporters around the country to come to Pine Ridge for his wake and funeral.
…Dick Wilson declared, “the Oglala Sioux have organized and are prepared for the AIM invasion.
He sent his goons to the hilltops around the home of Bissonette’s mother,where the wake of several days was being held. “If you have to shoot them,” goon leader Duane Brewer was heard telling his men “shoot them all, women and children too.”
Bisonette’s cousin Floyd Running Hand was one of the arrestees. when he demanded to make a phone call, his jailers choked him until he blacked out. He awoke in the hospital, where doctors were told he had tried to hang himself. He was told if he wanted to leave the hospital alive, he would agree. He did.
John Iverson, was hauled before Judge Dorothy Richards, to whom he complained that he had asked for a breathalyzer test to prove his sobriety only to be refused by the police. Judge Richards laughed. Pine Ridge didn’t have breathalyzer equipment, she said, then she nicked him $20 and gave him fifteen minutes to get off the reservation.
Things were getting pretty tense with AIMers from various places taking up arms opposite of the goons.
Then….
Dick Wilson’s car came swerving into the wake. AIM’s sentry’s proved cool of head and stopped the car without incident. At the wheel they found a drunken teenager who said Wilson had paid him and given him the car to drive into the compound. Aim resumed, reasonably, that Wilson had been trying to provoke a firefight with the kid as a sacrifice. WKLDOC filed a complaint with the BIA police accusing Wilson of trying to incite violence and corrupting a minor, but when reporters asked the police if they were going to arrest Wilson, they said they hadn’t received WKCLDOC’s complaint. Later they said they had received it but that they could do nothing about it because it had been improperly filed. (This was apparently untrue.)
The FBI had jurisdiction over crimes of violence on the reservation, but it also took no interest in the complaint. Perhaps the FBI was too busy investigating the mourners-a job it had begun several days earlier by slipping spies inside the mourning caravans.
to this day the FBI censors almost every word of its several-hundred-page dossier on the espionage. The censors reject the notion that they are still withholding the documents because the documents would show the FBI was spying illegally on peaceful mourners. The FBI says it is only trying to keep secret the identity of informers who might still be alive…
I wonder if David Hill was one of them?
I had a thought when typing this last part and remembering the Little Bear girl who was shot in the eye on a previous post. Everyone has it bass ackwards. I mean no offense against Anna Mae or any disrespect but she knew what she was getting into she was an adult fighting a very dangerous fight….but these kids. That is where the real outcry should be. The children are the future…and I don’t want to think the worst of my government but haven’t the colonizers previously gone after the children? Like I always say I am the most inexpert person you can possibly find in this area of topic but it seems to me that while an Indian shot Little Bear and an Indian gave a drunk teenager his car… the government chose to ignore the case of the truly innocent. Indian boarding schools, sterilization, and ignoring crimes against the Indian youths…maybe it is not intentional but a collective unconscious mentality of a colonizing government. Just a thought that popped into my head. If that was a little white girl or a white teenage football player holy hell would have been paid by the perpetrators. Of course the poverty may have something to do with it.
ANNA MAE AQUASH 33/WOMEN RULE/ PEDRO BISSONETTE
All excerpts are in italics and are from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
I was driving down the road yesterday when I spotted Willy Whitefeather walking so I slammed on my breaks and rolled down my window. I was glad for it. I haven’t seen Willy in well over a year. I needed the boost of positive energy. He is the most positive person I have ever met without being clueless. I need to do another post on him this weekend. I was glad to be reminded about his Hopi? Cherokee?? story about the return of the black widow when the balance of the power is restored to women.
I was avoiding doing this post because I was distracted and had nothing to say so I sat down just to type the story of Pedro Bissonette. But Steve Hendricks wrote these paragraphs about women that made me think of the black widows in Willy’s story.
On Pine Ridge, men who disagreed with Dick Wilson tended to do so quietly, his goons being a convincing deterrent to clamor. It was therefore mostly to women who picketed the tribal buildings and filed complaints and prodded their their fellow Oglalas to plot at Calico Hall. Whether women were less harassed by the goons or simply less cowed was an open question, even among themselves.
..politics among the Oglalas had long been a male domain, at least on the surface, and feminism had pierced the domain only so far by the 1970′s The women who nourished the rebellion thought, probably rightly, that men would not join the struggle if only women led. At one of the meetings before Wounded Knee was seized, Ellen Moves Camp,one of the fiery female leaders,demanded of the crowd at Calico Hall, “Where are all our men?!”
Photo: Anne Pearse HockerOne hollered back, “I’m right here”; this was Pedro Aloysius Bissonette, and it was not an empty boast.
This came from a website called FIND A GRAVE which has a page dedicated to him.
Bissonette…was a co-founder of the Oglala Sioux Civil rights Organization and a frequent, voluble, and seemingly fearless detractor of Wilson. When Wounded Knee was seized, he was the only resident of Pine ridge to join the rebel’s ruling junta. On the night of October 17, 1973, five months after wounded Knee fell, he was driving toward the town of Pine Ridge from the when a pair of BIA policemen who had a warrant for his arrest saw his car and followed him. Bissonette turned of the highway, drove forty or fifty feet down a dirt road, and stopped.
There are different versions of this story that Steve Hendricks writes about but I am just going to relay the story that Hendricks believes is accurate. Apparently Bissonette had done quite a few good deeds and also had accumulated quite a few arrests for brawling and other indiscretions…
...after Wounded Knee, the indictments assumed unusual importance. The greatest of the charges was assault on a federal officer; its origins were tangled. some months before the assault, Theresa Perkins put a bullet into Bissonette’s breast, narrowly missing his heart. Perkins was apparently angry over his attentions to other women. Bissonette recovered, refused to press charges, and tried to reconcile with her. but the reconciliation went poorly. In his version of events, when it seemed she was reaching for a gun to shoot him again, he backhanded her and broke her jaw. She was not as shy as he about prosecuting.
Why is it so hard for people to stay out of bad relationships?? That could be a whole different blog. Love and abuse: one has nothing to do with the other.
So they issue a warrant he went to the station and threatened the officers into dropping the complaint then he punched a welfare worker who had denied benefits to one of his friends. BIA police stop him the next night and he asks the police if he can turn himself in the next day because he has some whites to take care of….The police say no and he calls them Uncle Tomahawks (that’s funny!) They arrested his friend Poker who was with him. Bissonette jumps in a car and pins one of the officers against the car cracking a vertebrae. The next day Bissonette turns himself in and makes bond…and where does he go??? to his Mother’s??? no he goes to his girlfriend’s house. But some people like drama. Me? I don’t tolerate it in my life for any length of time. It is an addiction…just a chemical that the brain produces and when you don’t have a drama you go into withdrawal and you create another.
He made bond quickly, but again he fought with Theresa Perkins, again was arrested, and again was released. All the while he was leading the resistance to Dick Wilson.
The government charges Bissonnette with a bunch of crimes he is defended by a lawyer by the name of Robert Warder. Warder wanted him to get a psychiatric evaluation but Bissonette refused. Then his lawyer brokered a deal if he would testify against Banks and Means. Bissonette refused. He asked for a new lawyer but the judge refused so when the trial started Bissonette turned his back to Warder and the rest of the defense and remained in that posture for the rest of the trial. (That was clever and funny!) WKLDOC appealed the judge’s decision to let them represent Bissonette and the judge eventually let all the charges drop. Can you imagine these judges back then just going hog wild with power over minorities? People they just don’t like?
On a late September day in 1973, four months after his trial, Bissonette allegedly fired a shot over the heads of goons in Whiteclay, Nebraska, a village just south of Pine Ridge consisting of little more than bars for liquoring the residents of the dry reservation.
After the warrant was issued, Bissonette fled Pine Ridge….But the police discovered his whereabouts when he made a phone call to Dennis Banks, whose line was tapped, and a friendly tribal judge tipped Bissonette that the police were coming for him. He fled again, this time for Colorado. But as he drove south from Montana, he decided he didn’t want to live on the lam, and so, on the night of October 16, he drove back to Pine Ridge.
Later that day Bissonette had a run-in with the police, a prelude to his final encounter that night. Three decades later the FBI still refuses to release key documents about the encounter or the names of the witnesses to it, so much remains unknown.
What is known is that at half past three in the afternoon, Bissonette picked up a hitchhiker near the town of Pine ridge and drove her to a homestead north of town. shortly before they entered the homestead, Bissonette noticed that a BIA police car following him. He turned into the long driveway of the homestead, and the police car followed a respectful distance behind. He stopped the car at the house, told his hitchhiker to take cover, and stepped out with a rifle. The two BIA officers inside the police car later said that Bissionette pointed dhis rifle at them, but as there were children and other innocents outside the house, they decided to U-turn and wait for Bissonette back at the highway. When they did so, Bissonette fired a shot at them, which encouraged them in their retreat. a few minutes later Bissonette came racing by them onto the highway and, after passing a bus…..got away.
A search for Bissonette was called and not successful. At dark it was called off.
By one account, the officers were instructed to shoot to kill. The entire episode, if true, made the fatal shooting that night much more understandable.
ANNA MAE AQUASH 31/THE STORY OF NINE YEAR OLD MARY ANN LITTLE BEAR
All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks
Chapter4!!!!!! Page 81!!!!! I’ll still be doing these posts in 2012…..probably as a meteor is crashing onto my head.
Monica Charles graced me with her presence and let me know that the trial is starting in 16 days and that David Seals will be testifying. God Bless him! I am reading his book POW WOW HIWAY now and he is funny I have been meaning to do a post on it. No matter the outcome some people will not be happy unless by some miracle there is a plague of honesty and remorse. John Graham has children as does Anna Mae. Not sure about Richard Marshall. I know that based on the evidence presented at Arlo Looking Clouds trial I would not find comfort in his conviction had he murdered my parent. But I don’t walk in their shoes it just seems strange that they have no anger at the FBI. But may be they were also angry at their mother for not being around while they were growing up. My own father died so suddenly and there are things I still wish I could talk to him about. If fact one of our last arguments was about Indians. I must have just finished Russell Means book and he told me that there was only one tribe whose children were sent to boarding school…I don’t remember that much about it except that we were yelling. I barely remember the book….the only memory about Anna Mae was triggered by the post about her hands being cut off. Maybe I shut it all out. Maybe I have some form of white guilt, but I really don’t feel that I have that type of guilt. I have Catholic guilt. Not as much as I used to have. But I am more proactive now. I spent my early years partying and going to concerts…it wasn’t until the last year of Clinton’s presidency that I started paying attention to the state of the country. I have been wrong about a lot of things in life but have always had the gift of changing my mind when presented with a new idea or bit of information. I do not cling to my beliefs in the face of factual information. I don’t pretend that I am right because I have too much pride to be wrong.
Here is an interesting site that has interviews with mediators on Wounded Knee. FBI perjuring themselves….etc
And here is a photo of the U.S. Marshal who has a set of balls
U.S Marshal Colburn
Here is more information about him on the US Marshal website. The site also give an account of Wounded Knee that doesn’t disparage the Indians and even expresses regret that a few were killed. If only the keystone cops at AMERICAN INDIAN MAFIA would take some lessons from this man.(I hope he doesn’t break my heart in the next chapter) I hope Monica Charles isn’t having heart failure….
Chapter 4 starts with a little girl getting shot in the eye. What the fuck???? Did that Giago guy write any posts of outrage about that???? Seriously I really don’t know. And those Indians at Wounded Knee are they still homeless??? I remember some woman calling for Monica Charles to sew blanket for them….as if the Governor couldn’t have declared a state of emergency and gotten them housing. Not to belittle their plight or hardship but are they sleeping outside??? This little girl was shot in the eye!!! Take my house and everything in it…I would rather have my eye!!!! I can find another place to live have a ton of friends and family who would love to have me as a guest. Nine years old and someone shoots you in the eye??? Her name was Mary Ann Little Bear…Maybe I am getting ahead of myself and the FBI, Wilson the BIA did an investigation and the bad person who shot her is in jail next to Arlo Looking Cloud. Could it be true?????
Nope.
Well fuck it all I just Googled Giago and Mary Ann Little Bear nope not a mention but I only looked at the first page which should have brought up any diatribes he wrote about her.
I am listening to rap music which may not be a good idea when writing about Anna Mae…I usually listen to Eva Cassidy or play good new age music….emphasis on good new age music not to be confused with that Yanni crap..ok I am changing the music here we go Yo Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin an awesome recording!!! I wonder if I can find it on youtube:
Ok on with Mary Ann Little Bear’s dilema…I truly hope that she did not let this get in the way of having a wonderful life.
The Police were called (this happened at midnight). Well after daylight, …BIA officers and FBI agents arrived at Paul Thunder Horse’s house. At least half a dozen adults had witnessed the shooting, either from one of the cars or from the nearby houses, but the lawmen spoke to only a few of them, and to those only briefly. They took no official statements nor even, so far as the interviewees could see, notes. Nor did they photograph the bullet holes in the cars or the houses, nor collect the lodged bullets.
The witness were unaminous about where the shots had come from: the property of the Francis Randalls, 250 yards up the way. The Randalls were goons; the Little Bears and Thunder Horses were AIM sympathizers. The lawmen made a brief visit to the Randall house and may have confiscated a couple of pistols, but these would not have been the crime weapons since bullets from pistols would not have carried 250 yards. No arrests were made.
The parents swear a complaint and the police do….nothing.
Now I am totally against the death penalty but under certain circumstances if the family of the victim really feels it will help them to recover by killing the perpetrater themselves. By all means…. I read a story awhile ago and bookmarked it because if I was the woman in the story I would have probably done the same thing:
MOTHER SETS FIRE TO HER DAUGHTERS GLOATING RAPIST
And then those motherfucking BIA police officers …
announced to the press that Mary Ann Little Bear had been maimed in an “exchange of gunfire,” the implication being that both sides were to blame. There was no evidence then-or now -that the victims “exchanged” a single shot, or even had a gun with which to do so.
Seriously I want to know how do these people sleep at night??? Someone please explain it to me.
When the BIA and FBI refused to arrest the shooter, AIM sent armed men to guard the Thunder horse house and WKLCOC sent a team of investigators. The government that barely stirred itself on behalf of Mary Ann Little Bear now mustered fourteen (FOURTEEN) BIA police, FBI agents, and U.S. marshals to threaten the AIMers with arrest.
Dear God let not Colburn be one of the U.S. Marshals. Thats it I have to take a shower and go to bed.
ANNA MAE AQUASH 29/FINALLY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER WITH A SET OF BALLS!!!
All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
I don’t put a lot into race….never really think of myself as “white” of course I see color but I don’t base my friendships on it. I was raised a white American and am terribly proud of who I am. Not because of my color….I am one of the few people I know who isn’t afraid to look at myself honestly good or bad. I know me. I love being American this is the greatest land with the greatest people.
Having said that this Indian history is hard to swallow there are very few redeeming white people in THE UNQUIET GRAVE so far!! Monica Charles said awhile ago that the difference between her and I is that she fucking hates the police, and the whole “just us” system and I see them as public servants. My anger and horror of this isn’t that I have decided one way or the other who killed Anna Mae…but over the systematic corruption of our public servants who should be representing everyone!
Mark Thompson was bringing up the capitalist slave system a ways back and I have half dropped out of society for the most part. Everything going on with the government, economy, Anna Mae for that matter happens because we are a divided. We allow ourselves to be divided. I say this to everyone complaining about the state of the world. Collectively we have asked for it. The races can no longer afford to be separate in ideology. We will either choose capitalism or we will choose the good of the people and the earth. One will lead us to survival the other to destruction.
Indians of course are discriminated against but the only way out is for people to unite. Not meaning we lose our individuality or culture but uniting. It might not be fair but the fact is unless whites are swayed into a different way of thinking about Indians their situation will not change rapidly. Unless collectively there are more people uniting for causes that are for all people much will stay the same.
Consider the Anna Mae case no matter your opinion there really is no evidence to convict anybody. There is a bunch of hearsay. Take a roomful of people divided and pointing fingers. You walk in and make 4 friends and decide that they are right and convict someone based on opinions. The general public fails to realize that the FBI could have easily picked another 4 people who have a whole different side. They could then pick another 4 people and yet a third opinion and would convict a whole different set of individuals. So far there is no evidence in this case.
Imagine being Arlo Looking Cloud behind bars and maybe he did it or didn’t….but the evidence is not there. He supposedly confessed. But under the influence of narcotics…If his last name was Kennedy he would be a Senator!!!!
There wasn’t one white person who liked me writing about this on alt.native. The Indians were divided. The FBI groupies don’tt like it. Most of my friends don’t like it. All in all I don’t give a shit even when I was in my teens I walked to my own drum. One Indian reading my stuff said that white people getting involved in Indian affairs makes things worse for them. I don’t believe that….I think if you are an Indian and you invest all of your hopes in some white people “fixing” everything you will be disappointed. The Civil Rights movement was successful because African Americans united and were able to also sway the majority of white people. It was successful because they were basically in charge of their own destiny. When the majority of people take action then things will change. Of course the majority of people can also do harm depending on what it is we want. Everything in the world is basically because that is what we collectively wanted. That is why I am beginning to admire reservation Indians they have the courage to not participate in the capitalist slavery system. I am sure that there are some who stay for other reasons….alcohol or mental problem. Just like in other poor areas where access to health care and education is lacking. I know a lot of white people who also choose not to participate in corporate slavery they live off the grid…grow their own food. I have a foot in each world. Woke up a bit late and can’t quite make the leap….either way!!!
I don’t have a tv in my house but when I am staying at the Red Lion I watch tv nonstop…lately everytime I am going past Nancy Grace the woman who does the crime stuff there has been no mention of the Anna Mae case. Its all about the white victims. Here is the CNN page for Nancy Grace e-mail her. No matter the side you are on the story deserves attention. See if they give a shit about an Indian woman who was murdered 30 years ago.
When someone complains to me now about the government I ask what have you done who have you written? ….nobody. My Mother does this and then uses the excuse that she doesn’t write good letters and her spelling is bad. Well guess what? America is made up of more than ivy league grads. And they aren’t too fucking smart either look at how much Harvard lost…8 BILLION DOLLARS
Everybody deserves to be heard and represented.
Anyway it still boggles my mind that the trial is being held in South Dakota. I just looked up what the percentage of people who voted for Barack Obama was in South Dakota – 45%. So the state is progressing in their issues of race. The worst states were Utah, Oklahoma and Wyoming all in the low 30′s. Can you imagine what those places are like?? I live in Oregon and we voted 57% in favor of Obama and we still have many many issues concerning race. If John McCain had picked a different running mate then there might be speculation whether people were voting based on race….
Anyway to get on with the story AIM has taken over Wounded Knee and the FBI has set up roadblocks and President Wilson and his goons have set up a roadblock to the roadblock. President Wilson will not allow the WKLDOC lawyers through to see their clients. They have sent a message to the FBI who has talked to Wilson who has denied the request and the FBI…
…agents offered WKLDOC their regrets. what could they do? The WKLDOCkers suggested that on occasion the FBI had been known to arrest lawbreakers, but their suggestion went unheeded.
Judge Andrew Bogue, one of the two federal judges in Sough Dakota and the judge of first resort for cases in the western half of the state, said he saw no reason why the goons should have to remove their illegal roadblock. Unfortunately, Supreme Court precedent left him no choice but to order the goons to let the lawyers through. The goons grudgingly let them pass.
The BIA and the FBI continued to support the goons anyway giving them shotgun shells, C-rations, two way radios,
Eventually the government parked an APC with the goons. the goons showed their gratitude by continuing to level their rifles at all travelers, federal and WKLDOC alike.
…one day the goons turned away mediators from the Justice Department on grounds that they were overly sympathetic to AIM. Wayne Colburn, the director of the Marshals Service, had by then grown tired of having shotguns pointed at him whenever he approached the roadblock. when he heard of the mediators being turned away, he grabbed tow of his marshals, puth the rest on alert, and sped to the roadblock to set the goons straight. FBI agents up the road had heard over the radio that Colburn was coming and tipped the goons who had rifles at hand..
Hoping not to inflame the Wilsonites any more than necessary, the marshalls left their guns in the van-a decision they soon regretted. Colburn gave the goons a choice: let the mediators through, or join him on a ride to jail. The goons said they intended to do neither….
“If there is going to be bloodshed,” one of the goons eventually said, “let it start here.”
Colburn later said he believed at this point that he and his men might well be murdered…..one of the marshals sidled back to the van on pretense of using the radio, grabbed a gun instead, and spun on the advancing goons. Colburn told them to get their asses up against the van.
As they did, an FBI agent appeared and told Colburn that tehre was really no need to arrest such good friends as these.
“If you’re3 not going to help,” Colburn answered, “you might as well get back up against that van yourself.”
The agent said he was under no obligation to follow the orders of a U.S. marshal.
“your ideas on jurisdiction,” Colburn said, “mean about as much to me as piss falling from the sky.” He told the agent to clear the hell out of the way, and the agent did.
Colburn took 11 goons to Pine Ridge for processing…
That night other goons reestablished the roadblock. Before Colburn could dismantle it again, FBI agents prevailed on the goons to temporarily disband it. They promised that higher-ups in Washington wre at that moment working on a deal to let the oradblock stand….
Colburn demanded the roadblock come down…an arbiter agreed with him. That afternoon Colburn took the negotiators on Pine Ridge through the roadblock but were stopped by a teenager with a rifle. There was a standoff between Colburn and the teenager but an FBI agent stepped between them. The teenager blew a hold in a car radiator a few days later. He was never charged.
In fact the government had just decided to train the goons and put them on the federal payroll.
Of course I wish Colburn had made a stand for WKCLDOC being denied access to their clients…but like I said I’ll take what I can get!! Most of us are not concerned with others problems until they begin to effect us.
I was looking for something on the goons at Wounded Knee and found this by a band called REDBONE who I hear on Sirius all the time they wrote COME AND GET YOUR LOVE. Who knew there was an Indian band that got airplay??? Maybe everybody except me!
Anyway here is their song WOUNDED KNEE
and then COME AND GET YOUR LOVE
ANNA MAE AQUASH 27/BIA HIGHERS AND LOWERS ELIGIBLE VOTERS IN ORDER TO KEEP WILSON IN POWER
All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Stephen Hendricks.
I listen to Talk Left on Sirius radio a lot. And there are so many subjects I would like to cover on the blog but I just don’t have the time. Anna Mae is the most important as it does not get the attention it deserves. All day I can hear about Somalia, Iraqis, Afganistan, AFRICOM, torture, economy but the most discriminated against group in the United States I rarely hear or read anything about in mainstream media. Fucking Aljazeera covers more Native American Issues than we do!
Racism is tearing not only this country apart but the world. There are people in the United States that believe this is no longer true…that there is no more racism but it is only because they themselves are racist in addition to the fact that our media does not report on issues of race with the same zeal that they report on young celebrities or Octomom. I was listening to Lynn Samuels today and she had come up with a new phrase chocolate coated fascism. Under the guise of peace loving spiritual liberals they justify their fascism with a Save Tibet sticker on their car. Funny how much compassion we can muster…funny how much outrage we can muster for oppressed people in other countries and yet we are blind to the oppressed people next door in our own country. A caller to Lynn Samuels’ show gave an example of a candy coated fascist- the people in chat rooms and discussion groups who spout all sorts of fascist insults and then put a happy emoticon at the end so they could tell themselves that what they were doing was OK! That had me laughing because it is so true!! I thought I was alone in noticing it.
The other thing I heard was from Thom Hartmann (whom I adore) who said, We don’t have an illegal immigration problem we have an illegal employer problem. I love that man…he is so intelligent and yet so easy to understand.
I still haven’t had time to see what is happening with the Anna Mae trial maybe on Saturday and Sunday I will be able to sit down and read. I am thinking of turning my page on racist thoughts into an Anna Mae page with links and addresses of people to write or e-mail. Most of my friends work and don’t read my blog everyday more like once a week some are angry about all of the attention I give to Native American issues and some call and want to know more but time is such a hindrance when you work and have a family. I’m single and mostly work part-time and I still don’t have the time to investigate everything I would like to. And I am still trying to find my comfort zone when it comes to writing about these issues….so I do a lot of thinking and self reflection. As I have said to keep informed on all of the issues concerning America you need 10 clones reading constantly!! I had a very good thoughtful conversation with one of my friends that I visited last week. I was surprised that she brought up correcting past mistakes in history in order for us to move towards being a better country- towards survival. I brought up the broken treaties and she agreed that while we would probably never be able to honor them 100% a serious effort was needed. Dianne doesn’t have a computer though so she can’t grace us with her wisdom!
I should probably turn this into two seperate posts but I think it is all interconnected. Now for the next installment:
I stopped yesterday because I was very tired and there was a section about voting out President Wilson that confused me. I will explain it as best as I can now.
The Independent Oglala Nation wanted Wilson to be recalled. The Feds said the Oglalas had to vote him out. One third of registered voters were needed for a referendum. The Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization collected the signatures and sent them to the BIA.
The BIA said that there were not enough signatures-the BIA redifined the term eligible voters and therefore tripled the voters.
“It looks to me,” Senator Jim Abourezk observed, “like the BIA is making the voter-eligibility figures higher and lower when it wants. In this case, the BIA is a law unto itself.”
…Wilson or one of his goons…posted a notice urging Oglalas to "march into Wounded Knee and Kill tokas(non-Oglala Indians)… (and every other non-Indian)…they want to be martyrs? We will make it another Little big Horn!! and anyone of theri beatnik friends can be a stand-in for Yellow Hair"
…they were more in the traditions of Indians who found it profitable to scout for Custer than of the Indians who killed him.
…the next day Wildon and fifty mixed-bloods answered the call-sort of….they set up a road block a few hundred yards in front ot the FBI roadblock. To reach the FBI barricade and Wounded Knee beyond, travelers first had to pass through the goons, who stuck their guns in the faces of all comers as the FBI watched.
When WKLDOC’s lawyers arrived to visit their clients, the goons refused to let them pass. The lawyers sent a message to the FBI agents up the road, reminding them of the court order permitting them to see their clients.
The agents talked to Wilson but Wilson refused to let them pass.
People think this stuff doesn’t have anything to do with today but history if not remembered or ignored repeats itself gaining in destructive momentum.
I must end here because the next part finally has a member of law enforcement with a set of balls and redeeming character. I look forward to finally writing about someone no matter his reasons for waking up to the terrorist actions of Wilson and his goons actually does something!
ANNA MAE AQUASH 26/TRIBAL JUDGES
All excerpts are in italics and are from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
Meant to do a post on Anna Mae last night but after being gone a week my computer had lots of updates and then I had a problem installing my new Norton. Had to figure out where I left off and since this week is very very very busy I might miss a few more.
I haven’t had time to look at any news so I don’t know if there are any new developments about the trial.
Noam Chomsky says if you want to stop Terrorism stop participating in it. THE UNQUIET GRAVE is very disturbing and there are times when I want to beat down some people….the book brings about very intense emotions. Since I have banned myself from reading alt.native my energy hasn’t been going off in the wrong direction. There are forces that tend to distract in a negative way. I was happy to learn from them a lesson in self control and interconnectedness. When you read people who have no purpose in life but to spread hate all day long it gets to you.
Enough of me Anna Mae calls….
Hobart Keith, a tribal councilman and Wilson critic, also told of having been beaten by a goon. The goon was Glen Thee Stars…Keith had reliable witnesses, but tribal prosecutors refused to indict.
Keith said he would go to federal court, and his case was so strong, it seemed that even the federal prosecutors might hav to act. to head them off, tribal prosecutors belatedly charged Three stars with assault. He was brought to the courtroom of Judge Dorothy Richards, a Wilson appointee who in her last job, as clerk of court, had been accused of embezzling court fees,
After Wilson elevated Richards to the bench, she allegedly had fees and fines paid directly to her, notwithstanding a ban on the handling of cash by judges. (Doesn’t it always boil down to money. People replace God with money the ultimate false God….or is it the ego?)She also alleged to have falsified the arrest records of defendants in order to bring harsher sentences on them and to have taken the furniture and appliances from a home of troubled youth and had them installed in her own house. (Unfuckingbelieveable)
When Three stars appeared before her, she convicted him without ado and sentenced him to ten minutes in jail and a nickel in fine.
Jeopardy was thus attached to his offense, and Keith could not pursue it in federal court. BIA superintendent Stan Lyman wrote approvingly in his diary, “The judge said she had just made the punishment fit the crime.”
You would think that sometime people in general would get a clue. When you commit crimes no matter the side of the law you are on…you will pay the consequences. Maybe not a judgement day but just the natural consequences whether you believe in reincarnation or that death is finality or that you are a ghost that wanders what it all boils down to is that there are no do overs in this life. And the only laws that matter are Gods laws no matter how you interpret him/her. These man made laws mean nothing. Whether you “won” the fight is of no importance. IT DOES NOT MATTER. Rich, poor, titled, it does not matter.
Other critics of Wilson told of being denied trials by jury on the excuse that funds to pay jurors had suddenly dried up….Others reported that judges simply refused to call their courts to order to hear complaints. Still others were turned away well before reaching a courtroom, by tribal prosecutors whose offices just happened to close whenever complainants appeared, or by policemen who just happened to run out of complaint forms.
Wow what a lot of stuff to regret later in life. Ask yourself if this is what you would be proud of if having a conversation with your creator. Seriously, if the thing my dad taught me about living your life like it is on the front page of the New York Times doesn’t work for you imagine sitting down with God are you proud of all you have done for others in your life. Of course if the God you worship is J Edgar Hoover, Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld you will be comfortable with the crimes of the FBI and the BIA. Until they have run out of people to persecute and they start on you.
ANNA MAE 24/WOUNDED KNEE
Excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
This is the best video explaining how out of control and unacceptable the tactics used by the FBI, NSA and other agencies. These agencies were investigated by the Church Committee. That the FBI was using COINTELPRO tactics is a FACT. Here is a link to a very good summary of the FBI’s covert actions COINTELPRO. The thing is that in neither the video or the report are Native Americans mentioned and the FBI says that they were not engaging in COINTELPRO tactics. There is a video and book by Ward Churchill….For some reason when I first started reading a bit on Native Americans ten years ago Ward Churchill made me nervous (strictly my feelings I know nothing about him…. I had two books in my hand one was by Ward Churchill and the other was by Vine Deloria. I chose the Deloria. (Pudgy Indian likes him) Anyway I just googled Ward Churchill and here is a good article that explains the controversy surrounding him. I have mixed feelings about the whole wannabe an Indian thing….it is obvious that Ward Churchill has dedicated his whole life to being an Indian. For whatever reason he won’t acknowledge that maybe he isn’t….I don’t know what it would matter. The people that hate him would be gleeful but there are those that would respect him just for telling the truth and being honest. I do think it is sad that people put so much into identity into what kind of blood they have…..even if he is 1/16 Indian why so much denial and hatred of the 15/16ths white? Maybe all of us disease free people should get mixed blood transfusions!! I don’t know enough about him to comment on his credibility but here is his video on COINTELPRO. I do think he makes some excellent points and he reads Noam Chomsky so he can’t be all bad!!
Since the Trail of Broken Treaties, the FBI had cultivated moles inside both AIM and the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization, and the moles had kept the Bureau informed of the activists’ movements…The FBI monitored Russel Means as he drove from Rushville, Nebraska, to Pine Ridge. The identities and methods of his watchers remain unknown, but Means was on the reservation all of three minutes before two of Wilson’s goons, Poker Joe Merrival and Glen Three Stars, tried to thrash him. Means got a way, but a friend, Gary Thomas, the federal legal aid lawyer on Pine Ridge, was not so lucky and was beaten. Afterward Thomas lodged a complaint with the BIA police and FBI and produced two witnesses, but the authorities ignored him.
That is the sort of stuff that makes the FBI and the United States government lose all of its credibility with me when it comes to Indian affairs. They clearly pick and choose who is protected under the laws of the United States.
Joseph Trimbach (author of AMERICAN INDIAN MAFIA), the FBI agent in charge of the three-state region, was the FBI roadblock when the occupiers’ demands were brought out. Originally there were three:
that the U.S. government unbreak America’s 371 broken treaties with Indian nations, that it root out the rot in the BIA, and that it investigate the tribal governments of every Lakota reservation.
…the demands were augmented: Dick Wilson, Stan Lyman, and Wyman Babby were to be fired; the beatings of Wilson’s goon squad were to be probed; and the White House was to meet with the occupiers.
Trimbach passed the demands upward, asked Washington for help….Come the morning, he was in command of 250 FBI agents, U.S. marshals, and BIA officers, a dozen armored personnel carriers mounted with machine gun turrets, tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition, and even a Phantom jet. His manpower would soon double. Dick Wilson, not wanting to be outdone, outfitted his goons with clubs, football helmets, an those most potent of reservation killers-six packs.(funny!)
Against this array the 300 occupiers of Wounded Knee had maybe 100 men of combat age and an arsenal of deer rifles. Ammunition was scant.
The press comes, some sympathize others don’t because of the hostages. Politicians come to negotiate their release. Hendricks has a source that says the hostages were let go but decided to stay…Tom Giago has a source that says they were threatened.
The Justice Department, for example, had tried to justify the heavy weaponry on its side by saying that rebels had an M-60 machine gun. But reports inside Wounded Knee found there were no M-60′s and in fact most of the Indian rifles were three shots from falling apart. another time, an armored personnel carrier tried to flush Indians from a bunker, and the Indians returned fire. Back in Pine ridge, a government spokesman said the Indians had fired first and that the APC had been nowhere near the bunker. when a reporter said that was untrue, the spokesman said the reporter didn’t know what he was talking about. The reporter said he had the whole thing on video.
“Don’t you think that destroys your credibility,” the reporter said, “telling us the APCs were two to three miles away, when we have documentation-on film-that those APCs came to within at least five hundred yards of the bunkers?”
…the government relented and let journalists into Wounded Knee for visits of a few hours, but reporters who parked their cars at the FBI’s roadblock had seen nothing. (These cowards disguised as honorable men with badges bring a great shame to our country.) Only after the vandalism was mentioned in Newsweek did it stop. Teh harassment was worse for reporters who were considered “alternative,” “undergoud,” or “leftist”- that is reporters wihout the protection of a large corporate parent. Many were arrested by the FBI, BIA, and the Marshals service, charged with a manufactured crime like interfering with an officer, and escorted to the reservation line.
One reporter arrested by the FBI protested that she had done nothing wrong and said the agents would have to drag her to jail kicking and screaming. The agents gave her a choice: come with them peacefully, or go with Dick Wilson’s pals in the BIA police. The agents counseled against the latter course, as they could not guarantee her safety with the police. She went with the FBI.
Once again what are the requirements for getting hired by the FBI. You have to lie, have a mother that didn’t raise you to respect women, and be willing to only enforce laws for the privledged few, cowardice and no conscious whatsoever. I wonder what they would have done to someone like Anna Mae if no one was watching? (that goes for the AIM leaders too!)
ANNA MAE AQUASH 21/WHY DID WILSON BECOME WHAT HE PROCLAIMED TO HATE?
All excerpts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
What is with men who are so afraid of the idea of people helping each other??? Communism was a failure but not to the extent that capitalism is proving to be …but people like this have so much fear and hate that all they can do is worship what they say they detest. Like the preachers who condemn the gay lifestyle and are the first to take it up the ass….I suppose Wilson really was a Communist.. stealing from the very people he was supposed to be representing. Instilling Communist like oppression on some of his people when he should have been representing and protecting all of his people. Kinda like the FBI.
Dennis Banks and Russell Means rallied AIMers to the town of Custer…for a confrontation with Hobart Gates. (prosecutor) On February 6, 1973, a hundred or so AIMers….were met by police in riot gear. The police allowed only a few of them into the public building for the meeting with Gates. Banks, Means, and a couple of others went inside and harangued Gates.
…words passed between AIMers and lawmen on the courthouse steps, and the verbal soon became physical.
….an officer shoved Sarah bad Heart Bull, mother of the slain Wesley, down the courthouse steps.
Once fists were thrown, it took no time for brawl to become riot. The police were generous with clubs and teargas, and more than one Indian was knocked unconscious, but the Indians wrestled away several police batons, and at lest one policeman was knocked unconscious too. Dozens on both sides were bloodied. Several of the Indians seized a nearby gas station, made firebombs, and tried in vain to burn the stone courthouse. they had more success with the wooden chamber of commerce building, which burned to the ground.
The sheriff deputized white citizens and called for reinforcements from officers of the state Fish and Game Department.
In the week after the riot the Black hills fairly crawled with National guardsmen and state troopers. Indians were stopped, searched, and arrested for the crime of driving with red skin. Gun shops saw a run on their wares by the white citizenry.
Sort of like what is going on with the election of Obama…a bunch of frightened white men stocking up on guns and bullets. Here is an excerpt from Howard Witt in the Chicago Tribune: “Why are white people buying assault weapons?” said Ben Agger, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Arlington who wrote a book about the Virginia Tech slayings. “I almost hate to say it, but there is a deep-seated fear of the armed black man, because Obama now commands the military and other instruments of the justice system. They are afraid Obama will exact retribution for the very deep-seated legacy of slavery.” Read the rest of the article here.
Indians started calling Rapid City “Rapist City” or “Racist City”
Many years later, the man who became Rapid’s chief of police would say of the 197o’s “It was a different era. When I first became a policeman here, if you found a drunk Indian downtown, you’d put him in a garbage can. and when he go out, he was sober enough to leave, and that’s just the way things were.” AIM asked the city fathers to leave, and that’s just he way things were.”
AIM asked the city fathers to shut the bars until tempers cooled. The fathers declined. The next night enraged Indians went from bar to bar smashing mirrors and windows, ripping out barstools and tables, and brawling with white barmen and patrons. The next day, the city closed the bars.
Then the residents of Pine Ridge tried to impeach President Wilson.
Wilson answered the call for his impeachment in the traditional manner of those who found themselves incircled by hostile redskins: he called the calvary. The U.S. Marshals service, perhaps the least understood of federal law enforcers (its mandate was shipping federal prisoners and guarding federal buildings), sent its Special Operations Group to Wilson’s rescue. SOG….was a domestic “strike force” that had been created in response to protestts int he 1960′s that targeted federal buildings and land. In training and tactics, SOG was so like the Green Berets that its creators were accused of having formed the group to skirt the congressional ban on using the armed forces domestically. ( The military could be used at home only on explicit presidential or congressional order; SOG could be used merely on the attorney general’s say-so). the sixty five marshals of SOG who came to Pine Ridge….were not shy about displaying their ribles and machine guns on the streets below. Wry Oglalas called their makeshift citadel Fort Wilson.
The BIA police also heeded Wilson’s call, adding forty officers from other reservations to the dozen normally on duty in Pine Ridge. The FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office for South Dakota, neither of which had previously taken an interest in crime on Pine Ridge, also established offices in Fort Wilson. The FBI agent in charge of the entire Minnesota-Dakota regiona nd the U.S. attorney both took up residence.
One big officer was sitting there, typing out everything that happened and phoning it in, every hour on the hour, to the director of marshals in Washington, D.C. Everybody had a gas mask. If grenades were to be used, they would be fired from shotguns; the shotguns and grenades were all laid out, ready to fire. Should gas be used, a big fan was set up in fron tof the window to blow it away from the building. the window had already been taken out to form a lookout post.” so many lawmen were wedged into the BIA building that the BIA had to shut down almost allof its normal administrative operations on Pine Ridge. (That sounds like it might not have been bad!)
All of this, it is important to remember, was in response to and entirely lawful move by the tribal council to impeach its president.
Wilson called his trial to order and proceeded to screen Anarchy- USA, a film by the John Birch Society that linked the civil rights movement to godless communism and godless Communism to revolution in Algeria and elsewhere.
Wilson’s enemies retreated to the small community of Calico…
The Oglala Sioux Civil rights Organization, as the asemblage called itself, now asked the marshals of Fort Wilson for protection from Wilson’s goons, but the marshals declined, So OSCRO invited AIM to stand guard and help strategize.
Wilson, through brutality, graft and patronage, had a lock on the tribal council, and the BIA had thrown the dead bolt against administrative appeal.
The U.S. attorney had refused to prosecute Wilson for the boldest of crimes, and civil suits faced the tallest of odds, for reasons taht will soon become clear.
They asked the elders’ advice.
“Go to Wounded Knee,” the elders said. “Make your stand there.”
They did.
ANNA MAE AQUASH 19/PRESIDENT WILSON
All excepts are in italics and from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
Today nearly every school child can tell you something of the black civil rights movement; maybe one in a thousand can speak of the red.
Before the Trail of Broken Treaties the Oglala voted in a new president Dick Wilson. He is quite a controversial character. He was accused of taking money from white businessmen, paying for votes, buying tribal land at a quite a discount, stealing and selling a tribal truck, taking money from the tribe under the table, nepotism, not keeping the tribal accounting books, forging his secretary’s name on $69,000 dollars in checks.
Because he was anti-AIM he had the full support of the BIA.
Wilson…illegally ran most of the tribes affairs through a small executive committee under his control. One of the executive committee’s more notorious acts was to outlaw the assembly of three or more people withe the means to riot. So broadly worded was the statute that “means to riot” included vocal chords.
In November 1972, as the Trail of Broken Treaties came to an end, Wilson ordered all tribal employees to Billy Mills Hall… Wilson announced that the Trailers were bound for Pine Ridge, that they meant to hold a victory dance at Billy Mills, but that the dance was a Trojan horse, that AIM’S true end was the sacking of the tribal and BIA headquarters. The crowd was appropriately riled, an the tribal council, which Wilson called briefly into session, passed an ordinance 72-55 was supposed to do no more. But when 72-55 appeared in the statute book, it empowered Wilson to throw anyone who supported AIM off the reservation or out of a tribal job.”Wilson had the people of Pine Ridge so paranoid,” said Dave Long, the vice president of the tribe and one of the few dissidents on the council,”that when a few AIM members were seen in Rushville, over the Nebraska line, the tribal buildings in Pine Ridge were evacuated.”
True to his word Wilson arrested Russell means and Dennis Banks and other AIMers whose had spent their entire lives on Pine Ridge. He also fired the dissenting Vice President Long..
…without pay or due process, even though by law Long was removable only by impeachment. Means and long filed a complaint witht the prosecutiors of the U.S. attorney’s office in Rapid City, noting that Wilson’s despotisms were expressly forbidden by the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968. They asked that Wilson be charged with violating their civil rights. The prosecutors said they would give the matter consideration, which is all they gave it.
If the prosecutors were disinclined to let so trivial a thing as an act of Congress stand in the way of Wilson’s harassment of AIM, perhaps it because the Justice Department, of which the U.S. Attorney’s Office was a subsidiary, had just asked the FBI, in the aftermath of the Trail of Broken Treaties, to step up its monitoring and infiltration of AIM.
Then Wilson brought about the goon squad…Google goon squad Pine Ridge and it comes up with a lot. You can read further here, here, here and then I found this refuting many of the deaths on Pine Ridge were by goons or the FBI, it also says there were no investigations….how were the findings made??
Wilson asked to put the goons on the federal payroll, and Stan Lyman, the BIA superintendent on Pine Ridge, thought the idea capital. So too Lyman’s boss, BIA director Wyman Babby. In November or thereabouts, $60,000 was forwarded to Wilson.
The federalized goons were to be deputized by the BIA police on Pine Ridge, but the scheme ran afoul of Richard Colhoff, the BIA’s chief of Police on Pine Ridge. Colhoff said the goons were a public nuisance. In fact, they were the source of most of the trouble on the reservation, and even had they been upstanding citizens, Colhoff said that deputizing a group of untrained men for riot control was madness.
So of course Wilson whined and the director Wyman Babby found Richard Colhoff a job on another reservation.
With Colhoff gone, Wilson ordered every able-bodied man employed by the tribe to Billy Mills Hall for riot training. some came willingly, others out of fear of losing their jobs. There were brief tutorial in judo and the use of nightsticks, followed by the distribution of paychecks. More tutorial and pay checks followed.
Long accustomed to abuse and fearful of the goons, the Ogalalas of Pine Ridge were slow to chafe. But by
the end of 1972, six of the reservation’s eight district councils, which functioned as neighborhood councils do in a large city, called on Wilson and Lyman to resign. come January 1973, when Wilson again refused to call the tribal council into session, several councilmen circulated a petition for his impeachment.
ANNA MAE AQUASH 18/THE CONROYS/THE NATIVE AMERICAN EMBASSY
All excerpts are in italics and are from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
I just got off the phone with a friend of mine and I really do need to put up that page about Indians and racism. I keep rewriting it. I have a lot to say as I travel a lot and meet people from from all socioeconomic backgrounds. I don’t stay in my circle of five friends that all think the way I do!
On another note I put up this funny thing about the Hopi word Koyaanisqatsi on my Anna Mae 17 post and one of my friends sent me an e-mail that there is a movie by the same name. She says she watches it occasionally to remind herself what we can so easily become. My friends are afraid to post on the blog so they either call me up or e-mail me with comments.
Here is the movie I have not watched it yet but will when I am done with this post!
Tom Conroy was a BIA realty officer on Pine Ridge who was underpaying for land that he purchased in one instance there was a discrepancy of almost 26,000 dollars (170,000 today!) The GAO investigated him but of course he got away it. Here is the GAO report. Why bother spending the tax payers money for these investigations if they are going to ignore the wrong doing?
I wish Monica Charles had written something about what it was like being on the Trail of Broken Treaties….instead I will do a brief summary.
They expected their influence would be greatest on the eve of the election, but in fact the nation’s reporters and politicians were strewn about the country on campaigns and the Trailers only guaranteed themselves obscurity.
When Indian delegations came to Washington, the BIA exted them small courtesies, like helping find lodging and schedule meetings.
…Harrison Loesch forbade the BIA from helping them.
…just before their arrival the…National Park Service denied the Trailers a permit to hold religious services at the Iwo Jima memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. One of the flag bearers depicted in the iconic memorial was a Pima Indian named Ira Hayes.
The mood worsened when the first of the trailers arrived in Washington on November 1 and found they were to lodge in the cold basement of a ghetto church occupied by rats….After a miserable night, Trailers by the hundred decamped form the church to the BIA headquarters in Foggy Bottom and squatted there in the understandable theory that the building belonged to them.
Indians continued to arrive from around the country, and by day’s end, with the crowd in the BIA’s auditorium numbering a thousand, Loesch arranged for them to move temporarily to a roomier hall in the nearby Department of Labor. But the Trail’s leaders sensed that they had the BIA in a bind and agreed to go only if Loesch set up a meeting for them with the White House, which till then had snubbed the Trail.
The government would later say the Indians started the riot, which is how the story played in the news media, but the claim was not true.
Earlier in the day the Depart of the Interior had asked the D.C. police to clear the building at five o’clock. when the de’tente was reached, nobody thought to tell the police that the eviction was off…..
the would-be evictors were evicted in a few minutes. Several combatants on both sides were bloodied.
The Trailers, unjustly attacked and afraid of a second charge, heaped office furniture in front of every exit and fashioned weapons from broken-off table legs and envelope openers…
A deal was struck….and next morning would move to the Labor auditorium, where food and cots would await them.
…the door at Labor had been locked. The Indians feared a setup-maybe the labor auditorium was a decoy just to get them out of the BIA. They quickly reoccupied their bastion and strunga banner across the front that read NATIVE AMERICAN EMBASSY.
They were there to stay.
…”Perhaps only the BIA could have managed successive failures of this magnitude, ” historians Paul Smith and Robert Warrior wrote. ” The locked door was the result of a decision by a minor functionary who believed that only after everyone had left the BIA building could anyone enter the Labor Department.”
So there were negotations….didn’t work. the government cut the phone lines…ultimatums were issued…the Indians vandalized the building….pissed off the white folks…Finally…
…the White House promised to make a formal relpy to the Twenty Points and paid for the Trailers’ trip home, they would go. Nixons aides agreed and handed over $66,500 in small bills.
With the Indians out of the Native American Embassy, the reelected Nixonians gave the Twenty Points due consideration, duly declared them fanciful…..
Damn good thing whites are’nt racist…..something like this just might raise ones suspicions! Or apparently not.
Before vacating the BIA, the natives had backed a U-Haul to the building’s loading dock and packed it with ten tons of documents. ( Way to go!)
The stolen papers showed how the BIA was bamboozling Indians of their land and of royalties from land leases.
How shocking!
It turns out that the FBI had a mexican disguised as a Pueblo Indian spying on the Trailers.
…on Columbus Day, and anniversary Indians have long associated with infiltrationof their ranks, the D.C. police gave Arellano a medal for his outstanding covert work.
ANNA MAE AQUASH 17/LAND THEFT/POISONING THE LAND
All excerpts are in italics and are from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
Wow…I’m on page 35!!!
Then we took 525 square miles of land from Pine Ridge and gave it to the Department of war for a bombing range.
The inhabitants of the range were given ten days’ notice to gather what they could and get off. For their land and improvements-fences, barns, houses, and so on- they were paid dimes on the dollar (white appraisers took a dim view of Indian property) and for their moving costs they were paid even less.
Of course whites didn’t do this because they are racist.
What land the government did not buy outright at these prices it leased at three (Yes 3) pennies an acre. The residents were told they could return after the war, but the air force kept thte land until 1986, at which time Congress gave it not to the Oglalas but to the National Park Service for the inclusion in Badlands National Monument, under whose stewardship the tract’s rich uranium deposits were not protected from mining.
But as I said this was not done because whites are racist it was because…
Indians, even in the 1970′s, were children- legally wards of the state, This condition, which continues today, was a holdover from the nineteenth century, when most Indians were unschooled in the language, commerce, and laws of America and the government sought both to protect Indians from rapacious whites and to keep Indians in submission.
See??? I knew there was a good reason!!!
...Indians could own land on reservations after a fashion, but they were never permitted to own it out right. Instead, their lands were held in trust by the Department of the Interior, parent of the BIA, which was supposed to manage the property for Indians’ benefit.
Lacking clear title, Indians could not use their land as collateral for loans.
Lacking loans (and jobs), Indians had no capital to buy the tools, supplies, and animals to work their land for profit.
Their only recourse was to lease the land, sell it to non-Indians, or leave it be.
Land hungry whites-farmers, ranchers, timber harvesters, miners-were only too happy to rent or buy, and the BIA was only too happy to broker the deals, sweetening them with below-market appraisals.
On Pine ridge in the early 1970′s, the BIA leased land for an average of $1 an acre per year and sold it for an average of $40 an acre.
Millions of acres slipped through Indian hands in this way.
Indians who held on to their land tended to be mixed-bloods, descendants of Indians who had married whites and so had better access to capital. For the most part, mixed-bloods also held the few jobs on the reservations, ran the tribal governments, and retained little of their language, religion, and culture.
A search of the old bombing range brought this interesting bit of information, In 1980 a study was done and the land was still not fit for humans to live on or grow food. And apparently there are still unexploded ammunition lying about. Read more about it here.
Here’s another good link on the clean-up of the bombing range it covers 342,000 acres and the government is going to clean up 2,486 acres of it…..click here
But now I have found this gem from a site called Native Unity they tell an even better story. Wow that is serious shit!!! A must read if you are not afraid to pull your head out of the sand…
I just read this on the same site: KOYAANISQATSI
ko.yaa.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language) n. 1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating. 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.
I’ve never met a Hopi…..how did they hear about me!!!!
ANNA MAE AQUASH 9
Excerpts are in italics and come from THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks.
Now Steve Hendricks questions why the FBI claim they could not recognize when
…the day before her trial, she jumps bond and walks out of the same hotel where the FBI are staying.
Only a few of the FBI’s informant fugitives are women, fewer still are Indian women, and fewer still are Indian women from Pine Ridge.
Agent Price knew Aquash. Less than a year before she turned up dead, he had questioned her about a murder, Several months after that, he had arrested her in a raid, by some accounts recognizing her on sight. He most certainly lied about being at Amiotte’s (ranch) and he lied about or obscured his proximity to the first autopsy, at which he had photographed her face.
Although he (Agent Price) would later swear he was not looking for her, internal FBI documents would eventually prove that just days before her body was found, he was helping to cooridinate the hunt for her.
….Aquash told her peers, which was that in the last months of her life Agent Price had given Aquash a choice: cooperate with the FBI, or he would see her dead before the year was out.
She had told him to go fuck himself. (Price has consistently and vehemently denied the story.)
There are questions about being able to identify the body because of decay…Agent Price says it was bad…Dr.Peterson says not so bad. Others say that her features were identifiable….
…the only person known to have seen them ( autopsy photos) is Myrtle Poor Bear. In Poor Bear’s story, Agents Price and Wood showed her the pictures as a threat. They said Aquash had been blackened by fire, not frostbite, and that if Poor Bear did not agree to lie under oath that she had seen AIM’s Leonard Peltier kill the two FBI agents in 1975, Poor bear would end up like Aquash. Poor Bear perjued herself. Price and Wood said Poor Bear’s claim of having been threatened was a lie….
Whatever the truth of Poor Bear’s story, the FBI has never explained why its agents were showing pictures of someone whose face was rotten beyond recognizing.
If Aquash was, as the FBI claimed, beyond identifying, what good did it do to show the pictures?
Candy Hamilton remembers finding a flyer about the body but it had the wrong age, wrong size-five-six or something.
The flyer does not survive, but the BIA memo on which it was based, It says Dr. Brown measured the body at five feet two inches and 110 pounds. How Aquash grew to five feet six or so in the flyer mentioned none of Aquash’s identifying traits- her gallbladder scar, her partial dental plate, her childbearing, her jewelry-though all were noted in Brown’s autopsy.
The FBI thought the bracelet unusual enough to show a local jewler….but the agents did not show it to the public.(Why bother with the jewler if they already knew who she was and what agents???)
The body was moved to Nebraska but the mortuary there said they couldn’t keep it.
BIA police chief Sayers…ordered the body buried. Yet mortician Tom Chamberlain told another story: the body, he agreed, was beyond embalming, but it was not bad off, certainly not beyond keeping. He had coated it with disinfectant and put it in his unheated garage, where he was certain it could have stayed a week or more in the cold weather-only, Sayers had called him a day or so after the body’s arrival and insisted it be buried. Chamberlain….asked how Sayers intended to so that when the corpse had not been identified and had neither a death certificate nor a burial permit attached to it. Sayers did not have an immediate answer.]
“Darnedest thing I ever saw,” Chamberlain said. “Been doing this for over fifty years and haven’t run into a case like this yet.”
A friend of Aquash’s ….Gladys Bissonette, offered to look at the Jane Doe, but Chamberlain told her he had been ordered to let only “authorized” people see the body.
The undertaker denied Bissonette’s claims…
The Holy Rosary Mission buried the body.
…neither church nor funeral parlor kept their usual records for processing a body.
Agent Wood swears in court that the FBI did not know the BIA had buried Aquash.
Inmates from the Pine Ridge jail who buried Aquash on March 2 also exhumed her on March 11. They said the same men in suits attended both affairs.
A report from Agent Wood said that on March 2, BIA officer Merrick told him the body “was buried at Holy Rosary Cemetery on March 2, 1976.
Wow I am almost done with chapter 1!!!!! Not quite though…
When reading this line by line the way I am the incompetency or corruption is astounding….if what Steve Hendricks is writing is true. I wonder what the NFIC Narrative has to say about all of this…
Funny how James Simon has no desire to comment on any of this….. embarrassment? shame?? denial???
ANNA MAE AQUASH 5 OR SPECIAL AGENT ZIGROSSI CONFUSED by Lizzy “the shilling, white sock puppet tool” Tool
That is too funny!
I know you are confused so read this discussion of my Anna Mae 4 post. Those were not landmines….
My apologies to Stephen Hendricks of THE UNQUIET GRAVE for forgetting to credit him on that post.
All excerpts are from his book. I forget that there are people that are not reading the saga from the first post!
Once again I know nothing about the murder and that I am learning by reading THE UNQUIET GRAVE first then LOUD HAWK and then I will look into AMERICAN INDIAN MAFIA. You may thank James Simon that I am making my lack of education so public. This is not my life…and the trial will probably be over by then!
I was not gushing I was EXCITED!!! Maybe I was excitedly gushing!!! Is it a secret that Indian authors have saved me from…not even sure what! But I had stopped reading fiction because it was no longer speaking to me…I was almost strictly reading non-fiction for years….who should I worship Paris Hilton?? You are talking to some one who was in Love with Joseph Brodsky when I was 19…that’s another post..and it was after I outgrew Shaun Cassidy!!!
POW WOW HIGHWAY only got one bad review on Amazon… much of the verbage is of low quality or, in other words, unnecessarily profane. While a literary argument can be made for reflecting vernacular in common use, the author’s over-indulgence in using profanity to describe the color of the car is quite unnecessary. Damn I love it already!
Anyone who wishes to engage in conversation with me is invited to do so by getting on my blog please read RULES FOR POSTING ON MY BLOG. perfect example of why I should be embarrassed by any real writer reads my blog that should be RULES FOR POSTING COMMENTS ON MY BLOG!
My sincere apologies if there are those who feel that I have been “trashing” alt.native I have often said that it is a good place to go for news on Indian affairs…..the name calling and the projection is a fact!
Now for the continuing saga…
…Norm Zigrossi said none of his men had been at the autopsy, a nurse who helped with the autopsy told reporters that she had given Aquash’s amputated hands to Agent David Price. a BIA investigator at the autopsy, Nathan Merrick, said he”thought” two FBI agents had been there, one of whom was Price.
Dr. Brown said on one occasion that a couple of agents “may” have been at the autopsy and on another that agents had wandered in and out of the procedure. (Why lie about something that simple?)
Dr. Brown finally says that no FBI agents had been there at anytime.
It is this position that the FBI has taken before Congress and other inquirers ever since.
FBI reports released under the Freedom of Information Act would eventually prove that four agents-Price, Wood, Donald Dealing, and John Munis-were in the autopsy room, some just before and some just after the proceedure.
Price even photographed Aquash’s face.
Zigrossi had either lied or been lied to about his agent’ presence.
“….we had the pleasure of deposing David Price,” Ken Tilsen, the senior most lawyer of WKLDOC, would later say. “Price, to my mind, must be the most evil living agent in an organization that trained thousands of agents in the practice of evil. When we asked him whether he was at the autopsy, his answer was, “I wasn’t there.”
I looked for the testimony on line but could not find it basically Price says he was only outside the room and might have looked in the window.
…in 2003, Norman Zigrossi said, “I know all about the first autopsy. I’ll never froget it. now, I can tell you which of our agents were there, and that was Price and Woods”-he meant wood.
Was he saying that Price and Wood were in the room while Brown was working on Aquash?
“That’s correct.”
Continued tomorrow with BACK AT THE RANCH
Final thoughts on this are that I am fucking disturbed and will never get over how people in power put themselves above the rest of the population except when it comes to accountability. They really do believe that they are above the law and if they break the laws oh well they are entitled. How dare we question them? This isn’t just the FBI its the politicians…economists….CEO’s…They see the rest of us as sub-humans. However I also feel that if we paid law enforcement more money it might attract more righteous and honest people…once again that is a broad rant. I am sure that there are plenty of people who are honest and who will do the right thing when confronted with evil and corruption. To those people my gratitude….still lamenting the fall of Elliot Spitzer…
JAMES “SNAPPLE” SIMON
I try to be respectful of people who comment on my blog. But I simply cannot walk away from James “Snapple” Simon. (I think he should change it to James “Simple”Simon). I really did not think that he would have the nerve to comment again because of my last comment.
This is the comment he left on my FOR JAMES SIMON POST
You bring up a lot of generalizations that really don’t get us anywhere, you know, the old “they all do it so I’m absolved of needing to educate myself any further” or else presenting a laundry list of personal expectations that cannot possibly be met, e.g., “until every CEO…” which again excuses a knowledge deficit. Well, in the event you are as open-minded as you say you are, you will have to spend more than a penny. Start by visiting (for free) the Trimbach’s web site, americanindianmafia.com. There you will find a video that tends to render your description of the Aquash murder investigation as more than suspect. If you only knew how federal investigators have agonized over this case for years, while the perpetrators have been able to convince people like you to suspect just about anyone but the aiders and abettors in this premeditated murder of an innocent woman (John Trudell comes to mind.) The fact is many people in AIM were co-conspirators in Anna Mae’s murder at precisely the same time federal agents were trying apprehend these people. I can assure you, for instance, that Anna Mae’s daughters (whom you must admit know more about this case than you do) would describe your arguments as specious and irrelevant. I’d really like to know what your source is for the claim, “The FBI used tactics that would ensure paranoia and division among AIM leaders.” This tells me you have succumbed to AIM propaganda and the same old historical equivocations that enabled the old guard leadership to fool so many, beginning with Robert Redford, Peter Matthiessen, and many well-intentioned people who really don’t know what they’re talking about. I agree with you, it is an uphill battle, but one worth fighting in the interest of truth and justice. I have yet to meet one person who has read Trimbach’s book and has not come away with the honest conclusion that there was much more to the story than they ever knew. In other words, they acknowledge that people who impose criteria as a prerequisite to considering other points of view, the evidence, etc., represent the same type of lock-step thinking they claim to abhor. I certainly hope you weren’t born last Thursday but I suppose I am just as skeptical of your willingness to consider what others have to say as you seem to be of law enforcement. If you want to have an honest debate, let’s get rid of the window dressing and stick to the facts. What say you?
This was my polite response
O.K. HALF OF THE CEO’S!
Mr.Simon you are avoiding the “generalizations”. If you think that the “generalizations” do not matter you are mistaken. Unfortunately that is the natural repercussion when those who have sworn to uphold the laws of the United States are the very people who desecrate them. Do you also overlook the “generalizations” of terrorist regimes? The United States Government simply cannot commit atrocities and pretend that they never happened. If you honestly believe that the FBI has only had the welfare of the Indian Nation in its best interest we simply cannot have this conversation. If you do not know the difference between right and wrong this conversation will be useless.
YOU are skeptical of ME??? Mr.Simon I suggest that you read my blog posts about Anna Mae thoroughly. While I have given my opinion on my mistrust of the FBI. I have never voiced an opinion that members of AIM had nothing to do with it. I have posted opposing videos on the subject AND a link so people could read what Denise Pictou-Maloney thought of her mother’s death. The United States operates on the assumption that all men are innocent until proven guilty….YOU seem to be the one who has already made up their mind! Do NOT project how YOUR mind thinks on ME. If that is how you operate I suggest you go post on Google alt.native! Debate? If you want to debate once again go to Google alt.native!
I readily admit I KNOW NEXT TO NOTHING about this case. I am in the learning stages. What I need is information I have had two previous commenters suggest books which I have purchased off of Amazon for less than five dollars each. (I would suggest that you DO NOT make light of my bank account. I live well below the poverty level and manage to pay my bills without the help of the government.) When I am done with those if I can find the book you suggest for a reasonable price I promise I will read it.
You stated that the FBI investigators agonized over this case. How do you arrive at this conclusion? Are you an investigator on this case? You posted this on my invitation to Monica Charles who has also agonized over the death of her friend and I have asked her to write a more personal account. She is working on it. What does this case mean to you? Personally? Did you know Anna Mae Aquash? It would be a very good start for a dialogue.
The facts will come eventually and ultimately there will be a judge that decides what will be admissible in a court of law. I do not envy the jury!
BTW do you know if FBI agents routinely take lie detector tests as I know military persons do?
HERE IS MY NOT SO POLITE RESPONSE
Funny how what you call “generalizations” do not bother you when concerned with AIM or Indians in general.
Funny how what you call “generalizations” do not bother you when concerned with liberals.
Maybe the truth is that you are one of those conservatives that think Indians and liberals do not matter because they are “unAmerican”.
The only person who feels that they do not need to educate themselves is YOU!
And what the hell is the deal with you. You start 2 websites AIM MYTHBUSTERS and AMERICAN INDIAN MAFIA. And then post on them under the name of SNAPPLE….So the casual observer will think you have readers???? Of course that the authors of AMERICAN INDIAN MAFIA retain YOU as their spokes person….we’ll I think we have a credibility issue right off the bat.
Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am an under educated wannabe artist over 40 who is going through early menopause and given to emotional outbursts!!!! Nothing to hide there!
But I have a feeling you have lots to hide. Such as your motives for your blogs. There are several options that I can only wonder at since you hide behind the keyboard.
The reason I have to spend more than a penny for the book is because it wasn’t even picked up by a real publishing house. Outskirts Press is a self-publishing press that only prints on demand. Order 1 copy you print 1 copy. WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED THERE; COULDN’T THE BOOK PASS THE VETTING PROCESS OF A REAL PUBLISHING HOUSE?
IS THE BOOK LIKE YOUR BLOGS?????? ONE SIDED?
I may lack a proper education but I’m not a brainwashed chump like you.
The FBI agents agonized? WTF??? Monica Charles now that woman agonizes!
You claim AIM engages in propaganda? WHAT THE FUCK IS THE FLASH WITH GUNSHOTS ON THE AMERICAN INDIAN MAFIA WEBSITE? You are a hypocrite of the worst sort!
You said I have yet to meet one person who has read Trimbach’s book and has not come away with the honest conclusion that there was much more to the story than they ever knew. As John McEnroe would say YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS!
As I suggest did you go to DEBATE this over at alt.native. Oh let me just take a look……
NOPE!
How do you spell c-o-w-a-r-d. Did your parents teach you to only fight debate people that you thought you could easily win? Wow that must be some family tradition to be proud of!!
But my Dad was 20 years in the military he raised me that only a coward would engage in battle with a weaker opponent…but then he didn’t raise me to be a fucking whining cowardice pussy. Where did you serve the Girl Scouts?
Of the two of us I can assure you that I represent the spirit of America and you should move to…..
France!
And you dare to write on my blog that you are skeptical of me??? Apparently your parents did not raise you with any manners either! (unless you were raised in the foster care system in which case I will immediately apologize.)
You know what else my Dad used to say Quit talking out of your ass. Do not try to hide the fact that YOU have already made up your mind about the case by accusing me of just that. It is obvious from my many posts that I cannot form an opinion on the case either way as it is very complicated. You on the other hand have taken the bait hook line and sinker. Did it bother you that we don’t even know what evidence the judge will or will not allow?? You are a very dishonest man.
The only real judgment on this case I have made is based on a quote by President James Hamilton: The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.
I notice you did not review the book or did you do that under a different name.
So here is the ‘Most Helpful” review by Frank Lee Speaks at AMAZON.
1. To say that American Indians are the Mafia is a figment of the imagination. The title of this book “American Indian Mafia” misrepresents all Indian people within the “American Indian Movement”. An online dictionary defines Mafia as: “a secret criminal organization operating mainly in the United States and Italy and engaged in illegal activities such as gambling, drug-dealing, protection, and prostitution.” The “American Indian Movement” is neither a “secret criminal organization” nor are they from “Italy”.
2. The language throughout the reading has a sour demeanor while imposing negative racial profiles to describe Native American Indians regardless of their affiliations. Under the heading “A Bum Steer”, Myrtle Poor Bear, who was a government FBI witness, is profiled in negative stereotypical terms. (Pages 441, 442, 599) A tone of racial arrogance and vengeance rings throughout this book.
3. There are no eyewitnesses, only hearsay and coerced testimony in this shallow, hollow account that does not prove Leonard Peltier shot or killed the FBI agents. While reading and searching for good solid evidence to support this claim, I did not find foolproof convincing evidence in this writing. Researching, I have found reliable information in the original court trial transcripts: US vs. LEONARD PELTIER, TRIAL TRANSCRIPT EXCERPTS – Case Number CR77-3003.
4. It is a contradiction to say that FBI Agent David Price and Anna Mae Aquash are “kindred spirits” as described on page 464 because they are opponents in their core beliefs. After all, it was David Price who ordered the mutilation of Anna Mae’s body by having her hands cut off. If she had lived to see any kind of body mutilation (cutting off hands, arms, legs or decapitations) practiced on any person, she would have spoken in opposition to David Price for ordering this heinous act that desecrates the body regardless of his reasoning.
5. Conclusion: This book should be rated zero because it reads like a “Propaganda 101″ novel. It lacks fairness, integrity and removes human dignity from those who suffered the most during this time, namely, the Native American Indian people. This is an example of 500 years of perpetual biased writing, ultimately living in the “Age of Propaganda”. This work is graded ” I ” as an Incomplete Record of actual events due to the withholding of pertinent documents/information related to this matter. Skeptical reading is highly recommended for this book.
6. Note: It is shameful that there are a few Indian people who mercenarily cater for maza-ska to the forces that not only murdered their ancestors, but mutilated them as well. Historical examples of murder and mutilations are: (1862) Little Crow and the 39 Dakota hanged at Mankato, Minnesota, (1890) Sitting Bull at Little Eagle, South Dakota. 1. To say that American Indians are the Mafia is a figment of the imagination. The title of this book “American Indian Mafia” misrepresents all Indian people within the “American Indian Movement”. An online dictionary defines Mafia as: “a secret criminal organization operating mainly in the United States and Italy and engaged in illegal activities such as gambling, drug-dealing, protection, and prostitution.” The “American Indian Movement” is neither a “secret criminal organization” nor are they from “Italy”.
2. The language throughout the reading has a sour demeanor while imposing negative racial profiles to describe Native American Indians regardless of their affiliations. Under the heading “A Bum Steer”, Myrtle Poor Bear, who was a government FBI witness, is profiled in negative stereotypical terms. (Pages 441, 442, 599) A tone of racial arrogance and vengeance rings throughout this book.
3. There are no eyewitnesses, only hearsay and coerced testimony in this shallow, hollow account that does not prove Leonard Peltier shot or killed the FBI agents. While reading and searching for good solid evidence to support this claim, I did not find foolproof convincing evidence in this writing. Researching, I have found reliable information in the original court trial transcripts: US vs. LEONARD PELTIER, TRIAL TRANSCRIPT EXCERPTS – Case Number CR77-3003.
4. It is a contradiction to say that FBI Agent David Price and Anna Mae Aquash are “kindred spirits” as described on page 464 because they are opponents in their core beliefs. After all, it was David Price who ordered the mutilation of Anna Mae’s body by having her hands cut off. If she had lived to see any kind of body mutilation (cutting off hands, arms, legs or decapitations) practiced on any person, she would have spoken in opposition to David Price for ordering this heinous act that desecrates the body regardless of his reasoning.
5. Conclusion: This book should be rated zero because it reads like a “Propaganda 101″ novel. It lacks fairness, integrity and removes human dignity from those who suffered the most during this time, namely, the Native American Indian people. This is an example of 500 years of perpetual biased writing, ultimately living in the “Age of Propaganda”. This work is graded ” I ” as an Incomplete Record of actual events due to the withholding of pertinent documents/information related to this matter. Skeptical reading is highly recommended for this book.
6. Note: It is shameful that there are a few Indian people who mercenarily cater for maza-ska to the forces that not only murdered their ancestors, but mutilated them as well. Historical examples of murder and mutilations are: (1862) Little Crow and the 39 Dakota hanged at Mankato, Minnesota, (1890) Sitting Bull at Little Eagle, South Dakota.
But now you done pissed me off and I promise I will post everyday about Anna Mae Aquash until the trial is over on days that I am home.
MY UNCLE VIC, THE GAO AND THE BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS
I don’t know the Portuguese side of my family very well because I grew up in Oregon and most of my Portuguese relatives live in Fall River, Massachusetts. Except for a short period of time when Iwas a wee little one I didn’t go to Fall River until I was probably 23 or 24 when my grandfather died.
I was raised to have good manners and to be polite, respect my elders…but going to Fall River was a whole new set of rules….don’t say this….don’t say that…don’t bring this up…and for some reason I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone that I shared an apartment with two other black girls. I don’t function well under rules and regulations.
I am closest to my Uncle Vic because he worked in Washington DC and I lived in Northern Virginia. So every once in awhile I would see him. He worked for the General Accounting Office (GAO) and has quite a resume. If I remember correctly he reads a couple thousand words a minute versus my couple of hundred..LOW END OF THE COUPLE OF HUNDRED. He wrote tons of reports and testified before congress …was on 60 MINUTES….but I don’t know that much because while he was driving into DC to audit our government I was driving into DC to hit the clubs and see bands like Nirvana, Faith No More, Soundgarden and I hate to admit it but I saw LA Guns!!
I vaguely remember being at Uncle Vic’s house and I guess he was overseeing the Department of Energy at the time because he said he was at AREA 51 and that the GOVERNMENT WAS NOT HIDING ANY UFO’S THERE. To which I replied that it was ok because I understood that he couldn’t TALK about the UFO’S because the government was watching him! Then I was busy having nervous breakdowns,seeing shrinks for a few years and didn’t keep in touch with him.
A decade later when I moved to Oregon, we got in touch and e-mail each other pictures. We both love looking at photographs. His pictures are more exciting because he travels the world and sends pictures of penguins in Antarctica…the Vatican…the Coliseum of Rome…can’t wait to see what is next.
When I started my blog I didn’t tell him for a few weeks because I have a hard time getting past the fact that HE IS RELATED TO MY MOTHER.She does not have computer access….yet!…I may not live past the day she sees this blog as I have what she would call a FILTHY MOUTH!!! My mother is so Portuguese Catholic that when I was like 25 or 26 she found out I had a FULL SIZE BED. And was horrified….WHAT DID I NEED A FULL SIZE BED FOR????? So I got pissed off and having a smart ass mouth I replied A GIRLS GOT TO MAKE A LIVING SOMEHOW…CLICK…she hung up on me and didn’t call back for a few months.
So anyway my SANE Uncle Vic looks at my blog and says he doesn’t care about my language and that he often uses much worse…He also said:
The Indian issues right on target. While working at GAO, I was responsible for auditing the BIA and got very familiar with Indian issues. I also spent some time at some of the tribes in ND and SD–it is truly the end of the trail of tears.
I was shocked because I thought he would be like everyone else and hate hearing about the Indian stuff…so I e-mailed him back….
Wow!
and I thought they just had you debunking my UFO’s!!!!!
I also asked if he knew of links to reliable sources about the government not paying for contracts on mineral rights from Indian lands.
He wrote back..
Here are a few that relate to the rip off of their royalties. If the government were a private company with the same responsibilities for managing someone’s royalties, they would be jailed.
Here are some of the links he sent me.
MAJOR MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES AND PROGRAM RISKS: DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR
There is a contents on the side bar and you have to enlarge the document but the stuff pertaining to Indian mineral rights starts on page 14.
Here is one concerning health care
INDIAN HEALTH SERVICE: HEALTH CARE SERVICES ARE NOT ALWAYS AVAILABLE TO NATIVE AMERICANS
Here are two reports that he wrote:
INDIAN ISSUES: BIA’S DISTRIBUTION OF TRIBAL PRIORITY ALLOCATIONS
OBSERVATIONS ON THE DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR’S PERFORMANCE PLAN FOR FISCAL YEAR 2,000
On the second document you have to scroll down to page 13 to read his assessment of the BIA’S accounting abilities.
I still think that government needs more pictures in their documents….they seem so sterile….if all you do is sit and read this stuff year after year it would become mind numbing no wonder those politicians are so disconnected from reality.
My other thought is that the United States is filled with such smart people like my Uncle Vic who can cut through all of the bullshit assess a situation based on facts…isn’t corrupt…doesn’t take bribes… and who do we elect to run our government???? We have it all upside down and backwards.
I’m so proud of him!!!!
THANK YOU MONICA CHARLES,THOSE TOOTHPICKS WITH CELLOPHANE ON TOP,AND WHY I LOST FAITH IN THE GOVERNMENT
My first real job was in the kitchen at the Hilton in Reno, Nevada. It was my first time off the goat farm in Eddyhell, Oregon. I was eager to do a good job since it was so hard to even get an entry level job as the recession of the 1980s was in full swing. I had to beg for a job EVERYDAY for about 2 weeks before they would hire me.
I remember being stunned that the hard boiled eggs came in big white five gallon containers containing preservatives. Sort of shocking when you grow up on a farm. I saw homeless drunks passed out on the street I would leave them money because I thought they would need to eat when they woke up.
One day while I was in one of the pantries I was unpacking a carton with many white boxes. I opened one and it was filled with those pretty toothpicks with the colored cellophane on top. I just stared at it awhile in shock…..
I had NO idea they were mass produced….
I THOUGHT THE WAITRESS AT THE SIZZLER LOVINGLY GLUED THAT COLORED CELLOPHANE TO MY TOOTHPICK AND PUT IT IN MY BLT TO MAKE MY DAY BETTER!
Seriously! Still upsets me in a funny sort of way.
Two weeks ago I started a blog,about a week later I put up a link to a Wickipedia page about Anna Mae Aquash. I didn’t put any thought into it just sort of like looking it up a word in a dictionary. I didn’t care in the sense that it happened long ago.
Monica Charles posted it on a discussion group for Indians. Monica was very passionate and I felt what she was feeling… not all the Indian stuff, but as a woman in a battle. My impression of her was that she was a young woman in her mid twenties who was probably going to get worn down from a battle that she could not control and would lose eventually.
I e-mailed her not sure if I was going to incur her wrath because I wanted her to approve of a post that I had linked to her website THE DAUGHTER OF TSE WHIT ZEN. And she responded with such kindness and encouragement I was taken aback. There are many people that I like instantly and many people I hate instantly and I liked Monica Charles.
So there I was giving this young woman advice and support. She in turn was providing me with links and books to read encouraging me to keep writing… I had some relatives staying with me for a few days. So I wasn’t doing my usual curiosity that killed the cat thing. After they left I sat at my computer and Googled Monica Charles. Good lord. This woman who I thought was a young girl had been demonstrating since I was probably five….
She was at,
Wounded Knee II
The occupation of the BIA
She writes poetry:
WOUNDED KNEE 1973 #5
We walked out past government sentries
Victorious and frightened in one breath
Flares popped bloomed and fell but never found us
An armoured personnel carrier loomed
A mammoth dragon tracking us through bad dreams
We collapsed in the hardened fluffs of snow
Hundred year old frozen ghost dancers
Two young white men jumped down, lit cigarettes
City eyes blind to Indians in the night
Their cigarettes glowed like serpent eyes
The snow crunched as they drove to their next post
We rolled and exhaled and stretched our stiff joints
We walked all night to…
You can read the rest at her blog THE DREAMER’S JOURNEY.
Recently she was involved in a fight for the rights of Indians to hunt whales. You can read about that hair raising tale here
Currently she is a warrior fighting for the truth to come out about Anna Mae Aquash’s murder and cover up by the FBI. Here is the SUPPORT LETTER FOR JOHN GRAHAM FROM MONICA CHARLES that she sent to OUR FREEDOM blog.
THAT IS WHAT YOU CALL A FUCKING HISTORY
Unbelievable! I actually started crying because she has to be such a brave person and I felt like an idiot… So I e-mailed her again to ask if she was the SAME Monica Charles I had been reading about and to express horror at my stupidity.That’s me. Monica wrote back once again with an encouraging e-mail.
I was raised in a Republican household and held those views most of my life, except that I was more compassionate. The death penalty didn’t make sense to me, I believed in support from government for women with children…Basically I was a RINO (Republican in name only).
The company I used to work for employed a lot of illegal immigrants and then they would treat them like shit. This had been going on for sometime but I didn’t know about it because I do not speak a word of Spanish. There was a young lady who was half El Salvadorian and half Peruvian that I worked with. One day I made a comment that some of the Hispanics were not too friendly. She told me it was because they knew I was some sort of Hispanic and they thought that I viewed myself as too good to speak my language. My mother is Portuguese and I do not speak a single word. I wish I did.
Being the seasoned employee and having learned to fight for my rights I was always helping people because I had to learn the hard way. If you came to me I could tell you what your rights were and who to call in the company to get what you deserved.They would fuck everyone over.The inhumane resource officer would lie about EVERYTHING. I was a thorn in their side but they couldn’t really touch me because they had made too many mistakes and I documented everything. But the Blacks and Hispanics were another story they would go out of their way to discriminate. Deny their days off, not pay for their holidays, only pay them for part of their day. So I spent about a year collecting pay stubs I had friends in the office who would copy me stuff and alert me of illegal things the company was doing. I looked at these crimes and considered them to be the same as a robbery or shoplifting. I REALLY TRULY BELIEVED MY GOVERNMENT…. THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES would care. I decided that we needed a Union and called the AFLCIO they were nice and gave me the number to the UFCW I swear I called them EVERYDAY 26 days in a row and left messages. They would not return my calls. So I went to their office in Maryland and they said Do you have an appointment? No! But I have been calling you for 26 days in a row and you won’t answer my calls. There was a discussion and I just sat down on the floor and cried. Finally they found someone to come and talk to me. Basically they told me I was fucked because I worked in Virginia which is a right to work state. BUT I AM AN AMERICAN AND THIS SIMPLY CANNOT BE HAPPENING!!! WE HAVE LAWS!!!!
During all of this I had filed a complaint at the Department of Labor in DC…now the nice people at the AFLCIO who I knew quite well by then tried to tell me that labor laws were not being inforced. I refused to believe them….Well I swear months later when I finally got my appointment with the Department of Labor evidence in hand they started off by yelling(no exaggerating) at me saying that my complaint was not valid. I showed the fucking bitch where it said that if I knew of persons being discriminated against I could file a complaint. Too bad they need to all file separate complaints. I walked to the AFLCIO and cried on their couch while they consoled me.
That fight lasted about a year. I lost. I was devastated to learn that what I had believed about my country was completely false. I’m fucking pissed off about my government and what it has become. What we have allowed it to become. I hope it gets better with Obama in office. I campaigned for him. I write my Senators and Representatives. But remember that song by the Who? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.… We’ll see.
But getting back to Monica Charles. I am in such awe of her strength. I cannot put my year of hell into a perspective that could compare the two. Monica Charles has been fighting for the rights of her people in a way I cannot begin to imagine….SINCE 1972 AT LEAST!! As fucked up as my childhood was I had the luxury of being so naive to think that the waitresses put cellophane on my toothpicks….to make my day better. I had the luxury of blissful ignorance that my government had the welfare of its people in its best interest.
I don’t imagine that Monica Charles was ever able to afford the luxury of being naive.
I don’t imagine that there was ever a time that Monica Charles was unaware of the government’s nefarious ways.
After at least 37 years fighting for the most basic rights of her people she still has the time, energy and grace to encourage and inform others.
THANK YOU MONICA CHARLES, I TRULY WISH YOU SUCCESS IN ALL YOU DO!!!!
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