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[article provided by Nita Manning. Thanks!!]
 

Cover Story · Vol 21 · Issue 1002 · 2/16/00
Bury My Heart
http://www.citypages.com/databank/21/1002/article8432.asp
by Mike Mosedale · PAGE 1 of 4 ·
 

For years it has been whispered that the 1976 slaying of American Indian
Movement activist Anna Mae Aquash was an inside job. Now a new rash of
accusations aims squarely at local heroes Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt.

Clyde Bellecourt is floating down the road in his loaded brown 1983 Cadillac
Eldorado. He wears an oversized red nylon jacket emblazoned with the logo of
the American Indian Movement--a head in profile with two eagle feathers
arranged to resemble the peace-sign gesture. His long black hair is pulled
back in a ponytail. His face is broad, beefy, and hard to read unless he's
smiling. Despite the handicapped parking permit dangling from the rear-view
mirror--testament to ongoing problems from a 1987 heart attack--the
63-year-old remains a bearish, imposing presence.

Navigating the familiar streets of Minneapolis's Phillips neighborhood,
Bellecourt pauses here and there to offer history lessons and point out
landmarks. He rattles off the names and numbers with a fundraiser's practiced
precision: There's the American Indian Opportunities and Industrialization
Center, which offers job training and education programs to some 700 clients
a year. The Legal Rights Center, which has provided services to some 30,000
indigent people since 1969. The Elaine Stately Peacemaker Center, which works
with youth and gangs. And, just a short drive away, the Heart of the Earth
School, a pioneering 260-student charter school where native kids learn about
the pipe and the drum along with the three R's.

As he passes the Little Earth of United Tribes complex--the nation's first
all-native urban housing project and, for a spell, his home--Bellecourt
recounts a triumphant lawsuit that forced the federal Department of Housing
and Urban Development (HUD) to fix the then-dilapidated townhomes and
apartments. He smiles in recalling how the struggle was finally resolved in
1992, via a cordial dinner meeting with then-HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros.
"Seven years in court," he says in his faraway train rumble of a voice, "and
that's all it took. A 15-minute meeting."

Bellecourt has been navigating the halls of power for a long time now--and,
even his harshest critics concede, he has a knack for getting what he wants.
In his three decades as a leader of the American Indian Movement (AIM),
founded in Phillips in the late Sixties, he has crisscrossed the continent
bellowing demands, negotiating deals and scrapping with just about everyone
on the way: cops, judges, tribal governments, reporters, and, of course, the
feds. But lately Bellecourt and his older brother Vernon have been
confronting what may be their most intractable enemy ever: their former
allies, and a persistent rumor about a 24-year-old murder.

The whispers have floated around for more than two decades, vague, unproven,
and known to only a few. But on November 3 they were briefly lifted into the
mainstream headlines by Russell Means, the mercurial protest veteran and
movie actor who remains AIM's most widely recognized member. Standing before
a row of microphones outside a federal courthouse in Denver, Means leveled a
blistering charge: In 1975, he said, the Bellecourts engineered the
execution-style slaying of an AIM member named Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash.
"Vernon Bellecourt made the phone call," Means declared resolutely, "and
Clyde took the call and issued the order for her murder."

In the years since her body was discovered in a remote ravine on South
Dakota's Pine Ridge reservation, Aquash has attained near-martyr status
within AIM and beyond: The folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie has written songs
about her. The Indigenous Women's Network gives out an Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash
award. And for the better part of a decade a small cadre of reporters,
investigators, and one distant relative have been seeking answers to
persistent questions about her death.

Means's announcement sparked a few stories in the national media (though none
in the Twin Cities), and it has been extensively covered in the Indian press,
with the Bellecourts' names bandied about on the nationally syndicated
program Native America Calling and in several native newspapers. That, in
turn, has provoked a barrage of counterallegations from the
Bellecourts--including claims that Means's accusations are the latest in a
long line of government-sponsored attempts to discredit and disrupt the
movement.

"Russell's a fed, man," Clyde Bellecourt says of his former comrade. "This
whole thing is a continuation of an operation set up by the FBI in the
Seventies." Vernon Bellecourt has offered even harsher opinions, telling one
reporter that Means is "totally fried."

In his more temperate moments, Vernon--who heads what he terms AIM's Ministry
for Information--attributes the accusations to a "deep-cover" CIA conspiracy
engineered by Ward Churchill, a University of Colorado-Boulder professor with
whom the Bellecourts have waged a fierce paper war.

Divisions, and elaborate conspiratorial theories, are nothing new within the
American Indian Movement. In fact, two separate entities now lay claim to the
AIM name: the National American Indian Movement Inc., based in Minneapolis
and headed by the Bellecourts, and the International Confederation of
Autonomous AIM, with which Means and Churchill are associated. For the better
part of the decade, the separate camps have been scrutinizing and denouncing
each other with a fervor they once reserved solely for the federal
government.

 Back when it all began, in 1968, no one could dispute Clyde Bellecourt's
stake in AIM. He was a firebrand who, in the words of one admirer, "had a
magnificent chip on his shoulder" that helped define the movement's
in-your-face persona.

Born on the White Earth Indian Reservation in 1936, Clyde was the seventh of
Charles and Angeline Bellecourt's 12 children. His father had enlisted in the
Army during World War I and fought in France, where he was shot up and
mustard-gassed. He returned to the States with permanent injuries that kept
him from steady work.

Not that there would have been much chance of finding any. Historically the
largest and poorest of northern Minnesota's Ojibwe bands, White Earth back
then had a 95 percent unemployment rate. The Bellecourts lived in a cramped
government-built home, squeaking by on Charles's disability and whatever food
could be wrested from the forests and waters. Angeline was a product of one
of the notorious government boarding schools, where, according to Clyde,
"every time they caught her speaking Indian they actually tied sacks of
marbles to her knees, gave her a bar of soap and a rag, and made her scrub
floors."

Young Clyde's experience in public school wasn't quite as harsh. But from an
early age he was openly defiant, questioning the value of paying daily homage
to George Washington--"Boy George," as he now calls him. "Here's this man,
wearing high-heeled shoes and little silk stockings, with a ruffled shirt and
a blond wig and rouge on his cheeks," Bellecourt says. "They would tell us
he's the father of the country. Well, he didn't look like my father or my
grandfather."

At age nine Bellecourt was sent to a Benedictine mission school on the
reservation. The strict discipline didn't sit well with him, and he became a
chronic truant. In short order he was shipped off to a military-style
reformatory in Red Wing. He spent three years there--the first of many stints
in institutions that would shape his character and, by extension, that of the
American Indian Movement.

When Bellecourt was 16 his family moved to the Twin Cities. After World War
II, the federal government encouraged the migration of Indian people from
rural reservations to urban areas, a policy designed to encourage
assimilation and open up more reservation land to non-Indians.

Bellecourt found it difficult to adjust to the city. He tried his hand as a
professional boxer (compiling a 2-1 record as a light heavyweight), but
continued to get in trouble with the law. When he was 14, his brother Vernon,
then 19, was sent to prison in St. Cloud for the armed robbery of a St. Paul
bar. Over the years that followed, Clyde was arrested for a succession of
offenses--including burglary and robbery--that ultimately landed him in the
big house at Stillwater.

It was there, Bellecourt says, that he learned from a fellow inmate about
Indian history, the broken treaties and stolen land. He also began to explore
native spirituality in pipe and sweat-lodge ceremonies. "People always say
that the American Indian Movement started in 1968," Bellecourt says. "But to
me it started in the hole at Stillwater in '62."
 
[...]
 

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