<+>=<+>KOLA Newslist<+>=<+>
 

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

Paroled by his late twenties, Bellecourt used his prison training as a
steam-plant engineer to land a job with Northern States Power. But he
remembered the lessons from Stillwater. In 1968, he conducted a series of
meetings with like-minded Indians, and then called for a summit in an
abandoned storefront on the north side. Concerned Indian Americans (a name
dropped subsequently because of the "CIA" acronym) styled itself after the
Black Panthers--a radical alternative to mainstream civil-rights
organizations that took its cause straight to the streets.

Rechristened AIM, Bellecourt's group started a neighborhood patrol and
established a court-monitoring project that led to the founding of the Legal
Rights Center. "Back then, there were only two Indian organizations in town,
and they weren't concerned about police brutality and racism," Bellecourt
says. "So we became that voice." Also part of the organization was Dennis
Banks, a Leech Lake Ojibwe who, like Bellecourt, had run into trouble with
the law before landing a professional job as a recruiter for Honeywell.

When Russell Means joined AIM in 1969, he was a part-time accountant and
former dance instructor living in Cleveland. Born on Pine Ridge, he'd grown
up in California, then bounced around the country before gravitating toward
activism. By the time he attended his first AIM gathering, he knew he'd found
his place--an organization populated by uncompromising, tough guys just like
him. Despite the bitter schism between them, Means credits Bellecourt with
infusing the movement with its core credo. "He wasn't afraid of the police
and he wasn't afraid of jail," Means recalls. "He was such a confrontational
person, such a righteous person. I think Clyde's personality gave that aura
of righteousness to the American Indian Movement and we took that. We went
with that and we became enormously successful."

Media-savvy and forceful action soon catapulted AIM out of Minneapolis and
into the national limelight. The group staged mass demonstrations at
courthouses, embarked on cross-country caravans, even occupied--and then
trashed--the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) building in Washington, D.C.
Then, in 1973, AIM led a dramatic occupation of the hamlet of Wounded Knee on
Pine Ridge. The action drew unprecedented attention to reservation poverty
and became a rallying point for Indians across the country. Even among AIM's
critics, Wounded Knee is regarded as a transforming episode in Indian
activism, a ballsy stare-down with the federal government that provided a
crucial spark to the revival of native pride, culture and religion.

But Wounded Knee shaped AIM's destiny both for good and ill. By the end of
the 71-day standoff two protesters had died in firefights, and all those
involved in the siege, some 137 people in all, were arrested and prosecuted.
Though nearly all the cases ended in acquittal, the proceedings--including
the high-profile trial of Banks and Means--put AIM on the defensive and
altered the culture of the movement.

Freelance journalist Kevin McKiernan, who was the only reporter inside
Wounded Knee and covered AIM extensively thereafter, says the transformation
was helped along by the FBI. Since 1972, the bureau had been investigating
AIM and its leaders, compiling extensive dossiers on the Bellecourts, Means,
Banks, and others, and making heavy use of informers and infiltrators. The
counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO for short, had proved remarkably
effective against other Sixties radical groups the bureau deemed a threat to
national security, including the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground.

"The senior agent in charge of South Dakota told me that between '73 and '76,
the FBI ran 2,600 agents through the Pine Ridge reservation," McKiernan
recalls. "That was their boot camp. They kicked in a lot of doors and they
pushed a lot of people around. People were afraid on that reservation and the
FBI was becoming more militant, and the hardcore segment of the American
Indian Movement was becoming more militant too. It was like two trains bound
to collide. And they did."

In the midst of the Wounded Knee siege, McKiernan shared a trailer with a
young Micmac woman from Nova Scotia named Anna Mae Pictou. Pictou, who had
snuck through security perimeters under cover of night, had first come to AIM
through her work as a community organizer in Boston. During the standoff she
married an artist and fellow activist, Nogeeshik Aquash. McKiernan recalls
her as a lively, intelligent conversationalist with a sense of humor. "She
was the only person I could make Indian jokes with, and then she'd make white
jokes," he says.

After Wounded Knee tensions and violence escalated at Pine Ridge, then in the
grips of a feud between "traditional" residents and a tribal leadership whose
security force went by the official name of Guardians of the Oglala Nation,
or GOONs. In the three years that followed, some 60 AIM members and
traditionals were killed, according to the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense
Team, which worked on behalf of those involved in the standoff.

By 1975 an AIM contingent had settled outside the village of Oglala in a
traditional encampment called the Jumping Bull Compound. On June 26 two FBI
agents arrived at Jumping Bull, allegedly to serve an arrest warrant for a
teenager wanted on a robbery charge. A firefight ensued, and the two agents
and one AIM member were killed.

Three men were ultimately tried in that case. Two were acquitted by an Iowa
jury on the grounds of self-defense, while a third--Leonard Peltier--was
convicted in a separate trial. His quest for a new trial or a presidential
pardon has made headlines ever since.

According to accounts of those who were there, Aquash had been staying at the
Jumping Bull compound with Peltier and the others until the day before the
shootout, when she traveled to Des Moines to attend the trial of a fellow AIM
activist. Nonetheless she was named as a suspect during the investigation
into the agents' deaths, and the FBI kept a close eye on her.

Other eyes were on her as well. After Wounded Knee fear of informants within
the movement reached a fever pitch. A few months before the Jumping Bull
shootout, AIM security director Douglass Durham was exposed as a paid FBI
operative, later testifying to his activities in a congressional hearing. A
former Des Moines cop, Durham had aroused the suspicions of many AIM leaders,
including Vernon Bellecourt and Russell Means; Means says he aired those
concerns at an AIM-sponsored action in northern Wisconsin.

"Before I left," Means recalls, "I took Douglass Durham's van and I told
Dennis [Banks], 'We think he's a fed. So tell him if he wants his van, he has
to come to the Pine Ridge reservation to get it.'"

"I think everybody knew what that meant," he adds, "and I leave it to you to
surmise. If Durham had been a real threat, he would have disappeared and
quietly been buried somewhere. But he wasn't, so we exposed him to the news
media. That was more valuable to us than taking care of him internally. But
believe me, there was lots of paranoia in the movement."

That paranoia was exacerbated by a widely described COINTELPRO practice known
as "bad-jacketing"--the suggestion made by an operative that another person
was a snitch. Durham, according to many in AIM, applied the bad jacket to a
number of people, including Aquash.

"Everyone had informeritis after [Durham's exposure]," says journalist
McKiernan. "He put such a poison dart in the heart of AIM that the folks at
COINTELPRO must have had a celebratory dinner after that.

"I don't know who killed [Aquash]," McKiernan adds. "But I know who designed
the gun." Others note that rumors about Aquash gained currency in the
movement when, in the final year of her life, she was twice arrested by the
FBI and released on light bonds even though she was not a U.S. citizen.

Two months after Durham's exposure Aquash attended an AIM conference in
Farmington, New Mexico. One of the two men ultimately acquitted in the
Jumping Bull trials, Bob Robideau, has charged that Vernon Bellecourt had
come to suspect that Aquash was an informer, and that he ordered Robideau,
Peltier, and another man to interrogate her. If they believed she was guilty,
Robideau has said, they were to bury her where she stood.

Vernon Bellecourt disputes the story. He points out that Robideau has close
ties to Means, and that Peltier has denied participating in any such
interrogation. But he acknowledges that he was intimately involved in AIM's
internal security. After Wounded Knee, he says, he assumed responsibilities
for seeking out infiltrators and informers within the movement, and he
relishes describing how he "busted" Durham. Bellecourt insists he never took
action against Aquash, nor ordered any taken.

"We had to have suspicions about a lot of people," he explains. "At the time
at least two people came forward and told us that the FBI attempted to
recruit them. But I was cognizant of the fact that there was a lot of
paranoia, and that it wasn't without reason. I think I just took the
information and tried to sort it out."

On February 24, 1976, a rancher named Roger Amiotte discovered a woman's body
in a remote ravine on Pine Ridge. The FBI dispatched the corpse to a contract
pathologist, who concluded that the woman--found wearing a windbreaker,
jeans, and canvas shoes--had died of exposure. He severed the hands at the
wrist (an act many later interpreted as deliberate desecration) and turned
them over to the FBI. "Jane Doe" was quickly and quietly buried in an
unmarked grave in a mission cemetery.

A week later a fingerprint analysis in Washington, D.C., identified the dead
woman as Anna Mae Aquash, who had not been seen in at least two months. The
body was exhumed and an independent pathologist--brought in at the urging of
the Aquash family--performed a second autopsy. That examination revealed
Aquash had been shot with a .38 caliber bullet, fired at close range into the
back of her head. Evidence suggested that she might have been raped.

The botched first autopsy and the FBI's failure to promptly identify Aquash,
who had been detained by agents at least three times in the previous year,
fueled widespread suspicions of a government cover-up. Many in the movement
concluded that Aquash was killed in retaliation for the two agent deaths at
Jumping Bull. (The FBI has consistently denied any involvement, and shortly
after Aquash's murder, then-FBI director Clarence Kelley took the unusual
step of declaring that she had not been an informer.)
 
[...]
 

<+>=<+>
Information Pages: http://users.skynet.be/kola/index.htm
Online Petition: http://kola-hq.hypermart.net
Greeting Cards: http://users.skynet.be/kola/cards.htm
<+>=<+>
if you want to be removed from the KOLA
Email Newslist, just send us a message with
"unsub" in the subject or text body
<+>=<+>