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Cover Story · Vol 21 · Issue 1002 · 2/16/00
Bury My Heart
http://www.citypages.com/databank/21/1002/article8432.asp?page=3
by Mike Mosedale · PAGE 3 of 4
 

Very early on there were also rumors that AIM was involved in the slaying. In
his book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, author Peter Mathiessen quotes AIM
leader Dennis Banks as saying that he called off an internal investigation
into Aquash's death because "if it was true that AIM was involved, it would
crush the movement."

Means says he paid little attention to suggestions of AIM involvement, and he
made no mention of Aquash in his 1995 memoir, Where White Men Fear to Tread.
"I always thought that the rumors were instigated by the feds' rumor
mill--either by agents or agents provocateurs or federal snitches," he says.
"So I never took it seriously. I figured that's the cost of doing business
for the American Indian Movement."

Paul DeMain did take the rumors seriously. The editor and publisher of the
Hayward, Wisconsin-based newspaper News from Indian Country has been keeping
files on the Aquash case since the news of her murder first broke. Back then
he was a journalism student at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He was
intrigued by the case largely because of the allegations about FBI
complicity.

Like many of the people interested in the matter, DeMain says he was driven
by a sense of spiritual connection to Aquash. And he identified with the
predicament that preceded her death: In 1975, while working as a student
reporter, he had spent some time covering an AIM-backed occupation on the
Menominee reservation in Wisconsin. One night, he says, he was hanging around
with some of the protesters at a rural cabin.

"It was just a big party," DeMain recalls. "I was sitting on the couch and
everyone left the room but one individual, who went into the kitchen. All of
a sudden he comes out and, lo and behold, there's an AR-15 pointed at me. And
he says, 'Who are you? We know you've been taking notes and making records.'"
Scrambling to establish his credibility, DeMain mentioned the name of a
respected figure from the Menominee Warrior Society with whom he had been
staying. "If I wouldn't have had that connection, there's a good possibility
I could have been buried back outside that cabin," he says. "That was the
atmosphere of 1975."

In 1994 DeMain began an extensive investigation with the assistance of two
other reporters, interviewing some 50 sources and reviewing much of the
17,000-some pages of declassified FBI documents concerning AIM. (Another
6,000 pages, some thought to relate to the Aquash case, remain classified;
last year the Native American Journalists Association petitioned,
unsuccessfully, for their release.) For years, DeMain says, sources were
reluctant to talk. But amid the dead ends and false leads, just enough bits
of evidence surfaced to keep him going.

In 1996 he interviewed Dennis Banks on a march supporting Leonard Peltier.
"When I started talking about it with him he welled up and couldn't speak for
a while," recalls DeMain. "I had a few names already and he didn't deny
anything. And he said, 'You've got to keep asking questions, keep searching.'

"And then he said, 'You know, we believe the FBI set us up, that you'll find
someone in the government that worked hand in hand to get us to that point.'
He didn't say the GOONs killed her, and he didn't say the FBI killed her. He
just said, 'Keep searching for the truth.'" (Banks could not be reached for
comment.)

In 1997 DeMain published his first set of findings in News From Indian
Country (www.indiancountrynews.com), sketching out a timeline for the final
year of Aquash's life. According to DeMain, Aquash was kidnapped from a
Denver home where she had been staying in December of 1975 and "questioned
intensely" by some AIM members in Rapid City before being hauled out and
executed. Though his investigation drew on a variety of sources including
trial transcripts, DeMain acknowledges that the allegations about who killed
Aquash and why are based on interviews with sources who insist on anonymity.

In subsequent revisions to the timeline, DeMain has included more detailed
versions of the alleged events, naming three individuals he believes were
involved in Aquash's kidnapping. In DeMain's view the kidnappers (one of whom
he claims was also the trigger man in the execution) were acting on orders
from above. "These boys wanted to be dog soldiers," he says. "They wanted to
be in the gang, they wanted to be important people. They were already doing
security and toting around guns. So when someone in the movement ordered Anna
Mae's pick-up, they went and did it."

They may have had other motives as well, DeMain says: A relative of one of
the three had been present at the Jumping Bull compound, was a suspect in the
shooting of the agents, and could have feared being implicated by Aquash.

Last March a Denver Police Department detective named Abe Alonzo pushed the
case further yet. Alonzo, who'd been investigating the case since 1994,
posted an open letter "to all Native Americans" on the Internet. The document
noted that three grand juries had been convened in the case (in 1976, '83,
and '94), and that none had returned an indictment. "This may be the last
effort to prosecute those responsible for her murder," Alonzo warned. In
November a fourth grand jury convened in Sioux Falls to hear testimony about
Aquash's death. Citing confidentiality rules, a spokesman for the U.S.
Attorney's office in South Dakota declines to provide any details on the
proceedings.

Alonzo's letter confirmed some of DeMain's suspicions, saying that the
investigation had "led to three individuals who are responsible for forcibly
taking Anna Mae from Denver" and killing her at Pine Ridge, and that "a
number of individuals" had questioned her in South Dakota. News from Indian
Country has quoted the detective as saying that "the majority of information"
in DeMain's timeline was accurate, though he wouldn't comment on specifics.

In September Alonzo, who works with the Denver PD's intelligence division,
was taken off the case; his superiors told DeMain that the investigation was
being reassigned to the homicide unit. To some observers anxious for an
arrest, it felt like a setback. But DeMain maintains that progress remains
likely, in part because of the growing number of people--particularly, he
says, women--now volunteering information about the case.

"After Anna Mae was killed," says DeMain, "there were a lot of women inside
the movement who heard all sorts of rumors, who knew about the bad-jacketing,
and then Anna Mae shows up dead. For years, they wanted to believe something
different, but now they're grandmas and, goddammit, they live every day of
their lives thinking about it. They knew what happened to Anna Mae, they saw
her a few days before she was killed, and they heard these people were
involved.

"When this stuff comes out, it comes out with all the putrid fermentation of
20 some years," DeMain concludes, adding that he now considers the murder to
be "not an unsolved crime, but an unprosecuted one."

Last summer Clyde Bellecourt, Russell Means, and Dennis Banks marched
together for the first time since the Seventies. The occasion was a protest
in White Clay, Nebraska, a hamlet of 22 just two miles from Pine Ridge. Two
Lakota men had been found murdered on the outskirts of town and the
protesters claimed that the killings hadn't been properly investigated. The
circumstances were eerily similar to those that had drawn AIM to Pine Ridge
nearly 30 years ago. But the display of unity was an illusion this time.

"With me and Dennis there was no problem," Bellecourt recalls. "But with
Russell, it was really hard. He stopped to shake my hand and I accepted his
hand. But I wouldn't have anything to do with him."

Means and the Bellecourts had spent the past two decades locked in a battle
for control of the movement, and their divisions had become personal as well
as ideological. Cliques had existed in the movement from the beginning: As
Means puts it, "Dennis [Banks] had his circle, Clyde had his circle, and I
had my circle." But by the early Eighties, the schisms widened. As AIM and
its international arm--the International Indian Treaty Council--became
increasingly involved in foreign affairs, the two camps picked separate sides
in Nicaragua. The Bellecourts were courted by the Sandinistas and Means
allied himself with Miskito tribal members who fought alongside the contras.

In addition, Means has charged that the Bellecourts' willingness to solicit
federal money flew in the face of the movement's values, since throughout
Indian history federal money has often been linked with corruption and
compromise. The split escalated in 1993, when Means acted as a prosecutor in
a special tribunal convened by a group calling itself the International
Autonomous Confederation of AIM. The panel--which included Ward Churchill
(the Colorado professor the Bellecourts have come to view as Means's
Svengali)--expelled both brothers from the movement on grounds that included
Clyde's 1985 conviction on an LSD distribution charge.

The Bellecourts rejected the validity of the expulsion, having previously
incorporated AIM as the National American Indian Movement. "This whole
Autonomous AIM is bullshit," Bellecourt scoffs. "Nobody recognizes it.
There's no such thing as Autonomous AIM, and these chapters that have formed
don't do anything but disrupt what AIM does."
 
[...]
 
 

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