<+>=<+>KOLA Newslist<+>=<+>
[article provided by Pat Morris. Thanks!!!]
Sun, 27 Feb 2000
http://insidedenver.com/news/0227knee1.shtml
>Dreams of Justice
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24-year-old murder keeps Pine Ridge Reservation on edge
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By Mike Anton
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Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer
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PINE RIDGE RESERVATION, S.D. -- He drifted up from the darkness of sleep
and into the light.
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Patrick Janis stood amid the barren trees on the creek bank behind his
sweat lodges. The midwinter trickle was iced over. Janis stepped on
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the glassy surface and looked down.
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A body floated up from the bottom. At first, Janis couldn't tell who it
was. But as the body came closer, the Lakota medicine man saw it
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was Anna Mae. The woman he had met as a boy. The woman whose piercing eyes
had looked right through him, measuring his
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weaknesses and strengths, exposing him. The woman he named his daughter
after.
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Janis looked down at Anna Mae. Her mouth moved. She was trying to say something.
Janis strained to listen, but he could not hear.
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"Hey, this woman's alive," he called out in his dream.
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A group of men appeared. They smashed the ice and lifted Anna Mae from
the water. Janis still couldn't understand what she was trying to say.
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But he saw her hands were tied with rope.
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And then, as quickly as she appeared, she was gone.
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When he awoke, Janis was in his mobile home at the end of a rutted dirt
road. He felt unsettled.
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He needed to know more about this dream, discover why Anna Mae's spirit
had come to him now, so many years after the Indian activist was
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abducted from Denver and murdered here on the Pine Ridge Reservation in
South Dakota.
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"A dream like that is like a thread on your shirt," said Janis, a 42-year-old
with small-boned hands and a weight-lifter's chest.
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"You pull it and you pull it and you think it's going to come off, but
it just keeps on unraveling. I wasn't far along in medicine, so I didn't
understand it
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all."
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Neither did Robert Ecoffey. Miles away on the reservation, the newly minted
federal marshal had had his own dream of Anna
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Mae. It wasn't the first time she had come to him.
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Perhaps a sweat could shed some light on this, Ecoffey thought. Maybe Patrick
Janis could help him understand what had happened.
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Decomposed body found in ravine
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On Feb. 24, 1976, a rancher mending fences came upon a badly decomposed
body in a ravine where the prairie meets the
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Badlands, deep in the heart of a place that's synonymous with the United
States' sorry treatment of American Indians.
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"I'm pretty sure somebody wanted her found," Roger Amiotte said. "If you
wanted to hide something like that there's places here
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that nobody in the world could find, including me."
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A pathologist retained by the government somehow missed a bullet in the
back of the head; he said exposure was the cause of
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death. Unable to identify the remains, the FBI had the hands severed and
shipped back East to match the fingerprints. The remains were buried in
a
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pauper's grave.
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Another dead Indian on a reservation where gunbattles between warring factions
had become a part of life. End of story. Or so it seemed.
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In fact, the story of 30-year-old Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash -- who she was,
why she was killed and by whom -- has only taken on more meaning
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through the years. It's another unhealed wound on a reservation where history
is notched by injustice.
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There was an exhumation. A second autopsy that found the .32-caliber slug.
An ongoing FBI investigation. Three grand juries.
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Accusations that federal agents were involved. Accusations that American
Indian Movement leaders had one of their own killed because they
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feared Aquash was an informer.
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Many clues in the mystery of Aquash's murder are found in Denver. It was
here that Aquash sought refuge from her accusers within
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AIM. It was from a Denver public housing project that she was kidnapped
and taken back to South Dakota. It took the partnership of two law
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officers -- one Indian, the other a veteran Denver detective -- to revive
the case in the mid-'90s after it had turned stone cold.
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And today, Denver's streets are home to one of the suspects in the killing
-- a middle-aged homeless career criminal who may be one
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of only three people who know what happened to Aquash that winter day 24
years ago.
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In life, Aquash was a Canadian-born Micmac Indian drawn to the Pine Ridge
Reservation in 1973 by the 71-day standoff between the FBI and
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members of the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee. She quickly became
a leader in that fractious group.
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In death, Aquash has become a martyr among the Oglala Sioux, a tribe that
has known more than its share of violence and deception. She is a folk
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hero to those who feel they're still engaged in a cold war with the United
States, her case a wellspring of conspiracy theories in search of the truth.
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Indeed, Aquash's death serves as a metaphor for all that remains unresolved
on the Pine Ridge Reservation a generation after Wounded Knee thrust >
the despair and anger of Indians before the nation.
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"This is not just another unsolved crime," said Ecoffey, who reopened the
case in 1994 after becoming the first Indian ever appointed as a federal
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marshal. "It's basically a cry for justice. Not just for herself, but for
all Indian people -- especially for Indian people on this reservation.
Her case is
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full of symbolism."
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Little has changed on the reservation. The county that incorporates most
of Pine Ridge is the nation's poorest. Unemployment hovers around 80 >
percent. Suicide and alcoholism are epidemic. A mistrust of government
-- federal, state or tribal -- still underscores nearly every political
skirmish.
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Indians still are killed without explanation. In the past two years alone,
the bodies of six Indian men have been pulled from a river in nearby Rapid
City.
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Last summer, two other men were dumped in a ditch within sight of
Whiteclay, the sleazy Nebraska border town that's little more than the
dry
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reservation's unofficial liquor store.
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Mitakuye Oyasin. We are all related. It's a Lakota saying that refers to
the people. But it also could be applied to issues on the Pine Ridge >
Reservation.
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People here have a deep collective memory, so the clashes of today often
have roots that are intertwined with the wrongs of the past. Allegations
of
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tribal government corruption really have to do with a 66-year-old federal
law that set up the reservation's form of government. The recent unsolved
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murders are linked in people's minds not only to Aquash's death but to
violations of treaties signed in 1868 and 1851.
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Every piece is part of the whole, and it all intersects at a desire for
justice.
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"People here feel that the only way to get attention to the issues is to
do something dramatic," said Elsie Meeks, an Oglala Sioux and member of
the
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U.S. Civil Rights Commission, which recently held hearings on the rash
of deaths. "It's really a cry for help."
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Last summer, a march on Whiteclay turned into a riot and led to the establishment
of a protest camp on the edge of town.
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Last month, a simmering political battle led to a resident takeover of
the tribal government office building in Pine Ridge.
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Reports about both can be tracked online, a curious fact given that more
than half of the homes on the reservation are without telephones.
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Similarly, numerous Internet sites are devoted to the Aquash case, offering
not only background and theories but the suspects' names, which authorities
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have never released.
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Ecoffey's work on the case led him to Denver. With the help of Denver police
Detective Abe Alonzo, the two determined Aquash was kidnapped
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from a Pecos Street home by three AIM members two days before she was killed.
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In Alonzo, Ecoffey (pronounced ECK-oh-fee) found a partner who was as obsessed
by the slaying as he was.
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When Ecoffey took Alonzo to the murder scene in South Dakota, the two shared
a cigarette -- a tobacco offering to Aquash's spirit. The hair on
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Alonzo's arm stood up. Ecoffey told him how his car once stalled on the
highway at that precise spot. Another sign, Ecoffey said.
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"It's been documented during this investigation that Anna Mae had requested
to pray before she was 'executed,"' Alonzo wrote in an open letter
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to American Indians, which he posted on the Internet last year. "Anna Mae
was never allowed to say her final prayers. I know and have felt Anna
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Mae's spirit. She deserves the dignity to rest in peace.
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"I have seen the fear of many people when questioned about Anna Mae's murder.
The only fear people should have is their inner fear for not bringing
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justice to those responsible for Anna Mae's death.
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"Anna Mae wasn't the only Indian to die during that time that no one cared
about. ... This may be the last effort to prosecute those responsible for
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Anna Mae's murder."
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Since then, Alonzo, a 27-year police veteran, was yanked off the case and
transferred out of the intelligence unit. A police spokeswoman says the
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department is no longer investigating Aquash's death and has turned over
its files to the FBI.
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"I apologize, but I can't talk about it. I've been given orders," Alonzo
said.
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But then, he added, "This thing isn't over."
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Massacre, siege on same ground
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A white flag snaps in the wind on the hilltop where the four Army cannons
opened fire 110 years ago, raining shells on the 350 Indian men, women
and
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children in the valley, washing away the last remnants of the culture they
knew.
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Soldiers chased down and shot those who tried to disappear into the maze
of dry, rolling hills and pine-studded ravines that lace the countryside.
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Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash wasn't born here, but she quickly learned the landscape
around Wounded Knee, sneaking past the federal blockade to
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ferry food and supplies to those who were holed up against the government.
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The fact that the 1890 massacre and the 1973 siege by AIM happened on the
same ground makes for perfect symbolism. It was a symbolism that
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drew young, politically charged Indians from across the nation who, like
Aquash, wanted to stand up for their people and taste the moment.
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"I had the honor to know her," said Tom Poor Bear, who was 16 and rebelling
against the anti-Indian teachings of his Pine Ridge boarding school
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when he joined the standoff.
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"She was a very spiritual woman. Really committed and dedicated to her
people. Anna Mae was a resister. She resisted the colonializationof our
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people. She was a treaty fighter. And once you oppose a government -- it
doesn't matter what kind of government it is: federal, state or tribal
-- that
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government will do anything to quiet you."
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Aquash grew up poor in Nova Scotia, in a house with no electricity or plumbing.
She dropped out of high school and moved to the United States,
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first to Maine to pick blueberries, then to Boston, where she was introduced
to AIM and Indian political activism.
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She joined the protests of her time, including the 1972 takeover of the
Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C. Aquash was smart
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and her skills ran the gamut. She could raise money, organize clothing
drives, teach martial arts and handle a gun. Just 5-foot-2, she wouldn't
back >
down from anyone.
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She married her second husband during the Wounded Knee siege. Later, she
took up with AIM leader Dennis Banks.
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"A lot of other AIM women were jealous of her," remembered 71-year-old
Geraldine Janis, a friend from Pine Ridge who still has the red shawl with
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the AIM logo Aquash wore at her wedding. "She didn't let no one boss her
around. She said what she wanted to say. She was just such a strong
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person."
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Janis' daughter, Eileen, was a little girl when she met Aquash. Like her
brother Patrick, Eileen remembers Aquash as a towering figure, a woman
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whose goal was to compile a history of the Indian people as told by Indians.
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"To me, she was free," Eileen said. "She traveled to fight for other people.
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And when she traveled around she got to meet different people that you
only see on TV when you live on the 'res.' But she actually got to meet
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them, you know?"
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In the years after the Wounded Knee standoff, the Pine Ridge Reservation
became the scene of a civil war pitting supporters of the federally backed
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tribal government against dissidents wanting to overthrow it.
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Lawlessness stalked the isolated towns that dot the reservation, a vast
expanse the size of Connecticut. More than 60 Indians were killed, untold
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numbers wounded. Meanwhile, government infiltration of AIM led to suspicion
within the group and a hunt for those who had turned informant.
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After two FBI agents were gunned down in 1975 at an AIM encampment near
Oglala where Aquash had been living, she was sought for questioning.
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She was arrested and interrogated by FBI agents searching for Leonard Peltier,
the AIM leader who would be sentenced to life in prison for the
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killings after one of the most controversial trials in American history.
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"You can either shoot me or throw me in jail," Aquash reportedly told the
agents, "as those are the only two choices that I am taking."
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She was released on bond, but was arrested again two months later after
Oregon police stopped a motor home she was traveling in that belonged to
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actor and AIM supporter Marlon Brando. There was a shootout, and Peltier
and others escaped.
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After another FBI interrogation, Aquash was released again. Some within
AIM wondered why the FBI kept letting her go. Suddenly, Aquash was
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under suspicion.
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"She moved back to Oglala and they started the talk that she was a snitch,"Geraldine
Janis said. Aquash, once fearless, was now clearly afraid. "She
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was scared of everybody. She never did tell me why. All she said was, 'I
don't trust anybody.'
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"I knew she wasn't a snitch. I do know one thing, though: She was scared
and wouldn't get into a car with anybody she didn't know. So whoever took
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her out, she had to know them. Whoever killed her, she had to know."
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Back on the reservation, Janis regularly drove Aquash to town for food
and cigarettes. "She lived all alone out there," Janis said. "I'd bring
her to my
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house so she could take a shower. And then, one day I went out there, and
she was gone."
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A week later, Aquash called Janis. She had moved to an AIM safehouse in
Rapid City, she said, but was kicked out.
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"I don't know where I'm going, what I'm going to do," Aquash said.
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Janis offered to come get her, bring her back to Pine Ridge. Aquash said
she'd call her back.
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"But I never heard from her," Janis said. "I think that's when she went
to Denver."
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In Denver, Aquash sought refuge with her friend TroyLynn Yellow Wood, moving
into Yellow Wood's red-brick triplex on Pecos Street. It was late
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November 1975.
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Aquash talked about her two young daughters a lot; she had left them with
relatives in Canada and she was always concerned about them, Yellow
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Wood said. Aquash also talked about how the FBI released her, hoping she'd
lead them to Peltier and others wanted for the murders of the two
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agents.
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"She knew what was going on. More than I did," said Yellow Wood, who is
49 and still lives on Denver's west side. "I didn't think there was anything
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to be frightened of. She was paranoid about everybody and everything --
as was everybody back then. Everybody was pointing fingers back and >
forth. I mean, everybody was afraid of everybody."
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Yellow Wood won't say who abducted Aquash, but she knows the three people
-- two men and a woman, all Indians active in AIM -- who many
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believe took her friend back to South Dakota for questioning. She is related
to the woman and considers one of the men to be "like a brother."
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"She didn't want to go, and I did whatever I could to try to prevent that.
But I didn't have any leverage. I tried to put a stop to it, but I just
got pushed
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aside," Yellow Wood said. "Once she thought it was going to cause a problem
for me, she said, 'I'll go. I'll take care of this. I can't continue living
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like this.'
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"She didn't want to go. At the same time, she wanted to get things resolved.
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She was tired of what everybody had been saying about her, how they had
been treating her. She was just sick of it. So she went.
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"I never thought anything bad would happen. I didn't think there was anything
for her to be frightened of. I never had anything to fear from Indian
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people. I never had anything to fear, I guess I should say."
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It was the last time Yellow Wood would see her friend.
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The next time Geraldine Janis saw Aquash, she was dead and her hands were
gone.
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It was after the exhumation from the unmarked grave and the second autopsy.
Several dozen people, mostly women, gathered on a hill in a small
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family cemetery on the reservation.
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The day was cold, windy. Blowing snow lashed at faces set in stone. They
burned the cheap wooden coffin and wrapped Aquash in a traditional star
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quilt. Then the younger women took turns digging. The ground was winter
hard and it took them two hours to get the job done.
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"It was real tough work. Everybody was scared," Janis said. "None of the
AIM leaders came. That was odd. Probably felt that somebody was going
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to shoot them. I think they're cowards."
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Another crime unsolved
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First light and Loren Black Elk emerged from his tepee and faced the cold
January wind looking exactly like a man who has been sleeping on an old
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mattress on the ground for seven months.
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He looked tired. His 40-year-old body was hunched over, stiff. He wore
his night clothes, which also happened to be his day clothes: a jean jacket
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over a sweat shirt. He shuffled to the cook shack he built with donated
wood and pushed through the door, which had a sticker on it that read "Home
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Sweet Home."
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He lit a cigarette, stuffed some newspaper into the stove and chased it
with a match. A warm, yellow glow illuminated the room, the plastic coolers
and
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the camp equipment, the rifle and machete propped up in a corner, the photo
of a smiling Wally Black Elk, Loren's brother, hanging on a wall.
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Wally's body was found outside in the ditch along with the body of his
cousin Ronald Hard Heart last June. The FBI will reveal little except to
say its
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investigation is ongoing. Many Indians, though, believe the crime was racially
motivated -- that the two men were abducted in Whiteclay, killed
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and dumped on the reservation.
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"He was a good guy, not like most," Loren said of his brother. "Hate. That's
why he was killed. We're going to stay here until we see justice."
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They call this Camp Justice: three tepees, a collection of tents, the cook
shack and two portable toilets. Established to draw attention to the murders,
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the ramshackle camp has attracted family members of the victims and veterans
of protests from long ago.
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Twenty-four years after Aquash's death, this roadside vigil is a troubling
reminder of how naturally murder and politics intersect on the reservation.
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"We're at war with the United States government," said John Small, a lanky
51-year-old camp resident who has been living on disability checks ever
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since he blew his left hand off "fooling around with explosives" during
the turbulent '70s.
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"It's hard," Small said of life at the camp. "But poverty makes you a survivor."
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Camp Justice went up on tribal land after a protest march last July brought
out not only locals angry at what they say is indifference by authorities
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assigned to the double murder case, but American Indian Movement leaders
from across the nation.
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On the surface, it appeared that the decades-old feud between Russell Means
and Vernon and Clyde Bellecourt had been put aside as the AIM
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icons led 350 people on a two-mile march from Pine Ridge to Whiteclay.
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(Four months later, Means said one of the suspects told him that the Bellecourts
orchestrated Aquash's murder because they feared she would
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expose Vernon as a federal informant. Bellecourt denied the accusation
and suggested that maybe Means played a role in the killing. "Of course
an >
FBI operative would say that," Means said. "That's standard operating procedure.")
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The march on Whiteclay -- a town of 22 residents where 4 million cans of
beer are sold each year -- started peacefully. But the protest escalated
into
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an outpouring of enduring grievances: Racism. Exploitation. Claims that
Whiteclay and all of northern Nebraska rightfully belong to the Sioux.
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Robert Ecoffey carried a sign that read "Justice for Anna Mae."
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Police blocked the entrance to Whiteclay. Tempers flared and the march
quickly turned into a riot.
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"Ever since Custer discovered gold in the Black Hills, they've been murdering
our people -- over our land, over our spirituality, over our way of
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life," said Tom Poor Bear, Aquash's friend from the Wounded Knee siege.
"A white person can kill an Indian person and get away with it."
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Wounded Knee shaped a teen-age Poor Bear in lasting ways. "It opened up
my eyes. It made me who I am. It gave me my identity back." Now 43, >
he once led a campaign to cut the reservation's sky-high rate of diabetes,
which he blames on the high cholesterol and fat content of the federal
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commodity food so many here rely on.
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"It's stuff my dogs wouldn't eat," he said. "It's another government smallpox
blanket."
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Poor Bear, an organizer of the Whiteclay march, is Wally Black Elk's brother
and among the dozen or so mainstays at Camp Justice.
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"The FBI is not doing a thorough investigation," he said. "If it had been
two white people who'd been murdered, this place would be swarming with
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FBI agents. I look back to when those two FBI agents were killed here on
our land and I feel the FBI still holds that against the Oglalas."
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To Poor Bear, it's 1972 all over again. That year, an Indian man was plucked
from a street by a group of whites, beaten, stripped of his pants and
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forced to dance at a bar in nearby Gordon, Neb. He died the next day. Three
men were convicted of manslaughter.
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The case turned Pine Ridge into a magnet for Indian activists, and sent
the American Indian Movement down the road that would lead to Wounded
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Knee a year later.
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One thing often leads to another on the reservation, a connecting of the
dots that can make old scars bleed and reinforce long-held beliefs.
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That's what happened when the U.S. Civil Rights Commission met in South
Dakota in December. It was a hearing that started early and stretched well
>
into the night, a day when a pot full of emotion came to a boil and overflowed.
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"A lot of the testimony was on issues that I doubt we'll have any impact
on" such as poverty and the lack of jobs, said commission member Elsie
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Meeks. "I know these issues. I'm from here. And to sit and hear these people
for 17 hours ... .
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"It was pretty overwhelming. I was terribly depressed. People had some
immense expectations of us that I know we won't be able to fulfill."
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Mitakuye Oyasin. We are all related.
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On Jan. 16, the pot boiled over again when 100 Oglala Sioux took over the
tribal headquarters building, demanding an investigation into allegations
of
>
corruption and fiscal mismanagement against the tribe's treasurer and some
members of the tribal council.
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The move was spontaneous, with backers of the tribal president -- a political
foe of the treasurer's -- hoping to secure documents they feared would
>
be destroyed.
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>
When FBI agents showed up with a U-Haul truck and carted out boxes of paperwork,
a group of protesters formed a circle and chanted to the beat >
of a drum. Historically, the FBI has been the local villain; on this day,
it rode to the rescue.
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It was all done peacefully, even though on that first night a gunshot rang
out from a passing car and set everyone on edge. The tribal police supported
>
the occupation; many were among the hundreds of government employees who
were threatened with being laid off because of a funding shortfall.
>
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Inevitably, the protest's aim grew -- from the issue of corruption of individual
people to the corruption of the entire system.
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"This has been going on since 1934," said Harvey White Woman, a former
council member and a protest leader. "This all goes back to the Indian
>
Reorganization Act." That law replaced traditional forms of government
with tribal councils supported by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
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"When we have elections, it's 'Here -- vote for me,"' White Woman said,
pulling a handful of cash from his pocket. "Or it's, 'Here's some beer.
Some
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drugs. Some whiskey.' People off the reservation don't take us seriously
because they don't take our council seriously.
>
>
"We want the people to control our destiny in the traditional ways. The
people -- not this corrupt system -- need to say which direction our
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children's lives are going to go. We're just tired of it."
>
>
As one day stretched into another, supporters brought food, coffee and
goodwill to those holding the building. Elders placed a sacred pipe in
the
>
council chambers -- a not-so-subtle message that they were now in control.
>
At first, the American flag was flown upside down -- a signal of distress
that was adopted in the '70s by AIM. But after some military vets among
>
the group complained, it was taken down.
>
>
Outside the building's doors and on the rooftop, men with walkie-talkies
and binoculars kept an eye on things.
>
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"Working security," they all said. And as the takeover stretched into February
a feeling of deja vu developed, a feeling that it was the 1970s all
>
over again, a feeling that, like the Aquash murder, there are no clean
endings in Pine Ridge.
>
>
He heard it over the intercom, a woman weeping. It was coming from the
jail in the basement, so Robert Ecoffey, then a young police officer for
the
>
Bureau of Indian Affairs in Pine Ridge, walked down to check.
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The cell was empty.
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"That was back in 1977," said Ecoffey, who is 45. "I was curious. I asked
myself, 'What does this mean?' I was a young man and did not understand
>
what was happening. I heard her crying, but there was no one there. So
I sought counsel from a medicine man, and the medicine man said there is
this
>
young woman who has been murdered and she has come to you for help and
one of these days you will be in a position to help her. He said she
>
knows you have a good heart and will help her.
>
>
"It was the first time she came to me. But there have been others."
>
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The time his car stalled by the murder scene. And dreams. Once, Anna Mae
came to Ecoffey in the night, as clear as the plains sky. She was
>
smiling. Keep going, she seemed to be telling him. You're on the right
track.
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>
Ecoffey shared that dream in the sweat lodge with Patrick Janis. Janis
told Ecoffey of his dream, the one at the creek where Anna Mae's hands
were
>
tied with rope. That's what happened to her, Ecoffey told him, but it has
never been publicized. The two talked and sweated some more.
>
>
By then, nearly 20 years had passed and Ecoffey was now a U.S. marshal.
>
He had access to the FBI's files on the Aquash murder. After reading them,
he decided to try to revive the moribund investigation.
>
>
"This case was so messed up from the beginning," he said. "Anna Mae deserves
justice."
>
>
When he was young, Ecoffey took a different path than many of his friends
on the reservation. The year that Tom Poor Bear ditched school for
>
Wounded Knee, Ecoffey was a high school senior, already married and a father.
A year later, he was in college studying for a criminal justice degree.
>
>
In June 1975, Ecoffey was doing an internship with the tribal police when
he was assigned to accompany two FBI agents to a reservation ranch to >
look for a man wanted on theft and assault charges.
>
>
They didn't find him that day. The next morning, Ecoffey was pulled off
the search and told to investigate a burglary. The FBI men returned to
the ranch
>
for another look. There was a fierce gunbattle and both agents and a young
Indian man were killed.
>
>
"I feel very lucky I wasn't with them," Ecoffey said. "I guess the grandfathers
had something different in store for me."
>
>
When he began to pursue the Aquash case, Ecoffey had an edge over the FBI:
People would talk to him. The government's probe -- botched at the
>
start -- stalled, Ecoffey says, because people on the reservation wouldn't
cooperate with agents of a government many feel played a role in Aquash's
>
slaying.
>
>
"I befriended an elder in the community, a strong leader and a member of
AIM, somebody who was looked upon highly," Ecoffey said. "I helped her
>
with some things. One day, I posed a question, whether she had heard what
happened to Anna Mae. She was friends with an individual from Denver
>
who might know something. She said she'd visit with that person. And, lo
and behold, that person visited me."
>
>
The trail led to Denver and eventually to three suspects. Ecoffey won't
comment on the case further.
>
>
One man is said to be living in Canada's Yukon territory. The other man
is 46 years old and lives on the streets of Denver. His Colorado Bureau
of
>
Investigation rap sheet runs 10 pages, single spaced, and includes arrests
for robbery, theft, assault and possession of drugs and weapons dating
to >
1974. Last month, he was jailed for assaulting a man at a bus stop. Three
days later, he was cited on East Colfax Avenue for drinking gin.
>
>
"I was only trying to stay warm," he told the officer.
>
>
Robert Pictou-Branscombe tracked this man down in Denver two years ago.
>
>
"I could have tore him up right there, but that wouldn't have been right,"
said Branscombe, 52, a cousin of Anna Mae's and a former Marine who >
began looking into the case nine years ago when he thought the authorities
had abandoned it. "When I told him who I was, he fell to the sidewalk and
>
was on all fours throwing up."
>
>
The two sat on a curb. Branscombe lit him a cigarette, and they talked.
>
>
"He just nodded his head in agreement to everything I said" -- confirming
the story of what happened, Branscombe said. "I tried to talk him into
getting
>
into a halfway house. He hits the sauce pretty good. To get credible statements
out of these people, we're going to need people who are straight.
>
>
"He has a reputation," Branscombe said. "He is known as a hit man with
the street folks. He's a dangerous little character."
>
>
Branscombe has traveled thousands of miles and claims to have interviewed
more than 400 people trying to piece together the puzzle of his cousin's
>
final 48 hours.
>
>
Aquash, he says, was driven from Denver to Rapid City where she was interrogated
and beaten. There was a trial of sorts, a lot of angry people,
>
some of whom wanted to take care of the job right then and there.
>
>
Instead, Aquash was driven to another home, then to a lonely stretch of
reservation highway near the town of Wanblee. It was mid-December 1975.
>
Aquash's hands were untied and she was led to a snow-covered ditch by the
same three people who kidnapped her two days before, Brancombe >
says.
>
>
She asked if she could have time to pray.
>
>
The answer came from behind, the crack of a gun.
>
>
"There are no secrets on a reservation," Branscombe said. "The people who
know the truth at Pine Ridge need to come forward, stand united. They
>
need to think of Crazy Horse, think of Sitting Bull, think of what the
Lakota nation stands for. They need to come forward with the truth. The
whole
>
truth."
>
>
Perhaps one place where the truth can be found is in the western Nebraska
town where the third suspect -- the woman -- lives in a battered mobile
>
home.
>
>
When her door opened, a young man stepped out. He was missing his two front
teeth. His fists were clenched at his side.
>
>
"Go talk to the FBI or somebody who knows what's going on," he said.
>
>
The woman stepped behind him. She is said to be in her 70s now. She is
small, tired-looking, her voice as coarse as the frost-covered prairie
grass.
>
>
"I don't want to talk about it," she said. "I've talked to too many people
already. I don't know anything about it."
>
>
And the door slammed shut.
>
>
Gunshot at tribal office
>
>
In late January, a man working security at the tribal office occupation
was shot in the leg a half-block away. Word spread quickly that the protesters
>
were now under siege by council supporters looking to retake the building.
>
>
Rumor -- the reservation is hip-deep in them -- was hat a second man also
had been shot. Some believed it was Ecoffey. The rumor was wrong.
>
>
Ecoffey, who went from being the reservation's marshal to its BIA superintendent,
has spent the past several weeks trying to mediate the
>
dispute that led to the building takeover.
>
>
The murder of Aquash, however, is never far from his mind.
>
>
"We know who's responsible, we know who did it," he said. "But knowing
it and proving it in a court of law are two different things."
>
>
Ecoffey is among those who wonders whether AIM leaders -- and not just
renegades within the organization -- were involved. Aquash had been on
>
the lam with Peltier and knew things about the killing of the FBI agents,
he says.
>
>
But there are other theories. Many Indians firmly believe that the FBI
falsely put out the word that Aquash was an informant as payback for the
>
killing of the agents.
>
>
Was the FBI involved? Dennis Holmes, the assistant U.S. attorney in South
Dakota who has overseen the case in recent years, has a one-word >
answer:
>
>
"No."
>
>
A federal grand jury in South Dakota heard testimony in the case as recently
as November, when Russell Means repeated his accusation against
>
the Bellecourts. "If I had known about it in the '70s, we would have taken
care of it internally," Means told a radio interviewer. "In other words,
we'd
>
have probably offed 'em."
>
>
Vernon Bellecourt says Means, who has worked as an actor in such films
as The Last of the Mohicans and Natural Born Killers, is simply stirring
>
the pot to promote a movie he wants to make, a story about the Pine Ridge
reservation becoming a free and independent nation.
>
>
"I get charged with always seeking the limelight and that the only reason
I'm bringing up the Anna Mae case is because I'm trying to get before the
>
cameras," Means said. "Hey -- my profession is getting before the cameras.
I don't need the news media anymore."
>
>
Amidst all the verbal crossfire, both men say that only an investigation
by Congress will get to the truth.
>
>
"What I've said for the past 20 years is that I have no idea who killed
her, but the U.S. government was squarely behind it," Bellecourt said.
"To ask
>
the FBI to investigate this is outrageous."
>
>
And if rogue members of AIM were also involved? "The American Indian Movement,"
Bellecourt said, "is not any more responsible than, say, the
>
American Legion would be responsible for the wrongdoing of some of its
members. Or the Shriners."
>
>
The case has left many Indians who knew Aquash caught in the middle, squeezed
by competing loyalties to family, friends and revered political
>
leaders who empowered them a generation ago.
>
>
"I don't think anything will ever come of it," said TroyLynn Yellow Wood,
who believes Aquash was protecting her from harm when she left Denver
>
with her abductors. "If there was just one person involved, then, maybe.
But there's so many people ... "
>
>
"I think she was really courageous and lived life on her own terms. I wish
that her daughters could have been able to know her better. Her gentleness
>
and her vibrancy and her beauty and her hope for the future. The pride
she had in being a Micmac. The softness of her voice. The strength of her
>
heart.
>
>
"She saw me as one of her last friends, somebody she could depend on,"
Yellow Wood said. "I still admire her. I still care about her. I still
pray for
>
her."
>
>
Across the Pine Ridge reservation, people disagree whether AIM leaders
ordered Aquash's death. Nearly everyone, however, believes that the case
>
remains unsolved after 24 years because the FBI set her up.
>
>
"Of course the FBI was involved," said medicine man Patrick Janis, who
once worked as a reservation cop. "To believe that they weren't -- nobody's
>
that unsophisticated today. The question you need to ask is 'What's going
on in this country?' Because if they can do it to us, they can do it to
you."
>
>
It's also not surprising, he says, that AIM leaders are now pointing fingers
at each other.
>
>
"There was this other dream ..."
>
>
In it, Janis sat in a courtroom. There was a trial going on. In front of
the judge sat the old AIM leaders -- the Bellecourts, Means, Dennis Banks.
>
>
One of them -- Janis won't say who -- walked up and whispered something
in his ear. At that moment there was a huge explosion, and to Janis it
was >
a sign that someday the truth about what happened to Anna Mae will burst
forth and scatter like shrapnel.
>
>
"Now they're accusing each other of doing it." Janis raised an eyebrow
and slowly nodded his head. "I believe the people in my dream were showing
>
me the future. The truth, I believe, will come out."
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