The Injustice and the Lies

 Excerpts from Where White Men Fear to Tread

"We decided that Yellow Thunder Camp would become a spiritual youth camp, a live-in school where orphans and so-called troublemakers could learn to live as free people. Instead of teachers and classrooms - a sixth century Roman Catholic invention that rips people from their families and community to isolate them by age group and turn them into robots- we agreed that the whole community would participate in teaching. Our classroom would be the breast of our sacred Grandmother."

"Just as the FBI had found Louis Moves Camp to fill huge gaps in its case against Dennis and me, Myrtle suddenly appeared to supply what was missing to show that Dicky was the killer...Later when the feds needed someone to say Leonard Peltier had bragged about killing two FBI agents near the Jumping Bull's home, Myrtle was trotted out again. As implausible a witness as she made, in front of a white jury, the result was the same: Both men were convicted and sentenced to life in prison."

"In 1979 revolution came to Iran. Because of our Geneva conference and our friendly ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization, AIM had some credibility in that part of the world. Like the PLO, we are vitally interested in regaining our country and our sovereignty. John Thomas, known as John T., a witty, loveable guy who gets along with everbody, served as our roving ambassador, visiting Lebanon, Iran, and Egypt. When the Revolutionary Guards took as hostages everyone in the US embassy in Tehran, we sent John T. there to see what he could do. We didn't tdrust the phones, I'm sure the CIA and the Iranians listened to every call, so he flew back to New York to confer with Bill and me. John T. had incredible news. "They'll allow the hostages to send letters and packages home through us," he said. "But we must deliver each one ourselves, we can't just drop them in a mailbox." ... "From the start, the hostages were daily front-page news in every US newspaper. Each network aired four or five hostage stories a week...Legions of men and women from dozens of nations had offered to bring letters from the hostages, but the Iranians allowed only us Indians to carry them. Expecting a lot of media attention, we called a press conference in an airport VIP room...The other local stations and newspapers jumped on the story. The networks ignored us. We contacted them all, as well as Time and Newsweek, calling each several times. I'm sure the State Department, which has less clout at the local level, must have pressed the national media to spike the story because it was bad PR to call attention to the government's inability to deal with the crisis." 

"I walked with Sisseton Sioux named Sydney Kitto, into the yard for morning exercise. Something was strange. There were no guards in sight...Suddenly a kid came running up with a big pipe wrench and whacked the back of Kitto's head...When I turned back again, there was a guy I had never seen before. He stabbed me just below my left nipple with shank... I chased him back around the kitchen and into the cellblock. A wall of guards standing shoulder to shoulder parted to admit him, then closed ranks. when not one guard tried to disarm him, I shouted, "What are you doing? Why are you protecting that punk?"...The man who had attacked me held his shank until Vincent Bad Heart Bull broke through the line of guards to kick him in the face and then in the groin. Guards surged forward. IN the heartbeat before the brawl blossomed into a full-scale riot, Dicky jumped in front, yelling, "Wait! Stop! It's a setup!"

"A Sioux Falls grand jury investigated the incident. I was subpoenaed to testify, and said all I knew was that I had turned around and been stabbed. The assailant, a man named Schillinger also testified, along with several others. An all-white grand jury decided that I was at fault - in effect, that my chest had attacked his knife. Bad Heart Bull was sent to solitary for having thumped Schillinger. IN contrast, although he admitted to having a deadly weapon, my attacker wasn't even punished. He was transferred from maximum-security Sioux Falls to Oxford, a medium-security federal pen in Wisconsin. The man who had attacked Kitto, Schillinger's constant companion, became a trusty and was moved to a cottage outside the walls."

"After the rally, Milo Goings, the AIMster who had been wounded in the knee at Wounded Knee, assigned himself as my bodyguard. In the ensuing week, I learned quite a bit about the pig who had stabbed me. He belonged to the Aryan Brotherhood, a white-supremacist prison group, and a few years earlier had allegedly knifed other inmates in other federal prisons. The most curious thing about Schillinger was that he was a federal prisoner serving time in a state prison. He wasn't the only such in Grantie City. THe Untied States reimburses the states of those convicted of federal offenses who request transfers to be close to their families (they didn't do that for Leonard Peltier). Schillinger, however, had never been in South Dakota before and had no kin there. There was no legitimate reason for his transfer to Sioux Falls just before I began to serve my time . Although he was a recent arrival who had killed or injured three other dark-skinned prisoners, authorities immediately made him a trusty. IT seems that with Schillinger's history, there could have been only one reason for him to be in the South Dakota State Penitentiary- to kill me. If he had succeeded, I'm sure he would have been freed or otherwise rewarded." 

 

"After reading those alleged philosophers who knew nothing about human liberation, I made up my mind that I was no longer a militant but a born-again 'primitive.' I would rely on the wisdom of my ancestors." - Russell Means

 

"Chief among Brightman's concerns was an insidious new form of genocide- the forced sterilization of Indian women, which had become commonplace. IN 1969, despite and infant mortality rate worse than in any country in the Western Hemisphere- about one death for every three live births- Indians had become the fastest-growing ethnic minority in America. That apparently was unacceptable to the U.S. government. IF we didn't'follow the buffalo into near extinction, it would be harder to seize the rest or our land. Between 1972 and 1976, the Indian Health Service sterilized 42 percent of all Indian women of childbearing age. The sterilization program affected practically every fertile Indian woman who walked or was carried into an IHS hospital. Pregnant women who came to deliver their babies were tricked or forced into signing release forms. When they came out of anesthesia, they had had tubal ligations. Even women who went in for appendectomies or sore threats were told that if they did not submit to sterilization, their children would be taken away from their families would lose welfare benefits." -Where White Men Fear to Tread

 

"Columbus did not set out of find India but a country known to the Eurpoean as Hindustan. Look at the maps he had in 1492 and it's obvious! He wrote of the people he encountered in the New World as 'una gente en dio,' literally, 'a people in with God'... who were 'so peace-loving and generous as if to a fault. Therefore, they would make excellent slaves.' We were enslaved as 'Indians,' we'll gain our freedom as Indians, and then we can call ourselves any damn thing we please!" When he had finished, everyone agreed that all indigenous peoples of our hemisphere would be known as Indians until we could regain our freedom.

 

"Accepting the lesser of two evils, I waived my right to a jury and let Judge Braithwaite, son of a founder of the Sioux Falls Ku Klux Klan chapter, decide my guilt or innocence."

 

"I got the most votes- 534- and Wilson was second with 457. He controlled the election machinery and we knew he would do anything to steal the February 7 runoff, so we asked the BIA and the Department of Justice to send poll watchers. That is entriely within the government's responsibilities as "trustees" of the Indian people. Under U.S. law, we are all wards of the nation. But the same government that had sent observers to Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia and to Vietnam, Nicaragua, the Philippines, and other countries around the world-refused to send them to south Dakota on the ground that it had no right to interfere in the internal workings of a sovereign entity. Of course, the Untied States invokes the facade of Indian self-determination only when it serves its own purposes." 

 

"In1973, 1974, and 1975, more than twenty-five hundred agents were assigned for some significant period to the Rapid City office. In that time where were never fewer than two hundred agents and other FBI personnel there. In one six-month period, there were more than 350- far more than in San Francisco, Seattle, Cleveland, and Atlanta. Yet the FBI never solved any murder of an AIM member or supporter, or even an alleged supporter." It seems to me that their pre-paid government number scam worked, anyone who was contacted with those numbers was now an alleged supporter. "69 AIM people were killed and more than 350 others were shot, stabbed, stomped, burned by arson fires, beaten with tire irons or baseball bats, or seriously injured when their cars were run off the road. Those acts are covered by the Indian Major Crimes Act, which gives the FBI exclusive jurisdiction over felonies on Indian reservations. The feds refused to investigate any of those incidents, claiming a lack of manpower."

 

"I had even more urgent matters on my hands. I had to do something to end Dick Wilson's reign of terror on Pine Ridge. By that time, he had illegally transferred and eight of our reservation-Sheep Mountain Gunnery Range- to the U.S. Department of the Interior and organized his goons into crews of ten or twelve men to keep each community under control." - Where White Man Fears to Tread

 

the "Twenty Points" from the Trail of Broken Treaties, sent and insulting note. It said, in part, "The days of treaty making with the American Indians ended in 1871;... only Congress can rescind for change in any way statutes enacted since 1871..." "Once again, we Indians had accepted the white man's promises -just as our ancestors had. Once again, the government of the United States of America lied." And then what does the federal government do during trial? Do they act as Christians and humble themselves confessing their faults and sins as Jesus said? No! As Russell Means says, "I spent a lot of time that summer working on my legal defense with Mark Lane, Bill Kunstler, Ken Tilsen, Larry Leventhal, and the other lawyers at the WKLD/OC headquarters in Rapid City. Once day Mark and other WKLD/OC people noticed that several men in business suits had moved into an apartment house next door. Marke went there with everybody else, THREW OPEN THE DOOR, AND EXPOSED THEM. The "suits" were FBI agents who had bugged the WKLD/OC offices. They were breaking the very laws they had sworn to uphold (but weren't fired and still got their retirements). Our lawyers went ot Judge Bogue and got a restraining order to prohibit the FBI from installing bugs or tapping our phones." 

 

Gordon "Wilson wanted to buy the loyalty of more people than his own family could provide. The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, a Nixon-era program to urn America's police departments into paramilitary organizations with tanks and other heavy weapons gave Wilson millions of dollars, all channeled through a highways-safety program. Wilson used the money to hire goon squads. With hundreds of armed men, he began to act like Haiti's Duvalier or Nicaragua's Somoza. Wilson became a tin-pot dictator who sought to exterminate all political dissent on the reservation, especially in Pine Ridge Village. Anyone whom Wilson or his henchmen thought opposed them was beaten up, often along with their families. Car windows were smashed or tires slashed. Threats and intimidation were used to extort money. People were thrown in jail on the most ridiculous charges." -Where White Men Fear to Tread