by David Treuer
One of the murders on the reservation that the FBI did investigate, if only cursorily, was the assassination of Jeannette Bissonette. In March 1975, Bissonette and a friend were parked in an empty field when someone opened fire on her car. She was struck in the back and bled to death before her friend was able to get her to the hospital. The FBI found shell casings nearby that matched a rare gun that was easy to trace to its point of sale and from there to a ranch owned by a man named Ted Lame. The ranch was not a place where GOONs were welcome, and when the FBI showed up there, they were met by a number of Indian men, AIMsters, who were in the process of digging a slit trench, as though in preparation for a standoff. The FBI left, and shortly thereafter the AIMsters left, too: they were going to attend the annual AIM conference held that year in Farmington, New Mexico. Among them was Leonard Peltier, who had been on the FBI’s radar for years, and not just because he had been part of the AIM takeover of the BIA in 1972 and, subsequently, the standoff at Wounded Knee.
Peltier, métis from the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, dropped out of high school at age fourteen and moved around out west—Portland, Oakland, Seattle—before his drifting took him into AIM’s orbit. While on the West Coast, he’d met Dennis Banks, who took him on as a bodyguard and then brought him along to Washington, D.C., for protection during the takeover of the BIA. On the night of November 22, 1972—just a week or so after AIM activists had trashed the BIA headquarters in D.C.—Peltier got into a fistfight with two off-duty police officers at a bar in Milwaukee. The police said that Peltier had a gun and he drew it on them. He was arrested and charged with attempted murder.
That’s where paths begin to fork in the way Peltier’s story is told. Those who see him as a hero say that the officers bragged about taking him down, saying that they helped the FBI “get a big one” who had been targeted for his politics, even though in 1972 Peltier hadn’t done anything much more political than accompanying Banks to Washington. Those few who don’t see Peltier as a cultural hero tend to shrug as if to say that he grew up violent, engaged in violence, and was, in fact, violent, and whatever reasons the cops had for arresting him were probably very real. The only thing clear from this first full-throated encounter with the law was that Peltier was dangerous. He sat in jail for a number of months before making bail. And when he did, he skipped the state. So in addition to being wanted for attempted murder, he was now a federal fugitive. On October 21, 1973, Peltier was spotted in Pine Ridge by two BIA agents who were monitoring the funeral of Pedro Bissonette, Jeannette’s brother-in-law, from their car. Someone in another car opened fire on the agents. Unhurt, they managed to get the license plate number and determined that the car was registered to Peltier. After that, he was arrested on a weapons charge in Washington state, and he jumped bail on that, too. So by the age of thirty, Peltier was wanted in connection with three crimes—attempted murder, the attempted murder of the two BIA officers at Pine Ridge, and a weapons charge in Washington state, in addition to two federal fugitive charges for skipping out on bail.
In 1975, Peltier and his cousin Bob Robideau, who had served time for burglary and was wanted for violating parole in Oregon, along with Darrell “Dino” Butler, a prison buddy of Robideau’s, set up camp at the Lame Ranch. It was unclear what they intended to do. Peltier later claimed that he and his fellow warriors were called to Pine Ridge by traditionalist Pine Ridge residents to help combat the predations of Dick Wilson’s GOONs, a scourge that certainly needed to be checked. But it’s hard not to wonder if men like Peltier weren’t simply drawn by their own long association with violence.
On June 25, 1975, FBI agents Jack Coler and Ron Williams were driving nearby, looking for a red and white International Scout belonging to a man named Jimmy Eagle, who was wanted in connection with the torture and robbery of two white ranchers near Pine Ridge. The agents had heard there was a vehicle matching that description seen near the Jumping Bull compound. As they neared the ranch, they saw three teenagers walking down the road. The kids wouldn’t give the agents their names but they did say they were camped out with Indian adults at the ranch. One of the boys was carrying a rifle clip. The agents were very interested in what was going on at the Jumping Bull Ranch, not only because of Jimmy Eagle but also because of the ongoing investigation into Jeannette Bissonette’s murder. As it turned out, Jimmy Eagle and his red and white International Scout weren’t at the ranch, but Leonard Peltier and his red and white Chevy van were.
If one thing had been established, it was that Peltier was not interested in going to jail and he would do almost anything to avoid it. On June 26, Agents Coler and Williams were again patrolling Highway 18 separately near the Jumping Bull Ranch when they spotted a vehicle matching the description of Jimmy Eagle’s Scout. It seems to have been Peltier’s van (though a Scout, built like a Jeep, is hard to confuse with a van). At 11:50, agents listening to Coler and Williams’s radio communications heard them say that the van was full of Indian men with rifles. Williams radioed that the men were getting out of the car. Then: “It looks like they’re going to shoot at us.” After that, intense gunfire could be heard over the radio. After-action forensic reports and testimony heard at Peltier’s trial suggest that the agents had followed the van onto the Jumping Bull property. They didn’t make it farther than the middle of a ten-acre pasture before the Indians ahead of them took position on higher ground and fired more than 125 rounds into the agents’ cars. The agents fired a total of four times with their .38 service revolvers and once with the .308 rifle. Williams was hit first, the bullet going through his left arm and entering his left side. Coler was trying to squirm around the backside of one car to get a .308 rifle from the trunk when a bullet hit the lid of the trunk and nearly severed his arm. Williams crawled back to Coler and tied a tourniquet on his arm to stanch the bleeding. The two men huddled behind the car until someone (or perhaps more than one person—this is unknown) walked down from the ridge above the pasture and executed them. Williams grabbed the barrel of the AR-15 pointed at him, and a bullet blew off three of his fingers before it entered his face from a distance of three feet. Coler was shot next, in the head and throat. Backup was too far away to help. The Indians scattered to the hills.
When the authorities combed the ranch, they found bullet casings matching the gun that had killed Jeannette Bissonette. Peltier, Robideau, and Dino Butler separated. Butler and Robideau were apprehended and stood trial in federal court in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. They pled self-defense and were acquitted. Their defense team was very good and managed to keep from the jury photos or mention of the execution shots fired after the agents were incapacitated and helpless. Peltier fled to Canada, where he was apprehended by Canadian Mounties. After a long extradition process (during which the federal government supplied the Canadians with some very sketchy evidence) Peltier was returned to the United States. Having been in hiding and fighting extradition when the other men were charged, he stood trial separately, and his trial went differently. The prosecution proved that Peltier had motive to kill the agents, considering his previous warrants and charges. And they proved Peltier was the only one who carried and used an AR-15 assault rifle during the firefight; a casing from that gun had been found in the trunk of the agents’ car, and ballistics also showed that the men had been executed with that kind of rifle. Peltier received two consecutive life sentences. He is still serving time.
Anna Mae Aquash
In 1976—long after the siege of Wounded Knee was over; not long after the final fatal shootout at the Jumping Bull compound in 1975—a rancher in South Dakota was checking on his fence line when he saw a body in the ditch. It was the battered and partly decomposed corpse of a young woman in a ski jacket and jeans. The coroner later determined she had been raped repeatedly and shot in the back of the head at close range. The body was that of Anna Mae Aquash, a young Mi’kmaq loner from Canada. Inspired by AIM, she had left her two daughters with her sister in Boston and headed west to join the
militants. She wrote her sister saying, “These white people think this country belongs to them. . . . The whole country changed with only a handful of raggedy-ass pilgrims that came over here in the 1500s. And it can take a handful of raggedy-ass Indians to do the same, and I intend to be one of those raggedy-ass Indians.” On her first night at Wounded Knee, Dennis Banks ordered her and some other women to perform kitchen duty. She responded that she wasn’t there to do dishes: “I came here to fight.” Shortly thereafter she began an affair with Banks that lasted for quite some time. Despite Aquash’s fervor for the cause, sometime during and after the siege AIMsters began whispering that she was an FBI informant. The organization was paranoid about turncoats and informants. Not without cause: COINTELPRO (the counterintelligence program run by the FBI meant to disrupt and discredit domestic political organizations) had indeed infiltrated AIM and the Black Panthers and other political dissident and protest groups. However, there was no evidence (then or later) that Aquash was anything other than what she appeared to be: a dreamy, fierce, committed Indian woman. There were also sexual politics at play: Aquash was resented by a women’s faction within AIM known as the Pie Patrol: a group of Dakota women described by Mary Crow Dog as “loud-mouth city women, very media conscious, hugging the limelight.” They felt that Aquash’s romance with Banks could and would destabilize the movement. After the siege was over Dennis Banks went into hiding. Aquash drifted along with AIM, still wearing the “bad jacket” (the phrase used to describe someone who had been semipublicly accused of being an informant). In early June 1975, during an AIM conference in Farmington, New Mexico, Aquash was questioned by Peltier, who at the time still functioned as security for AIM. Allegedly, she was taken to a nearby mesa and was questioned by Peltier at gunpoint as to whether she was an informant for the FBI. Within weeks Peltier was wanted for the murders of the FBI agents at the Jumping Bull compound.
After the shootout with the FBI in late June 1975, AIM leadership was on the run. Banks was still in hiding—shifting from house to house in the West. Both Aquash and Darlene Nichols (with whom Banks eventually had four children) joined him at “various times,” sometimes at the same time. Eventually Dennis Banks showed up at Marlon Brando’s house in Los Angeles with Peltier, a fugitive wanted for the murders of the FBI agents at the Jumping Bull compound. Brando looked at Peltier and asked, “Who the hell is this?” According to Banks, “When I told Marlon, he said, ‘Goddamn, you’ve got some nerve. But it’s okay.’” They helped Brando unload his motor home (he was just back from a trip) and then he lent them the RV and gave them $10,000 in cash and they continued on their way. In November, as Banks, Peltier, Aquash, and Nichols were driving through Oregon, they were stopped by police and a gunfight ensued. Peltier bailed out of the RV and ran for the trees. He was shot in the back but got away. Banks stayed in the RV and tried to drive away, later jumping from the vehicle to elude capture. I don’t know what it says that the two men fled, leaving the women behind (one of whom was the mother to not a few of Banks’s children) to face charges. Nichols and Aquash were taken to jail, where they shared a cell before being split up (Nichols to Kansas and Aquash to South Dakota). Before that happened, however, the women seem to have developed some level of rapport. According to Nichols, Aquash was scared for her life: back in the RV before their capture, she said, Peltier had confessed to the women that he had killed the FBI agents at the Jumping Bull compound. He told them that one of the agents was “begging for his life, but I shot him anyway.” Aquash—already suspected of being an FBI informant—was worried that she was going to be killed. Nichols didn’t suffer from the same suspicion, and she had children with Banks.
After her release on bail in South Dakota, Aquash (still in love with Banks) fled the jurisdiction and failed to show up in court. Instead she went to Denver to meet Banks at a safe house occupied by Troy Lynn Yellow Wood. She waited for over a week for Banks to show up, but he never did. There were, however, many other AIMsters, principally women, drifting in and out. She wrote letters home and looked after children in the house until, after about a week, she got into a red Pinto with three other AIM members and was never seen alive again. It wasn’t until years later that, with Nichols’s help, Arlo Looking Cloud (a low-level AIM member) confessed to murdering Aquash with John Graham. Both men were convicted and are in prison. Prosecutors are not content with the convictions: they are certain that the two men (neither of whom had much power and neither of whom even knew Aquash) were acting on orders, but they have not been able to walk testimony up to the top. The person who ordered her murder has never been determined.
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TO ME, the shootout at the Jumping Bull compound and Anna Mae Aquash’s murder can’t be justified as an expression of AIM’s (often violent) direct action, their street theater, their agitprop. It was just violence, the result of violent men who didn’t want to go to jail. Many Indians muttered under their breath that “AIM” really stood for “Assholes in Moccasins.” Nevertheless, a kind of cult worship, largely by white people, grew up around the AIM leadership. Also, partly as a result of Peter Matthiessen’s In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Peltier was transformed into a sympathetic warrior whose only crime was defending himself against a tyrannical government. Russell Means, who was charged with domestic abuse by his Navajo wife but refused to appear in Navajo Nation court on the grounds that it didn’t have jurisdiction over him (and who also allegedly beat his father-in-law), went on to write a book, Where White Men Fear to Tread, and to play Pocahontas’s father in the Disney movie and Chingachgook in The Last of the Mohicans. Dennis Banks continued to work as an activist and published a memoir, Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement. Shortly before his death from pneumonia at age eighty, Banks was asked by a reporter about whether he ever advocated for killing someone he “knew for certain” was a traitor to AIM. He said, “I don’t know if I would participate in some sort of getting-rid-of-the-person. But I would say, ‘Take care of this.’ Or, ‘Take the guy out, and I don’t want to see him again.’” The reporter followed up and asked specifically about Ray Robinson’s murder. Banks said nothing. Then the reporter asked about Aquash, someone Banks claimed to have loved and who, in turn, loved him. His response: “If there’s a burning house, no one gives an order to put out the fire. Someone just goes and does it. It was people who fell into an idea.”
The Jumping Bull incident was largely the end of AIM’s efficacy as a prod to the nation’s conscience. Strong Indians empowered by their Indianness and their unwillingness to play by the rules imposed on them was one thing; criminals who killed people because they didn’t want to face the consequences for their own violent crimes was quite another. And increasingly, traditionalist Indians stood up to AIM’s authority as well. In 1979, during disputes over leadership at Red Lake Reservation that devolved into gunfire, riots, and arson, villagers from Ponemah, led by Korean War veteran Eugene Stillday, built a roadblock at the Battle River Bridge and stood their ground against carloads of AIMsters drawn to the violence. “You won’t get past these guys,” said Stillday to one who attempted to get through by showing a pistol tucked into his waistband, prompting the Red Lake veterans to take aim with their guns. The activist got back in his car and left.
Yet much of the work that AIM rank and file had accomplished—in schools and job-training programs and housing—carried on. And somehow—despite AIM’s ineffectiveness, violence, and chauvinism; despite the violence that always seemed to erupt around it—by the time the 1980s drew to a close, Indian life had become Indian again, due in no small part to the activism begun in the 1960s.
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IT IS MARCH, and winter is bone-deep in the northwoods. It seems like forever ago that there was anything green and giving in this world. As brutal and bitter as the winters are in the northern reaches of the Ojibwe homelands, there is a kind of peace that falls over the land in February and March
. Or if not a peace exactly, a kind of watchful waiting: April and May will erupt with their usual vernal violence soon enough. But for now the snow isn’t deep at all, and the swamps and lowlands are frozen solid, so you can walk wherever you need to go. Bobby and I are driving along an abandoned railroad grade on the south edge of Leech Lake Reservation, looking for cranberry bark. “It’s something new for me, David,” he says. “Guys have been doing it awhile and I was against it at first. I thought it destroyed the cranberry trees, but it doesn’t. They spread through their roots; they grow in clumps. If you cut it they send up new shoots. Leeching is a long way off and I go a little crazy sitting around and so I thought I’d try getting bark.” Of all the things Bobby does, cutting bark feels the most relaxing. You drive around until you find a stand of highbush cranberry bushes. “Cut ’em cock thick, David.” We cut with long-handled pruning shears, and we keep cutting until we have a few armfuls. These we load onto a sled and haul back to the truck. Once the truck is full to the top we head back to the house, where we have coffee to warm up. Then we go to his shop, turn on the radio, and peel the bark off the saplings with potato peelers. “See how I dull my peelers? I use a rasp and dull them up a little. If they are too sharp, they take too much wood and my quality goes down. If they are dull they take just the bark. I can tolerate about two percent wood. The rest has to be bark.” I ask whether the bark actually works to alleviate menstrual cramps. “How the hell should I know? I’ve never had menstrual cramps, David!”
Typically, Bobby has gone all-in on this new revenue stream. “There’s a guy around here who buys bark from the pickers. And he sells it to another outfit out of state. He doesn’t pay much; he’s keeping the price down. But what if we could do this and the pickers got a living wage?” So in addition to cutting his own bark, Bobby now buys from other pickers. “I did some research and found out who buys this stuff and I started dealing with him. I asked him how much he’d need to buy from me and he told me. And I asked him what kind of quality—how much bark and how much wood—and he told me. And I gave him exactly what he needed.” Bobby dedicated the back bedroom in his house to bark processing. Racks with large wire trays run from floor to ceiling. He dumps the bark on the trays, turns on a dehumidifier and a fan, and dries the bark until it is crispy. Then he crumbles it up by hand, packs it in bags, boxes them, and ships them to North Carolina. “My guy in North Carolina will buy all sorts of stuff. Irisroot. The buds from balm of Gilead. I don’t know who he sells his stuff to. Probably drug companies, places like that. We got a lot of stuff we can sell. A lot of stuff people want. And we haven’t even experimented with the half of it.”
