Leonard said, “Well, it’s breakfast time. Let’s give them coffee and something to eat.” He then lectured them for half an hour on the reasons for Wounded Knee and Indian civil rights in general. Then he had them politely escorted out of the perimeter.
For this he was charged with “interfering with federal officers during performance of their duties” (spying on us) and with “armed robbery” (the taking away of the agents’ guns and handcuffs). The prosecutor said that the occupation of Wounded Knee was illegal, a conspiracy and a crime. That Crow Dog was a leader and therefore responsible for everything that happened during the occupation, even if he himself did not do it, or even witness it. On this ground Leonard was sentenced to thirteen years.
The government was not altogether happy because Leonard had gotten a suspended sentence, putting him on probation. He was still free. So they had to do something about that. In March 1975, Leonard and I came home late and found a bunch of white strangers in our house. One, a man called Pfersick, said he had come to see the Indian guru. He was high on drugs, actually using them in front of us. Leonard told him that drugs were not allowed in Crow Dog’s home. Pfersick said: “Who the fuck are you to tell me what I can or cannot take or smoke?” A little later he made very crude sexual advances toward me, using foul language, patting me on the bottom. Leonard stepped between us, pushing him away. At that he went ape and attacked Leonard with a chain-saw blade he took from the wall. Leonard dodged it and got in a few good licks on his own. Some skins came to the rescue. They subdued the madman. Pfersick and his hangers-on were told never to come back and were thrown off our land. They brought a charge against Leonard for assault and battery. After a trial of only a few hours an all-white South Dakota jury found Leonard guilty and he got another five years. We used to say at that time that even Jesus Christ would have been found guilty in the State of South Dakota for every imaginable crime if he were an AIM Indian.
On September 2, 1975, still another incident happened. Two men named Beck and McClosky crashed their car through a wooden barrier, driving right into our yard. It was 1:30 A.M. and both were drunk. Of the two Beck was the heavy. He was a violent, murderous half- or quarter-blood. He had a long criminal record. Much later, when it no longer had an effect upon our lives, Beck murdered an inoffensive, middle-aged man called No Moccasin before witnesses and was sent to jail for it. The other man, McClosky, was comparatively harmless, simply Beck’s drinking partner. They came into Crow Dog’s place, making a big racket, boasting of just having savagely beaten a sixteen-year-old nephew of Leonard. Leonard was sleeping soundly and it took some time to rouse him. When he finally had put on his pants and stepped into the yard, he found some of the relatives who are always staying with us fighting off the intruders. McClosky got his jaw cracked in the process. Again someone, and you can guess who, induced Beck and McClosky to bring charges of assault and battery against Crow Dog and his relatives. We knew nothing about it.
Now it is a sad fact that on any given weekend innumerable drunken brawls take place all over the reservation. Men in a drunken stupor senselessly maim each other. Arms are broken, eyes gouged out, but this sort of thing is never investigated. On the adjacent Pine Ridge Reservation they had a civil war situation. Over a hundred people had been murdered and not a tenth of these cases was ever looked into, and then only if the police thought they had a chance of pinning the killing on some AIM member. That this endless violence was totally ignored by the government made what happened next unreal and unexplainable—at least at that time. At the break of dawn on September 5, 1975, four days after Beck and McClosky provoked the fight in our yard, I was awakened when somebody kicked our door in and shouted: “This is the United States marshal, this is the FBI, come out or we’ll shoot!”
Next thing I felt the muzzle of an M-16 pressed against my head. They came one hundred and eighty-five men strong, marshals, agents, SWAT teams, making an Omaha Beach–type assault on the home of a single medicine man. It was like a newsreel from Vietnam, like seeing a bad movie in a dream. Out through the broken-down door I could see an observation plane circling over us. Choppers were landing in the yard. Across the Little White River, flowing through our property, guys in camouflage outfits came paddling rubber rafts. Some men with flak vests were aiming submachine guns at us. It was as if we were a Vietcong village overrun by a hundred and eighty-five Rambos. It would have been funny had it not destroyed our lives. Through the window I could see the SWAT team coming down the hill in extended battle line. They were actually laying down some sort of smokescreen. I heard them singing: “We’ve come to take you away.”
Two Rambo types broke the window and climbed in. They pointed at little Pedro who was still half asleep and asked, “Is this the kid who was born at Wounded Knee?” They threw him across the room so that he hit his head against the wall. He was crying. I wanted to rush to him but one of the feds said, “One more step and I blow you away, right into the Happy Hunting Grounds!” He, too, put his gun against my temple. So now I had two M-16s on each side of my head. If these two had pulled their triggers they would not only have killed me, but also each other. A third FBI man threw a gun at my feet, saying, “Go on. Pick it up. I’m told you’re such great warriors. Go on. Do it. Let’s have a nice shootout!”
I saw that one of their headmen had walked in. I told him, “Yeah, you better watch your boys before they kill somebody.” His face got red and he walked out. In the door he turned around and said, “I’m from Minneapolis,” as if that explained the whole insane scene. He nodded to his men and they put their guns down. But they ransacked the whole place, trampled upon and broke our sacred things, and hauled men, women, and children half-naked out of their beds. They forced them to sit outside on the ground on that raw morning with hardly anything on. Out of pure meanness they shot and killed Big Red, Leonard’s favorite horse, and then blasted away at a little black colt. I asked them to show me their search warrants. They didn’t have any, just a few blank arrest orders against “John Doe” and “Jane Doe.”
They dragged Leonard away in handcuffs together with a few of his friends and relatives, among them my friend Annie Mae Aquash. On the ninety-mile trip to Pierre, the state capital, the agents had their fun and games with Leonard. When he had to leave the car to answer a call of nature, they put a gun at his feet, too, telling him, “You’ll rot in prison for the rest of your life. We’ll make you a sporting proposition. You’ve got a fifty-fifty chance. Take the gun and run!”
Leonard ignored them. The handcuffs they had put on him were of a special kind which tightens and tightens with every slightest movement. They cut off the circulation in his arms and made his wrists bleed. In Pierre they handcuffed him to a chair and kept at him for twenty-four hours, not letting him sleep, asking over and over again: “Where is Peltier? Where is Peltier?” This question made absolutely no sense to Leonard. The whole nightmarish event made no sense. Why the hundreds of agents? The helicopters? The rubber rafts? The only charge against him was McClosky’s broken jaw, broken not by Leonard but by one of his nephews. All that was needed would have been a single tribal policeman telling Leonard, “Cousin, there’s that complaint about a brawl. Why don’t you come to the tribal council and clear the matter up?” That would have been the customary approach had anybody bothered at all. Why this Omaha Beach kind of assault? The question bothered us for years. It was not until 1979 that we found out the reason for this madness. Leonard went to jail for over a year simply because the FBI had goofed and then had to justify its action in some way.
On June 23, 1975, there had been a shootout at the tiny hamlet of Oglala on the Pine Ridge Reservation, over a hundred miles from our place. The FBI had invaded the place because it was rumored to be an AIM stronghold. A firefight erupted. One Indian and two FBI agents were killed. Hundreds of people had been killed on that reservation during these troubled days and nobody had given a damn, but two dead FBI agents were a different matter. Somebody had to be tried and convicted for t
heir death—somebody, anybody. The FBI combed Pine Ridge for likely suspects but did not come up with anything. So-called witnesses were suborned, threatened, and browbeaten. One slightly feebleminded woman, Myrtle Poor Bear, was shown a photograph of someone’s mutilated body and told, “You’ll be like this unless you testify the way we tell you.” The government admitted later that their witnesses had not been “believable” and that the agents had put unlawful pressure on them. In the end they picked upon Leonard Peltier, an Indian from Fort Totten, as a likely perpetrator, not because there was a good case against him, but because he was a radical AIM leader and a thorn in the government’s flesh.
Crow Dog and his people were not involved. We had not even known about the events in Oglala. Crow Dog was at home when it happened, running his ceremonies. The FBI knew that very well. But someone had given the FBI a tip that Peltier was hiding out on Crow Dog’s place, and they believed it—which doesn’t say much for their intelligence as Peltier was half a continent away, in Oregon actually. The FBI had staged the whole Beck-McClosky incident from beginning to end, possibly threatening Beck with long jail terms for his various crimes unless he cooperated. Later they tried to justify their assault on Crow Dog’s place by pressing phony charges. We found all this out much later by reading some of the briefs coming out of the Peltier case.
After the last of the agents with their rubber rafts and ‘copters had disappeared, we were left stunned. Leonard’s old parents, myself, the kids—we were all in a state of shock. For a year afterward the children ran to hide themselves whenever a car backfired or a plane was flying overhead, screaming, “The FBIs are coming.”
The government made Leonard into a criminal for having defended his home and family against some drunken punks. To them my husband was more dangerous than Peltier because moral power is always more dangerous to an oppressor than political force. I felt unspeakably lonely. How could I go on without him? How could I handle the responsibilities which had now fallen on my shoulders? I was still so inexperienced and so very young, still in my early twenties. Leonard had taken care of all things for all the people in the Grass Mountain district, not only the healings and ceremonies but also the little everyday problems which are so important. How could I have filled the void? Leonard’s parents were old and in bad health and now, when they needed their only son to run the home and help them, he had been taken away.
I went through my daily chores in a daze. Any moment I expected Leonard to walk in the door. Sometimes I imagined hearing his voice calling me, and then I remembered where he was. The children asked, “Where is daddy, why is he in jail?” and I had no answer for them.
The trials were a farce. The government had not had much luck trying Indians in Wounded Knee–related cases up to that time. Whenever there had been a proper trial outside South Dakota, under a change of venue, whenever we had voir dire—that is, the right to question prospective jurors to find out whether they were prejudiced against Indians—whenever we had proper time to develop our case before an unbiased jury, the trials ended in acquittal. The government learned from this. They forced Leonard’s trial to be held in South Dakota—the state, as Annie Mae always said, where Jesus Christ himself would have been found guilty of inside trading and child molesting had he been an AIM Indian.
Leonard’s trials were rushed through in a day, without voir dire and without giving the defense a chance to make their point. Leonard had no illusions. During the trial he whispered to me, “They’ll find me guilty at two o’clock.”
I said, “Why two o’clock?”
He gave me a sad, knowing smile. “They want their free steak and beer lunch at the court’s expense. Figure it out for yourself. They go to lunch at twelve. It takes them half an hour to get there and back. They’ll take an hour to eat their steaks. After they come back they’ll sit around for half an hour to make it look good, as if they were deliberating. Then they’ll come in with their ‘guilty’ verdict.” And that’s what happened—at two o’clock sharp.
Before we could enter the courthouse to be with Leonard at his sentencing, we were thoroughly and electronically searched. They passed a beeper between Ina’s legs. She was eight years old at that time. They were afraid of us. They even stuck the beeper into Pedro’s diapers, looking for a gun. All they got was a beeper covered with baby shit.
At his three trials Leonard was sentenced to a total of twenty-three years. I watched the marshals dragging him off in handcuffs and leg irons. We just kept looking at each other until the iron bars snapped shut behind him and he disappeared from view. Leonard’s old Mother, Mary Gertrude, cried, “I’ll go on praying for him with the pipe. I’m Indian. I’ll keep praying with the pipe, making tobacco ties. And I’ll tell the spirit: ‘I want my son back here, where he belongs, where he was raised. I want him back in his house, in our old home where he was born. I’m old, but I won’t die until he comes back here.’ “
One marshal said, “Listen to that old, crazy squaw. Lady, I’m telling you, you’ll be dead a long time before your son comes back.”
It is hard for an outsider to understand what being in jail must have been like for Leonard, a traditional Sioux medicine man. Leonard is part of nature, a man who rides horses, who searches the hills and valleys for healing herbs, who herds cattle, who watches birds for signs, who talks to the clouds and the winds. I thought, “How will he be able to stand being cooped up in a tiny cell like a caged eagle in a zoo whose wings have been clipped?” But things were much worse than I could ever imagine, even in my nightmares. I knew little of what was going on in America’s maximum-security prisons. I soon found out.
After Leonard had been taken away he was whisked from one jail to another in a totally senseless pattern. I tried to follow him everywhere and keep in contact with him, but often neither I nor his lawyers had the slightest idea where he was being kept. The government seemed to be playing a game of hide-and-seek with us: Pennington County Jail in Rapid City; Pierre, South Dakota; legendary Deadwood in the Black Hills; Minnehaha County jail in Sioux Falls; Oxford and Cedar Rapids in Iowa; Terre Haute in Indiana; Leavenworth in Kansas; Chicago; Sioux City in Iowa; Lewisburg in Pennsylvania; Richmond in Virginia; and for a short time a holding tank in New York City. They dragged Leonard all over the country while I kept tracking him down.
From the first day Leonard spent in jail his friends rallied to free him. We turned especially to our white friends. They went all out, spent their rent money and funds that should have sent their kids to college to hire lawyers and fly them to different trials and jails, but they were as ignorant about the ways of American justice as far as Indians were concerned as we backwoods Sioux. But we all learned fast. It did not take us long to find out that money was all-important. If you have two hundred thousand dollars to spend on defense, you win your case; if you have no money, you lose. The so-called adversary system is simply a lottery. If you had money and connections to hire a brilliant lawyer and were faced with a mediocre prosecutor, you won. If you had no money and had to rely upon a court-appointed lawyer, you lost. If you could get a trial shifted to an Eastern city, you generally were acquitted. If you were tried in South or North Dakota, you went to jail. Guilt or innocence did not enter into it. We never got a jury of our peers. In all the trials I witnessed I never saw an Indian juror. They say that the law is getting ever more enlightened and liberal and color-blind. That is bullshit. In 1884 the first Crow Dog won his case before the Supreme Court which, under the 1868 treaty, ruled that the government had no jurisdiction on the Sioux reservations. Almost a hundred years later the courts ruled against us on the same question. The thing to keep in mind is that laws are framed by those who happen to be in power and for the purpose of keeping them in power. That goes for the U.S.A. as well as for Russia or any other country in the world.
After everybody involved had gone broke we learned how to raise money. In the end we had the support of the National Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches, the Quakers, Amne
sty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Of course we were lucky because just then Indians were “in.” A few years later the media and money would be concentrated on the environment, women’s lib, the Lesbian Nation, macrobiotics, or crystal-healing. Organizations supporting minorities have a tendency to put their main efforts into backing leaders with what is called “name recognition.” Thus main support was first concentrated on the cases of Russel Means and Dennis Banks. Leonard had to wait until support shifted to the secondary leaders. He had been sentenced to a total of twenty-three years. It took some two hundred thousand dollars to get him out of jail in slightly under two years. While I was happy to see him free, I had a bad conscience thinking of the many nameless kids who had stuck their necks out in all the AIM confrontations languishing in the slammer, unable to raise money for bail or defense.
Among my favorite lawyers were Ken Tilsen of Minneapolis, Dan Taylor of Louisville, Bill Kunstler of New York, and Sandy Rosen of San Francisco who later won the Kent State case. Richard Erdoes and his wife Jean became our defense coordinators, providing a communications center and a place to eat and sleep. The phone bills alone ran to about two thousand dollars a month. Among our lawyers, Bill Kunstler was the most famous while Sandy Rosen was a “lawyer’s lawyer,” the best in his profession. Bill was great in preventing damage simply by winning a case at the first trial. In a courtroom he was brilliant and irresistible. I always thought of him as almost more of a first-class movie star than a lawyer. Sandy was a great repairman once an initial trial ended in conviction. He was a master at writing appeals, sniffing out pertinent points of law, following the tiniest lead—absolutely tops when it came to preparing a case. As for me, in spite of my original shyness I eventually became a good speaker, addressing rallies in auditoriums, churches, and parks.
Lakota Woman Page 21
