By Mordecai Specktor
FBIs vs. AIM
The criminal indictments of former Pres. Trump are stacking up. In response to efforts to hold Trump accountable for his life of crime, extreme, right-wing Republicans are calling for defunding the FBI and the office of Jack Smith, the Department of Justice special counsel investigating the former president. Of course, these law-and-order proponents seeking to dismantle the FBI are in thrall to Trump and portray him as a victim of government persecution.
Many readers who know the actual history of the FBI may have mixed feelings about this development. So, it’s time to review events of 50 years ago, when the FBI launched a counter-insurgency operation on Indian reservations in So. Dakota.
The 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee – the site of the 1890 U.S. cavalry massacre of Chief Big Foot’s band – by Lakota traditionals and young members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) led to a U.S. government siege that lasted more than two months. Two AIM members, Frank Clearwater and Lawrence “Buddy” LaMont, a Vietnam vet, were killed by government gunfire; a U.S. Marshals Service deputy was shot and paralyzed.
In the aftermath of Wounded Knee 2, the government began prosecuting AIM leaders, tying up the movement in federal court, while violence escalated on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The “reign of terror” under the tribal administration of Richard “Dickie” Wilson and his GOONs (self-styled “Guardians of the Oglala Nation”) resulted in numerous uninvestigated assaults and murders, from 1973-1976.
The U.S. occupation of Pine Ridge entered a new phase on June 26, 1975, when two FBI agents, Ron Williams and Jack Coler, and a Native man, Joe Stuntz, were shot to death. The FBI agents had driven into an AIM camp on the Jumping Bull family’s ranch near Oglala, when the shooting commenced. The largest FBI manhunt in history took place after the agents were killed. The FBI’s newly established SWAT team terrorized Indians living on Pine Ridge, in its pursuit of AIM members involved in the firefight.
As it happened, a young reporter from Minneapolis, Kevin McKiernan, was present at both Wounded Knee 2 and at the scene of the Oglala shootout. In July, I finally watched his 2019 documentary, “From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock,” which offers a deep dive into this violent period on the Pine Ridge reservation. It’s an excellent history of the time and place, with McKiernan’s photographs and films from inside the Wounded Knee occupation and at the 1975 Oglala shootout providing an immediacy to the epochal events.
The documentary also stands as an indictment of the lawlessness of the FBI, which sided with Wilson’s GOONs, even providing armor-piercing rifle rounds (available only to law enforcement personnel) to the tribal vigilantes. The FBI used the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations as a counter-insurgency laboratory, rotating 2,500 agents and support personnel through the area, according to a former FBI agent interviewed by McKiernan.
In my visits to the reservations some years ago, I heard traditional Lakotas refer to the federal agents as the “FBIs” (eff-bee-EYES). In addition to the carnage, the FBI unleashed dirty and criminal operations under the rubric of COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence program), which engendered suspicions leading to the disruption and destabilization of AIM. A notable victim of the FBI’s dirty tricks regime was Anna Mae Aquash, an AIM activist from Nova Scotia. She was arrested several times and then released in what is seen as the FBI’s attempt to put a “snitch jacket” on her, to create the impression that she was an informant.
On Feb. 24, 1976, a South Dakota rancher found Aquash’s body in a ditch in a deserted part of the Pine Ridge reservation, near Wanblee. An initial autopsy concluded that she had died of exposure. A second autopsy conducted by Dr. Garry Peterson, a Hennepin County medical examiner, found a bullet wound in Aquash’s skull. “She died of a bullet wound in the back of the head, and it was very visible,” the late civil rights lawyer Ken Tilsen told the Star Tribune many years later. More than 20 years later, two AIM foot soldiers were convicted of killing Aquash.
And Leonard Peltier, an AIM activist (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe from No. Dakota), was arrested on Feb. 26, 1976, in Alberta, and extradited to the U.S. on the basis of perjured affidavits signed by Myrtle Poor Bear, a mentally unstable Native woman. Peltier was convicted for aiding and abetting the murder of the two FBI agents at Oglala and sentenced to consecutive life terms in federal prison.
When I talked on the phone with Kevin McKiernan in July, he mentioned that June 26, the date of the Oglala shootout is a paid holiday for Pine Ridge tribal employees. There’s no love lost between the Lakota and the FBIs. “There was a deep-seated personal animus on both sides,” commented McKiernan, thinking back to the bad old days on the rez.
As noted in the documentary, Oglala Lakota tribal officials have called on the Department of Justice to investigate dozens of unsolved murders that took place 50 years ago. The feds have done nothing.
