ABOUT
John Trudell testimony from recent hearings held by the Minnesota Citizens’ Review Commission on the FBI. The commission, a coalition of some 20 Minnesota organizations put together an independent hearing panel including DFL chairpersons Rick Scott and Ruth Caine. Union leaders, representatives of church and community groups as well as private citizens also participated. The panel took testimony on alleged FBI abuses in the area supervised by the Minneapolis office – Minnesota and the Dakotas. Much of the testimony centered around alleged FBI violations on South Dakota Indian reservations. One whole day was devoted to testimony concerning the Pine Ridge shootout in June 1975. The shootings resulted in the deaths of two FBI agents and one Indian, Joe Stuntz. No one has yet been charged with Stuntz’s death. Two Indians, Dino Butler and Robert Robideau, were charged with the murder of the FBI agents, but they were acquitted last fall. One other man charged was never indicted for lack of evidence, and another, Leonard Peltier, will go on trial in Fargo, North Dakota this month.
ANNOUNCER: The commission conducted four days of hearings into alleged FBI abuses, focusing on FBI activity on South Dakota Indian reservations, an area which comes under the jurisdiction of the Minneapolis FBI area office. The national chairman of the American Indian Movement, John Trudell, wrapped up the conference. Today on Midday we present his speech.
JOHN TRUDELL: I want to go back to the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. Because we’ve heard of the conduct of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We, from the American Indian Movement, we believe that its continuation of America’s land grabbing process from Native American people. And I’m going to read some stuff. It’s from a book called Crazy Horse and Custer. It was written by a man by the name of Ambrose I believe and he wrote it as a bicentennial project and he spent four or five years. And it’s, the way he has written the book, it’s uh, tells the story of these two men as they were growing up in their respective societies. He is not too accurate about ours. But being as he’s writing about white society and he’s a part of it and he has a lot of credibility and faith in their records. I’m sure he’s giving a more accurate picture of them. Anyway, I want to talk about war.
Trudell reads from Ambrose book [Editor’s Note: found on p.290 in 1996 Edition on Google Books)
Back East, meanwhile, the politicians were furious. A senator from Missouri pointed out that “the war is now costing daily at least $150,000 and, if it lasts through the summer, (and at the present rate it will certainly do that) it will cost us $100,000,000 without having accomplished anything.”33 The railroad builders were just as angry. The Cheyennes had derailed a train on the Union Pacific line and thereby obtained vast quantities of supplies. Although this was the first time the hostiles had thought to make a train the target of an attack, the railroad men knew how vulnerable they were to such actions and they told Sherman they would build no farther until he could guarantee peace.
And then some gibberish.
Congress, however, had no faith left in the Army. Ignoring Sherman’s plea for a more active war, it instead (July 20, 1867) provided for a peace commission to meet with the Plains Indians and see what could be done about negotiating an end to the war. In order to take some of the sting out of the Army’s objections to this policy, Congress required that four of the seven commissioners be Army officers. Sherman himself was one of them, along with old General Harney, the pre-Civil War Indian fighter.
Sherman agreed to serve because he really had no choice. Further, he was beginning to see a way out of his difficulties, one that would not bring any glory to his beloved Army but which would accomplish the main objective. What Sherman realized was that the coming of the railroad to the Plains would eventually mean an end to the Indian’s way of life. The advancing railroad brought settlement with it, and the settlers would crowd the Indians out. More immediately important, the railroad opened the country to the buffalo hunters. Eastern tanners were developing methods of curing buffalo hides and making them into acceptable coats and robes. There was a huge potential market for the hides. As the railroad reached ever deeper into the buffalo country, hunters would reduce the herds, then ship the hides east. By that system, the herds could be eliminated in a decade or less, and without the herds the Indians would have to go to reservations or starve. It would be, in short, a campaign with the enemies’ resources, not the enemy himself, as the target.
It was very important to them that they get that Union Pacific Union Railroad built across Kansas. It was extremely important to them. It was manifest destiny.
During the preceding winter the Army had decided it would have to abandon its hard-won positions on the Bozeman Trail. Its reasons were manifold. First, Sherman wanted to launch an extensive search-and-destroy campaign in Kansas in the coming summer and he badly needed the contribution of the regiment of infantry stationed on the Bozeman Trail. The total strength of the United States Army was around 55,000, but more than half these troops were on occupation duty in the former Confederate states, while a significant portion of the rest were on coastal defense duty.1 The troops at Forts Reno, Phil Kearny, and C. F. Smith represented more than 10 per cent of Sherman’s total frontier force—and they were totally wasted, as they could neither guard emigrants nor attack Indians.
Because at that point Red Cloud had effectively put a blockade around them and they were stuck inside their forts. They could go nowhere.
Despite these obvious facts, Army officers generally were opposed to abandoning the forts. They had paid a terrible price in blood to establish them and abject surrender hurt their pride. To a man, they expected to have to fight the Sioux again; the idea that the Plains of Wyoming and Montana would be left to the savages for any length of time was inconceivable. Sooner rather than later the Indians would have to be driven onto reservations, and when the time came to settle the score with the Powder River hostiles, the forts would be invaluable as bases of operation. Most of all, the forts represented a threat to the Sioux and there was no point in abandoning them without getting something in return.
Sherman took all these considerations into account as he prepared in the spring of 1868 to resume his peace-making role on the peace commission. He needed troops for Kansas; he had to shut up congressional critics, who were asking embarrassing questions about the cost-effectiveness of the Powder River war; he needed to get the Sioux to agree to something in return for abandoning the forts; he needed to maintain Army morale. He met all these objectives in the peace treaty of 1868.
It had been explained earlier in the hearings that in 1877 Congress passed the so-called agreement of 1876, which overruled the treaty provision that three-fourths of all white adult male Sioux had to sign an agreement in order to seed reservation land. Government attempts to get ahold of the reservation land in this period culminated in the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890. In his speech Trudell talked about some of the reasons why the 1868 treaty was ignored by the American government, a key issue for current American Indian Movement activities since AIM supports Tribal Council attempts to bring about a new enforcement of the 1868 treaty.
Sherman had surrendered the Powder River forts on the understanding that the Oglalas and other hostiles would move onto an agency on the Missouri River. Or would stay on the Powder River. The whole point to the treaty had been to keep the wild Indians away from the Platte and thus away from the Union Pacific Railroad. The government’s orders therefore where that there could be no trading along the North Platte. Making matters worse the traders could not load up their wagons and go to the Powder River to trade. Sherman’s attitude was simple, if the Indians wanted the white man’s goods then let them move to reservations. If they insisted on living the wild life then let them do so without any help from the whites. The government was especially insistent that none of the Powder River Indians get their hands on firearms because from Sherman on down the attitude of the army officers was that the Treaty of 1868 was a truce. Not a peace treaty. As Sherman put it, “We all know that the time approaches for the battle that is to decide whether they or the United States are sovereign in the land they occupy.” Then it would be the worst sort of foolishness to give arms to future enemies. The Indians felt they had been lied to.
The Panic of 1873 and the Black Hills Expedition of 1874. America had never seen anything like it. There had been ups and downs in the economy before the Civil War, but the slumps were relatively short and comparatively mild. Besides, prewar America was overwhelmingly rural and thus more or less immune to the crushing effects of an economic depression. By 1873 the country was more urbanized, more industrialized, and therefore more vulnerable. It was also unprepared for any bad economic news.
On September 18, 1873, the banking house of Jay Cooke failed. Other firms quickly followed, including the company of the father of George Bird Grinnell, which had been involved in the manipulation of huge amounts of stock. The crash “came on out of a clear sky,” Grinnell later wrote.* ‘Trusted officers of banks and corporations disappeared with the money of the institutions; the stock market promptly fell to pieces; prices dropped almost to nothing; and the Stock Exchange, to put a period to the ruin that seemed impending, closed its doors.”1 All of this confused and frightened the American people, who hardly understood what was happening to them. Their reaction is best summed up in the name they gave to this depression (which lasted from 1873 to 1877); they called it the “Panic of 1873.”
The whole country, not just the stock market, was indeed in a state of panic. Farm prices plummeted. One of the worst grasshopper plagues in history swept the Midwest and the Great Plains; when flying, the insects blackened the sky; when resting or feeding, they were sometimes two or three feet thick on the ground. An epidemic of yellow fever struck the Mississippi Valley. In the cities, meanwhile, there were one million or more unemployed, nearly 20 percent of the non-farm working force, and in a day when there was no public relief available anywhere. Although farmers could not meet their costs because of falling crop prices, food prices at the city grocery stores dropped only 5 per cent, while factory wages for those lucky enough to hold onto a job were down 25 per cent and more. There were more people in jail than ever before in the nation’s history, but crime continued nevertheless at unprecedented rates. Tramps were everywhere, wandering the land, wondering what had happened to them and to their nation. Worse, the nation’s leaders had no idea what had gone wrong. It was cruel and heartless, this smashing of the American dream, because it was so unexpected and so unexplainable.2
Since the political and economic leaders could not explain what had caused the depression, they could hardly come up with any solutions. Normally confident, boastful, swaggering, these men had held to the doctrine of continual progress as to holy writ; now their faith was destroyed and they knew not where to look to find another. They were a curious mixture, these leaders of the Gilded Age; innovative and dynamic in the business world, they had stretched the limits of what was possible in every direction. But for all the changes they had wrought, their political views remained stuck in the eighteenth century. The government’s role in the economy, as they saw it, was to pour money into industry (via such means as land grants and direct bonus payments to the railroads) but otherwise to keep hands off. The nation’s leaders would not provide unemployment relief or welfare, for they were as hidebound about the functions of government as they were innovative about business.
In trying to understand what had brought on the depression, the leaders tended to put the blame on a lack of circulating money. President Grant had limited the number of greenbacks, which had the effect of putting the country on a gold standard, which was exactly where the most conservative and influential economists of the period wanted it to be. But in an expanding economy the gold supply was insufficient. Farmers’ groups and labor unions wanted to expand the amount of paper money in circulation, but such a course seemed blasphemous to the men in power, who were wedded to the gold standard and who thought the issuance of paper money dangerously radical. Still, the powerful wanted more money too, in order to finance the rebuilding of the economy and to get the boom going again. And President Grant and his advisers did want the government to do something about the situation, provide some hope for the tramps, get the country back to normal. The solution to the problem, as the Administration saw it, lay in opening new territories for exploitation. Physical expansion had solved America’s problems before and would again. In effect, Grant’s relief program was to open new opportunities for the jobless and pump more money into the economy through the development of new gold deposits.
That is where Custer came in. Once again he became the cutting edge of the nation’s expansion. By conquering Sioux territory and discovering vast gold deposits, he helped end the depression, and the nation was able to get back to normal without having to examine itself, without having to change the existing cozy relationships between government and business. In the process, Custer added to his own fame.
United States, like many nations, has started its share of wars on trumped-up charges, but no excuse ever given for the initiation of hostilities—not the Mexican War, not the Gulf of Tonkin—was more absurd than the one given by General Sheridan for the commencement of the Great Sioux War. With the enthusiastic backing of his military and political superiors, Sheridan decided in the spring of 1874 to send a column of troops into the Black Hills in order to establish a fort there, and, although this reason was unacknowledged, to find gold. This was a direct, open, unilateral violation of the treaty of 1868. Sheridan said it had to be done because the Sioux were not living up to their agreements in the treaty. Specifically, he charged that the hostiles were still killing settlers in Nebraska and disrupting the railroads. Although the evidence is fragmentary, it seems clear that Sheridan exaggerated at best, lied at worst. The Indian agents were unanimous in the judgment that the tribes were behaving well, and Sheridan himself had reported officially in 1873 that “The condition of Indian affairs in the Department of Dakota has been remarkably quiet …” Bishop William H. Hare protested directly to Grant about the plan to march troops into the Hills; Hare said it would be a “high-handed outrage” and would forever sully the honor of the United States. Democratic newspapers accused Grant of instigating the march as a way of diverting attention from the nation’s problems.4
Washington ignored the complaints and warnings and went ahead with its plans. As George Hyde wrote, “this proves that very strong influences were back of the project, influences which were willing to risk a Sioux war in carrying out their program. … This violation of the treaty was deliberately planned and executed.”5 The proposed expedition received vast publicity—everyone in the West, it seemed, was talking about it. Custer applied for and got command of the entire force; he was immediately besieged with applications from civilian adventurers who wanted to go along.
To look for Gold The Black Hills, the United States Government has taken at least 1.5 billion dollars worth of gold out of the Black Hills. That’s just one mine. The Homestead Mine. 1974 they still were getting 40 million dollars a year out. It’s the largest gold producing mine on the Western Hemisphere. By their own records, see everyone knows that they broke the treaty. The Army put it, they put their, they put it out, who’s going to be Sovereign over that land. United States government in 1868, 1866, they signed a treaty. They started a preparations. And they signed a treaty. Saying that that land belonged to the people who they signed it with? They have deliberately went out and violated that treaty. They went out and they have broken it as, as they have broken every treaty they have ever signed with our people. And when we talk about FBI, and we talked about all the things that have been talked about. We understand law. We understand your rationalizations in your definitions of law. We know that there are five kinds of law. There’s common law. There’s criminal law. There’s constitutional law, there’s statute law and there’s treaty law. And before as Native American people. Before we will ever believe in the Constitutional law. Or the common law. Or the criminal law. Or the statute law. We want to see your government honor the treaty law. Because we believe that if one group of people are going to honor the law, then all groups of people must honor the law. And we believe that if a situation such as that does not exist. It is our feeling that a state of war does exist between the United States government and Native American people. It is our feeling that a state of war exists between the United States government and all the people on this land. But we will not ask you to believe what you do not choose to believe. We will ask you that you consider this. Constitution of the United States says that all American citizens will be accorded certain rights. It says that all citizens have certain freedoms. And if any governmental agency infringes on your rights or those freedoms, then they do not consider you to be citizens because they said on paper they would treat their citizens a certain way. And if they treat you different than the way they say on paper then they do not consider you to be their citizens. That is our interpretation. That’s our understanding. We are very concerned. About this long War. We’ve look at Pine Ridge in the context of this FBI attack. Our concern goes back. Our concern goes way back to 1868. And it goes back prior than that, but we’ll start from 68. That’s when your nation made an agreement with our nation. And if average Americans can sit back and accept the rationalization while my ancestors did that and they died. So that treaty doesn’t have to be honored anymore that it’s meaningless. If you can sit back in your own good conscience and accept that as a rationalization for building what you call to be a free Society. Then you have our sympathy. Because there’s nothing else we can do about it other than to choose to live our life the way that we feel it should be lived and we will sympathize with you and your confusion. You look it up. We will not go away around the 1868 treaty. We will not go away from that. We are going to come back. We’re going to continue to bring it up. We are going to continue to say it until someone listens. It has been proven to us that the United States government has not listened. They do not care to listen now, in a time of energy crisis. We understand what this government’s up to. Indians been saying the white man done it for 400 years. We know what we’re talkin about. Energy crisis. In 1873 it was the railroads that could do what they wanted for manifest destiny. And now it’s the oil companies. What’s changed. In 1873 they had women’s suffrage. In 1977 they got women’s liberation. What’s changed? They had hostile Indians and now they got militant ones. They had black trouble and now they got black militants. They had economic crisis. They still have economic crisis. But yet all this trouble, I don’t see the rich being affected by it. These things that we have got to live with. We brought up a question of madness some time back. We fail to understand. How you all can put the rich up on a pedestal. And admire them. When you see so many people who do not have enough. How can you admire a selfish person? That to us is what we call madness. How can you allow these selfish people to label you? Nelson Rockefeller and his clique, they turn around and they call the poor people lazy and they could do it if they wanted. And Nelson Rockefeller doesn’t, he doesn’t cook his own food and take care of his own kids, he didn’t drive his own car and didn’t shine his own shoes. He always had someone else to do it for him. Besides his policies at Attica and his grandfather’s policies at the Ludlow mine in Colorado. So when they start these attacks against us we feel that they have attacked all of us. We feel that in today’s generation they’re using the energy crisis. We feel, you know like when we was growing up, think about it. When it got cold outside man, you bundled up and you stayed as warm as you could and when they said it was 35 below zero that’s what it was you went outside and you were, you tried to be warm. And it was a lot of fuel and it cost of quarter gallon or a nickel a gallon, or twelve cents a gallon. Now there’s an energy crisis and when it gets cold, it gets 35 below and 70 with the wind chill factor and incidentally we’re jacking the price of your oil up another dollar. And people can’t cope. And people sit back and they allow this thing to continue to be done to them. We know that they have worked hard to keep us divided racially. They’ve worked hard to keep us divided religiously. Class. We do not accept the theory that all of this ended in the 1800’s. And that all the guys that are alive today are nice guys. Because we see too many bad things happening to too many good people, to accept that rationalization. And Leonard Peltier is on trial because he understands what we’re talking about. He’s not on trial because he murdered any agents. He’s on trial because he represented a higher ideal of freedom. The fact that we are human beings. And that as human beings we have the right to live our lives in respect and with dignity. And anyone who will interfere with our right to live with respect and dignity is our enemy. They are not looking out for our well-being. That’s what Leonard Peltier believes. He believes that if it’s necessary to be living in an armed camp with a gun in your hand to protect your people then you have to do it. And I want you to understand the difference. Leonard Peltier was never paid a dime. The people in Oglala, they never received one dime for what they have been through. They have done it, and many cases on heart and spirit alone. And these Federal mercenaries who attacked them, they did it for money. And these are the same mercenaries that are someday going to attack your children, for money. America is running out of places to expand. They’re getting kicked out of Asia, they’re getting kicked out of Africa. They’re getting kicked out of all the land bases that they have been exploiting. This is an exploitative society. The whole principle of the nation is to exploit, to eat, to take advantage of the weak. Well, they have got no place to go but the greed value is still here. The greediness does exist. And these greedy people are going to continue to want more than they need, but they have no other land base to go to to get it. And you can sit back and you can accept your rationalization and in fifty years there’s no more Indians because we’re going to fight to the death. Then there’s no more Indians. Then they’re gonna use all that experience, all that practice, all that training they got fighting us to the death to keep you all in line. And if you should dare to raise your head and speak out against them they will strike on you. And if you want to know how, watch the World War II footage about the Nazis. And just remember that the Nazis had limited technology. That’s what we’re talkin about. We’re talking about moral issues of right. And the main issue of moral right is that there was a treaty made, and there’s never been an act, there’s never been a legal agreement, it said 3/4 of the entire adult male population of the Sioux Nation had to agree to a change. And I’ll tell you right now that it didn’t happen then and it’ll never happen now. So that means you all cannot change your side of the agreement. And now let’s go back to Leonard. The fact that America would dare to take that man out of the community of Oglala. Dare to take him off the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and tell us, and try to get us to believe that he’s going to get a fair trial, that is an insult to our intelligence. We are not stupid people. The Constitution of the United States, that you all choose to live under, says that a man, a person, when accused of a crime is entitled to a trial by their peers. And they’re entitled to a trial in the community that they’re accused of the crime in. Leonard Peltier has automatically denied, being denied both. Interesting, the government has made all these accusations about AIM, about the militant Indians on the reservation, yet, they refuse to hold one of our trials there. But nobody’s ever asked a question, why? Leonard Peltier wants to be tried in Pine Ridge. And we want to know one valid reason why he can’t be. What, Indian courts aren’t as good as white courts? We don’t understand fairness as well as the white people do? We won’t be as objective as the government is? We cannot understand any reasons. No valid reasons. He’s entitled to that trial there. We are the only people in this country, if we are accused of a crime on our own tribal land, and that crime we’re accused of involves a non-indian we are taken away from our homes and we are tried by whites. And then I hear your politicians say they’re against what’s going on in South Africa. There’s got to be a change take place in America. It’s got to come. Whether we want it to or not. It is not something that we can close our eyes to, and it is not something that we can avoid. It’s going to happen. Now whether that change is going to be violent or whether that change is going to be nonviolent depends on your average American citizen. Because you have the power. You have access to the resources to produce the social change that is needed in very non-violent terms. And when I talk about that change whether it’s going to be violent or non-violent, I’m not threatening anybody in any way, shape or form. Because the violence I’m talking about. You haven’t seen any violence yet till the white people start fighting amongst themselves. That day’s coming. That’s what a class war is all about. So I don’t want you to turn around what I’m trying to say. I did not threaten anyone. And I did not intend it to be a threat. But we got to start dealing with certain basic realities. We’ve watched. We’ve heard about the FBI. From our end of it. We asked people to help form a commission so we can talk about the FBI. Because for 400 years we’ve been trying to find a way to get somebody sit down and listen. Somebody that had some sense and would be willing to use a little bit of common sense and logic and rationality. We’ve looked for 400 years. I hope, that we were successful here. That we don’t have to go start looking again next week. We think that it’s time for people to start speaking from the heart and telling the truth. We think that it’s time that we just start being human beings for a while. We get out of the role-playing. Putting on fronts and images. That’s what makes the FBI able to work. We are human beings and we can’t be more than one thing at a time. It’s a physical impossibility. To be more than one thing at a time. Either I’m a human being or I’m a liberal. But I’m not both. So you must understand. What we’re talkin about, our battle, our struggle, our resistance, whatever you wish to call it or anyone may wish to call it. When you think about Leonard I want you to remember this. You know, they put Geronimo in prison for murder or something. Robbery. Geronimo. They put him in prison Ft. Sill and he died down there in a fucking prison. The man that was fighting for his home and his land, see, but they called him a criminal and put him in a prison and they never let him out because if they let him out they were, they were too afraid of this man. But I never ever heard of him referred to as a political prisoner. Bob Rabideau You’ve heard his name. He’s one of the defendants. Sitting in a jail in Kansas on a cointelpro operation set up. Leonard Peltier spending a year in jail. He had no bail set yet. You heard the story about Angie Long Visitor. And how they went and snatched her to the hold her as a material witness. For Leonard’s bail hearing. But did you know that Leonard requested, he withdrew his motion for a bail hearing?. He said he’d rather not have the bail if it was going to be at the expense of someone else’s liberty. So he never even had a bail hearing. And then that damn FBI turns around says well we’re holding her for his trial. I don’t know what caliber of people you all associate with. I have an idea, but I don’t know. But when I see a man who hasn’t been out of a jail cell for the last year say wellI don’t want to bail hearing if they’re going to go over here and start jacking this woman around. Then you have to start looking at what commitments all about? So we would hope, I’m going to ask you directly, ain’t no hope to it. We would like you to consider everything that you’ve heard. What we want is we want them cointelpro files opened up. We want them opened up against all of us, but we want that first book, that first page, it open. We want it opened on AIM. We paid the price. We earned the right to be the first ones to have it opened up. There’s too many dead people that can’t be here now. We have faced the hardest attack of any movement in the last 20 years. Because we were living out in the country. And nobody could come to the rescue. But we survived. We want those files open. We understand the federal mentality. Dino Butler told me he’s already accepted in his mind that he’s going to die. They’re not gonna let him live. I’ve made the acceptance in my mind. You can go so far before they quote, neutralize you. We want those files. We have a right to know what’s in them. Everybody that ever paid a dime to this system has a right to know what’s in them. We want those files. We have a right to them. They have made, the government makes their PR response that they’re no longer actively engaged in that. You heard the alcohol, firearms and treasury mentioned, or tobacco. If you don’t learn how to deal with this FBI, everybody’s going to be doing it. Let’s go back to the concept. The American government guaranteed it would treat its citizens in a certain way. When it does not treat you in that way it does not consider you to be a citizen. To us that makes a lot of sense? Now let’s say that there’s a rationalization that exists amongst the powerful ruling class. And that’s where their mentality is coming from. They had to give the tramps a place to settle down they said in here. Poor people. And if the FBI’s allowed to get away with what they’ve even admitted to doing now, they’re running point, it’s a war. They’re running point. And when you go to war and you have someone run point if that point survives then the rest of the troops know they could come. And if the FBI runs point and if they are allowed to get away with what they’re doing, then everybody’s going to be doing it. You got enough people wearing badges as it is, and they’re already attacking the victims. Just on a matter of principle, you know, I don’t know who killed those FBI agents. I could, I don’t care. But I think if I ever found out that, they, we should be giving them a metal instead of a criminal indictment.
Trudell went on to describe how he felt former President Nixon and other government officials used reports of an energy crisis as a diversion.
They took that energy crisis. Hey, I been, I was all over United States and I was watching people buy gas. Prices going up. Selected cities. Media Center Cities. They just shut the gas off. So everybody that even had a lot of gas sat there, they watched people in Washington DC lineup for two hours to get a half a tank of gas. Manipulation. They had them all sensitized. And while they were redistributing wealth in that way, shape, and form your ancestors fought a non-revolutionary war on the principle of no taxation without representation. And it’s being practiced right now, but they hide it under terms of inflation and recession and things you can understand. Call it taxes. And you understand this? There was a level of liberalism coming into America. They saw it. When the anti-war demonstrations first started. They really believed that it was communist money doing it. And then they sent their intelligence units out there to start spying and they found out, hey it’s domestic bucks. Your average American, part of the affluency, we give them enough money to buy all this consumerism, this artificial things to make him think it’s going to make them more human, but some of that money was slipping through it was, it wasn’t going to the TV set, it was going over here to a human need. So they start laying out the plan. Law enforcement, assistance act, agency, whatever it is. Created in 1969. Start laying out the plan to nationalize the police, they started laying out the plan to have a redistribution of the wealth. And it started implementing the plan behind the Nixon. While everybody’s crybabying about Nixon’s constitutional rights. And did he do it or didn’t he do it. While everybody’s looking at Agnew and the rest of them. They were effectively subverting the intent of your Constitution. And it is our firm belief. That we should not subject ourselves. We should not have to subject ourselves to allow a criminal people to try us. It is our firm belief, that as Indian, people within our own land. Thatit is a hypocrisy and it is a joke. To drag us off our reservations and put us into courts, like they’re attempting to do Leonard. Like they did to Dino and Bobby. Land that was stolen from us and then you put a building on it and call it a Hall of Justice. But I want to talk about the land the building’s on. Before you all can talk to us about what Justice is. Anyway, we want those cointelpro files. And if you remember nothing else that you ever heard through here, please remember we want those files. We feel they are vital and they are necessary to Leonard’s defense. Leonard Peltier, amongst the other problems we have in getting a fair trial, those are necessary. Because we think it’s time that a line be drawn as to how far we are going to allow the conduct of the FBI to go unchecked. And Peltier’s willing to draw the line. He’s willing to stand, he stands there saying, I want to make it out now, I want to make the issue. I want to fight the FBI on the basis of what they are. I want to tell you I know directly firsthand about FBI things. Because I had a situation I think happened to me in the battle, but it wasn’t under this regional office. Although the Aberdeen Area Office was involved in it, so maybe it was. Considering that all BIA police, they work under what is called a criminal investigator. And a criminal investigator is trained in Quantico Virginia in Washington DC by our friendly feds. And that’s the liaisons, that’s the link between the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the FBI. Criminal investigators. I mean, that’s the out front personal link. That’s what makes them all function as a unit. Because he takes, he lists,see he’s impressed by the FBI. A criminal investigator is usually four steps away from evolution. So he’s impressed by shiny badges and guns and fact he can go push people around and they can’t push him back. So they’ll do what they’re told. And Anyway at one point they wanted to put me on trial in Nevada. That if I couldn’t prove I was Indian. If I couldn’t prove I was an Indian they was gonna put me on trial for armed robbery. A robbery that never took place. They made up the crime. Because they wanted to get me on assault with a deadly weapon. The feds wanted to try me on it, and the tribe wanted to try me on it. And the feds told the tribe, no, you can’t. So the tribe just went ahead and did it anyway. And the feds couldn’t try me. Because of double jeopardy. So then they say well John hey hold it, hold it, just a minute, we can’t pursue Trudell here, we, it come to our attention they told us at the Aberdeen Area Office. That John Trudell’s not Indian, he’s a Caucasian. And I don’t know if that’s, I think that might be about the worst thing they said about me that whole time. So then they turned around and said wait now, you know that nobody’s going to buy that. Now this is all the newspapers. Press. See the press wants to know why we think they aren’t objective. So then the next day they said no, he’s a Mexican national. They put a little wanted poster out on the reservation to that effect. And then they finally settled on I was a Mexican American. And I was trying, all the time I was trying to get a look at my birth certificate and it says Indian. So my birth certificate disappeared from the judge’s office, the tribal Judge’s office and we’ve never seen it again. So we couldn’t show anybody this piece of paper. And it’s on the basis of that they allowed the state to come and arrest me. The state sent in a little, I was at a school meeting one night and here comes every cop in the eastern half of the state of Nevada to take me out and arrest me. Well they took me out and arrested me and then they let me out on credit. I mean I could understand the politics real well. They took, they went a hundred miles, they spent $2500 to arrest me, took me back down another hundred miles, spent another $2500 to get me back, with their little relay cars and all this and that. Everybody had a radio to play with. And they got me back down there then they let me out on the word that I would pay $200 for bond the next day. So then I had no place to stay. Went around streets at ten o’clock at night. But it reached the degree I had to identity hearings. I’ve been tried on a basis of identity. I’ve been tried by everyone but the blacks. I would hope that they would try it so I can be a clean sweep. I was tried in white court and an Indian Court. I won in all the courts, but you know, had to go back and do it over again. I was tried in three jurisdictions. I was arrested three separate times. I had to put bail up two of those three times. All on the base of one incident because they weren’t satisfied with a court finding. I was going to take my wife Christmas shopping. She was uh, it was twelve days before our youngest daughter was born. They issued an all-points bulletin for my arrest. I was to be considered armed and extremely dangerous. I was headed south into Southern Idaho in a brown station wagon. Highway 51. I had eluded state and federal authorities. I had been involved in a shootout with them. Wanted for armed robbery. And they released this. I didn’t know it. They released this information, the description I have given you, in December the 4th, 1975 on the basis of an incident that happened July the 17th. And I’m kind of proud of the fact that I managed to maintain the longest continuous gun battle with the feds and nobody knew it. Took that long to elude them. But they were going to kill me is what they were gonna do and my wife and kids with me and they could, they could’ve give one damn. They didn’t care. So I know firsthand what we’re talkin about. Leonard Peltier has never been convicted of a felon, he’s not a felon. I mean you, to use labels that are used and usually want to discourage people away or whatever. He doesn’t even have that. Leonard Peltier was one of the, he was one of the men in there, along with Dino and Bobby, they were the oldest ones in there. Besides the elders. So our feeling is that the feds want to nail them on it because they were the oldest. See they couldn’t get Leonard for drunkenness. Because Leonard don’t get drunk. They weren’t gonna bust him on a drug bust because he don’t use drugs. They weren’t gonna to get him on a burglary charge, man because he just don’t need it. Now they couldn’t come up with something useless to get him with. So now they want to hang something on him that they got no proof on. In the Cedar Rapids trial, Norman Brown who testified here yesterday, and Wishy Draper, the one who was tied in the chair in order to get his testimony. They both said under oath, in Dino and Bobby’s trial, that one Myrtle Poor Bear was not in Oglala the day of that shooting, as a matter of fact, they didn’t even know a Myrtle Poor Bear. Leonard Peltier was extradited back to the United States of America on the basis of an affidavit signed by Myrtle Poor Bear who said, she said something to the effect, I saw on Leonard, how’d she put it, it fit with the first news report that went out; bullet-riddled bodies. Leonard seemed to lose control of himself and he just grabbed the gun and just started shooting the bodies, and like that type of a thing. Number one, she wasn’t there. Number two, and the reason I know she wasn’t there, could’ve never seen something of that nature take place. The bodies had three bullet holes in them. And if he stand right on top of three bodies just going like that. Rapid firing. And he, and they only had three bullet holes in them. I can’t believe it. Find it too hard to believe, you, at that close of range you have to hit something. And if he’s that bad a shot, he couldn’t hit them at that close a range, There’s too many things don’t fit. But I want to get at. The affidavit that she submitted in the Canadian court, and the testimony of the witnesses down in Cedar Rapids. Somebody committed perjury, and it was a federal witness. Because the affidavit for Canada was under oath in front of Judge Bogue. It was under oath in testimony down in Cedar Rapids. Somebody committed perjury, but no one’s ever been questioned about that. The government is not attempting to get the right person for the shooting the agents their just attempting to get the person they feel it’s right for them to get. And it’s got nothing to do with a crime. Because if, we were talking about economics, and talking about land, and the main reason I wanted to read this about the Treaty. The intent of the treaty then. Our people’s intent that it was to be honored. The government’s intention when they signed it was that they were just going to use it as a truce. But you see that don’t wash, that doesn’t cut anything, because they signed it. So it was not a truce. It was a binding legal commitment between two Sovereign groups of people. And we really want you all to think about that. I mean there’s, too many issues to cover. We’ve skimmed on the top. And we’ve come and we’ve made our attempt to talk to you about what’s going on because somewhere, ya know, there’s got to be enough, there’s got to be this many people somewhere that are sane. I mean I would really hope that there is. I’m not talking about, I’m not questioning anybody’s, the goodness in their heart. Because insane people, you know, they could have good hearts. Or they could have bad hearts. We know that the majority of the people in this country are good people. That they only want enough to get by on, that they want enough to survive, to meet the, to meet the basic materialistic needs. And have a little security. We know that. But we also understand that there’s got to be an agreement amongst us collectively. That in order to get our basic materialistic needs and our security met. That we will not exploit each other. And that we will not allow somebody else to exploit us against each other. Because if we’re not willing to make that commitment. If we’re not willing to reach that type of an understanding or an agreement. Then there is not a one of us has got the right to say that we have a spiritual soul. Not a one. And people that do not have a spiritual soul are insane. If we don’t believe in something. And a new color TV isn’t something. I just heard a word, trinket. Understand this. Maybe I could say it now and I’ll get out of your way and all that. Everybody makes a joke how some white people come over and they took the Indians for $24 worth of trinkets. Manhattan Island. You know, hey, we were telling white people, hey you can share this land, you could use it. And thanks for the gift in return. The white people said hey, they sold it to us. They let us have it. And we were saying you could use it. It’s a peculiar arrogance that man has that he can own land. Hey this Earth don’t need us. How can we own it? It’ll be here a long time after we’re all gone. How could we own it? I’d say that the Earth owns us. But I want to talk about them trinkets and beads. How many people sold out their humanity so the trinket that they could have, they could drive it home? Or they can live a fantasy life by watching it? The trinket of television. How they subconsciously, how they’re just attacking all the time. Number one, telling you that you’re not valid as a human being. Exploiting the natural things, you know, hey you man, you can’t uh, you ain’t gonna snag that pretty girl if you don’t drive that new trinket car. And buy some new trinket clothes to hide your own worthless self under. That’s what they’re saying. The way I look at it. And then they go tell the girls something. Just as confusing. And then everybody’s confused. So we’ll go to the bars and we’ll go somewhere else and get some of that more unnatural shit to pour in ourselves so we can be confused some more and we’ll call it the search for happiness. So anyway. We want you to remember that about trinkets. And don’t sell your humanity out for it. And we, collectively as human beings, we can’t sell our children out for it. Because to me that’s the height of the madness man when you just don’t care what happens to your offspring. When you close your eyes to human things. And you rationalize, well I could give my kid a lot of money. I can’t give him, I can’t give of myself or my spirituality because I don’t have any. So in replace I’m going to give them money. And I’m gonna give them some trinkets. And I’m going to instill the madness in them when they are very young. You see for no other reason, pretty soon there aren’t going to be enough trinkets. And then the people are going to be fighting over the trinkets that exist. Now if we can start getting ready to prepare the coming generations that there are other things in life besides trinkets, then the fight won’t have to be so awful, and it won’t have to last so long, but it’s damn sure going to have to take place. Over the trinkets. It’s like a story. It’s like a big play and they used us all as the characters. And I just want to make a personal understanding with all the people in this room on behalf of Leonard. We want your help. And there’s a lot of ways things can be done, but the most effective way we can think of now, is we want them cointelpro files. And we want some justice for everything that we have had to go through. As Indian people. And we would hope that somewhere in your own minds, in your own hearts, and in your own spirit that you will want some justice for the things they have done to you. The things that they have used you for, so that they could do it to us. Because when they attacked us. Ours was a physical attack. But they attacked your humanity when they did it. When they used their lies and rationalizations to get you all to accept it and to get your parents to accept and their parents before them. So we really want you guys to think about it. Ya know and I know this is taking a long time and drags out and I’m going to wrap it up. And I want to read you something. In someway, however small and secret. Each of us is a little mad. Everyone is lonely at bottom and cries to be understood. But we can never entirely understand someone else. And each of us remains part stranger, even to those who love us. It is the weak who are cruel. Gentleness is to be expected only from the strong. Those who do not know fear, are not really brave. For courage is the capacity to confront what can be imagined. You can understand people better if you look at them, no matter how old or impressive they may be. As if they are children. For most of us never mature. We simply grow taller. Happiness comes only when we can push our brains and our hearts to the furthest reaches of which we are capable. The purpose of life is to matter. To count. To stand for something. To have it make some difference that we had lived it all. [Leo Rosten]. So on behalf of Leonard I’d like to thank you all for your time.
This concludes our three-part series on the Minnesota citizens review Commission of the FBI will be bringing you more news on NPR of further action taken by the commission, which has been meeting this month to prepare a report on the hearings DFL chairs Rick Scott and Ruth Cain both members of the hearing panel have both indicated that they may contact vice president Walter Mondale to suggest further governmental investigation of the FBI. The commission is also considering other action. I’m Neil St. Anthony. ~
SOURCE: https://archive.mpr.org/stories/1977/03/03/highlights-of-the-minnesota-citizens-review-commission-on-the-fbi-hearings-part-3-john