Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) (24 page)

They came to Crow Dog’s Paradise at dawn on September 5, 1975—one hundred eighty-five of them, FBI, marshals, and SWAT teams. They came in full battle dress, with flak vests. They came with helicopters, heavily tracked vehicles, trucks, and even rubber boats “to prevent the Indians from escaping across the Little White River.” Some even came down the hill under an artificial smokescreen. I woke up when I heard a shout: “This is the FBI! Come out with your hands up or we’ll shoot!” Some agents smashed the windows of my house and climbed in. Others broke down the doors. They dragged me out of bed. I was sleeping in the nude but they would not let me dress. They pushed me down on the floor and held an M-16 to my head. They put plastic handcuffs on me, the kind that tighten with every movement and cut off your circulation. They put M-16s to my wife’s head. They dragged three-year-old Pedro from under his blanket and threw him against the wall. He was crying. Mary wanted to go to him
and comfort him but the feds would not let her. One FBI kept asking me again and again who shot those agents, who shot Coler and Williams. I told him I didn’t know. I was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at the time. They kept on: “Where’s Peltier? We know he’s around here somewhere. You’re hiding him.” When I said, truthfully, that he wasn’t here, they dragged me by the hair out of the house and tied me to a tree. I still was naked. There were women and children around, weeping. Some of the women were only half dressed. They searched even the children. My wife tried to bring me some clothes, but the feds wouldn’t let anyone come near me. Choppers were landing and taking off in my yard. The feds were wrecking houses, tipis, and cars. They shot my old horse, Big Red, out of sheer meanness. He had been the kids’ pet. My dad tried to bring me my pipe, but the feds stopped him. They looked into my beaded pipe bag, saying, “There might be a gun in it.” I told them that I was a medicine man and allowed no weapons in my place, but they paid no attention. My wife asked them to show her their search warrants. They did not have any, only blank arrest orders against John Doe and Jane Doe. As usual, we had people staying at the Paradise, and wherever I looked I saw men and boys tied to trees. There wasn’t one tree without somebody tied to it.

And what happened at my place happened down the road, a half mile away, at my sister Dinah’s place. She and her husband, Al, had their kids there, Frankie and little Colleen, and several guests. The feds brought all of those they arrested at my sister’s place over to the Paradise, where they put us all in squad cars and took us to Pierre, the state capital.

At Pierre they put me into jail, awaiting trial. They cooked up three phony charges against me. Much later I found out the reason for the big raid. An informer had told the FBI that Peltier was hiding on my place. They searched the Paradise and miles around with choppers, dogs, and rows of men, but they didn’t find him—for the simple reason that he wasn’t there. Because the FBI goofed I had to go through three trials and spend time in jail.

But I think, regardless of Peltier, they would have found a way to put me away, because as a spiritual medicine man I was a greater danger to them than our political leaders.

My mother, who was in her seventies at the time, watched the whole thing. “They were looking for Peltier, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere near Rosebud. Because they couldn’t find Peltier, they took my boy. That was a very bad day for us and for Rosebud.”

After Wounded Knee, the word went out from the FBI to the Justice Department and the courts: Prosecute, prosecute, prosecute! No matter if you can’t get a conviction, prosecute! If one AIM leader is acquitted on one charge, try him for another. Don’t dismiss cases that are weak or not worth the effort. Keep AIM in court all the time. Keep them busy so they can’t do their civil rights campaigns. Prosecute not only the big guys, but also the foot soldiers, the little people.

Out of every hundred Indian civil rights cases, only seven led to convictions. It did not matter that it jammed
up the courts and wasted the taxpayers’ money, just as long as it kept us involved in trial after trial and ate up our supporters’ money. No case was too insignificant.

Some prosecutors went to any length to get a conviction against AIM defendants. In the trial of Dennis Banks and Russell Means in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the prosecutor put on the stand a witness who swore falsely under oath to have seen Dennis and Russell do certain things at Wounded Knee, when at the time this witness had been a thousand miles away in California. When the judge, Frederick Nichol, found out about this, he exploded in anger. For an hour and a half he told the prosecutor and the FBI what he thought of them. He said that all his life he had believed in the FBI and the American system of justice, until this moment.

In his decision, Judge Nichol found sufficient evidence of further governmental misconduct to push him ‘over the brink’ of dismissal: (1) the prosecutor’s offering and failing to correct obviously false testimony; (2) seemingly intentional deception of the court as to the possibility of a witness’s involvement in a rape incident; (3) the deliberate deception or grossly negligent conduct of the prosecutor in eliciting testimony which was directly contradicted by a document in the prosecutor’s possession but which he had failed to furnish; (4) the attempt to conceal the extent of military involvement at Wounded Knee; and (5) the reasons given to the media by the prosecutor for refusing to proceed with eleven jurors after one juror had become ill. Judge Nichol dismissed all charges, finding the administration of justice had been “tainted” by “serious” prosecutorial “misconduct.” He said, “I am forced to the conclusion that the prosecutor in this trial had something other than attaining justice foremost in its mind…. This case was not prosecuted in good faith or the spirit of justice. The waters of justice have been polluted.”

The first of my three trials took place before the shoot-out at Pine Ridge and before the big raid on Crow Dog’s Paradise. This was the case involving the four postal inspectors who had come
to spy on us at Wounded Knee. The trial was a heyoka deal, a clown theater. I could not believe that this sort of “doing justice” could happen in America. It would have been funny if they had not found us guilty.

The prosecutor was R. D. Hurd, who had been criticized by Judge Nichol for his misconduct in the Banks-Means case. Instead he was named “prosecutor of the year.” The charge against Carter Camp, Stan Holder, and myself was “aiding and abetting in preventing federal officers from exercising their functions, and robbery.” Preventing them from exercising their functions meant that our security had stopped them from spying on us. Robbery meant that their guns had been taken away. We were tried simply because we had been in the museum when the postal inspectors were brought in. The prosecution said that being present there made us as guilty as the young guys who had stopped the agents at the roadblock. All three of us had asked to be tried together with Dennis and Russ before Judge Nichol in Saint Paul. This was denied us. The government wanted to have as many trials going on as possible, at different times and places. We were tried two years after the event. This denied us our constitutional right to a speedy trial.

The judge in this case was Edward “Speedy Eddie” McManus. He rushed the jury selection through in one day, giving our lawyers a deadline of five o’clock to finish their questioning. This did not give them enough time to find out whether some of the jurors were racist or prejudiced. We found out when one of the jurors threw a fit when I swore on the pipe instead of on the Bible. All the jurors were white.

Our first objection was that our trial was a case of “selective prosecution.” By this we meant that AIM members opposed to the government’s policies were prosecuted for trivial reasons, whereas in the case of Wilson and his goons, the government chose
not
to prosecute the arson, aggravated assault, and murder. In June 1974, while negotiations were going on about a plea
bargain that would have resulted in the dismissal of most Wounded Knee-related charges, the FBI wrote the attorney general an “action memorandum”:

This, of course, was against the rule that “the government may not prosecute for the purpose of deterring people from exercising their right to protest of official misconduct and petition for redress of grievances.”

We got nowhere with this. So they violated our right to equal protection under the law. We suffered from a double standard of justice from the beginning.

Immediately after their release at Wounded Knee, the postal inspectors were questioned for hours by the FBI. They testified before a grand jury. At that time they had nothing bad to say against me, Carter, or Stan. They didn’t know me. They didn’t even know my name. They didn’t know that Crow Dog existed or that he was AIM’s medicine man. I was just a person who had given them breakfast and a lecture. They were shown a stack of
photographs of people involved in Custer and Wounded Knee, including myself. But none of them could identify me from the photographs.

The witnesses against us were three of the four postal inspectors—Graham, Schneider, and Hanson. Jack Hanson spoke the truth. He said over and over again, and he also wrote, “Crow Dog gave us a dialogue and then left without having taken any part in the kidnapping, robbery, or release.” This was true enough, except that there was no kidnapping. The inspectors were simply stopped and detained for, maybe, an hour and a half.

The biggest problem was Graham. Before the trial he had made four conflicting reports. Now, on the stand, he suddenly testified that I had asked security to “search the inspectors’ crotches for hidden radios and microphones.” We had to laugh. Even the prosecutor said he “was surprised by this allegation.” My lawyer asked him how he knew it was me. Graham said he recognized me because he had seen a picture of me in a newspaper together with Russell Means when we were part of an AIM delegation in Washington, D.C. The defense proved that there was no such picture. Then Graham said that he knew me because the FBI had pointed me out to him. He testified that I had asked him for the keys to his car. Schneider later said, “Not for the car keys but for the keys to a briefcase inside the car, and it was Stan Holder, not Crow Dog.” Schneider also testified that I was one of those who had stopped the inspectors
outside
the museum, and that I had told him that he was a “prisoner of war.” He said the FBI had shown him the picture of a man at the roadblock and told him that it was Crow Dog. The picture was not shown to the defense. Had they shown it to us we could easily have proved that the man in the picture was not me. One of the inspectors said that my lecture lasted twelve minutes, another said it had been forty-five minutes, Hanson called it a half hour. And so it went. They all said different things.

Finally the case went to the jury on a charge of aiding and abetting. With no deliberation or discussion, they found us guilty.

On August 5, 1975, I went to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for sentencing.
My family and friends came to be with me. The courtroom was dark and gloomy, with heavy wood paneling. Everybody was searched before going in. They spread-eagled my seven-year-old daughter Ina and ran a metal detector over her. They ran the detector over little Pedro’s diaper. I wore my hair loose and unadorned. I carried my pipe. The courtroom was full of my Indian supporters and white racists who wanted to see us taken off to jail.

Then there was a hitch. Stan and Carter did not show up for the sentencing. Somebody said he’d heard on the radio that Dennis Banks had not shown up for his sentencing at Custer and jumped bail. I guess they didn’t trust the American justice system. At any rate, they had me.

Our prosecutor, R. D. Hurd, told the court, “Crow Dog is a danger to the American way of life. He must be put away.” He begged the court not to let me out on parole. He talked about the humiliation of the postal inspectors who had to stand with their hands on their heads when they were caught spying. He said, “I don’t care, and I submit to you that it doesn’t make any difference if conditions on the reservations are good or bad. I don’t care if the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie was violated or not by the United States.” Hurd went on and on. He told the jury that Wounded Knee “strikes at the very heart of the ability to maintain law and order.” He said that Crow Dog’s being a medicine man was immaterial. He said, “Crow Dog is not a peaceful man.”

Ken Tilsen spoke on my behalf. He said, “I know my client to be innocent of these charges and the prosecution knows he is innocent.” He said Hurd “lies to and deceives the court.”

The judge said, “The guilt of the defendant is established by the jury’s verdict.” He pronounced me guilty of aiding and abetting, of interfering with federal officers, of robbery. He called Wounded Knee “a violent insurrection going beyond the nonviolent approach to injustice.” He then sentenced me to three years for “interference” and eight years for “robbery”—that is, taking away the agents’ guns.

But this was Iowa, not South Dakota. Judge McManus went
on, saying that I was “a borderline case” because I was a spiritual leader. He cited the many letters he had received supporting me. And it was my first offense. He suspended the sentence and put me on five years’ probation. And so I walked out an almost free man.

Outside the courthouse my sister Dinah sang a brave-heart song and put sacred red face paint on my cheeks and forehead. The press surrounded me, holding microphones to my face. I said, “We Indians have been in suspended sentence for three hundred years. We were here long before the wasichus came with their courthouses and jailhouses. We will be here after all their courthouses and jailhouses have crumbled to dust.”

My troubles were not over. I knew that the government would not rest until it had me behind bars. Waiting for my next trials, I had a Native American Church meeting. I talked to the Great Spirit: “Grandfather, this is me. This is how I pray to you, so that I could be with my people. In the future, Grandfather, I am going into another trial. Grandfather, don’t let me be in the penitentiary. My Indian people need me. I want my Lakota people to learn the old Indian ways. I want to teach them. Grandfather, bless my nephew who is taking care of the fire for us. Bless my other nephew, who is going to do the cedaring. Bless my drummer. Grandfather, for many generations people came here to this place to pray. Our ancestors’ moccasin trails are still here. Let them be recognized by the United States government. Grandfather, I ask you, I ask the great Creator, the earth maker, don’t let them take me away. Mitakuye oyasin.”

I was first to be tried for having defended my home when Beck and McCloskey came, claiming to be looking for Leonard Peltier. The trial took place in Pierre. The presiding judge was Robert Merhige, whose court was in Richmond, Virginia. The government probably picked Merhige because he knew nothing about the situation of Indians on the reservations, or about AIM, or about me and my background. The government had instructed him to run several AIM-connected federal cases as quickly as
possible, and he did. He tried a case against Russell Means in the same courtroom, on the same day, as my case. The prosecutor again was R. D. Hurd. There seemed to be no way to evade him. He had become the government’s special anti-AIM prosecutor.

My lawyer, Dan Taylor, arrived on the scene when my trial had been going on for some time. I had been given a court-appointed lawyer by the name of Srtska, who had been the campaign manager for state attorney general, later governor, Bill Janklow, who had run on an anti-Indian, anti-AIM platform. In his campaign speeches Janklow often said that he would put AIM members behind bars above ground, but that he preferred to see them six feet underground. Srtska had made no investigations on my behalf; he just advised me to plead guilty. I spoke English very badly at the time, did not understand the language of the law, and often had trouble following the proceedings. I was not given an interpreter.

Dan Taylor rescued me from Srtska, but he was given no time to familiarize himself with my case, no time to go to Rosebud to interview witnesses. He asked for a continuance, and the judge gave him forty-eight hours. Dan protested that he had not even been notified and that he needed time to prepare my defense. The judge said the court-appointed lawyer had been given enough time to prepare the case. The defense was not allowed to question would-be jurors. An all-white jury, mostly ranchers, was selected within one hour. The trial lasted only one afternoon. The jury found me and Coke Millard guilty. Sentencing would take place the next morning, November 30, 1975.