Searching for God in nature, photography, whiskey, books and art…. whatever rant I am compelled to voice

Posts tagged “AIM

RICHARD MARSHALL FOUND INNOCENT

I was traveling all week one side of Oregon and then the other…Thursday I came home to the good news that the first  fiasco trial in the Anna Mae Aquash murder outcome was innocent!!

A federal jury deliberated for less than two hours Thursday before finding Vine Richard “Dickie” Marshall not guilty of murder in connection with the 1975 slaying of American Indian Movement activist Annie Mae Aquash.

Marshall’s supporters, who filled one side of the U.S. District courtroom, erupted in cheers and applause when the verdict was read about 2 p.m. Marshall stood and hugged Dana Hanna, his court-appointed attorney.

Afterward, Hanna noted that people have said a Native American cannot get a fair trial in front of an all-white jury in South Dakota. “We have proved them wrong today,” he said.

Prosecutors had tried to prove that Marshall, 59, provided the handgun used to kill Aquash, who some in AIM believed was a government informant.

Arlo Looking Cloud, who was convicted in 2004 of her murder and is serving life in prison, was the government’s key witness. After years of denying that he, John Graham, Theda Clarke and Aquash had stopped at Marshall’s home in Allen just hours before Aquash was killed near Wanblee, Looking Cloud came forward in 2008 to say they had stopped in Allen and that Marshall had given them a handgun.

On the witness stand last week, Looking Cloud claimed he did not tell the story sooner because he was afraid of Marshall.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Mandel suggested to jurors that there was another reason Looking Cloud didn’t talk sooner. If he had mentioned going to Marshall’s to get a gun, Looking Cloud would have been admitting he knew Aquash would be killed, Mandel said.

Mandel cited evidence that Clarke had given Graham a note that read something like, “take care of this baggage.”

“Folks, there wasn’t any baggage,” he said. “There was only a human being they wanted taken care of, and that was Annie Mae Pictou … ‘Take care of it?’ Hey, you can draw your own conclusions as to what that meant.”

In order for Marshall to be convicted, federal prosecutors had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he had both provided the gun and known it would be used to kill Aquash. Hanna suggested in his closing arguments that the government had proven neither.

“This case of the government consists of the words that came out of Arlo Looking Cloud’s mouth and Serle Chapman’s mouth,” neither of which Hanna said were credible.

Hanna argued that Looking Cloud made up the story about Marshall in hopes of getting out of prison and because Looking Cloud believed Marshall had “ratted him out” to investigators.

And Hanna questioned why Chapman, a British writer, did not tell investigators until 2008 about an unrecorded conversation in which he said he asked Marshall about the gun.

continued at RAPID CITY JOURNAL

Contact Heidi Bell Gease at 394-8419 or heidi.bell@rapidcityjournal.com



REDFORD ON PELTIER

story at STELLAR HEALING


MONICA CHARLES WRITES ABOUT THE ANNA MAE MURDER TRIAL

ANNA MAE AQUASH: THE LEGEND
By
Monica J Charles

Anna Mae Aquash is the stuff of legends. She died in her prime under mysterious circumstances. She was only thirty years old and the mother of two small children. She was beautiful, smart and shined with promise. She was friends with the American Indian Movement leadership and the rank and file….CONTINUE STORY AT STELLAR HEALING

CLASSIC COINTELPRO
(The story of Anna Mae Aquash
and
Arlo Looking Cloud)

I don’t have words to name the anguish I have carried for Anna Mae, Arlo and John. Thirty years ago hope was a luminous butterfly breaking out of her cocoon in my heart. The days of the old movement, the 1970’s brought out the best in us, and the worst.

We flew to the sun and stole light at the occupation of Wounded Knee 1973 as our rag tag band of Indians yanked our history and destiny from the hands of the United States government. Wounded Knee had been synonymous with the death of our way of life. Close your eyes and you can see Big Foot and his people, frozen where they fell, shot by American soldiers…..CONTINUE THIS STORY AT STELLAR HEALING


YOUR FBI $$$’s HARD AT WORK???

WOW! Is this an example of our Federal dollars at work? Not sure who SNAPPLE is but since he came to my house uninvited supporting  Special Agent Joseph Trimbach. As a courtesy I put up a video that he thinks is relevant to the John Graham/Richard Marshall debacle trial. I think the trial is tearing apart Indian country but mostly the mainstream media does not report on it…another example of how the United States continues their ongoing history of racist beliefs and actions against the indigenous people population of this beautiful land.

Although I posted the video late last night with his name in caps he cannot seem to find it even though I also linked the post to his own blog LEGEND OF PINE RIDGE. Snapple is upset not  only because he thinks I did not put up Two Elks video but because he mistakenly  wrote on a previous post “the FBI is against Indians” He corrected himself but apparently he has no sense of humor. SNAPPLE claims I was making fun at his expense and that he is “older”…not sure what that means…at any rate he is an “older” person who quickly resorts to insults and tantrums when he thinks he has not gotten his way. On top of that I specifically told him that I would post it sometime…I was going to wait until the weekend but stayed up last night..

Mr. Snapple you need to read RULES FOR COMMENTING ON MY BLOG.

Here is one of several comments he left on my blog…I am responding in parenthesis

You are obviously a stupid little idiot who is not able to argue honestly if you choose to make something of an older person’s typing error. And lazy and dishonest not to post TWo Elk’s recent video.

I have given you the youtube link a few times.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbkm1lMI0DU

Monica and Anna Mae both were both reportedly in a relationship to Dennis Banks, although he was married to Ka-Mook.(Noo….Monica Charles says she was not in a relationship with Dennis Banks and what is your source to such a claim? Do you just throw that stuff out there hoping a sex scandal will spice things up? You sound like the NATIONAL ENQUIRER!)

Monica’s brother (where do you get your information??? Do you think everybody with the last name of Charles is Monicas brother???) Norman was allegedly with Peltier when the FBI agents were shot.

Monica is pretty much at ground zero and spends a lot of time discrediting Indians such as Richard Two Elk and Ka-Mook, who have told the authorities what they witnessed so that there would be evidence to take to court.(Didn’t Ka-Mook get paid 49,000 for her testimony? She basically testified heresay and seven months later married one of the governments lead investigators in the  Anna Mae Aquash case. From what I understand Richard Two Elk’s testimony is so bad and he has put out so many conflicting stories that he is not taken too seriously on the stand….or by PBS.)

Here is something Two Elk said about what Dennis Banks ordered boys to do during the occupation:

“I was there, at Wounded Knee. At the age of 19, I backpacked weapons and supplies into the village with my AIM brothers. I remember it was near Easter, because that’s when our leader, Dennis Banks, ordered us to ‘take care’ of a young white guy, suspected of being an informant. We knew what that meant. We strung him up on a cross in a mock crucifixion, and beat him. After we took him down, they led him away and I don’t think he was ever heard from again.”(Richard Two Elk has apparently written several different versions of this incident…If this is true why have the FBI not prosecuted him for murder???)

http://www.expertclick.com/NewsReleaseWire/ReleaseDetails.aspx?ID=26541

Agnes Gildersleeve testified that Indian people were held in a church and threatened with guns. AIM took over a disabled man’s trailer and other people’s homes.

Agnes recounts:

“[AIM] took complete control of the telephone service and local residents were not permitted to answer any of the phones. When my phone would ring, an armed guard would immediately answer the phone and direct the call over to [disabled Wilber Reigert’s stolen] trailer house where Banks, Means, and Bellecourt were located…” (Trimbach p. 88) (The Gildersleeves were well known for taking advantage of Native Americans at their trading post…selling objects offensive to Native Americans. Here is Steve Hendricks talking about the Gildersleeves:

Tim Giago writes that I unfairly impugned the honor of the late Clive and Agnes Gildersleeve. The Gildersleeves owned the trading post at Wounded Knee, which was looted by militants who had seized the village to protest oppression on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and beyond. Sloppily lumping my book The Unquiet Grave with Peter Matthiessen’s In The Spirit of Crazy Horse, Giago writes, “In [the two books], you will read about a ‘white man’ and a woman often referred to as a ‘white woman,’ although Agnes Gildersleeve was an Ojibwa woman, who ‘ripped off’ the local Lakota people. This apparently justifies the attacks upon them and the destruction of their business.”

I did not write that Ms. Gildersleeve was white, did not use the words “ripped off” (though they are not far from the truth), and did not excuse the attack on them or their business. I did explain why many Indians hated the business:

“Its owners, the Gildersleeve and Czywczynski families, had strewn billboards for seventy-five miles that announced, SEE THE WOUNDED KNEE MASSACRE SITE, VISIT THE MASS GRAVE. POSTCARDS, CURIOS, DON’T MISS IT! The postcards showed slaughtered Indians, including Chief Big Foot, frozen in the 1890 snow. The traders enlivened their commerce with beadwork, quilts, and other curios bought low from Oglalas and sold high. A Catholic priest once watched Mrs. Czywczynski barter a beader to a stingy $3.50 for an exquisite work, then turn around and sell it for $12.00. The traders doubled as creditors, lending their Indian patrons $10 at humble interest of $2.25 a week. As village postmasters, they also offered a rudimentary auto-payment–opening the mail of customers who had run tabs, cashing their checks without asking, paying their bills at the post, and calling other shopkeepers across the reservation to see if debts were owed them too. There had been calls to boycott the post, but none had worked. The post was the only store for a dozen miles, and the many carless Oglalas of Wounded Knee had no choice but to buy groceries and other wares at its inflated prices. Years later Clive Gildersleeve was called to testify about his business practices, and he invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself ninety-nine times.”

Giago goes on to paint me as an apologist for the American Indian Movement, which led the Indian rights struggle of the 1970s. This is rank distortion. Mine was the first book to describe AIM’s secret killing inside Wounded Knee of an activist named Ray Robinson, and the book’s centerpiece was AIM’s infamous execution of Anna Mae Aquash two years later. As Giago well knows, I condemned AIM sharply for these and lesser brutalities, and more than one AIM leader has threatened me for my pains. What riles Giago is that I also praised AIM (the overwhelming majority of whose members were peaceful) for fighting oppression, and I denuded the oppressors, from small-timers like the Gildersleeves to big-timers like the FBI, the latter of which persistently goaded AIM to just the sort of violence it committed. In Indian Country, the haves like Giago have long fought to keep the have-nots in their place. It is one reason the have-nots are still so multitudinous.



RICHARD TWO ELK FOR SNAPPLE

I have posted on this before. I thought maybe it was something new…Richard Two Elk the man who wrote the forward to AMERICAN INDIAN MAFIA also makes videos. This is being put up again for SNAPPLE who runs the THE LEGEND OF PINE RIDGE blog. After watching it again I still have the same opinion….after the video…

I have several problems with this video…Richard Two Elks supposedly owns and produces videos yet he doesn’t know not to wear a hat on camera…indoors either as far as I am concerned. I was raised that it is disrespectful. Another thing that bothers me is that Richard Two Elks never speaks confidently into the camera…he hides his face and is always looking down at a prepared statement he also mumbles and slurs. It was a bizarre video the first time I watched it and still is. Richard Two Elks was at Wounded Knee II he knows who everyone is and the history….I still get names confused…but I can tell you what I know and believe….looking you in the eye confident that I am true to my feelings and in my beliefs based on what I know…But as I said this might be a difference between whites and Indians?? I am not trying to be mean but the video lacks passion and conviction for the subject never mind that I do not agree with all that is in the video….

Because I have read many other things by Richard Two Elk….I have a hard time believing that these are his words…this is how Richard Two Elks usually writes in some weird voice. This is a comment to me for posting the SNAPPLE post on alt.native

so…why da hill ya postin it hear?…

not nuff room onyer Clog, i meanz…blog…?

please refrain from redundant posting of content which may be read
elsewhere, in it’s entirety, IF anyone should want…

DUH!

and this

da mistake ya repeatedly recycle IS…ya seem to bleev we all wanna
play yer stoopid pre-adolescent games witya…
AxeUWally…we find sum sick entertainment in watchin you flop
roundabout…

pass dat Popcorn puleez…

and this from another post

if’n ya kickout 9 or 10 o yer C&Pz dat outta move yer last act o
IDIOCY off da Front Page anywhoz…

den ya kin maka neu face til Sizzle catch up witya N Cookya agin…

Dang…me Know ya Gotta B havin Bic Phun messin witus, eh?

Like I said it may be a difference between whites and Indians…but Monica Charles doesn’t speak like that…its weird like he has to create another  personality for???

I could be wrong but I was raised in a very conservative home and while I am quite liberal in my political views…I mostly carry quite conservative values and this man really bothers me…

One of the other things that bothers me about Richard Two Elks is that he admits to hanging a man on a cross and beating him…I know he was young but he was never charged by the FBI and speaks of the incident in the forward he  wrote(?) to Special Agent Joseph Trimabach’s book AMERICAN INDIAN MAFIA. I am a huge believer that all laws should be for all people….while I may not be happy with the prison system in the United States…I believe that run correctly it should be a place where people are held accountable for their actions…I think it is a necessary step to healing all parties involved.I think that people either rise to the occasion or remain unable to confront the horror of what they have done and thus are never able to be totally free. I do not believe that informers involved in crimes should get lesser sentences than those they have informed on…I do think that it should be a consideration after remorseful behavior and parole is being considered. Richard Two Elk reminds me of someone who is not proud of who he has become.

There are a lot of accusations flung about on alt.native and I try not to pay attention to the ones that are just insults being flung around…there are a lot….one of the accusations being hurled around for awhile was that the “real victims” of  Wounded Knees were those whose homes were destroyed and that the occupiers of Wounded Knee should sew blankets. Some write like the people are living in cardboard boxes not with no blankets or food….Wounded Knee seems to be  a very emotional and sacred site, there was a movement of Indians who were being repressed by the government State and Federal….they thought quite mistakenly that a group of individuals with a few rifles were a match for for the United States government…and like Japan-they were wrong.

The appropriate response after Wounded Knee would have been for the governor at the time to declare an emergency ask for Federal money in order for the owners to rebuild….if this was not done? Shame should be on our government.

The video is very one sided and while Richard Two Elk claims PBS neglected to tell the  death of  a black supporter at Wounded Knee.. he fails to mention that he hung someone on a cross and beat them to death…this person has disappeared and apparently he changes his story…AIM took him….the FBI took him…??? This is a man who the FBI has chosen as their spokes person on AIM and Wounded Knee. Further more this video fails to mention the abuse and murder of Indian children on Pine Ridge…a little girls eye was shot out. Houses and cars were routinely shot up….even some of the lawyers for the occupiers were beaten.  A young woman named Jancita Eagle Deer was raped by the future Governor…He was disbarred by the tribal courts…but the FBI was so racist against Indians that they did not consider the tribal judge to be legitamate….because he was Indian?? There are so many twists and turns to this story I encourage all of you who are interested to read THE UNQUIET GRAVE by Steve Hendricks. He seems to be unbiased and often criticizes or praises both the FBI and AIM.

The fact of the matter is PBS could do a five part series on Wounded Knee II and never be able to cover all of the finger pointing and accusations. The murder of Anna Mae Aquash alone has more whodunnit theories than CARTERS HAS LIVER PILLS!

My solution to all of this is to either let it drop or to put every single person under sodium penethol or hook them up to lie detector tests…every FBI agent, BIA workers…all of the major characters on Pine Ridge…in AIM…FBI informants…even with all of that peoples faulty memories probably still wouldn’t be enough to find out what really happened.