Throughout the three years after Wounded Knee II - a period long referred to as the "Reign of Terror" by local Native Americans - the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) carried out intensive local surveillance, as well as repeated arrests, harassment and bad faith legal proceedings, against AIM leaders and supporters at Pine Ridge. The FBI also closely collaborated with and supported the local tribal chairperson, Dick Wilson, and his vigilantes - the Guardians Of the Oglala Nation (GOONs). Mr. Wilson was notorious for his corruption and abuse of power. Following the peaceful conclusion of the 1973 stand-off, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation had subsequent conflicts and violence among its residents. Within this same period, the FBI's COINTELPRO conducted a full-fledged counterinsurgency war against the American Indian Movement (AIM) - complete with death squads, disappearances and assassinations - not dissimilar to those conducted in third world countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala. During the 1974 Banks-Means trial, Gladys Bisonette, a defense witness, testified that "The goons were allowed to carry high-powered rifles. It's nothing to kill an Indian on our reservation!" She asked: "If there's a crime against looking for justice, where do we go to find justice in America?" (Matthiessen, ibid, p. 91.) During this "Reign of Terror," some 64 local Native Americans were murdered and nearly 350 were subjected to non-lethal but serious physical assault. Virtually all of the victims were either affiliated with AIM or their allies, the traditional tribal members. The murder rate between March 1, 1973 and March 1, 1976 was 170 per 100,000. Detroit had a rate of 20.2 per 100,000 in 1974 and at the time was considered "the murder capital of the US." The national average was 9.7 per 100,000. AIM representatives noted there were many unsolved murders of a number of opponents of the tribal government installed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. By this time tensions were running extremely high on all sides, setting the stage for the incident at Oglala on June 26, 1975. The FBI had jurisdiction to investigate major crimes, yet these deaths were never adequately investigated or resolved. Nor did the FBI agents take any measures to curb the violence of the GOONs, with whom they closely collaborated. However, In May 2000, at the height of the clemency campaign on behalf of Leonard Peltier, the FBI's Minneapolis Field Office released its so-called accounting of unresolved murders on the Pine Ridge Reservation which was [later] analyzed and refuted by Professor Ward Churchill.
Peter Mattheissen's book does a bang-up marvelous job of telling the whole nuanced, complex, sad, and sordid story. [Recommendations: Get yourself a copy. Read it!] I don't have time to go through everything in there, but there's likely no better way to get familiar with the relevant facts. Plus, it just plain is good reading. Perhaps better described as the "New Indian Wars," this period in time marked a shameful epoch in American history. The truth is I don't even like talking about it. But if I want to tell the truth, then I MUST. Everybody knows the FBI are the good guys. Shoot, I watch and enjoy "Criminal Minds" myself. Heck, I like those agents: They're young and idealistic, wrestling with past traumas - or else they're old, grizzled, and dedicated to finding the truth. But. . . . Every single one of them? Without any exceptions? Ever? Throughout the whole of our nation's painful and ethically checkered history? . . . Come on: that's stretching even my credulity. Unfortunately, I was finally forced to let the FBI testify against its own behavior with documents released through FOIA lawsuits. I'll get to that part later. (I promise.) For now, I'm in danger of getting ahead of myself.
Please bear with me while I explain. After World War II uranium was found a bit south of the Black Hills city named after General Custer. In 1953 the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the military were its only buyers, but the AEC established a station at Edgemont, and with the creation of a domestic market for nuclear energy in the late 1960s and with a sudden rise in the price of uranium a new Black Hills "gold rush" broke out. At this same time the energy corporations were were acquiring coal and oil mining rights to vast tracts of the western states. Billions of tons of coal from the Fort Union seam (North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming) were presented to the companies at a cost averaging around three dollars an acre. It was a huge transfer of public wealth into private hands. Of course, while the corporations went into a feeding frenzy, some concerned people began to have grave doubts. Twenty-five large corporations, including Kerr-McGee (of Karen Silkwood fame), plus the Tennessee Valley Authority (a government-owned corporation) were considered by AIM to be dedicated enemies of the Indian Nations. [Yes, you read that right: the Tennessee Valley Authority was mining in Indian territory.] These concerns had already devastated large tracts of Indian country in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona through strip mines and their attendant landscape contamination. Now with the cooperation of the State, they wanted to do as much for the Black Hills. (Matthiessen, ibid, p. 105.)
However, the traditionals had been in opposition all along. In the early 1970s even the tribal councils were forced to weigh the benefits of mining leases versus the long-term welfare of their nations. In plain words, they realized the destruction of the land must lead to the certain destruction of the Indian people. With so much money on the line (Indian land in the west contains most of the continent's uranium and much of its coal and oil) it couldn't hurt to identify AIM as a Communist-inspired terrorist front, and thereby destroy this threat to democracy and mining profits once and for all. An FBI document issued in 1974 draws attention to a statement made by Dennis Banks on April 16th of that year that AIM now intended a shift in emphasis toward the the prevention of continuing resource exploitation in Indian Lands. At that time, there was little if any documentation for a suspicion that the great wealth of materials beneath reservation lands explained the government's remorseless attitude towards militant Indians. (Matthiessen, ibid, p. 106.)
The Justice Department had been disappointed by its failure to obtain a conviction in the Means-Banks case in St. Paul, but it soon grew clear that convictions let alone justice - were completely beside the point. What was being accomplished - through foul means and fair - was total disruption of the American Indian Movement in what was emerging as a program to "neutralize" AIM leaders all over the country. If you want to read the sordid details of this particular disgrace then read Peter Matthiessen's book, starting on page 106. Eventually his tale lead to the unmasking of an undercover FBI informant and provocateur named Douglass Durham, who had wormed his way into the AIM leadership and did his best to discredit them. (Matthiessen, ibid, p. 110.) He actually succeeded in causing a great deal of trouble before being outed. On March 5, Durham was confronted by AIM leaders in a hotel room and admitted his identity as AIM's mystery informant. One of Durham's peculiar boasts was that he was regarded by the Des Moines police as "head of the largest criminal organization in Iowa." Apparently he kept up his criminal career even when working for the police and for the FBI. On March 12, 1975 AIM held a press conference in Chicago where Durham himself confirmed that he was an FBI informer. He identified the agents in the Minneapolis FBI office to whom he had reported, and went on to express regret about his role, praising AIM as "an organization attempting to effect change in America." Apparently he had sold information to the FBI later used in the prosecutions, as well as photographs of Wounded Knee defenses. He gave several boastful interviews to the press bragging about the power he had wielded as national security director of AIM. (Mattiessen, ibid, p. 121.)
NOTE: Durham's exposure as an agent provocateur attracted the attention of a Senate Select subcommittee on Intelligence, headed by Senator Frank Church. The Church Committee, created in January 1975 to investigate reports of domestic spying and counterintelligence programs both in the FBI and CIA, had already decried such activities as the sexual blackmail of Martin Luther King and the actress Jean Seberg, allegedly pregnant by a Black Panther lover (before his murder, FBI operatives suggested to King that he commit suicide, and the harassed Seberg eventually did so); it was also interested in the role of FBI informants in the Chicago police raid in which Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were assassinated. The Church Committee, which eventually condemned COINTELPRO as "a sophisticated vigilante operation" aimed at those whom the FBI considered threats "to the existing political and social order." The tension accumulating on Pine Ridge exploded on June 26, 1975, with the killing of two FBI agents there, and the committee's investigation of COINTELPRO and AIM came to a sudden and unfortunate end. (Matthiessen, ibid, pp. 125-126.) [Question: Can any attempt to correct long-standing but accepted abuses (which are evil in themselves) not be a threat to to "the existing political and social order?"]