While all that drama was happening, yet another tragedy was playing out to the north. On February 6, 1976, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police Inspector named Edward R. J. Mitchel received a call after midnight in his motel at White Core, Alberta. He was instructed to go to Hinton (one hundred sixty miles west of Edmonton) to organize a search for "a Mr. Peltier." The search wasn't needed, since an informer had evidently told the police just where to go. That day, Mitchell and his Mounties proceeded to the remote camp of a Cree leader named Robert Smallboy. Smallboy's camp was a makeshift congregation of small cabins and a portable one-room schoolhouses donated by the provincial government. At about three in the afternoon the fugitive was found sitting near the blackboard, beside a suitcase containing two loaded revolvers, an M-1, and a .30-30. (Peltier asserts that the weapons he was found with were unloaded.) The captive was placed in an unmarked police car with another ResMurs suspect named Frank Black Horse. Because the .30-30 rifle in his possession had been taken from the farm in Ontario, Oregon, on November 15, 1975, he was charged with with the theft of the gun and pickup truck in addition to his alleged murders and attempted murders. While awaiting a hearing, he was removed to Oakalla Prison, outside of Vancouver, which was then subjected by the press to FBI warnings of armed escape raids and terrorist crimes against the populace. In the lurid atmosphere being whipped up to expedite his extradition, this desperate felon (never convicted of a felony in all his life) was kept in complete isolation from the other prisoners and handcuffed at all times when outside his cell except during his exercise, which was limited to less than half an hour each day. He was permitted no outside exercise at all between February and June 1976.
Despite a show of concern for justice - including formal demands for an investigation into the death of Anna Mae Pictou, "a Canadian Citizen" who would not have acknowledged herself as such, the Dominion was undergoing its own fever of anti-Indian sentiment and anxious to rid itself of Peltier, certain to organize Indian resistance to similar exploitation. The year before, in a document leaked to the willing press, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had warned the citizens about a dangerous AIM-inspired Indian movement. It was part of an international terrorist conspiracy which sought social and economic equality for Canada's Indians as well as just recognition of their land claims. "The Red Power Movement," the police declared, "has become the principal threat to Canadian stability." Established in the late nineteenth century as a military force to remove Indians from prairie lands coveted by settlers, the Mounties had never outgrown the idea that Indians, in the main, are a venomous nuisance. An indication of the status of native peoples, and the special attention paid to them by the police, can be gained by the fact that 25 percent of of jail inmates in Saskatchewan are Indians, who represent just 2 percent of the general population. In fact, the Mounties were only too eager to cooperate with their American colleagues in bringing to justice this cop-killing aborigine, sought by the Unites States with the same fervor that Sitting Bull had been sought a century earlier.
While in prison, Leonard was adopted by the Kwikwasutainwook people of the Kwakewlth ("Quakiutl") nation on Vancouver island at a traditional potlach ceremony. He was given a plot of land on Kwakewlth territory and the name Gwarth-ee-las, "He-Leads-the-People." As a Sioux-Ojibwa from the Canadian border country, he had rapidly become a hero. When his extradition hearings came up in May, an effort was mode to present him as a caged animal instead. Although an assistant referred to Peltier as "a model prisoner," the director of Oakalla publicly described him as one of the most dangerous prisoners ever confined there. He called Leonard a man capable of committing "any sort of act to stay in Canada - even as far as to murder or maim an inmate or prison official." In treatment condemned as "unjustifiable" by Amnesty International, which sent an observer to his trials, he was kept alone under heavy guard in an observation unit, due to escape plots he was alleged to be hatching. Whenever he left his cell, he was subject to body searches and was invariably shackled hand and foot on the short trip between his cell and the courtroom. In what the Vancouver Sun described as "what must surely be one of the most remarkable occasions in the history of this country's legal process . . . . entrants to the courtroom are being spread-eagled against the wall and frisked in scenes from S.W.A.T. A policewoman runs her hands inside the bras of female reporters. Shoes are removed. Jackets are removed. Purses must be left outside. Is this a Canadian courtroom? It is, in fact, a Canadian courtroom asked to rule on the internal policies of another country." (Matthiessen, ibid, pp. 275-276.)
At Peltier's extradition hearings, lawyers, friends, and family plead to the Canadian government the the FBI was engaged in a systematic repression of AIM, and that Peltier's life would be in danger if he was denied political asylum. These pleas were countered by the Wisconsin "attempted murder" charges, which buttressed the weak Oglala evidence. However, the final blows to Leonard's hope for avoiding extradition were two surprise documents in which a firsthand witness identified Peltier as the unassisted killer of Coler and Williams. In fact, the witness had signed three separate (and different) affidavits. Only two of these were used to seal Pelier's fate. This witness was the same Myrtle Poor Bear who had just before so conveniently plugged every hole in the prosecution's leaky South Dakota case against Dick Marshall, thus ensuring his murder conviction. Her first sworn affidavit was never even presented during Peltier's extradition hearings. However, on May 11, Paul Halprin, a prosecuting attorney for the Canadian Department of Justice representing the United States, presented her second affidavit, dated 23 February, in which the witness declared that she had accompanied Peltier to Oglala in May, 1975; that Peltier "and others began planning on how to kill either FBI, U.S. Government police or BIA agents who might come into the area." She described in graphic detail Peltier's being in charge of the planning, her witnessing the killings - performed in exactly the manner presented by the FBI in their contrived "execution" scenario - and a most convenient explanation of the FBI's embarrassing failure to apprehend suspects at the scene of the shoot-out. Secondly, Mr. Halprin then presented her third affidavit, dated 31, March. Here the agents completely abandoned the notion of Poor Bear's having overheard planning for an ambush. Instead, they focused on the details she provided as an "eyewitness."
These documents came as a complete surprise to the defense, which should have been notified of them in advance, according to ethical trial doctrine. In yet another surprise affidavit, an FBI agent claimed to have found in the open trunk of Coler's car a .223 shell casing, apparently ejected by the killer's rifle during the "executions," which had since been matched by an FBI ballistics expert to an AR-15 rifle that other witnesses had apparently associated with Leonard Peltier. Two days later, John Trudell spoke for the stunned defense. He described how AIM had been provoked by the FBI into violent responses so that its leaders could be killed, jailed, or otherwise "neutralized" - thereby eliminating all Indian opposition to usurpation of valuable Indian lands. Remember this was in 1975, years before the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit which in 1987 finally forced the FBI to turn over the needed critical documents was even filed. With no hard evidence in their hands, Trudell's assertions - even though true - remained only unsubstantiated unilateral claims on behalf of a wanted defendant. They were not enough. On June 18, Mr. Justice W. A. Schultz ruled that sufficient grounds for extradition had been presented. Leonard was on his way back to the U.S.A. for trial. Eventually, the FBI's use of perjured and coerced testimony was disclosed - and admitted. But by then, it was too late: the damage had been done. [Question: Why can advocates of "law and order" be so aggressive in preserving order, and yet so soft in following the law?]