[In a running conversation with Indian Country Today Senior Editor Jose Barreiro, Trudell seeks to address lingering issues in the dissolution of AIM and particularly in the case of Annie Mae Pictou-Aquash, the Micmac woman and AIM activist murdered in South Dakota during the winter of 1975 – ’76. One man, Arlo Looking Cloud, has been convicted in the murder while a second indicted man, John Graham, awaits extradition from Canada to the United States to stand trial.
This series covers Trudell’s perspective on the issues of violence in the activist movement where the renowned poet proposes a theory of the ”deeply embedded government operative” and the role of rogue government infiltration programs in stimulating violence in social and political movements. Trudell also addresses his own shift from political organizing to the musical poetics of stage and film.]
Jose Barreiro: It’s been 30 years since the killing of Annie Mae Pictou- Aquash. The case remains largely unsolved, although there has been one conviction in recent years. You’ve expressed interest in advancing some thoughts on the subject. I wonder how you’re feeling about where that investigation might be at and where you would like to see it go?
John Trudell: It’s interesting how the investigation into the killing of Annie Mae has unfolded. Where it stands right now, Arlo Looking Cloud has been convicted and he is serving time in the U.S. for his part in the crime. John Graham, ”John Boy,” is in Canada fighting extradition back to stand trial for murder, and my understanding is that he has been ordered to be extradited back but he is on a final appeal.
So we understand that the extradition is imminent.
This is the interesting part: to see if he actually gets extradited. Because he then would have nothing to lose and he is the one who would most likely know who made the actual decision to have Annie Mae killed. My overall view of this thing, I think that agents in the government were behind it. I mean this very seriously, that the government is the main force behind the killing of Annie Mae and the direct link representing the government would be agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I think that Annie Mae’s death is a result of a larger counterintelligence Cointel program that was being directed at AIM at that time. Some of those excesses by government agencies were later curtailed by the Congress, although now things appear to be going the other way; but in this case, I believe the government is still covering up. Annie Mae was murdered in 1975 and I know that by the 1980s Arlo had testified to the grand jury. It was still the 1980s when Arlo was first picked up and taken in for questioning by the government about this, about her abduction and killing. And so, considering that there were implications that AIM leadership at some level may have been involved in it, I’ve always found it interesting that the government did not more aggressively pursue her killing in the 1970s and in the 1980s – why did they not aggressively pursue it?
The implication of AIM leadership involvement in her execution surfaced publicly certainly by the 1980s.
Well, when Arlo’s story started coming out is when I heard it directly, in 1988. I heard it when Arlo told me about it; but when I look back at the story that Arlo told, it became obvious to me early that this whole trail of decision-making on the killing of Annie Mae could possibly lead to somebody within the AIM leadership. And I found it interesting that the government didn’t pursue that – I wondered why the government, after so much persecution of AIM, just didn’t get on that one and pursue it. Now, they’ve got all these mandates and attempts to discredit AIM leadership, to attack AIM leadership, and here is the hottest possible case – why wait 25 years to make the accusations? I would suggest this is on purpose. It is because trails go cold, evidence is lost, people forget; you know, putting distance between the event and when they went to deal with it. Over time, things are more easily rearranged. So we can see that through the years there have been close to a half-dozen grand juries about this and nothing was ever actively pursued beyond that. And so, I think that as time has passed the government is resurrecting the case now to try to just lay it at AIM, at the folks in AIM that their extended personnel was able to agitate and manipulate.
You feel they didn’t fully investigate it before?
Not aggressively. And there were no indictments. For some reason, they would get shut down or go away or whatever. And that had been the history of it until this last and present round when they indicted John Boy and Arlo Looking Cloud and took Arlo to trial and convicted him. Now they are going after John Boy, who has fought it from Canada. I say this is interesting now because if John Boy gets extradited back and stands trial, then I think that it creates a real opportunity to find out very specifically and exactly who is behind Annie Mae’s murder. Because no matter what role John Boy Graham may or may not have played in this, he was never the order-giver. And Arlo was never the order-giver. These were not the people who gave the orders. These are the people that we can allege were following the orders.
These two men would not make that kind of decision on their own. They would have no purpose to do it.
That’s the key part – having no purpose to do it. See, she wasn’t a threat, a risk; she posed no danger. She posed absolutely no danger to the group that took her; and to the men who allegedly shot her, in particular, she posed no threat. Again, they were not the decision-makers.
According to the testimony in the cases so far, Annie Mae was kidnapped in Denver and brought to the place of her shooting in the Badlands, via a number of safe-houses, in Rapid City and at Rosebud Reservation. At a house in Rosebud, according to testimony at Arlo Looking Cloud’s trial, Annie Mae with Arlo guarding her waited in the car as John Graham went in and got the final instructions on what to do with her. Are you saying he emerged from the house with the instructions to execute?
No doubt someone inside [the house] made a decision that came back to that running car. So, I keep having the suspicion way in the back of my mind that somehow, that maybe, John Boy won’t be extradited back down into U.S. courts on some technicality or other. For one thing, the U.S. attorney that had pursued the case has now been changed and there’s a different U.S. attorney now. So I don’t trust the thing right now, just in the sense that it serves the government’s purpose not to extradite. Because government excesses were committed at that time that led to shameful deaths. Better to close the book. And then that would be the FBI’s way of closing this case, because it would be left on Arlo Looking Cloud.
That would close the case.
That would close the case and Arlo is the one left holding everything. And when I think about this whole process, that Arlo is probably the only, other than being in the time and place that he was at, and a very confused head, I think that Arlo is the only innocent one in all of this. And I do. And I’m going to say innocent from the sense that, whatever happened, he couldn’t live with it. See, everyone else could. He couldn’t. He was the most innocent of all of them and he is the one having to do the time. And as I look at it the other part of the context is that Arlo is the full-blood traditionalist – knows the ceremonies, speaks the language, knows the songs – and everybody else involved in this didn’t have the same degree of traditional attachment so that the one who is the most traditional, the one who most represents the ancestors, is the one left holding the bag on this thing.
He’s the one who couldn’t put it behind him.
That’s right. And so it all gets dumped back on him. And you look at Annie Mae: and Annie Mae, in her own way, represented that same sense of traditionalism. And she’s the one that gets murdered.
A selfless kind of spirit.
Yes, very selfless. She was in it for the people. It wasn’t about any of the other things. It was about the people. And I can’t say what motivated her, whether it was anger or rage or grief. I can’t say her motivations, but I do know that Annie Mae truly was … out of that whole time frame, if we are going to call people ”leaders” and make those kind of identities, she truly was a people’s leader. But not by choosing that identity; she never took that identity. She just was very intense and very sincere.
[Interview with John Trudell: Theory of the planted operative: ‘A jacket was created for Annie Mae’ Part two]
[Editors’ note: In a running conversation with Indian Country Today’s Senior Editor Jose Barreiro, John Trudell seeks to address lingering issues in the dissolution of the early American Indian Movement leadership and to comment on the case of Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash, the Micmac activist murdered in South Dakota during the winter of 1975 – ’76. Part two of the series covers Trudell’s perspective on the issues of violence in the activist movement. The renowned poet-apostle of Indian activism proposes his theory of a government operative deeply embedded to discredit the movement, during a time of rogue government infiltration programs that sometimes stimulated violence in social and political organizing. Trudell discussed the shootout at Oglala, S.D., in 1975 that resulted in the deaths of one Indian activist and two FBI agents, and other incidents from those tempestuous times. Next week, Trudell addresses his own shift from direct political activities to musical poetics of stage and film.]
Jose Barreiro: In last week’s interview, you proposed that Annie Mae Pictou-Aquash was targeted in the government’s campaign to break up AIM leadership and discredit the organization during the 1970s. Many people were being accused of being informers through that time but she was increasingly targeted to the point of death. How do you see that progressing, why did it end up on her head and what’s your sense of the sequence that led to her execution?
Annie Mae didn’t have respect for people who didn’t deserve respect. I mean, she respected all life and all things, but when people didn’t deserve respect, she would show her attitude. Because there are a lot of people who want to give orders and be bossy that don’t deserve respect. So she had her own attitude and was strong-willed. So you’ve got that factor. The other factor is, let’s look at the group within AIM that she was active with. She fell in with and was around Dennis Banks and Leonard Peltier and Dino Butler, so she traveled with this group – the Banks group – and at that particular period of time between 1973 and 1975, in the running firefight with government across the prairies, this was the most active AIM group. Between Wounded Knee and Annie Mae’s killing, in that period of time, you also had the Oglala firefight in the June of 1975, and again the group around Banks was the most active. I mean, they were very, very active, taking the more militant position just in terms of an armed self-defense. So there was a lot of this going on, a lot of gun energy going on anyway after Wounded Knee. It kind of became a thing. Wounded Knee changed everything in relation to the use of weapons for a lot of AIM. Which changed everything among the main activists. What happened to Annie Mae was a result of those changes, the increased violent and paranoid attitude. And she wasn’t the only one of our people that was shot when the guns were brought in because that’s what’s behind all these deaths in Pine Ridge and everywhere else that it happened.
The increase in gunplay was a factor; what other factors were there?
Since the people that Annie Mae was amongst were the most active, they were drawing the intensity of the federal heat. So, I think, the most important factor: in there amongst them, was an operative, a very special operative. I think there was an operative, one of our own people, well trained, that the government placed in AIM. The government placed this operative in AIM by 1971 possibly. Certainly by 1972, I think the government put in the inside of AIM, not an informant but an operative. An Indian operative to go in and become one of us. He wasn’t alone in this assignment; they also put in informants and snitches and rumor people to create all this and that, but I think that there was at least one operative. And in those procedures, the role of the operative is to get as close to leadership as possible and to incite and introduce more antagonism. I think this operative was amongst us and had been amongst us for some time, and I think that when you go into that group of people that represented the movement – the big names like Dennis Banks and Russell Means and the ones that were drawing the most heat as being recognized as the leaders by the government – well, I think they all in that sphere of the movement had an operative amongst them. Remember that the violence escalated rapidly during those years. The explosion of militancy was surging from many sources. In that summer of 1975, you had the shootout in Oglala, the killing of Joe Stuntz, the killing of the two FBI agents, you had the bombing at Mount Rushmore, there was a series of bombings at Pine Ridge in the fall. And the operative in my mind, as I consider it, was mostly in that group, hyping up the violence. And Annie Mae had gravitated to that most active group and as the government tracked them, she was amongst the people that were accused of doing these things.
We understand you don’t intend to name the operative, although you do have someone in mind.
I am tracking this still. There may be more. You know, there are always very angry or very cruel people that attach to movements. So I know about nasty people. But this main one was nasty with a purpose.
What happened?
I think that Annie Mae was set up to take the fall by the operative so that the operative’s identity would remain anonymous. I think the operative worked some of the susceptible leaders in the movement to focus suspicion on Annie Mae. A ”jacket” was created for Annie Mae. This is police talk for creating a public personality for a person. I think he started creating this jacket for Annie Mae in the summer of 1975 after the Oglala firefight. I think that’s when this jacket really started to emerge – these accusations started to come. And I think that Annie Mae was being set up the whole time because I think this operative was familiar with Banks’ and Peltier’s movements and activities in the fall of 1975, between the shootout at Oglala and the mobile home police stop in November of 1975, when Banks and Peltier got away and Annie Mae was picked up. This is an important moment. The leaders of this AIM group are involved in a running confrontation with the feds and something like a planned police operation occurs to that mobile home. My sense is that during that whole time the operative has inside knowledge and participation in their activities and movements as fugitive AIM leaders. I suggest he was setting them up and he was the one who dropped the dime on them. And then when the mobile home police stop happened and everybody had to scatter, then I think the operative set in motion the harsher prospect of arousing the accusations that lead to the killing of Annie Mae. As I see it, this operative had access to the leadership and could manipulate things. Now I’m not saying that they all liked one another, but they all had a common need that was being met, a common ego being played or something that led to them doing this to Annie Mae.
You are mentioning the trajectory of one person that you have in mind, and we know you don’t want to name this person. There was another operative that was revealed at that time – Doug Durham. He wasn’t an informant either; he was an operative.
Yes, Doug Durham was an operative. If you look at that historical behavior of the federal agents, they always plant operatives. They always do, and it isn’t just to us. But I am not talking about Doug Durham; he is not the operative I am tracking. It is true he antagonized a lot of people and this and that, but I’m telling you, Doug Durham was almost like the fake operative because Doug Durham got exposed by the government first. The operative that did the real damage never was exposed. I find it interesting that by 1975, obviously by the time of the Oglala firefight, the bombings started. There was the first bombing that I am aware of – the bombing at Mount Rushmore – and then the series of bombings that happened at Pine Ridge in the fall. I find it interesting that there was basically one person that I know of that was connected to those bombings; and as an interesting observation, the bombing thing never really did catch on for AIM. See, as long as that one person was there making it happen, they are setting it off and doing it, it was happening, but nobody else picked it up. Nobody went with it. I mean, that’s just an interesting little side observation.
Incitement of movement people to become violent, to do bombings and such: this was suggested by the operative?
Yes; and in this pattern of bombings and stuff, see, Annie Mae was made to be connected to that. There was one story that she was made to make a bomb so that her fingerprints would be on it. This was when they were accusing her of being an informant. So I’m interested in the people who made her make a bomb.
In your theory, the sequence of violent incidents of the 1970s was manipulated by the operative?
There’s more than even Annie Mae at stake here. If my theory about the operative is correct, this operative is connected to the firefight in Oglala. That firefight would have never happened without the participation of the operative. This changes a whole lot of stuff. The operative was the one who set in motion the gun play at Oglala, which culminates later in the killing of Annie Mae because Annie Mae knew stuff and didn’t trust the operative.
There was already distrust by Anna Mae of the operative. She was figuring out this person?
Yes, she did not trust this person. Those were her words to me. And this affects Peltier, too. The operative set it in motion. The whole event would not have happened except for someone working for the government. An operative is linked to the killing of agents of the government by the role they played in being the operative. So there are serious implications. Why do you think they won’t give Peltier a new trial? In the Peltier case, the federal agencies admitted in the court system that they’ve lied, they made this and that up, but judges always find a little legal terminology to say why it doesn’t justify giving him a new trial. Because there is a basic truth. What they did to AIM in Pine Ridge, there’s something here that really is very sinister in its own way. And that’s what all of this is about. In my theory, the trail to the operative can unravel everything for them. This affects Peltier. It’s a classic case of a counterintelligence program in operation and it works, and I think that it’s trackable by the people who know how to hunt this kind of way – I think it’s trackable. I think there are trails all over the place.
So this is your challenge. This is really the reason for your statement to Indian Country Today?
It is a challenge to all our good people from those years, to track this operative – to find the operative – who painted that jacket, one piece at a time, on Annie Mae.~