LAND OF THE RED GIANTS OF IXTLAN

Chapter 19 - Anna Mae & Leonard: "In video-theatre 'FREE PELTIER'"

The funniest thing I ever saw was a little old lady laughing so hard at my play that she
fell off her folding chair and was actually rolling around on the floor choking. The
situation was nearly tragic, about like the play, as her sons or granddaughters frantically
pounded her on the back to get her breathing again, while we on stage had to stop our
own crazy antics for a minute to watch the performance in the audience. Reality blurred
until I never did know when we were doing the play and when I was living it out on the
streets, or in the Oyate Community Center in the Lakota Homes ghetto where we had set
up our improvised excuse for theatre.
Just when they had gotten the old Lakota Gramma back to some form of normalcy and
back in her chair, Jay Hart, a handsome Mohawk woman who was playing Custer in a
grotesque mask with long blonde hair, stepped across the borders between art and gender
and snuck around behind the Gramma and whispered, "Are you dead yet, Ciye?" Upon
which the poor old lady really lost it and screamed and fell off her chair again! Chaos
erupted, as all of us poured off the commedia dell'arte platform and chased the evil
whiteman around the room and out into the street. Kids and dogs chased after us and we
just kept going with it, running around the parking lot as the audience ran after us, and
passing cars stopped to gape in wonder at the surreal scene of clowns and devils in
fantastic costumes screaming, falling down, throwing confetti-bullets like Jerry Lewis or
Harpo Marx wrecking the fabric of society.
We just kept it up night after night, year after year, until the play I'd ironically titled
'Free Peltier' became almost an annual event, almost like 'A Christmas Carol' over at the
Whitey Community Theatre in town which would never, never allow us to put on our
irreverent allegory of tragedy and comedy. We'd asked them and the picturesque Black
Hills Playhouse up in Custer State Park, not far from the bad sculpture of something that
was being called 'Crazy Horse Mountain' for millions of tourists, to let us put on 'Free
Peltier', even as a midnight show, but there was no room in their perennials between Neil
Simon and The Sound of Music. In 1990 we'd even asked their board of directors,
affiliated with the University of South Dakota, to put on Kopit's 'Indians' in respect to the
100th anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre, but, like Senator Tom Daschle who
refused to apologize for the massacre, there was just no place for Indians in a State that
had an Indian population of 10% and of whom travelers from all over the world came to
see not only Mount Rushmore but some remnant of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.
The local Journey Museum had agreed rather enthusiastically to sponsor us for a
performance or two in 1997, but at the last minute they withdrew their invitation as well.
Crying, the newly-arrived white lady from New York who was the museum's director of
education and who had eagerly signed the contract with me, explained their board of
directors had nixed the controversial project. "It's Janklow," ol' Marv Kammerer
explained while we tried to console the poor lady out in the hallway, where she was so
afraid she had to hide and whisper. "His rich buddies like Stan Adelstein are on the board
of directors."
"Janklow?"
 "Yeah. He runs the State, you can be damn sure. You got a scene in there about him
raping that girl, Jancita Eagle Deer."
"Yeah. But he can't sue anymore, after losing the case to Matthiessen and Newsweek."
"That doesn't matter."
To this day the play hasn't been seen outside of the reservations and a few community
centers in the border towns, and on video which our great Irish cameraman and
impresario Bill McIntyre shot, but which has never aired anywhere even on cable access
channels. Bill's always trying to sell Buddy Red Bow's music videos to MTV, or the
feature video to downloadable computer companies, but no luck. We've tried
innumerable times to create some jobs for Skins in TV and all the performing arts,
forming corporations and limited partnerships, submitting proposals to tribal councils and
foundations, arguing that there is a huge worldwide audience for Native programming in
education and entertainment as 'Dances With Wolves' and thousands of popular cowboy-
and-indians movies and sitcoms have proved over the centuries, but no luck. Generations
of George McGoverns and Bill Janklows come and go, but unemployment remains
steady between 60-80%, which keeps the prison population steady at 40%, fetal alcohol
syndrome increasing, rapes increasing, real estate prices increasing. I'd argued to
sympathetic producers like David Wolper at Warner Bros (who did the atrocious mini-
series of Mystic Warrior based on the book 'Hanta Yo') that Indians were highly talented
visual and performance artists, and could go into all the clean careers of the technical
skills in filmmaking as well, replacing casinos and cattle-ranching as a better economy
for the West, but no luck. We'd submitted countless budgets and proposals to generations
of Tom Daschles and Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbells to build up Native production
studios, but no luck.
Instead, Jay Hart put on a grotesque FBI mask and screamed at an actor playing
Leonard in a jail cell, "Shut up! No praying in there!" I jumped out in a two-faced
Phantom of the Operaesque mask and chortled, "Ha ha, puns, shut up in jail. That's good.
That's good. Half the world is starving to death and you guys are making jokes."
"Who are you?" Leonard asked.
"Oh ho, good question, Ciye, good question. A lot of people have been asking that for
a long long, loooong time. Some people call me Unkcegila, The Dump Under The Earth,
or the Devil, or Dionysus. Since we're in Lakota territory I'll call myself Iktomi, the dirty
spider trickster."
"I've heard of you," Leonard sighed saidly. "I'm in no mood for jokes today. It's going
on 30 years I'm in the Joint now."
In so-called reality, Leonard himself had first approved of the play back in 1994 when
we first proposed it to him, and snuck the script into Leavenworth through some friends
like Joe Chasing Horse and Rosalie Little Thunder for him to read. He was only allowed
to read it while they were there, with guards hovering over his shoulder wondering what
was so funny, and then return it after the 2 hour visit. Since theatre efforts are always
short on men and long on women, Alice Johnson first read all the whitemen in the play
who were all named George, and it was an hilarious conceit from the first.
Kathy Burnette read the part of Myrtle Poor Bear, which was pretty ironic and
appreciated by all of us, as Kathy had played Anna Mae Aquash in the Ted Turner TV
movie 'Lakota Woman', with Mrs. Turner aka Jane Fonda often on the set as the producer
and inflaming the Vietnam Vets around town who truly hated her as 'Hanoi Jane', and it
was Myrtle who had been directly involved in important aspects of Anna Mae's murder
back in 1976. In fact, as the years progressed and FBI investigations into the unsolved
case grew, the play grew into more of a paean to Native women than men, and Anna Mae
grew into mythic proportions as the personification of all of them. Powerful, beautiful,
and tragic, she became almost Everywoman who'd gone unnamed since Columbus in
countless massacres, childbirths, heroic struggles for their lands and families in all the
Americas from the Arctic to the Antarctic, but also especially important to women as a
fallible woman.
One lady on an internet chat room snapped, "What's so important about this chick?
She drank and slept around."
Kathy was embarrassed and a little annoyed, at first, to be playing Mrytle, who was
just about the antithesis of Anna Mae. Myrtle was always sneered at by many men (and
women, if the truth be known) in the Movement as an ugly, alcoholic, slightly retarded,
fat, semi-illiterate fool who had been threatened, and even tortured, by the FBI agents
David Price and William Wood until she signed phony affidavits that were used to
extradite the fugitive Leonard Peltier from Canada. She later admitted in his trial in Fargo
in 1977 that she didn't even know the dynamic Peltier, let alone had never been his
girlfriend as she'd said in the 3 affidavits or heard him brag about killing the two FBI
agents Jack Coler and Ron Williams.
Her tearful, clumsy testimony on the witness stand, and in my play, was one of the
most heartbreaking episodes in all our struggles, as she told of the FBIs threatening to do
to her young daughter what they'd done to Anna Mae, showing her gruesome autopsy
pictures, she said they'd said, of the dead woman mutilated and decomposed, if she,
Mrytle, did not sign the affidavits and lie to the world, and make her own name anathema
to all Indians everywhere who loved Leonard. Anna Mae's story became epochal as much
because of the sickening manner in which she was treated in death - her hands cut off for
identification at the FBI crime lab in D.C., they claimed, and exhumed from a Jane Doe
grave for a second or even a third gruesome autopsy - as with the constant harrassment
and arrests she'd suffered in life. Myrtle broke my heart in that courtroom, the sorrow of
her race sobbing in horror and pity and terror.
Other actresses like the wonderful Linda Johnson played her as we went along over
the years, and Leonard himself turned away from endorsing us as we delved deeper and
more irreverently into the burgeoning investigations and Grand Juries, until by 2003 the
cops finally charged two Native men with Anna Mae's murder. Revealing the close
connection between Leonard's complex case and Anna Mae's, and the intersection of
Cointelpro operatives going back and forth with ease between the FBI and AIM, the
annual event the local newspaper would only include as a small blurb in their arts
calendar as "In video-theatre 'FREE PELTIER'" became a big deal over in the Oyate
Community Center. With lousy acoustics in a big meeting room, a hundred local yokels
would crowd in to watch what I billed as a "rehearsal-in-progress" for no admission,
making popcorn and coffee in the little kitchen. Kids brought soda pop and candy bars.
No white people came to see it and no one ever reviewed it. It was a non-event.
By the time Arlo Looking Cloud was in town, for the murder trial in 2004, so was the
New York Times and NBC. But Arlo was in the Pennington County slammer and
couldn't come over to catch the show, because his family was way too poor to make his
huge bail; and the bigshot media types were too busy drinking at their luxury resort
cabins up at Mount Rushmore to interview the notorious killer accused of the heinous
crime.
After he was convicted in a tidy 4-day trial I finally went across the street to talk to
him. Only one Lakota website lowered themselves to print the only interview, Alfred
Boneshirt's DLN Coalition, while plenty of mainstream Native media like Paul Demain's
Wisconsin newspaper 'Notes from Indian Country' and Tim Giago's local 'Lakota Times'
gloated about the swiftness and thoroughness of the justice system, and that finally there
was about to be closure on the rotten episode of AIM as an aberration in good clean
Indian Country.

ARLO LOOKING CLOUD INTERVIEW

www.dlncoalition.org
February 2004
Pennington County Jail
Rapid City, South Dakota
by David Seals
"It was a set-up, Man, all the way," Arlo said, in the first of several 10-minute collect
phone calls he made from the Pennington County Jail in Rapid City, where he's awaiting
an April 23 mandatory life sentence for his February 6 conviction of the murder of Anna
Mae Aquash in 1975. "Who were they covering up for? They're covering up for
someone."
"Who?" I asked.
"I don't know."
Later that night we were allowed a 20-minute face-to-face talk on telephones with a
glass window between us, in Cellblock Two, booth 2B. We got into that all-important
matter of "Who" again: for if he didn't kill her then who did? His Trial had shown a
police videotape with him confessing it, and several witnesses swore under oath he told
them he'd done it. It was much less clear what he thought the role of John Graham was in
all of it, as the U.S. Prosecution claims. Graham is a Canadian Native awaiting
Extradition to South Dakota as a co-accused in the 1st degree homicide charge.
"Yeah, so, they were covering up, but who were they covering up for, you mean?" I
asked.
"Well, I know who was covering up, my lawyer Tim Rensch. He was in collusion with
the Government."
We slowly got around to the damning police videotape that was shown in court, of an
interrogation of Arlo in the Denver Police Dept. on March 27, 2003, in which he
confessed to it and said Graham pulled the trigger. What was noticeable about the tape, as
I watched it in horror in the U.S. Federal Court in the 4-day trial Feb. 3-6, was that he
was almost incoherent, and the police were asking a lot of leading questions. And he had
no lawyer present. "What about the videotape?"
He grinned at me behind the glass, a handsome fullblood Lakota with classic Sitting
Bull good looks and long black hair. "I was drunk. They were giving me drugs and
alcohol. Abe Alonzo, the big Denver cop who's going around acting like a hero, claiming
he'd captured me, knew where I was every day. He met me at the liquor store every day
and bought me the booze, and gave me drugs. I was really into chiba. You know what
chiba is?" he grinned again, giving me a hard con's eye stare.
 "No."
"Heroin. I loved that stuff. He was getting it for me. All I wanted."
"So the videotape and confession ... "
"They were all fucked up. I told Rensch that, but he didn't use it in court. Rensch
didn't use a lot of questions I asked him to. I told him a lot of stuff but he didn't use it in
the trial. I don't know why. I didn't even see a witness list until the last day, and they had
a mock-trial back in December. December 16 I think, to practice everything, but I didn't
even get a copy of the questionnaires. I didn't know anything. They didn't tell me
anything."
And how did John Graham's name ever come up?
"That's where Ecoffey perjured himself on the Stand." {Robert Ecoffey is the U.S.
Marshall who originally brought Looking Cloud's and Graham's names out 10 years ago,
and he testified at the trial} "He said Gladys Bissonnette and Al Gates first told him my
name in 1994. No. No. It was Pat Janis, his close relative who told Ecoffey. Pat is
married to Angie Begay. Angie Begay is a Navajo woman who was married to John
Graham back in the 70s. Maybe it was some jealous woman's thing that got all this
started, I'm not sure. There's always a lot of gossip around Pine Ridge and Indian
Country. Angie was also married to Dennis Banks, did you know that? They had a
daughter, Arrow Banks, she's a grown woman now."
"Angie Begay also testified in the trial, didn't she? Yeah, she's the one who said she
saw Annie Mae tied to a board and carried out of the Denver house of Troy Lynn Yellow
Wood."
"Yeah."
"But Troy Lynn herself testified she didn't see Annie tied up or anything. She left
willingly on her own. And that's when you and John and Theda Clark took Annie to Pine
Ridge?"
"Yeah I guess so. I didn't know her or John very well." He just shook his head like it
was all bullshit. His lawyer said in court Arlo went to visit a friend Tony Red Cloud in
Rapid City and wasn't even with Annie after they dropped her off at a safe house on Pine
Ridge, 100 miles away from Rapid City. "I never saw her again, or even John Boy, I don't
think. I'm not sure."
"You never saw them again, after you dropped Annie off at a house on Pine Ridge?"
"No."
It was all pretty contradictory to what had come out in court, and he could see I was
confused. "Richard Two Elk. Who's he? He has said for years you told him you and John
killed her?"
"I barely knew him."
"He said he was your brother and you grew up on the reservation all your life?"
Arlo laughed. "He's lying about everything. I barely knew him. We never grew up
together or anything else. I'd run into him in Denver a few times at my Aunt's {Troy
Lynn} and we'd go outside and smoke a joint and then go back inside. That was all. We
never talked. You know, he was always going around tape-recording everybody, why
doesn't he have a tape of me or anybody else? Witnesses in the case. He doesn't know
anything."
 "He testified and said he was with you when you talked to Annie's daughter on the
phone, Denise Maloney from Nova Scotia, and told her you killed Annie, you and John
Boy killed her?"
Arlo shook his head. "I don't even remember that. I couldn't believe it when I heard it
in court."
"Two Elk said, and Denise testified too, that they called her. Paul Demain called her
and said you wanted to talk to her, and he vouched for it and Demain vouched for Two
Elk that he was Arlo's trusted brother. So Denise and her sister Debbie got on the phone."
Arlo shook his head. "Set-up. Same with John Trudell {a longtime AIM leader who
also testified Arlo told him he'd killed Annie}. Me and my Aunt went up to his hotel
room {in Denver in 1988} and his bodyguard said, uh, we can go outside and smoke a
doob. So we went down to the street, to his car or something. Trudell, you know, in court
he looked to me like he was coming down from the morning's high. He was sweating and
nervous."
Arlo also wanted to tell me about several startling visits he'd had after the trial from
FBI agents and other government lawyers. They wanted him to sign affidavits on other
suspects but he refused to sign anything. He said he thought one of the lawyers, a tall
man in a suit, was the notorious 1970s COINTELPRO double-agent Douglas Durham.
"Are you sure it was him?"
"Yeah, pretty sure. We'd all seen him around a lot in AIM. He was tall."
It all went back, in the end, to that question of "Who". Why did the U.S. Attorney
McMahon raise the issue of Leonard Peltier so much in the trial, putting irrelevant
witnesses like Kamook Banks on the stand? She last saw Anna Mae Aquash alive in
November 1975, well before even the Government said she was killed by Graham and
Looking Cloud and Clark on December 12. But Kamook implicated Peltier all over again
in the deaths of 2 FBI agents at a famous shootout on Pine Ridge, one of many shootouts,
a few months before Aquash turned up dead. The trial inflamed local anti-Indian and
anti-AIM feelings, including in the jury, by bringing up Peltier's name and the whole
history of AIM's stormy involvement with the FBI.
Local Indian sentiment in South Dakota pretty much agrees with Arlo Looking
Cloud's feelings, that he didn't get a fair trial and that justice has not even begun to be
served for Anna Mae. They point to the fact that the defense attorney only called one
witness for the defense, and that was an FBI agent; whereas the prosecution called 23
witnesses against Looking Cloud and Graham. Indians wonder why Theda Clark hasn't
been charged and arrested too. They wonder why family members weren't called to
testify about Arlo's character and heritage, and finally, why Arlo himself was not allowed
to testify on his own behalf.
"Rensch wouldn't let me talk, Man. He wouldn't let me testify at my own trial."

[Chapter 19 cont. to page 2]