 There were rars around Native American issues and Native American oppression in the United States. I'm in prison because of Native American oppression. There is absolutely, I've tried many, many cases, many murder cases. I have defended murder cases as a defense lawyer. There is absolutely no question in my mind that Leonard Pelletier was fairly and justly convicted of the crime of murder, of the two murders of these two agents and that the sentence was an appropriate one under the set of circumstances. We hope to let the people in this area know what happened at our trial and what happened prior to our trial and what has happened after the trial to let them know the truth that is going on against the American Indians in this country, you know, by the United States government. My name is Leonard Pelletier. I'm 46 years old. I'm here in Leavenworth, United States Penitentiary serving two life sentences. I think we should be concerned with Leonard Pelletier's case quite apart from the plight of a young man who's spending his life in prison for something he almost certainly did not do. I think that any of us could be there if the political climate were so arranged that we fell afoul of the system in some way. I mentioned in my book that I thought it was the most important case from an historical, economic, and social point of view since Sackling, Vanzetti had a lot of the same elements. It also involved the FBI. It was an early triumph of J. Edgar Hoover there. Well, we're talking about the 1975 timeframe and at the time I was physically located in Washington D.C. at headquarters and my assignment at the time was working what they call the Government Crimes Desk. And as part of that, it encompassed the Crimes on Government Reservation, which would be the Indian Reservation. So therefore when the two agents were murdered at Pine Ridge, I was acutely aware of the activity there and what was going on. Leonard is a very strong person. I don't know if I could have taken this. He's been in jail now 13 years. He's seen the courts reject him time and time again. He's seen this vile chicanery of the FBI and hiding documents and persecuting him unmercifully, and yet he keeps his spirit. He's the one who got out of his vehicle with the two others and starts shooting at the agents. He's the one who takes them out in the escape. He is the one who ends up in Oregon in another shootout in which one of the agents' guns is found in that vehicle. He is the one who then escapes to Canada. He is the leader of the events that took place that day and thus he was charged along with others for the crime of murder. Our cell doors are open at 6 o'clock in the morning. I report to my job at 7 o'clock, which I work in the second floor of recreation. We have an art studio up there. We have ceramics and a leather craft room. Usually everyone is assigned to a job here in the federal system. It's something that I've always really wanted to do. Finally here in 1985 when I got here in Leavenworth I decided to just start developing. I've been painting ever since. My subjects are Indians naturally. The statement I'm trying to make right now is basically I want to record my generation of Indian people. A lot of my work are from Indian people that were of my generation, my grandfathers and grandmothers. That's what I'm really trying to concentrate on right now. I was born in the state of North Dakota. My father's from the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation. The only employment that we had was a migrant farm work in the spring and through the summer. My father also received army pension from World War II when he was wounded. So that was a little extra that we had there. But my father and I were pretty close. We got more closer after I came to prison. We got along quite well. He really feels strong about this. Really proud of what the people is doing for him. He's really got hopes. My mother's from the Fortaught and Sioux Reservation. First if they start to call him, you're a big Indian, you're Indian or Indian face. You know, you shouldn't do that. I wonder what's wrong with the Indian to be an Indian. I wonder what. If it's so bad, how come God put us on Earth to be an Indian? I remember when we were living up in this log cabin where I grew up with my father. My grandmother was there. I was staying with my grandmother. And this government car pulled up. Even at that time we were still Indian people. We were still very concerned when they seen a government car, a new car coming up. They'd all say, here's going to be a brand new car. We don't have kids that hit for the woods, right? Because they knew something was happening. They never came out for any of the reasons. I went to Waughton Indian School in 1953, I believe it was. My grandma couldn't speak English, so it took us to Waughton in a bus. A whole bunch of kids went dead a year. Lined us all up. They gave us all GI haircuts. Then ran us through the showers, scrubbed us down. And as we came out of the showers and dried off, then they put DDT on us. That began three years of a memory of my life that I thought was very, very, very, very, very harsh. First of all, we're cousins. So his mother, my mother, sisters. And so we pretty much grew up under our grandma many years. And then years that we weren't wet there, we were in boarding schools. He up north, I was down south, Oklahoma area. And so Leonard was pretty much in the same bureaucratic system that I was, which was boarding schools and then the different type of institutions as a youth. I was 14 years old and when I first started attending a number of different community meetings that my elders were having. And I basically just started to start paying attention to what they were speaking about and got myself quite of an education on really what was happening. I know that my family was living in real heavy poverty, real high poverty. But as most poor people, they were really quite a shame of it, of being poor. So I, in my mind, I subconsciously believe that my family was the only one on the reservation who was having a hard time. Although I would go to my friends and neighbors and stuff and, you know, or was having just as hard a time. Really, when I look back, I think I always wanted to be an agent all my life. I studied to be a priest, a Catholic priest for four years and left the seminary halfway through at my college degree and then went into law enforcement. I became a policeman and I guess maybe always in the back of my mind I wanted to be an FBI agent and I saw it as a way to enhance my profession, my career and I took it very seriously. And lo and behold, I got into the FBI. It was kind of the crowning achievement of my life. In 1958 and 59, the Eisenhower administration was enforcing the termination policy. There was three reservations that were selected to be terminated. The monomones from Wisconsin, the climate falls from Oregon, climate unions and the Turtle Mountain chip was. At that time, there was quite an opposition from Indian people to not accept termination. We didn't want to terminate our reservations or our nations is what we call them. So they relocated Indian people to the cities back in the 50s. And so they were just given a place to stay, given a job, then turned loose and that was it. So a lot of them were successful, a lot of them weren't, a lot of them ended up in institutions. But as a whole, most of them got involved in the different Indian struggles. The U.S. government has made a tremendous mistake in segregating Indians on reservations and giving them cradle to grave paternalism through taxpayers' dollars. Every other ethnic group in our society who have come to our shores have been mainstreamed and integrated into society. Basically because the American dream is an economic dream and without being integrated in society, an ethnic group would be denied the economic benefits that being integrated provides. But anyway, they promised them jobs and homes to be waiting for them when they get there. Nothing brought them, they didn't know what to do, they didn't know how to get back. Some of them had to take the freight back, even women. So they wanted to get them all off the reservations. They must have been after something. If we didn't accept relocation, there would be no social services given to the people, which existed at that time was commodities and once in a while you get a voucher to buy food and stuff like that. Let's give them a hand, let's not give them a handout. And if they get a hand, there are very few people in our society that won't take that hand and take it to its full advantage in terms of job retraining programs and employment opportunities. It's been said that the devil puts idle hands to work and it's no real surprise that any group of hands that are that idle because of the reservation status and the fact that most of the reservations are far away from where the job opportunities are, are idle. A lot of people, well, you got a lot of people mad, you know, for getting teased. But when he worked, he was a good worker and the other thing if he stated any of his aunts or anybody, he had money, they got half of it for his board and room and like some of these kids nowadays, they wouldn't give you a nickel if you asked him for it. But that basically, that's the way he grew up, you know. Well, I guess he was a foster home. Self-supporting enemies. And you got to pay your own way in life. Well, that's the way he was. Some of the statements made by the women there that in these meetings asking for the men to be warriors to do something to help resolve the conditions of poverty that was resulting from the termination thing. And she said that her children were at home starving. She wanted some warriors to stand up and do something about this, right? And, you know, as a young man sitting there, 14 years old, I'm thinking, wow, you know, when I grow up I'm going to do something to help my people. I mean, it was a crusade. I was trying to stamp out evil in the world and here I had a nice brass badge that said I was on the side of good and right. And I believed this. And I approached my work as a crusader. Looking back, though, I realized it kind of gave me the permission to go ahead and do anything to these people, lawbreakers that I wanted to. They were a fair game. I was on the side of right. They were on the side of wrong. And the work was fun when I looked at it in that regard. Well, on government reservation, I think there's 13 different felonies that the FBI had jurisdiction over. And that is everything from theft to rape to murder. So, he almost had to operate as a detective bureau on the reservation as opposed to the normal kinds of things that an FBI agent would work. So, it was a little different. You had a different approach to your job. Well, the interest of the FBI is keeping native Indians in check. They realize that after decades and centuries of oppression, a new spirit has emerged among Indian people. That's the activist spirit of the American Indian movement. And other Indian groups now, which have split it off or are exemplifying what AIME tried to do. At that time, I was something like 30, 33 years old. And up to that point in my life, I never had nothing. There was nothing in this society that would allow me to relate to my indigenous background. And when I became aware of the American Indian movement, it allowed me something to identify with as an indigenous person. And it really made me feel good. And that's why I've been following the ways of the American Indian movement. The teachings to me, it's a spiritual reawakening within myself as it has been with a lot of our people. Like a lot of them sneak off me or let in the corner on the playgrounds and be talking their own language. Sometimes they might get caught. Well, I, yeah, when I went two years or so off to go to school, I had to pray just as soon as you got out of bed before you dressed. I had to bed all up, and I said some more prayers. And you went to breakfast. Usually I went to church first. Then the breakfast, you prayed. After breakfast, you prayed. Dinner the same way. Lunch at noon the same way. And dinner the same way. You prayed until you got in bed at night. And a lot of them kids, you know, with some horsing around or something, would be a sister there with a big long stick. You know, cracking one, you know. I think a lot of young Indians are interested in this now. A lot of them are trying to relearn their languages that have been lost and some of the clam traditions and so forth. And they're learning it from a group of old people who are disappearing very fast. So they kind of have to get that information together now and do it quickly. During my travels around the country, I stopped off at a number of different reservations across the country. Visiting people and just, you know, roaming around as a teenager and having fun also, you know, when I could. The education that I received from that was that our reservation wasn't the only one living in those type of conditions. It was spread all across the Indian country. So he came out here and lived in Russia out there. And he stayed around here, Portland, I guess for several years. Well, actually when I first moved out to Portland, I was looking for some Indian organizations to get involved with. But there wasn't any in Portland at that time. But when I had moved up to Seattle, I first started getting involved through the Indian Center and through other Indian organizations right there in Seattle, Washington. I started getting involved with the Indian people on Frank's Landing and the PL up Indians down there who were protesting for their fishing rights. We organized a group of people and occupied what was called Fort Lawton at that time. It was an army base that the army was abandoning and wanted to sell it to the city for a dollar. Well, under treaties in Washington State, any surplus land that the government no longer wants or is going to use is supposed to automatically revert back to Indian people. And we tried to get it for that purpose. We wanted to build a university under college, a cultural center, and different Indian programs. The end result was we did, first I should mention, that we had the majority of the citizens of Seattle, Washington behind us in our efforts because they were saying we've got enough parks and we can't take care of the parks we've got now and et cetera, et cetera, and give it to the Indians. Anyway, we were given 15 acres out of it, Bernie White Bear, who's still there, who still runs the organization. Then, like many of us here in the community, the Seattle community were involved in a lot of different planning efforts, looking at ways to enhance and introduce services to the Native American community, which were not here before. And made our interest known to the city. We were referred to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for a resolution of our concern of our receiving part of the property. And we determined that the only way we were going to get any real visibility in headway was to actually follow what the brothers and sisters on Alcatraz had already done, and that was to physically occupy the property. And that's what we did. We came together in 1970 and on March 8th, we physically moved on to the property here at Fort Lawton. The Seattle Indian Community and Leonard played a significant role and very committed to the community's causes and joined us, and all of us were, everybody that was involved basically were arrested. And we would be released and we eventually ended up with a 20-acre site for a perpetual use. And that then gave us the land base that was necessary for this community then to forge forward and continue to develop other programs off this location for the social and educational services of people. And we concentrate here on the cultural and educational aspects and recreational aspects of the needs of the Native American community. It's really quite successful. There are involved in quite a number of different Indian programs and issues. During that period there was a number of different reasons that caused me to get involved and join the American Indian Movement. At that time there was an elderly man named Raymond Yellowtunder that was a ranch hand and Gordon Nebraska, which is right on the border of the Pine Ridge, Oglala Lakota Nation. And he had come to town like he did all the time. He'd go out there to the ranch, stay out there three, four months, come into town. He would give his money to his sisters who would pay their bills. He supported them, right? Whatever he had left he would buy some clothes and he would drink it up. And he was picked up by, I believe it was three young men or one girl. They had first humiliated him by stripping all of his clothes off him and throwing. They were having a dance that night at the American Legion. And threw him inside of that dance hall naked. And the mayor that was there and the chief of police put a blanket on him and told him to get back to the ranch or they all knew him around there, right? Or they would arrest him and stuff like this, right? Well, short time later Raymond was observed being forced in a car again by the same young people, right? And the following day his body was found with cigarette burns and other means of torture. You know, he was dead. Yellethunder death and a aim came in to talk to him to help. So when they come in to ask for help that's when Dick Wilson told him to get the hell out of there. That he didn't like long-haired people and that's when it all started then. When we seen that they weren't going to do nothing but, you know, just let another murderer go by, pass without anybody being arrested. The Hair Brothers, the same, very same thing. And they killed Yellethunder. Now we went to Washington D.C. and demanded that it be a federal crime to kill Indian people. And they said no. And so when a white man hunts down an Indian, he makes two days to plant it and hunts him down and pranks about it. Again to slap the Indian people in the face. The older guy got two years in prison but the other two got probation. Sat in that bar, took a beating from Bad Heart Bull and claimed in front of witnesses, at least 10, that he was coming back to fix and kill Bad Heart Bull, of which he did. That's pre-meditated murder. Probably back in 1972 there was a, what they call it, a trail of broken trees. A lot of the tribes started from the west coast and they traveled by car, caravan to Washington D.C. And a lot of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle area. And then a lot of the people went there. So then they were, the BIA would not meet with them. Would not meet with them. And then they just turned them away. So they took over the billing, BIA billing, to bring attention to them, the cause. Started a peaceful protest. But again, because of, I don't know what reasons, what the reasons were. Totally disrespect or hate of Indian people. We were immediately attacked by busloads of Washington D.C. police. And a peaceful sit-down, what really was a sit-down demonstration turned into a very violent demonstration. The trail of broken treaties which occurred around election time in 1972, involving the Occupational Bureau of Indian Affairs. The government was very upset about that. The CREEP, the Committee to Re-Elect the President was very upset about that. Amongst the things that they were upset about was the fact that here were Indian people raising very legitimate grounds and treaty demands right at election time, which didn't go very well with the Nixon people, as well as documentation that was found inside the BIA building showed a forced sterilization program of Indian women between the ages of 18 and 25, which had in fact resulted in about one-third of all Indian women in those age groups being sterilized. The government granted amnesty to people, got them out of town, but then there were rumors that approximately 30 people were targeted for some kind of action. It was a few weeks later that two plain-clothes Milwaukee police officers attacked Leonard Peltz here in a restaurant and then charged him with attacking them. According to the girlfriend of one of the police officers, Bel-Anne Gild, when she testified in 1978, she remembered her former boyfriend having a picture of Leonard Peltz here and talking about how he was helping to catch a big one for the FBI. They just got done lying to us again in Washington, D.C., right, and said they were going to investigate and of course they never did anything. The chiefs of the Frank's Fool's Crow and the other chiefs and headsmen made a decision that some kind of demonstration or something to bring the attention to the world, the plight of the American Indian that was happening here in the United States in the 70s, right. She said that in 1972 the people here on the reservation got together and they had the American Indian movement to come down because of the situations that were going on here on the reservation. Dick Wilson, who was the tribal chairman at that time, had organized his own private police force. The Goon Squad was essentially anybody who was employed in the Wilson administration, anybody who was working. And like I said the issues essentially were economic and basically that's how I guess people tended to divide themselves. And also there was differences, there were philosophical differences because at that time we were making great strides in moving the tribe into the 20th century so to speak. Then on the American Indian movement side there were some traditional people who believed that we were selling out for traditions and customs and culture and stuff like that in order to make those strides. Between 1973 and 1976 the FBI was funding, was arming, was equipping, was providing intelligence information to a contra-type force on the Pyramid Reservation called the Goon Squad. They called themselves that, the guardians of the Oklahoma Nation. The people were concerned and they invited AIM to come down. The entire reservation is an armed camp. It is growing from the hatred that has developed between AIM and non-AIM people. The hate has developed to the point where every man, woman and even children. I seen in Pine Ridge a 12-year-old carrying a .22 rifle. At the present time I am still the chairman of this Oglala Sioux tribe and I intend to be until my term is completed in April of next year. Well, they never really done anything to me but I just pitied all the people and so that's why, because all my family was all with the Goons and I was only one but I felt sorry for all the Indians who wouldn't fight back or stand up and that's why I was there with AIM. If any Indian is physically abused on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation the American Indian Movement is going to declare war on the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The American Indian Movement and the Oglalas and other Indians from numerous tribes across the country held state-occupied the Wounded Knee area for 71 days. When the AIM came in we had our first meeting out north here at Calico and then they decided to go into Wounded Knee so we went into Wounded Knee. Before we got there everything already got into the store and everything. Shooting had been bad for several days already, I mean real bad. It was just constant and you just didn't go outside and they had a bunker, it was up the road going toward Manderson and there were some trailer houses up there and we were up there. The radios were just going on our scanners. You could hear all the talking back and forth and then they were calling in on radios that's when you got shot up there. You know it's almost like you anticipated that something really bad was going to happen because it had been bad already for days, I mean that was like the worst time ever. A lot of shooting went on all the time but that was really bad then. On our way out they picked us up, took us to jail. We let them go to the bathroom. Next morning they got us up early, they didn't even let us wash or anything. They put us in a bus and took us up to Rapid City and that's why they sent all those charges up there. Drunk driving and record and rendering and carrying concealed weapons. So the program against aim intensified especially with Wounded Knee, especially with the Senate of Custer, the government made massive arrests around Wounded Knee. Some 500, some odd people were prosecuted of which they only got 12 convictions so it really reflects upon the realities of the use of the criminal justice system for political purposes in this country. The Oglala's don't like what happened and if the FBI don't get them the Oglala's will. Just what I said. We have our own way of punishing people likely. Shooting on the reservation? You said it. We'll take care of them. Dick Wilson was, you know, just like a Gestapo. He just ruled a whole reservation and didn't pay attention to anybody. He didn't go by the rules or policies, Constitution. Because the greatest enemies of the traditional in one way have been their own people who have made it into the white world and who are. And you can't blame them either. There's been so few benefits for Indians that you share it with the traditional people and there's never been enough to go around. So they see these people as kind of a threat to what they have established, you see. And there's no reason why an Indian person should be or part Indian person should be Indian or not Indian. It doesn't matter how much Indian blood you have, you are either Indian or not according to your, whether you follow Indian way or not, or to the degree you do. And this is a matter of choice and it's not a question of one person being better than the other. But there has been a pattern often encouraged by the tribal council leadership to make the acculturated people, the ones who are Christians and so forth, be elite and they often have more money and so forth. And these other people are considered more primitive in some way. Well, it isn't true. The reverses also could be argued. Under the Indian reorganization act we're supposed to have a self-government for all the people. But I guess in order to control things he had to use power. And he just run that whole tribal office. He had goons all over and he paid them big salaries. They didn't do nothing, no kind of work. And he just spent, you know, federal monies the way he wanted to. My family's been harassed. I've been harassed, I've been threatened. But the only thing I can say is I'm still the tribal chairman here. If they could work together and make allowances for each other instead of always being to each other's throats. Now, we are famous in this country and all colonial or neocolonial peoples are the same. We just set one group against the other. Always advances our interests, so it suits our purposes. It's always been the case with Native Americans that we've always tried to push them into reservations, take away their traditions, make them Catholics or Protestants, make them citizens against their will of the United States by an act of Congress. Take away their land, as they have done to the Pine Reginian Reservation. It used to be the Great Sioux Reservation that was an enormous body that was to endure as long as the grasses grow and the river flows. I imagine he got some kind of kickback as to what happens. He gave away one third of the Oglala Nation to allow them to strip mine for uranium and on the Sheep Mountain Range in South Dakota. Well, the government has been doing a very interesting thing in this area for much of the last 100 years. It has told the Lakota that by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 this is Lakota land. It has also told the white population that under the Homestead Acts this is white land. And it has told both peoples that the other was trying to take it from them. And this has been very interesting because especially in the last 20 years where this has really been encouraged a great deal, red and white people appointing the fingers at each other is trying to take the land from each other all the while and multinationals are very quietly coming into the area and claiming the region for themselves. Multinational corporations that came in here during the early 70s include Union Carbide, Westinghouse, Burlington Northern, Chevron, Conoco, Decker Cole, Exxon, Kermit Ge, to name a few. These treaties are hopelessly out of date. Most of the treaties were signed at the time when the area that was populated by Indians was a wilderness. It was before reservations were established. It was before the federal money started flowing to Indian reservations and they simply have not been brought up to date by the Congress. And that has contributed substantially to the problems that we have faced in the state of Wisconsin. And unless Congress changes its attitude, Wisconsin's problems are going to spread as more tribes become more militant and as the extremist elements of more tribes end up saying, let us stonewall the feds, let us stonewall making agreements with the state and we'll cut you a better deal with better money simply by being irresponsible. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the profits that are being talked about, there are approximately four million acres constituting the area known as the Black Hills. One of the gold companies that is currently strip mining the northern hills has requested an expansion of some 800 acres onto what the government calls forest service land. According to corporate records and announcements, this 800 acre proposed expansion in the next 10 years, this company, Brone Mining Company, states that it will take approximately three and a half billion dollars worth of gold from this 800 acres. So if you figure that you can mine at least half of the Black Hills, which is what the geologists say, for gold alone. So approximately two million acres and 800 acres would produce three and a half billion dollars worth of gold. It gives an idea of the magnitude of the economics that we're talking about in this area. It really puts everything into place and makes everything more understandable in terms of why the Pentagon would be directly involved in the isolated area of this country against a small group of people who the corporations felt were a threat to their multi-billion dollar operations. I guess the difference between the American Indian movement and the tribal government in terms of the issues probably had more to do with the economics than anything else. So they had a lot of heavy miller oil and gas at the Pine Ridge Reservation, next to the Badlands. Black Hills is very sacred to our people, but yet they want the minerals from there. So all of these issues came about. They all interlocked, interweaved. And so a little history thing, back around 1874, I believe, General Custer took an army caravan to the Black Hills and he took some geologists with him. Saw a lot of minerals, a lot of timber, everything. And they wanted this for more reasons than one. So this here led again to the Indian tribes, so mainly the Oglala tribe, right next to the Badlands, right next to the Black Hills, caretakers of the Black Hills, the biggest tribe, the crazy horse tribe. Leonard's issue is so much bigger than just one person. The Indian people are symbolized in Leonard Peltier. He represents a struggle of people at the root of which is the land. That's the struggle between the Indian and the non-Indian world or corporate America and the Indian people is the land and the exploitation of that land. At the time that the American Indian Movement was investigating a lot of land claims, it became clear to us that there was some negotiations going on for a huge portion of the reservation with the national parks. And as it turned out, our suspicions were correct that almost 150,000 acres, as it turned out more than that, we thought it was about 100,000 acres of land that was being negotiated to give away in exchange for rights and privileges. And I believe that Wilson thought that he was leading in the right direction. We fought against any kind of transfer of land. Yet, as we know, it's been cut down and cut down in the very day before the shootout here. Another part of the reservation was taken for uranium land and many people believe that the shootout was deliberately arranged to take off the headlines, the taking of more land from what was once the Great Sue Reservation, making it now even smaller than the two counties that now occupies in South Dakota and taking people's minds off that and arranging a shootout. They didn't count on two agents being killed, but that was the stakes they were playing with. In 1975, the same year as the FBI recognized that for the first time that a golden American Indian movement was to halt strip mining and stop exploitation of the earth, the most dangerous organizations of the country, and switched its operations from simply a counterintelligence program to a counterinsurgency program and in fact issued one of the most unique position papers that has ever been issued by any government agency in this country. And that was a paper that was entitled FBI Paramilitary Operations in Indian Country. It was essentially how the FBI was going to deal with AIM in a paramilitary fashion. It included everything from the role of the White House to handling paramilitary operations within the borders of the United States. We know that this was done April 24th, 1975, approximately two months before the firefight. Within a month later, the FBI, according to documentation, began a massive buildup of personnel in the Pine Ridge Reservation, including people such as Special Agent Jack Kohler, who was brought up from the Denver Division. Kohler was a counterintelligence agent out of the Denver Division. He was also a SWAT team member, but in we're SWAT team members. You know, the more I think back and the more I read about the FBI and its inception, that its prime function always was to handle political dissent. I really think so more and more. Because even now I feel it, you know, if you go into town or, you know, what's happening, you know, there's a lot of stuff that we go into town for, like meetings and stuff, you know, I don't feel comfortable around them. I try to be friendly and stuff, but I don't feel all that comfortable. I don't know if I'll ever forget the things that happened when they were, you know, with the FBI's and the goons. I believe that's right. I think the murder rate probably was around 60. I know it seemed high to me at the time, and I don't recall during the three years that I was there if it decreased or not. My sense is that it did decrease while I was there. The American Indian Movement was asked to send some people here in 1975. I think it was around February when we came up at that time. When the call came into us, I was in New Mexico at that time. While we were there in Farmington, we were concentrating on the 15 Indian people that were brutally murdered, mutilated and murdered right there in Farmington. Some of them had their heads bashed in. Some of them were just outright mutilated. That's the reason why we decided to have a convention there. And the result of that was three or four teenagers was arrested, got a year or two in a juvenile reformatory. For 15 murders, I think they served something like a year in the reformatory. But from the request from the Ogallalas, a number of us who had already been living there on Pine Ridge and everything else made a decision to go back to Pine Ridge and show our presence and hopefully we could do something about the terrorism and the killings that was going on. We had a camp out there on the Jumping Bull Ranch where we all stayed out there. We had a sweat lodge out there. We had some teepees out there. Some of the things that we did while we were there was helping build. We wanted to help build up the economy. We knew that in order to survive as an independent nation, we'd have to have our own businesses and something self-supporting. So we started planning large community gardens and helped build some businesses, structures from the ground up. It was kind of tense because the American Indian movement did go to Pine Ridge or came to Pine Ridge from, went to Pine Ridge from New Mexico and there was an awful lot of American Indian movement activity. I also recall that because of that activity, the FBI at the time increased the number of agents on the reservation to do their job. There were probably 20 to 35 people living in tents at Tent City. It was their home and it was all part of their movement. The American Indian movement leaders lived there and that was their headquarters. The traditional people, the old people, they were really concerned about their safety and the safety of their people. They wanted someone from the American Indian movement to come in here and would be willing to stay here and live here and be a part of the community and not just come here and stay for a little while and take off and go somewhere else. They wanted people who would commit themselves here. Peltier and myself were two guys that gathered other people around us and came here to stay. And on June 1st, because the killings and the terrorism were still continuing, the Ogallal of Chiefs wrote a letter to the State Department telling the State Department that because they cannot receive any responses from any law enforcement agency, the United States government that as of June 1st, they were now going to start organizing to become a sovereign nation again. We knew that there was a large buildup of people from the American Indian movement and we just didn't know what we had and it was just a reaction to that. We didn't know exactly what was needed. There was a lot of observations of people on the reservations out in the countries, out of the communities, wearing fatigues, army, military fatigues. On the reservation borders, there was a lot of mobilization of armored personnel carriers. I think we were in and out of Marshal Law at that time. We were placed under Marshal Law about two or three times. I think each duration had lasted about maybe from two days to several months. But at that time, you couldn't enter or leave the reservation without producing identification stating your business. I think there was even curfews to where all the roads were shut down. We know from FBI documentation that three weeks before the firefight, FBI inspectors from headquarters in Washington, D.C. and Minneapolis Division headquarters were given a tour of the Pine Ridge Reservation in the area around Porcupine and in the area near Oglala, and they were shown in the area that purportedly had bunkers. And in the words of the FBI, these areas were exclusively occupied by members of the American Indian Movement and the government talked about the need to assault these areas, the government with paramilitary forces, the government talked about the need to use armored personnel carriers. It's like someone just took a shot at us. They just took a shot at us. In the evening of the 25th, the two agents went out, I think it was in the ambassador, automobile, and they were looking for Jimmy Eagle, one of the places they went to was this jumping bull area, jumping bull hall, jumping bull compound. They went to that area and they were looking for Eagle. They talked to people there that Jimmy Eagle had been in the area, but that he wasn't there now. He had been riding in a red vehicle and they might find him in a red vehicle. They were accompanied by some BIA officers. Well, they claimed they were there for looking for Jimmy Eagle, but they were there a day before that and they were told that Jimmy Eagle was not allowed on there because he was a drinker and a troublemaker that he was not allowed around that area and not to come back. Went back the next morning after talking to three or four young Indians that were in the area, went back the next morning and with this warrant, they had been told that a red vehicle, that he might be in a red vehicle and while they were at the jumping bull property, a red vehicle leaves from the area they were in, goes down through an open area down to a river-covered area and they follow it. I think there is some evidence indicating to this that it was a planned assault. We know from a map that Kohler had in his briefcase of the time that he was killed that he had the jumping bull hit a map of Pine Ridge. The area around the jumping bulls was circled. It had bunkers written on it. It was mislabeled the Wallace little senior ranch, which was actually on the other side of the highway. So what we have is documentation which shows that the government was planning a paramilitary assault on exactly the area in which they did in June 26, 1975. And of course, when they got to about the middle of the field, the other vehicle with three people in it, three men in it, got out, brought out weapons, heavy weapons, long-range weapons, an AR-15, which is the civilian side of a military M-16, an M-1, World War I and Creeotype, and another weapon and started shooting at them. And they are in the center of this open area. The next day when it came down, I was down into the camp and there was a shooting going on over by the ranch house. Of course, I didn't pay no attention to it because there was a dam close by there about a mile away. I used to hear shooting there. We used to hear shooting there every day. Somebody used to be practicing over automatic weapons. We think it was some of the Goon squads. We don't know for sure. But at first, that's what we thought it was. And then all of a sudden, we heard people screaming and hollering. So we ran up there and we see what was happening. There was a shootout going on. So I ran into the houses because there were little babies there and women and children and stuff like this here. And I got them out of there and told them to get out of there. By this time, we were surrounded and the shootout lasted for about 11 o'clock that morning until about 7 o'clock that night. My understanding is they drove in past that white house over there and went down between those hills. They took a position right down there. Most of all of our people were over here. The only people that were over there was Wanda Sears and her children. And no fire was coming from over there. And I couldn't understand why they didn't just pull around and drive back out. And when I thought about that, then I became a little bit concerned about this, maybe it was a trap. And my concern was to get these people out of here at that time. Two of them, and one of them was Collard and one of them was Williams. The two agents that got murdered were traveling back onto the reservation and they passed a vehicle, which we believe to be a scout kind of vehicle. And they thought that they saw in the vehicle Jimmy Eagle, whom they had a family warrant for. And they turned and followed that vehicle. And they were drawn into the compound. I guess it was a jumpable compound. And when they got down into a hollow, the vehicle that they thought Jimmy Eagle was in, some of the individuals in that vehicle jumped out and opened fire on them. And as Collard was trying to get back to his rifle, which was in the trunk, he got his arm pretty much shot off. And Williams was trying to turn a kit, his arm. And when he did several of those that were firing from long distance, they were taking fire from several different points, came up and just blew Williams away. And then they put both of their bodies face down. And then they were in that position until they were located, I guess, later that afternoon. I think that took place probably between 8 and 9.30 in the morning. The bodies were discovered, I think, around 11.30 to 1.30 in the afternoon. You know, I had gone down there, I guess, a couple hours after it had occurred. But from what I understand, prior to the actual shooting, the two FBI agents had a federal warrant that they wanted to serve on the occupants of one of the houses. They had approached the house. And I believe that the occupants of one of the houses had opened fire on the car. The FBI agents continued to drive down past the house and down below where the corrals were. And then there was a little, I guess, a little meadow that was bordered on one side. The cars were right down there. And the front car was kind of parked this way. And the other car was pulled in like that. They were parked like that so that they offered some kind of shield, I guess, for the agents. But then the word spread through the camp that there was a shooting going on at the Jumping Bowl House. So a number of us grabbed weapons and went up there to defend our people. They just stayed there. We knew they were shooting at us. We could see them every once in a while pop up and shoot. And then they would disappear behind our cars again. And to this day, I don't really understand why they had the opportunity. Nobody was trying to stop them from going out. They were trying to stop them from coming in here and further. So I know why they didn't leave that day. I can only speculate on, you know, I think my belief is that they knew that they had a lot of backup. We found out later that there was a 10-man BIA SWAT team that had been trained by the FBI. They were just a little ways away from here. The government very quickly began surrounding the area as soon as the first shots were fired and began a massive buildup of FBI and other law enforcement personnel, mostly SWAT team people from the very beginning of the firefight. The firefight lasted until well past midnight and that was one of the reasons why the FBI withdrew its forces that day. At the end of that day, there were three people that were dead. Two FBI agents, Joseph Stones. After we got away from here, we went over to Rosebud. That's the next reservation over east of here. And I think it was around September 5th when I was arrested there. The FBI came in there early one morning at daybreak and I was living in a little cabin behind L. Running's place there and Annie May was living in a tent there at that time. They came in and they arrested me and they arrested Annie May at L. Running's place and took us to Pure South Dakota. The general investigation that followed I think was probably as intense as the FBI has ever done in its history. You know, the defense are correct in that. Obviously, when agents are murdered, that's given the very top priority and it was. I mean, we're talking about hundreds of agents working on the case, which is one of the problems. They stumbled over themselves. There are too many agents working the case. There's too many agents doing too much stuff. They literally did stumble over each other's feet. They created so much paper that none of us as trial lawyers could keep track of it. That's part of the problem that we wound up in the end. I mean, there was stuff that we didn't even know existed and that was part of the problem of working it as intensely as they did is they created so much stuff that nobody could truly master it and none of us did. I think that initially because of the fact that we had a lot of our SWAT people there and we didn't know what exactly we had and that they had the APCs there and they had a lot of equipment that the military would use. It appeared that way, but once we realized what was going on we immediately got rid of that part of the investigation and we got back and put the guns away and got our pencils out and that's what we do best. Yeah, when everybody was arrested and everything and plus under the advice of some of the head men and chiefs that I should perhaps go to Canada, you know, because there was a lot of terrorism from the law enforcement agencies now on Pine Ridge. In fact, because of this, all the Sioux nations plus other tribes got together. This is the first time since 1876 that all the tribes got together and demanded that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies get off the Pine Ridge Reservation. That was the first time in almost 100 years that this had happened. We, the undersigned members and supporters of the White Clay District Pine Ridge and Reservation do hereby request a removal of all alien law enforcement personnel. I haven't heard of the petition. We certainly don't plan on leaving the area until we have completed our assigned job here. When Leonard was not extradited at that time then the trial of Butler and Robbidou went forward and the two men were eventually acquitted. I stood trial in Cedar Rapids, Iowa last year on the same charges that Leonard felt here has to go to trial up here on. I was acquitted down there. Bob Robbidou stood trial. He was acquitted. A man by the name of James Theodore Eagle was indicted on the same charges. Charges against him were dropped in September of 1976. I felt very relieved that when Bob and Deena were found not guilty because I knew we were not guilty and I never really believed that I would be found guilty. According to FBI documents, the FBI blamed the acquittals on rulings by Judge McManus that he led in evidence that the FBI was responsible for the climate of fear and terror on the Reservation. And then Paltier was convicted before Judge Benson I think a year later or maybe eight months later, I forget. He had a different judge, different jury, back in Indian country, mysterious transfer of the case and he had a judge who was totally anti-Indian and who made rulings which were totally different than the judge in Cedar Rapids had done. And I think that militated for a conviction so I think he was somewhat at a disadvantage compared to us in Cedar Rapids. Well, I think that the judge had a lot to do with that personally and that's my personal opinion. Judge McManus' approach was to allow Mr. Consular to present anything and everything as evidence in the trial or at least his position and I don't think Benson did that. But I suspected and knew that I wasn't going to receive a fair trial or for anything to happen with the legal system. Judiciary system. When they produced Affidavits from this woman named Myrtle Porber that she was my girlfriend and she was an eyewitness and some other stuff that she'd said. This person I've never met in my life. I knew something was wrong and I said, well, the only thing we can do is for me to fight extradition here as hard as I can and try to get a promise out of the United States government that they would give me a fair trial. That was one of the reasons for fighting extradition. Whatever is said in those Affidavits in my judgment, as I indicated by not calling her as a witness once I had all of the evidence together, Myrtle Porber was not a witness. She was not present and was not a competent witness. So essentially what happened is Peltier at that time made a serious strategic blunder. Instead of simply voluntarily coming back, he resisted and forced him to extradite him. Well, what happened in the meantime, Robidou and Butler go to trial. And as the theory changed over time, because in the Robidou case, the theory was that there was a preplanned ambush of the agents. Well, that didn't work too well in Cedar Rapids. I was sold some seven, eight months later. The ambush theory was dropped and it became that the agents were killed because Leonard Peltier knew that they were coming after him on an old warrant and that therefore he killed the agents to keep from being arrested. So basically what the government did is they suppressed anything that was inconsistent with their case and only several years later, through the Freedom of Information Act, were we able to come up with the documentation which in fact showed that the only evidence that arguably directly connected him with the deaths of the agents was a fraud. Well, the trial was a long, hard trial. About five weeks. When we got all through with it, we wound up with no eyewitnesses. There were no direct testimony to eyesaw, Leonard Peltier finished off the agents. We had basically tried it on a kind of a combined hybrid theory. Our main theory obviously was that Leonard Peltier had gone down and personally executed both agents. I mean, there's no question that. That was our main theory. But we hadn't proved that and we knew we hadn't proved it. And so we argued it to the jury quite simply as, ladies and gentlemen, this is what we think he did. But we know we didn't prove that. But, you know, we think we've convinced you that he did. I mean, we think the circumstantial evidence is enough to suggest that. But you don't have to believe that because to commit murder, you can commit murder equally by aiding and abetting in it. And we knew that we had five or six or seven shooters. And we knew that we'd narrowed it down to a small group of which Leonard Peltier was the oldest. He was clearly the leader. He was the one. Even their own witnesses established this. He had been invited into the area. I mean, he was the one. He had brought the others along with him. It wasn't the other way around. We knew that. The remainder of the prosecution's case against Leonard Peltier, taking away the ballistics, is simply that which was the same as Rubidou and Butler. There is no difference. They were acquitted. He was convicted because they fabricated that evidence by having an FBI agent, a ballistics expert, a firearms identification person, perjure himself, despite his report, and then hide the report so the perjury would not be apparent. So we've got bullets hitting the car over where we think he would have been firing from. Everything lines up right. We've got him seen by the bodies. There's only three people that ever, by testimony, ever placed down there, and that's Rubidou, Butler, and him. Now, nobody says he's at the agents. Anybody saying that? But we've got basically a piece of circumstantial evidence which is almost as damaging, and that's the shell casing that's injected into the trunk. What that basically tells us is quite simple. That shell casing is not an unusual shell casing for an FBI agent to have. A 223 could very well be one of their own weapons. So it doesn't mean much of anything until it matches up with something else. When it matches up with a weapon that the FBI could not have had access to, it tells you that that probably was one of the murder weapons. What do you want to show you now? This is a bolt from an AR-15. This is your ejector. This is your extractor. Here is your firing pin. Firing pins on an empty brass. When it strikes your primer, it leaves an impression in there, which is very identifiable. It's just like a fingerprint. What the Evan Hodge testified on behalf of the government that essentially after he had finished examining casings and weapons that had been received from every other part of the country as well as from the scene, he then went to the casing that was supposedly found within 10 feet of the agent's bodies, compared that casing to extractor marks that were on the casing that was found supposedly near the agent's bodies, compared them to test-fired casings from the AR-15 from Wichita and claimed that there was a match. He testified that he could not and did not do a firing pin test on that AR-15 from Wichita because the weapon was too badly damaged from the fire and explosions of the vehicle from which it was seized. According to documents we obtained under the Free Information Act, Evan Hodge committed perjury when he said that, that he not only could do a firing pin test, but he in fact did do a firing pin test back in October, not in February, where he claimed that he made the match through extractor marks, and that the firing pin test conclusively showed that that weapon was not connected to the scene that day. What we have here are two different handwriting pertaining to 223 caliber casings with the K-40 rifle, which was the AR-15 from Wichita and a third handwriting on this page. Well, what Evan Hodge did, he did misspeak at the trial. It was a polite perjury because he said that only two people, he and an assistant, by the name of Joe, had worked on the comparison of the shell casing, which was the only crucial evidence against Leonard, different from the Cedar Rapids trial. And when he went back into his back room there at the courthouse after he had been on the stand for a number of hours, he met Joe and said to Joe, yours was the only signature different from mine on the reports, the only handwriting, and therefore there were only two of us. Isn't that so? And Joe surprised and said, no, that's not my handwriting at all. It was handwriting on the crucial report which led to the famous telegram or teletype of October 2nd that it couldn't have been Leonard's gun. And he said, no, that's not my handwriting. And they discovered there were three other people who had worked on the comparison at the FBI laboratory. So he had to come back in and say he had misspoken and that there were other people and they would endeavor to find those other people for us. According to the blistics evidence, and we're talking about the casings that the government actually turned into the laboratory because it's clear they were selective, there were at least three AR-15s that were linked to the scene that day. While at trial the government argued to the jury that there was only one. It's contrary to what their evidence showed, it's contrary to what the court of appeals found that the evidence showed. The theory of the government's case from the very beginning was one of eating and abetting that there were more than one individual, even though Leonard Boutier was the leader, that there was more than one individual that was involved in the killing of the two agents. And you're guilty of murder if that is proven. The government does not have to prove that one single individual did all these events or even that he's the one who fired the final shot. I think the evidence ultimately proved that he was the leader and that he was a key shooter and that he was where the rounds were found and the types of rounds and so forth that he was a critical shooter in the death. But this was the theory of our case from the beginning and this is a very common theory that if you are an aider or an abetter to the crime then you're guilty of the crime. Well, the prosecution changed and flip-flop on who was the murderer. In the Fargo trial it was all Leonard. He did the killing, he was the executioner, he had murdered the agents in cold blood with a high-powered AR-15. When it got to the appellate level, it was all changed because they knew of the significance of that teletype saying it couldn't have been Leonard's gun and therefore they changed it to an aiding and abetting theory which was not the theory that went to the jury and now they said that they didn't know who shot the agents, who killed the agents, but Leonard was with the group that did and therefore he was an aider and abetter and just as guilty. A complete change in theory necessitated by the revelation that it really couldn't have been Leonard's gun. I mean essentially what the October 2nd teletype said was that the weapon that the government told the jury was used by Leonard Peltier to kill the agents, in fact could not have been the weapon that was used to kill the agents and in fact what the government therefore did was not only present false evidence to the jury, in post-trial surveys with the jurors it's real clear that this was the crucial evidence that was against Peltier and upon the determination of the court of appeals this was indeed the crucial evidence that was used to convict Leonard Peltier. It's interesting that today the government has changed its position. But once we got the October 2nd teletype which showed that this physical evidence was indeed a fraud the government immediately changed its position and said that it didn't prosecute Leonard Peltier as the person who shot and killed the agents but essentially prosecuted him as an aider and abetter. This argument was also rejected by the court of appeals. We did not have the October 2nd teletype. We did not have anything which would have shown that in fact Evan Hodge was committing perjury in trying to claim that there was in fact a definitive link between the air 15 from Wichita and Leonard Peltier and the scene. Leonard was not branded a new trial despite all these revelations because it was a political and not a legal decision. The FBI pressure has been intense in this case. They indicated that they were even going to drop the prosecution of one of the young men who was indicted but never tried, Jimmy Eagle because they wanted to as they put it drop the full prosecuted weight of the federal government on Leonard Peltier and they were told in the field develop evidence that will tie Peltier in with this crime. And so what really happened essentially was that the appellate courts who know something is terribly wrong that's why one of them wrote in the opinion as I've never seen in any other appellate opinion we are uncomfortable with our decision. If this had been a supermarket robbery and a couple of clerks had been killed they were not in a new trial but when you substitute the victims for clerks, reed, FBI agents then you find that they have to have somebody whom they can pin these what they call murders I call homicides during a shootout but they could pin those two corpses on. Well Leonard's case is important to those us in Congress because the Constitution is very important to us it's the bulwark of our civilization and when we see something take place in the third branch the judicial branch of the United States that was established by the Constitution where we think that something should be done over again like a new trial then we are very interested. The loss of liberty unnecessarily by one individual American is very important to all of us in Congress. I don't feel that I've done anything wrong on June 25th I don't think that anybody that was in our camp that day that fought that day, raised a rifle I don't think nobody has done any wrong that day we've done no more than what any of our people would have done to protect our people you know crazy horse done the same thing when Custer attacked the camp then it looked a little big horn you know Chief Joseph done the same thing when he was trying to lead his people to Canada we never done no wrong in my mind that if I had done any wrong or not that day I believe that what I did was right that anybody else in the same situation would have done the same thing. There's clear evidence that he was innocent the evidence was fabricated and distorted and as you know he was extradited from Canada on the strength of false and fabricated affidavits which the government was finally admitted to say were false and fabricated he was denied a fair trial by being transferred back into Indian country from whence he had been removed along with the Rupert Duane Butler because essentially they thought the juries would be unfair and then mysteriously back from Iowa by a process we don't know yet what happened neither does the judge Joe who was to try the case in Iowa Judge Edward McManus who had tried the Rupert Duane Butler case and he was sent back to be eaten up by the wolves to be tried before a highly prejudiced judge some of whose rulings were later reversed in other cases because of anti-Indian remarks and he was just a victim to a need for a someone to have the mantle of guilt on his shoulders for the death of those two FBI agents Did you kill the agents? I did not kill those agents I had the distinct impression he was telling the truth but I couldn't count on that mathematically What I count on much more is the behavior of the local Pine Ridge Indian people around him the way they speak of him now I just know knowing those people they would not speak of him the way they do if he had really lost his head a non-warrior panicked and blown those two agents away like that they really love him they love what he did for them they love the fact he stood up for them he's a genuine hero to them