American Indian Movement (AIM)
Web: http://www.aimovement.org
Quotes
The FBI and its allies waged all-out war on AIM and the Native
people. From 1973-76, they killed 69 residents of the tiny Pine Ridge
reservation, a rate of political murder comparable to the first years of the
Pinochet regime in Chile. To justify such a reign of terror and undercut public
protest against it, the Bureau launched a complementary program of psychological
warfare. [1999] WAR AT HOME by Brian
Glick
Virtually every known AIM leader in the United States has been incarcerated in either state or federal prisons since (or even before) the organization's formal emergence in 1968, some repeatedly. After the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee the FBI caused 542 separate charges to be filed against those it identified as "key AIM leaders." This resulted in 15 convictions, all on such petty or contrived offenses as "interfering with a federal officer in the performance of his duty." Russell Means was faced with 37 felony and three misdemeanor charges, none of which held up in court. Organization members often languished in jail for months as the cumulative bail required to free them outstripped resource capabilities of AIM and supporting groups. COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story By Paul Wolf
In many ways, the stark unwillingness of the federal government to accord
Leonard Peltier even a modicum of elementary justice is symbolic of the entire
AIM experience during the 1970s and, more broadly posed, of the U.S.
relationship to American Indians since the first moment of the republic. The
message embedded, not only in Peltier's imprisonment, but in the scores of
murders, hundreds of shootings and beatings, endless show trials and all the
rest of the systematic terrorization marking the FBI's anti-AIM campaign on Pine
Ridge, was that the Bureau could and would make it cost-prohibitive for Indians
to seriously challenge the lot assigned them by policy-makers and economic
planners in Washington, D.C. The internal colonization of Native America is
intended to be absolute and unequivocal.
.......In 1953, just prior to the
passage of PL-280, Felix Cohen, one of the foremost scholars of
Indian law compared the role of the Indians in America to that
of the Jews in modem Germany. He noted that, "Like the miner's
canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison air
in our political atmosphere ... our treatment of Indians, even
more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise
and fall of our democratic faith." 213 Given that all
that happened on and around Pine Ridge occurred long after
COINTELPRO allegedly became no more than a "regrettable
historical anomaly," 214 Cohen's insight holds
particular significance for all Americans. In essence, if we may ascertain that
COINTELPRO remained alive and well years after it was supposed to have died, we
may assume it lives on today. And that, to be sure, is a danger to the lives and
liberties of everyone.
[1990] The COINTELPRO
Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret War Against Domestic Dissent by Ward
Churchill and Jim Vander Wall.
So that if you're talking about first oil in Oklahoma, and then low-sulfur
coal and uranium in the West, those mineral deposits lay principally on the
lands of indigenous people. This led to an outright war on the Pine Ridge
Reservation with a group called the Goons, being sponsored by the FBI and the
U.S. government and the American Indian movement and local organizations like
the Independent Oglala Nation supporting native sovereignty and traditional ways
of life.
During the period from 1973 to
1975, at least 60 people were killed by the Goon squads on the Pine Ridge
Reservation, and I say at least because these are reported homicides. It is
probably much larger than that because the agency to which you would report a
homicide was the FBI, who were of course sponsoring the people committing the
homicides. So a lot of assaults and murders went unreported. On June 25, 1975,
the FBI went on to a property called the Jumping Bull Compound on Pine Ridge
supposedly looking for Jimmy Eagle, who was a young Native American man, on
charges of having stolen a pair of cowboy boots.
The real reason for them being
there was that there was an AIM encampment there and when they encountered
people from the encampment, a firefight ensued and the two FBI agents who went
in - Ron Williams and Jack Coler were killed in the firefight, as well as AIM
member, Joseph Stuntz. Leonard Peltier wound up being framed for those murders
and when I say framed, I mean that the FBI coerced witnesses and fabricated
evidence in order to obtain a conviction.
.....Peltier has now been down in federal prisons
since 1976 on bogus charges and fabricated evidence. [Interview]
Jim Vander Wall
The FBI and its allies waged all-out war on AIM and the Native people. From 1973-76, they killed 69 residents of the tiny Pine Ridge reservation, a rate of political murder comparable to the first years of the Pinochet regime in Chile. To justify such a reign of terror and undercut public protest against it, the Bureau launched a complementary program of psychological warfare. [1999] WAR AT HOME by Brian Glick