LAND OF THE RED GIANTS OF IXTLAN

chapter 1 - North Dakota (cont. page 2)

"Maybe it's history, and maybe it's literature.

I don't know the difference."
- Count Leo Tolstoy
[talking about his new book
'War and Peace' in 1869]

I was back at that same Courthouse in Bismarck, North Dakota in 1984, and it looked
a lot different, probably because it was a pretty October day and I was there with
hundreds of Indian friends on a special occasion; special, because by then I was deep into
the upper echelons of AIM and I had a good feeling about participating in some
important efforts by powerful people to redress cruel grievances and evil injustices done
by men against their fellow men, animals, and the world. The sky was blue and warm in a
crisp early autumn we call the late Indian Summer with a huge orange Harvest Moon
thrown in for good measure. There's something special about North Dakota: I don't know
what it is. Maybe because it's so close to the genuine wildness of Canada with spaces so
vast you can drive a good car fast for days and barely get from one plain, generic
settlement to another in northernmost Manitoba and Saskatchewan. You can die out there
in a minute and Nature wouldn't think once about it. There's no damn people screwing up
everything everywhere, so that you can go hundreds of miles and not be left with
anything but your own thoughts and how they relate to the wind and the dirt.
"I was here back in the Seventies when all this shit was going down," I said, "right
here in North Dakota."
"Oh yeah?" Peter Matthiessen replied, as we both were leaning against the wall inside
the Courthouse getting frisked by the cops.
"Yeah."
He looked interested, as we passed through the security screeners after emptying our
pockets and taking off our watches for the cops to inspect. Peter was a nice guy, an
Eastern writer of National Book Award-winning adventures like 'The Snow Leopard', and
most recently his exhaustive study of AIM and the FBI 'In The Spirit of Crazy
Horse'. "Oh yeah?" He wanted to learn as much as he could about exotic places and
peoples.
"Right here in the Courthouse, in fact. Well, I was across the street having lunch with
some folks from Standing Rock, but we saw them take Anna Mae and Russell Means out
in handcuffs one time."
"Anna Mae Aquash?"
"Yeah, I'm pretty sure."
"When was that?"
"Well ... I know the date exactly because my father had just had a heart attack back in
Colorado, so I flew home from Minot that weekend and was back at work Monday
February 9. I started the school assembly tour the previous Monday Feb 2, so I know I
got back the 9th into Minot airport, at night. I only missed one day of work. Dad was
recovering okay. So I know I drove to Standing Rock early the next morning and did my
one-man Mark Twain show at the Cannonball schools on the Rezz."
"Mark Twain?"
"Yeah. I was an actor. It was a job. Anyway ..."
We were walking slowly down the crowded hallway toward the courtroom where
Leonard Peltier was to appear for an FBI 'evidentiary hearing' to see if he could get a new
trial. He'd been convicted of first degree murder of 2 FBI agents back in 1975 in South
Dakota, in a Fargo trial in 1977, and had been in federal penitentiaries for 7 years.
"February 9th or 10th, you say?" Peter asked.
"Yeah, the 10th for sure."
"1976?"
"Yep."
He stopped and looked skeptically at me. "That's incredible, Dave. You saw Anna
Mae alive 2 weeks before they found her dead on the 24th?"
"Exactly."
"When no one else has reported seeing her or hearing from her since the previous
December? There's that whole mysterious missing time of two months when she's just
disappeared from the earth. Are you sure it was her? Who else saw her?"
"Everett Male Bear from Fort Yates and his wife, and her aunt and uncle from
Cannonball and Fort Rice."
"I know Everett."
"Yeah, he works in the Standing Rock water office. They all said they'd be glad to
sign sworn depositions. But no Grand Jury has ever asked us to testify or anything."
"There's been several GJs investigating her unsolved murder."
" He's around somewhere, I just saw him."
"We'll talk later. Bill Kuntsler and Bruce Ellison might be very interested in this." We
had to run in the courtroom and get a seat, behind Kuntsler and Ellison and my good
friend Lew Gurwitz, Leonard's lawyers, as crowds of people were trying to get in. U.S.
Marshalls were lined up all around the walls in their gray polyester sports coats with
simple silver badges pinned over their hearts, watching all of us, nervously, but trying to
pretend they were the power in control of the situation. It was their turf. We were a bunch
of misanthropes with long hair, in blue jeans, out of place in their world of law and order.
Steve Robideau, Leonard's cousin and the Director of his Defense Committee, waved
for me in a front pew of that unholy church, where he'd saved me a seat, among the
irreverent congregation that had come hoping to be saved by American Justice and
Jewish lawyers from New York City. I waved back and tried to make my way to the front
past the throngs of well-wishers and somber Chippewas and Kiowas happy to be there to
be supporting Leonard in his tragic struggle. As I walked through the courtroom I tried to
comprehend the conversation I had just had with Peter about our mutual books that we'd
both just published; he, to a big time New York audience and bestseller status, and me,
with a miserable little self-published paperback with a scrawny first printing of 250. But
he had been gracious about it.
"I heard your book, 'The Powwow Highway', is great. Everybody's talking about it."
"Yeah? We're going into a second printing." I almost felt like a real writer, lying about
my pathetic little 'second printing' of another 250 xerox copies.
"Great. Congratulations."
 I knew I was a fraud, but what're ya gonna do? "Is the paperback of yours coming out
soon?" I knew he hadn't read mine and that it had never been in anything but a cheap
wordprocessed mess, so I rushed to change the subject before I was found out. It was a
nice illusion to be pretending to be writers talking about our books.
"No," he frowned. Now it was serious. "Janklow's tying it up in court."
"So he is still sueing you?" Janklow was (and still is) William Janklow, Governor of
South Dakota at that time, whom Peter Matthiessen and his publisher Viking Press had
referred to as a "rapist" in 'In The Spirit of Crazy Horse'.
"Yeah. He doesn't have a case at all because it's true, so I think he and the FBI are
doing it to stop the paperback."
"Oh yeah?" These were the problems of real writers. Janklow was also sueing Dennis
Banks of AIM and Newsweek magazine too for repeating the rape story.
"What a sleeze that guy is."
"Try living in South Dakota," I nodded, where I'd been living for a few years by then.
He looked at me. "Is that where you're from? I know Steve talks about you all the time
and what a good job you're doing for Leonard's defense committee."
"No, I'm from New Mexico where I was born in Roswell in 1947, and Colorado
originally."
"Oh? Do you know _______ in Aspen?"
"Who?" I don't remember the name he mentioned, not that I knew anybody in that
repulsive, exclusive resort town.
He didn't understand at all why I didn't know so-and-so in Aspen, if I was (really)
from Colorado, and repeated the name, irritably this time, as if I was just stupid or trying
to hide something. He was a healthy tall man with a tan and a handsome, confident
demeanor that the women liked. I felt more comfortable with my poor, grassroots
neighbors who weren't quite as healthy with our coffee and donut diets, and we never
played tennis or went skiing.

"Harassment against 'In The Spirit of Crazy Horse' began even before
most copies had been shipped by the publisher. In early 1983, William
Janklow, a powerful figure in South Dakota politics and twice elected
governor, asserted the book libeled him. He called stores and Viking,
threatening huge damage suits if they put the book on sale. Under-
standably, many stores were terrified and removed the book from their
shelves. Others did not. Janklow then filed suit against Viking and
Matthiessen on May 19,1983, naming three South Dakota bookstores
as co-defendants. He sought $24 million.
"In his complaint, Janklow alleged that the book portrayed him as,
among other things, 'morally decadent, a drunkard, a racist and bigot',
and 'an antagonist of the environment'. Janklow further claimed that
Matthiessen's recounting of historical charges and accusations leveled
against him by the American Indian Movement (AIM), together with
'other factual errors, too numerous to include', were 'prepared either
with a reckless disregard for the truth or with actual malice for plaintiff'.
"On June 13,1984, South Dakota trial judge Gene Kean issued an
opinion granting Viking's and Matthiessen's motion to dismiss Janklow's
 entire case. Judge Kean found that Matthiessen's reporting of the
historical charges made against Janklow was fair, balanced, and
protected as 'neutral reportage' - an evolving First Amendment doctrine
that affords protection to reporting of charges. Janklow appealed.
"The next year, the Supreme Court of South Dakota reversed the
dismissal ... In 1988 Judge Kean again dismissed Janklow's case ...
Again Janklow appealed, but in a four-to-one decision the majority
of the S.D. Supreme Court said the First Amendment required
dismissal ... Janklow, after stating he would pursue the case as long
as he lived, chose not to take it to the United States Supreme Court."
- 'In The Spirit of Crazy Horse'
[afterword by Martin Garbus] (3)

Sitting down with Steve and Jimmy Robideau I felt better, freer of the blurred
distinctions confusing libel and The Law as definitions of my old fact vs. fiction theme.
"Hey Man, good to meet you," Jimmy from Seattle said, giving me a good
revolutionary handshake, "I love your book."
"Oh, thanks." I was amazed. I thought Indians would hate its gritty down-to-earth
realism about the alcoholism and squalor of the reservations that I hated so much. "I was
afraid the troops would have carved their names in my back."
They laughed. "No Man, you told it the way it is, and let the chips fall where they
may." They were both very dark-skinned men who'd been in prison and had a much
grittier look and feel to them than the cleanness and clearness of Peter Matthiessen and
the white lawyers on the other side of the rich fence in front of us. In this cavernous,
antiseptic room, Steve and Jim were unfunctional men with very long very black braids
down their backs in cheap clothes and beaded rosettes, buffalo bone chokers, and the
kindest black eyes I've only seen closeup in buffaloes among the entire animal kingdom.
Their kindness and their complete easiness and openness is what has most endeared
indigenous people to me more than anything. Once they knew who I was the hard aloof
exterior they present to amerikan strangers, who've not been introduced to them by
someone they trust as someone trustworthy, they dropped the barriers immediately and
welcomed me into their homes. Hospitality, I've read even in the Bible, was the most
cherished quality of all the most ancient and civilized nations of the world. 80% of the
time we were cracking jokes and drinking coffee and helping each other out.
Steve Robideau, especially, and I had become fast friends, working together almost
every day back in Rapid City at the 'Peltier House' where he and his wife Arlene and their
little boys Wamblee and Toki lived, and my 3-year old son Sky (Makhpeya they caled
him) came with me almost every day. The kids played in the backyard while we got out
the newspaper 'Crazy Horse Spirit' and tried to get Leonard out of prison. He'd call us just
about every day and I talked to him many times. Steve and I would smoke a joint once in
a while in the evening after working all day, and scramble up some eggs or baloney we
got from commodity-issue BIA-USA charity while the coffee pot was on all the time. He
would talk to me for hours in his quiet gentle voice, smoking cigarettes, about the cruel
struggles he and Leonard had faced, growing up on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa-
Ojibwa reservation in North Dakota, on the Canadian border. It was where I'd also done
my one-man show back in that watershed winter of '75-'76 next to a snowshed where the
snowplows were parked, in the elementary and high school gym at Belcourt N.D., and on
the other Rezz towns of the Devil's Lake Sioux and the New Town agency headquarters
of the 3 Affiliated Tribes of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arrikara, and the Wolf Point Sioux
in Montana. I'd also stopped at Lame Deer on the way on that same trip where I'd gotten
the Northern Cheyenne inspirations for my books, next door to the Crow Rezz and the
Little Bighorn River.

"When he was fourteen, Leonard took off for the West Coast, where
his mother's brothers were struggling to survive. "I was born just one week
after Leonard," says his cousin Steve Robideau, "at the Red Lake Center
for unwed mothers in Minnesota. My grandmother raised me in Grand
Forks, and I was sent to the government boarding school at Turtle
Mountain, but I didn't really know Leonard well until he showed up in
Oakland with Bob Robideau's family. It was Bob's father, Bill, who
taught all of us about machine work and carpentry, and later me and
Leonard worked as welders in shipyards up in Portland. Leonard always
had girls, and money in his pocket, because he's a real good worker,
and people liked him. He was just Leonard. He's always been just
who he is, and he's always been good-hearted, he just likes to laugh
and tease. Leonard really wanted to be in the Marines, go off to war
in Vietnam, but they gave him a medical discharge because of a
shallow bite. He was disappointed but he could still laugh about it.
I wasn't in the Marines to bite people, he said, I was in there to
shoot people!"
- 'In The Spirit of Crazy Horse' (4)

"All rise!" an authoritative voice suddenly commanded in the noisy, high-ceiled, old-
fashioned room with flags and expensive, antique woodwork intimidating generations of
lawbreakers and impressing armies of judges, juries, and lawyers.
The existential joke of protocol became immediately apparent as, simultaneously, we
all obediently stood up and Leonard Peltier entered the theatre. Leonard got the joke a
heartbeat ahead of the rest of us and cracked a big grin and waved at all of us, and we in
turn cheered for him. It was one of the most wonderful moments of my life; and probably
his too. The big un-handsome man in curly black shoulder-length hair raised a fist in
salute and, I swear to Goddess, his bright yellow ribbon-shirt glistened in the unnatural
flourescent lights with a large scarlet slash of a lightning bolt sewn into the shiny satin
shirt, so bold and provocative among the gray-suited policemen surrounding him that I
didn't know whether to duck from the impending gunbattle that might ensue at any
moment or just to cry for joy. There are such moments of high drama in this world.
"Who said that!" Jimmy asked.
I looked around to the back of the room where we'd heard the command to rise, when
the judge entered, right after Leonard, over to his throne upstage center, and a big Lakota
man commanded us in the same authoritative voice, with supreme comedic timing, "Be
seated!"
And with that we timed it perfectly to sit on the judge's anticlimactic entrance so as
not to violate the letter of the law, which law enforcement authorities had taken great
exception to in a number of other irreverent courtroom performances (in their
performance of their duties to the exalted and sacred protocols of the holy U. S.
Constitution), and not stand up for the Supreme Arbiter as we were required to do at
gunpoint.
"Bill Means," I answered, grinning, giving the best of the 4 Means brothers of Pine
Ridge a director's high-sign and a wink to an actor who'd done good. He smiled back, the
Director of the International Treaty Council in our San Francisco and New York offices,
and accepted the hearty congratulations of hs jolly good fellows all around.
The cops and "Hanging Judge Paul Benson" didn't know what the hell to do.
It was an auspicious start to days of profound platonic dialogues in which Leonard's
main attorney, William Kuntsler of Chicago 7 fame, argued like Socrates with the sole
FBI witness in the hearing, one very normal and nervous gentleman named Evan Hodges,
a scientist in the federal weapons laboratory in Washington, D.C., that Leonard was
innocent and the government had no incriminating evidence against him at all, least of all
some dubious ballistics the Feds had come up with months after the firefight on Pine
Ridge in 1975.
While Kuntsler dazzled me with his histrionics that I couldn't follow about .223 shell
casings that didn't match a burned up AR-15 as the "execution-style" murder weapon, and
culpable .302 teletypes from Hodge's lab, I watched Leonard at his table in his even more
dazzling lightning-bolt sitting with his Pipe laid out on a cloth in front of him with
sweetgrass and sage.
I thought of the Canumpa Pipe in that profane building, and how Steve and I had
carried it in to the jail that morning, at the head of a long procession of dozens of old
Protectors like an ancient shamanic Ceremony, with cop cars and federal black
helicopters swarming all around us like we were the fabled red devils of yore.

I talked to Leo Peltier, Leonard's father from Turtle Mountain, on one of those balmy
afternoons when the court was in recess. We talked out on a picnic table in a city park or
on the grounds of the 3 Affiliated Tribes tribal college (I'm not sure where we were), that
was putting us all up in the gym and feeding us, hundreds of supporters from all over the
world, the good Hosts as ever. Leo was a quiet gentle man very much like his nephew
Steve, only with short white hair and thin, sickly, circumspect. But what could we say?
His son was in prison for two life sentences, for defending women and children when FBI
agents came in shooting at their camp one hot June morning. He was sad and angry at the
injustice and violence of the government, but what can you do? I was more hopeful, but I
was younger, just a little younger than Leonard himself who was pushing 40, and white-
skinned. I tried valiantly to cheer him up, saying that all these people we'd gathered here
after months of grueling organizational work and efforts would surely make a difference,
and we had good lawyers, and a lot of media attention. Everybody was working hard,
nobody was drinking, a 24-hour spiritual vigil was being kept up around the courthouse
and jail where Leonard was, with many drums and a friendly Buddhist monk playing
bells and bangles, and marchers carrying signs and a great painted banner of FREE
PELTIER with the red AIM logo of a red fist like a face with the two fingers of Peace
and Victory raised over it like war feathers.
 "Sure, I'm glad to see so many young people supporting my son. But where are the
Elders? Where are our traditional elders to support us?"
I didn't have an answer then. It's taken me another twenty years to begin to understand
that one.