00:00:02 Speaker 1: Before and after seventeen seventy six, European colonizers traveled to the Americas, slowly eroding indigenous land as they went. When uranium was discovered in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the US government sought to take land from the Oglala Sioux and deliver it to private enterprise. Thus began a reign of terror in nineteen seventy two that led to over sixty unsolved murders on the Pine Ridge Reservation and came to a climax in a nineteen seventy five firefight that left one Native man and two federal agent instead. Now by FBI estimates, forty two Native people were engaged in the firefight with swatims from all around the country that had been lying in wait, but the chaos and crossfire made it very difficult to pinpoint who was responsible for the deaths. Two Native men were tried and acquitted on the grounds of self defense, so and evidence changed when they then tried one of the leaders of the American Indian Movement, Leonard Peltier, sending him away for two consecutive life sentences. This is wrongful conviction. You're listening to wrongful conviction. You can listen to this and all the Lava for Good podcasts one week early n AD free by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction. I mean, I have a lot of heroes, and I've had the chance to meet and interview many of them, but none greater than the man that we're interviewing today. He's very humble, so he probably hates the sound of that, but I got to say it like it is. Leonard Peltier is an American legend of civil rights who survived countless assassination attend dodged hundreds, if not thousands, of bullets, escaped from federal prisons, from manhunts from the country. I mean, I feel like Johnny Depp needs to play you, Leonard in a movie someday. I hope he will.

00:02:12 Speaker 2: Johnny and I are okay perfect.

00:02:14 Speaker 1: Then we're going to produce this movie. And I'm joined today by Ben Bolin, one of my favorite podcasters, who's going to be co hosting this episode and this season of Wrongful Conviction.

00:02:26 Speaker 3: Yes, sir, on stuff they don't want you to do. My colleagues and I intensely studied aim the American Indian Movement your story as well. We are overjoyed to be speaking with you today when you have emerged from what I would call a gross miscarriage of American justice.

00:02:49 Speaker 1: And later on we're going to be joined by one of Leonard's co defendants, Darryl Dino Butler, who was acquitted in a separate trial. We will also speak with a member of Leonard's original defense, Bruce Allison, who has remained steadfast two and four Leonard for the last fifty years, as well as legal legend Ron Kobe and Holly maccaro, a tribal advocate who was instrumental in winning Leonard's clemency, but before Leonard's ronful incarceration, prosecution, or even his political activism. Leonard or Tate Wikowa was born in nineteen forty four in North Dakota.

00:03:26 Speaker 2: My English name is Leonard Peltier. I'm a nation Abbi were called Chipwa and many different places, and were called Sue's also Lakota in a number of different places, but those are our real names. I'm eighty years old. I've just got out of prison after spending forty nine point juniors in federal prisons across the country. I have been an activist since I was nine years old when I was first taken from my home and forcibly put into a boarding school. How it happened was my grandmother and grand father basically adopted us and was raising myself and my sister Betty, and my cousin Pauline. And then Grandpa, who was a provider for the family, died in fifty two. Grandma was by herself, so she thought, well, I got to have some help to feed these kids. So she went to the BIA agency and asked for help.

00:04:24 Speaker 3: And BIA is the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

00:04:28 Speaker 2: Yes, and they found an excuse to take us and put us in a boarding school in Watson, North Dakota, and they were trying to beat the Native language and religion and culture out of us.

00:04:42 Speaker 3: Today, the BIA is part of the Federal Department of the Interior and now manages about fifty six million acres of land held in trust with Native nations, and they implement federal laws and policy regarding policing, resources, agricul infrastructure, economic issues. But back in the fifties, the federal government was on a mission to assimilate Native people into Anglo American culture. It's a mission that began even before the eighteen eighty three Code of Indian Offenses. That code outlawed various Indigenous religious practices for the comfort of their new European neighbors, we could call them. And so, even in the aftermath of World War Two, in which so many Native men served, fought, and died, for Leonard and his siblings, getting food assistants meant being ripped away from their families, robbed of their language and religion, in a boarding school system where abuse ran rampant.

00:05:52 Speaker 2: I myself almost died when I was ten years old escaping from there. But I wasn't the only child, and this was not the only school. I was just one of thousands of kids that were facing this type of brutality. That's when my political activism started. When I got there, there was already a group of older kids that had started a group called Resistors, and we would go behind the gymnasm and sing our songs and talk native to each other and our prayers and stuff like this. I was there from nineteen fifty three to nineteen fifty six. I happened to go in there at a time when I hit it. Lucky the people were lobbying, and the soldiers were lobbying the President of the United States Eisenhower, and so Eisenhower put out a presidential order no more maltreatment of the Indian kids and the schools, because there was so many kids that were literally becoming lost. They call them and they don't know what happened to them.

00:06:57 Speaker 3: You may have seen the news articles in the last decade or so about the discovery of mass graves near old Native boarding schools. So while Eisenhower's intervention was a welcome public change in tone in the nineteen fifties, we have to remember a nefarious agenda was still afoot. It's an agenda that began even before the first iteration of the BIA, way back when it was called the Committee on Indian Affairs under Ben Franklin. This committee oversaw trade and treaty relations. The authority was transferred to the Secretary of War in seventeen eighty nine, and this led to a century of wars, treaties, broken treaties, and above all, the slow erosion of indigenous land.

00:07:48 Speaker 2: When they first got here, the first lands they took with our agricultural land, all of the vegetables and stuff you see on the table came from us. Our farmers domesticated a while vegetable into a domesticated one, and we had some of the best agricultural land in the world. So they took us off of that and put us on barren land that they didn't take we would ever exist then, I mean, you can find writings where they said this, they should not be able to live through somebody's lands that they put us on. But we did because we knew how to develop barn land into productive land.

00:08:27 Speaker 3: But as more Europeans arrived, the transgressions continued, like the Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty signed by then President Andrew Jackson, which meant for the Natives who would not assimilate, they would be moved west of the Mississippi River into what was at that time called Indian Territory. Yet in the eighteen thirty four Worcester v. Georgia Supreme Court decision, the court ruled in favor of previous treaties and the sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation.

00:09:00 Speaker 1: Jackson notoriously infamously remarked, let's see them enforce it, and in one of the first times in American history, a sitting President ignored the Supreme Court and began the deadly trail of tears, marching the Cherokees from their rightful place in Georgia to present day Oklahoma.

00:09:19 Speaker 3: And over the following half century, many more wars were fought and new treaties were signed, only spoiler to later be broken again. Probably the most egregious land grab occurs in eighteen eighty seven, when the US Congress passes the DAWs Act under the guise of assimilation. This act divides land that was collectively held by various Native nations into what they called individual land allotments, like the ones settled by their European counterparts, and then once settled. This leaves one hundred and thirty eight million surplus acres of Native nations.

00:10:00 Speaker 1: Land, which was then made available for purchase by non natives, and by nineteen thirty four, only forty eight million of those acres remained, at which point the Indian Reorganization Act sought to drastically change the relationship by ending assimilation mandates, encouraging tribal self governance and constitutions, elections in corporation for resource management, and that tribal land would be protected by the federal government, and any federal lands that were unused would be returned to native control. But of the ninety out of one hundred and thirty eight million acres to be returned by twenty ten, only about eight percent of them had been restored. Unsurprisingly, it appears that economic interests caused a change of course.

00:10:47 Speaker 2: As time went by, they start to find out that the Baron lands they put us on was rich in minerals uranium, uranium, gold, silver, I mean copper. They wanted this land for themselves, so they started again a system of termination for us. In nineteen fifty six, they were starting to write American Termination Act, which was supposed to be completed by nineteen eighty five, and that was to terminate all Indian reservations in this country. They were going to supposedly buy our lands. But the first reservation to be terminated was the Monominee of Wisconsin. Then they came here to the Turtle Mountain, chip Or Cree Nation and told us that we had to leave, we had to relocate. But my father that his generation fought back. I was only thirteen years old and I was able to participate. We fought back here and literally drove them away. From terminating this nation. And it wasn't just Turtle Mountains, it was Pine Ridge. All of us was in that danger.

00:11:53 Speaker 3: And part of that termination policy was the Indian Relocation Program, through which the BA promised economic opportunity in urban areas, offering vocational training and relocation assistance. Yet the Native people who were willing to believe in this promise often found nothing but low wage opportunities, racial discrimination, poverty, homelessness. Yet Leonard, at this point is still young. It's nineteen fifty eight. After being sure that there were no reports of abuse, he enrolls in a boarding school in Land Crew, South Dakota. Upon arrival, he's called to a meeting by other Native teens.

00:12:35 Speaker 2: So this guy comes over, I think he was sophomore, and he said, come down to the rec room. We're going to talk to all of you guys. So we go down there and this guy comes I take he was a senior, and he said, there is a group of white boys driving around the city Flinger of South Dakota, and they're picking up these young Indian girls by force, taking them out in the country. They're beating them up, they're raping them, and they're leaving them out there to die. Your job is to escort them from the boarding school grounds to the movies, and there was a soda shop right next door to it. Your job is to protect him. And I know, I was, Yeah, we'll be there, goddamn rights, we'll be there.

00:13:19 Speaker 1: But why did these teenagers feel responsible for public safety? Well, according to the Major Crimes Act of eighteen eighty five, the tribal police only had jurisdiction over nonviolent crimes committed by Native people, while federal authorities had jurisdiction over all violent crimes, no matter who committed them, So federal authorities were typically approached after the fact by Native crime victims, as they were. In reference to a South Dakota teenager named Bill Janklow.

00:13:47 Speaker 2: Bill Janquell, his family was a very rich racture and this one girl gets beat up. He raped her and everything, and they thought she was knocked out, and she got Bill Jenkuill license plate number, and that's how they caught him. He pled guilty. He was given a choice of either going to a farm school till he was twenty one or going into the military for two years. So he goes to the military, serves two years, it comes out and he goes to college on a GI bill and he gets a lawyer's degree. So he comes back to the South Dakota area and somehow he's the leader part of the agency that handles all Rosebud funding from Washington. He's married, now got two kids, and he starts doing it again.

00:14:36 Speaker 3: In January nineteen sixty seven, when Janklow was the director of the Rosebudsoe Legal Services Program, he allegedly raped a young woman whom he employed as a babysitter. Her name Jensita Eagle Deer.

00:14:51 Speaker 2: The head of the BI Police Department was telling us he takes Bill Janquell to jail, he makes a call and the FBI comes in said, you've got no jurisdiction. You've got to let him out. That's the way it was back. So Bill Jenkle was never charged for raping Genese to Eagle there or any of those other young girls they were children. He never was charged for that. He starts running for office for the Attorney General's office.

00:15:20 Speaker 1: And Jancy the Eagle Deer's allegations resurface.

00:15:24 Speaker 2: So we were demonstrating raising hell and talking about we want this son of a bitch in jail or some god damn thing. He's raped numerous of our children. We were pissed. We couldn't get nobody and listened to us. So we become an active enemy of Bill Jenkles and he becomes the Attorney General of South Dakota. God and the attorney general himself was outraged. He said, I don't believe this. You have kicked me out of office and elected a admitted rapist child molest her.

00:15:58 Speaker 3: Soon after that election, Jencita Eagle Deer is killed in a hit and run accident, and Bill Jinklow went on to be the twenty seventh and then thirtieth governor of South Dakota before a stint in Congress that gets cut short when Jinkler runs through a stop sign at about sixty five miles per hour and kills a motorcyclist.

00:16:23 Speaker 2: He hits him on his motorcycle and kills him, and his father, who was happy to be a successful rancher, himself, said, this guy ain't gonna get away with this, not this time. Well, he got found guilty in a trial, but he was sentenced to weekend in prison. So what they were having him do is coming in the morning Saturday morning and Sunday night, he would sign out to go back to his job.

00:16:47 Speaker 1: I don't want to sound cynical, but it's almost like the white, wealthy and well connected experience a completely different version of the legal system. Is that to an extreme, and so the righteous commitment to justice that drove their opposition to not only the protection of Janklow but also his elevated status.

00:17:10 Speaker 2: Well.

00:17:10 Speaker 1: That driving force continued to guide Leonard when he moved to Seattle, Washington in nineteen sixty five.

00:17:16 Speaker 2: My uncle Toby he'd probably get me a job up there, so I did. I went up there. Later on I met this state of he was older than me. It's like a father to me. Howard Miller, him and I got to talking about opening a auto shop. We did. And I was staying with Howard and his wife and come home for supper and I'm watching there was a demonstration going on about the fishing and hunting, the struggles that was going on since the forties or whatever. Way back there. In nineteen fifty five, Marlon Branda got involved and even got arrested, and it just kept escalating, and they were out there tear gashing and beaten out the people, and they had this one young lady. He had about a five six year old son. They had ripped her blouse and everything, which was a common practice they did to the women. And there was beaten on her. And this little boy come running up there and they said, don't hit her, and he started beating him. So I told Howe, I said, you can have everything. I'm going on with them.

00:18:19 Speaker 4: I'm gonna go fight with them.

00:18:32 Speaker 2: I started getting involved, and I started joining different organizations, and one of the ones was the Alcatraz occupation.

00:18:42 Speaker 3: According to several treaties and the Indian Reorganization Act of nineteen thirty four, surplus federal lands were supposed to be returned to Native people. So with Alcatraz the penitentiary closed in nineteen sixty three, it should have but was not returned to its rightful tribe. From November of nineteen sixty nine to July of nineteen seventy one, a collective of Native organizations, including the American Indian Movement or AIM, occupied this island Alcatraz under the following banner Indians of Old Tribes. And this was not the only action taken for land reclamation.

00:19:24 Speaker 2: We were doing the same thing on Fort Lawton that land was being given to the city for one dollar, and the city didn't want it. We've got too many parks now, we can't pay for them, so let dominions have it with the rich and people that were involved in it had plans on building whatever. Would you give it up. They finally gave us fifteen acres, but that was nothing compared to I think it was fifteen hunderd acres there. But those were the type of actions that we were going and we got a confrontation with the army there, and the military one of the things that they did that still stays in my mind, and I kind of believe that they would have never used them on us. But one time they got off their buses and they had flame drawers and so a lot of people left to the back trail. But they never used them, of course, but it was used as a tactic of fear against us.

00:20:19 Speaker 1: But the American Indian Movement wasn't deterred. In nineteen seventy two, they organized a caravan to Washington that picked up more numbers as it drove through other nativations along the way, until they had about two thousand people descending on the BIA building in a protest called the Trail of Broken Treaties.

00:20:41 Speaker 2: We went to Washington to the Burevern and Affairs, that's our White House, hoping we could get an audience with somebody that could help us, because we were not getting any help back there on the reservations and the termination was being enforced upon us, and they're supposed to be protecting us. Of course they weren't. They were fighting against us to eliminate our control of our lands and depend on the United States government for handouts. That's how they controlled us. They forced us to submit to them through these handouts, and people were tired about it. We wanted to bring our treaties back up to them and make them abide by their promises, and of course they weren't doing that. So when we got there, we all ended up in the parking lot, parked our cars and demonstrating around the Bureau of Indian Affairs building. Like I said, it's supposed to be our white house, and the superintendent, Leo Bruce, was supposed to be our president, although he was appointed but whatever party was in power at the time. So we went in and asked them. We said, look, we got all these people here, old people, some of our headsmen and chiefs and stuff like this. And we got children out there, us young people to sleep out on the ground. We don't care about that, but we want you to give these people lodging somehow. Lei Bruce UPSI, I can't do that. I ain't got to fund it, and got to well, what are you doing with the millions and millions of dollars that goes into the budget every year, Why can't you take care of our elders? We know, lion, we knew that. And Russell Mean said you're not going to let you do the Star elders, and it escalated into occupation.

00:22:21 Speaker 3: And during this six day occupation in November nineteen seventy two, AIM leadership rifled through the BIA's documents. Bruce Ellison, who supported AIM as an attorney throughout the standoff at Wounded Knees, South Dakota in nineteen seventy three, as well as in the aftermath of the shootout at Pine Ridge in nineteen seventy five. Well Bruce told us about some of the things that they discovered in the BIA building occupation in nineteen seventy two, as well as what it meant specifically for the Oglala Sioux on the Pine Ridge Reservation there in South Dakota.

00:22:57 Speaker 5: When the BIA building was taken over by American Movement in nineteen seventy two, there were a whole troughs of documents that were taken and removed from that building. People who have heard of this have generally heard of the fact that it disclosed a four sterilization program for Native women. Another part of that, though, was that this area was given a priority for uranium mining. That was seventy two, right, and then you have Wounded Knee seventy three, and then you have this firefight in seventy five. You have resistance basically all over the country, and now this new goal of aim to stop destructive mining or anium mining. Most people don't realize the front end of the nuclear fuel cycle is an incredibly environmentally destructive process. It leaves the earth poisoned for eons of time, as well as a myriad about other things because not just uranium. It so they having metals that get out, arsenic that gets out during a lot of these processes. So I would say that the economics, they always say that what are war's about, They're about lane and or resources. Well, this one was kind of government had already seized the land, not officially, not legally, it's still unseated territory, but they did want to go after those resources. At that time, there were some twenty uranium mining companies which were staking out claims throughout the Black Hills, and this went on from mid seventies into the late seventies.

00:24:21 Speaker 1: When American business interests need Uncle Sam's help justly or not, and nations around the globe, well, they may or may not go as far as to medal in elections, and it appears the Feds had a clear favorite in South Dakota tribal politics, in which there was a deep divide between traditionalists who maintained Native culture and refused assimilation, and those like the newly elected Oglala Siu Tribal chairman of nineteen seventy two, Dick Wilson, a so called progressive native, the type that really took to assimilation and to the interests of the United States federal government.

00:25:00 Speaker 2: Well, you have a group of natives that we call sellouts. They accept everything that the government tells them or gives us commodities and all this says to and will do anything the government says, will fight against us. I mean, I had had some of them say I wish I wasn'tn Indian, and I used to tell them, well, what the hell are you doing here? Gold leave? Ain't nobody keep in your hair. If you don't like being an Indian, the hell out of here. But we got those types of groups that fight against US. Dick Wilson was one of them.

00:25:32 Speaker 3: And in the aftermath of the BIA Building occupation, Dick Wilson signs a resolution that authorizes him to create a paramilitary group called the Guardians of the Oglala Nation, giving them the acronym Goon.

00:25:47 Speaker 2: Well, the FBI financed them, They gave them sophisticated weapons, various calibers of ammunition intelligence. This all came out from Dwayne Brewer, who was the leader of the squad.

00:26:01 Speaker 1: And this mercenary force was comprised of other so called progressive Natives. While other progressives were active at FBI counter Intelligence, the same program that targeted the Black Panthers. Co Intel pro they would infiltrate, sew division, create paranoia, undermine legitimate goals, and supply information. And of course we're all familiar with how history ran its course over any successful Black leadership, while AIM was no different. It appears the FEDS were targeting AIM leadership with criminal prosecutions, like the time when Leonard was at a restaurant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the months before the standoff at Wounded Me in nineteen seventy three.

00:26:44 Speaker 2: They're following me out everything I was doing. They were put in this restaurant. We don't know who they are. We were all in our AIM jackets, and they start intimidating us. So we thought it was just two white races and we're going to get in a fight with them. And the next thing I know, Oh, I'm charged for attempted murder on two police officers. I went to trial there years later and I was found not guilty. I was acquitted at that bullshit charge. You know, that wasn't the only place. Other places they were trying to connect me to some kind of criminal activity. Just trying to set me up is what it was.

00:27:22 Speaker 3: But while he was in jail in Wisconsin on these trumped up attempted murder charges, the traditionalist natives on the Pine Ridge Reservation were seeking to impeach Dick Wilson. He was accused of corruption, voter fraud as well as violence and intimidation of his political foes.

00:27:41 Speaker 2: I think two hundred people were voted, had been dead for fifty hundred years or whatever else. That's how he won the election. To fraud. He was making his family rich, is what he was doing. His brother all of a sudden on a big pack of land and filled with cattle and everything like this, and prior to his election did not have that amount to land or cattle. So corruption, corruption at its best under him.

00:28:10 Speaker 1: Well, it seems like all of these operations, the co Intel pro operations against the Black Panthers, Malcolm X et cetera, they always involved an inside trader electic Wilson. Is that a fair word to use for him?

00:28:24 Speaker 2: We call them worse in that?

00:28:27 Speaker 1: And when legal avenues failed to oust Wilson, Aim and their allies chose the town of Wounded Knee, the site of the last large scale massacre of Natives in eighteen ninety, as their next target for occupation, and they were in a standoff with US marshalls for seventy one days.

00:28:44 Speaker 2: I was in jail for the first couple weeks of Wounded Knee, but as soon as I got out, I heard they needed supplies food and everything like this. So I went to work immediately gathered food and everything. In Oleft, Wisconsin. During the Wounded Kney occupation, Richard Nixon ordered the eighty second Airborne out there to put the military on a domestic issue is against the constitution United States. So the colonel that was head of the eighty second Airborne came out to the reservation and he went first to Dick Wilson. And when he came out, there was a group of our elders and they called them over to cross the road and they told we would like to show you and tell you what's really going on here. And when he went back to report to Nixon, he said that a tribal chairman, Dick Wilson, I think he's a big liar. I don't believe a word he said. So the traditionalist took me out to the reservation and I said, I've seen poverty. There's worse than Central America. And he said, I don't blame those people for fighting. I don't blame him for uprising. He said, if you send us out there, you ordered us out there, the majority of us are going to fight with the Indians. Wo oh, I heard that Nixon's mother told him, don't you hurt those Indians. Don't you hurt those people that? And his daughter was also another one.

00:30:09 Speaker 3: Three people were killed in total over those seventy one days.

00:30:13 Speaker 2: Finally, Wounded Me was over after Buddy Lamont was shot in the forehead by a sniper and Grandma Lamont wanted to end because she wanted to bury her son, who was a Vietnam War hero. So that's how wounded the end it. Actually, there's a lot of promises were made to the Native people that they were going to do this, they were going to do that, and didn't that happen? Again, most of us knew that was just some more lies.

00:30:44 Speaker 1: One of Ames's objectives was reopening treaty negotiation and holding the federal government accountable for violating the eighteen sixty eight Treaty of Fort Laramie with the Oglala Sioux. That violation was the Fed stealing you've guessed it more can land, this time in the Black Hills, you know, the place where Mount Rushmore is located. A nineteen eighty Supreme Court decision later ruled in favor of the Sioux, awarding them compensation plus interest starting from when the treaty was violated back in eighteen seventy seven, but they refused to accept that compensation in favor of the return of the land and this disagreement has still not been resolved. But back in nineteen seventy three, after Wounded me, the FEDS tried to prosecute the Visible AIM leadership Dennis Banks and Russell Means, with charges that held a potential fifteen hundred years in prison. What does they even mean a these numbers? But the case was dismissed based on prosecutorial misconduct, including evidence tampering, So the FEDS regrouped and plotted their next moves.

00:31:53 Speaker 5: In nineteen seventy four or ear least seventy five, the FBI considered aimed to be one of the most dangerous organizations to the country. When they listen their reasons for why AIM was being targeted, they specifically noted a new what they called mission statement of the American movement, which was to protect the earth from destructive mining. And the FBI starts switching from a canter intelligence operation to a counter insurgency operation.

00:32:22 Speaker 3: And they had help from various assets who had infiltrated AIM, including the head of security during the Wounded Knee occupation. Doug Durham. It's believed that he was the one who supplied the aim memo, the one that contained the mission statement threatening federal interest in uranium mining.

00:32:42 Speaker 2: Doug Durham. You got to hear this guy's story. This guy's a police officer and Omaha, Nebraska, and he's right next to Omaha's a reservation, look Quota reservation. He's grabbing these girls and forcing drugs on them, getting them hooked, and prosecuting them. That Omaha Nebraska police force fires him. He immediately goes to work for the FBI and that gets on their payroll and he infiltrated the American Indian moment. So they asked him in this hearing, they said, what about the American Indian moment? Do we have to be concerned about Russell and Dennis? And he tells him no, He said, I think the fifteen hundred years has pretty much silenced them. He said, the person you have to be concerned about is Leonard Peltier. He's a young guy. He's not afraid of the government. You won't get in the front of a camera because he just want this picture out there. But he's getting very popular among the people, and he's the person that we have to worry about. And after wounded knee, they really start coming after me.

00:34:02 Speaker 1: While Leonard was traveling the country to support various political actions back on the Pine Ridge Reservation, tensions with Dick Wilson and the Goon squad got even worse. So the Oglallas sup once again called upon Aime and Dennis Banks, who was in Arizona at the time with one of Leonard's co defendants, Daryl Dino Butler.

00:34:23 Speaker 6: My name is Dino Butler. I'm a member of the Sledge Competitive Tribes of Oregon. In nineteen seventy four, I was in Arizona. A call came in from South Dakota. They said that the goons were up there and they were throwing beer bottles and ecuting out houses and beating people up and everything. They were just getting out of control. They called Dennis to ask him if there was any warriors that were willing to come up there and stay there for a while and help them. So Leonard and me and some other brothers and sisters agreed to go up there to South Dakota at that time. We went to the housing projects there and we stayed there for a while and then we went to Ted Lange's place. Then we ended up at Jumping both plays. During all this time, the goons were still acting up and shooting up everything.

00:35:14 Speaker 2: The goons, they were going around the reservation and terrorizing single mothers that were strong, aim people, the elders, their homes are being shot up. We went and spent hours in the middle of the night going over there protecting those people. Anybody that affiliated themselves with the American Indian moment are traditionalists.

00:35:35 Speaker 3: So when Bruce said counterinsurgency earlier, you can hear how that doesn't appear to be hyperbole. There were sixty unsolved murders on Pine Ridge between seventy three and seventy five, and with a population of only twelve thousand, they had the highest murder rate in the country.

00:35:55 Speaker 5: Scores of people being killed, people being kept on the floors of their home, homes well, bullets swam through the walls. And we're talking about homes where families were living, where young kids were living, where elders were living.

00:36:08 Speaker 3: These murders would have been under FBI jurisdiction, yet for some reason, no one was ever pursued. Meanwhile, the FEDS were trying Dennis Banks for a second time, this time for the alleged assault and rioting associated with the Wounded de occupation, and they knew he was being protected at an aim stronghold called Jumping Bull Ranch. It seems they also knew Leonard was there from.

00:36:34 Speaker 5: Documents we got parts of or all of. A little bit later, they had their security and their intelligence informants focusing. I mean, they were looking for Leonard all over the country. So we get to a month before the firefight and a bunch of FBI agents are brought into Pine Ridge. Most of them are SWAT Team members. They're on sixty day special assignment.

00:36:53 Speaker 2: Before the shoot out, we've seen a lot of activities with helicopters and stuff, and they had these machines out the windows and everything. We didn't find out un till years later, but they were surveying that whole area. And then they had these ages driving around like stormtroopers, and they would walk into people's doors. They would not knock, they would just push the doors open. That's the same thing that's kicking them over. And they terrified the community. A lot of the people were getting scared. A lot of the people were getting angry. A lot of the men. We were saying, you know, something's going to happen. They can't keep doing this to us. That's not legal.

00:37:34 Speaker 5: Three weeks before the firefight, the FBI issues a document in which they talk about jumping balls. They claimed that there were bunkers there, that there are probably going to have to assault these bunkers. And three weeks later there's a paramilitary assault on that particular area. And as the US Comission on stil Rights pointed out, those bunkers are really aged root sellers that you wouldn't want to stand behind if someone was throwing rocks at you less defensive position. What also is clear is that once the first shots were fired, and I got to say that, the government began to lie right away from the start of the firefight. Right away, it became a big lie for their own particular narrative.

00:38:17 Speaker 1: So, after a two year long federally funded terror campaign through the Goon Squad, which as you can imagine, only intensified with the arrival of SWAT teams from all over the country in that climate, the FBI claimed that they were simply carrying out just an ordinary, everyday arrest warrant for a guy named Jimmy Eagle.

00:38:37 Speaker 2: There was a warrant. Supposedly, that's a lie because the FBI don't have this jurisdiction. They were saying that they had a warrant out for Jimmy you go, for stealing a pair of used cowboy.

00:38:51 Speaker 5: Boots, used cowboy pots.

00:38:54 Speaker 2: They don't have. They don't have jurisdiction. There's no jurisdiction for them to do that. They can't do that, so that was a lie.

00:39:03 Speaker 3: If you remember, we mentioned the Major Crimes Act of eighteen eighty five. This designated all violent crimes and other offenses under federal jurisdiction. A pair of stolen cowboy boots would have been handled by tribal police. In addition, it appears that Jimmy Eagle was in Wyoming at the time, on another reservation entirely, yet he was allegedly known to drive a red pickup. So on June twenty sixth, nineteen seventy five, the FBI claimed that agents Ronald Williams and Jack Koehler, who were in plain clothes and unmarked vehicles, not identifying themselves. The FBI claims these guys were allegedly in hot pursuit of what they claimed to have thought was Jimmy Eagle's vehicle, a red van but with a white top, and as the federal narrative goes, the car would not stop until it arrived at Jumping Bull Ranch.

00:40:01 Speaker 2: That's not true. That's not true. They didn't follow that red and white van in there. That red and white van was there ten minutes, at least ten minutes before they showed up. I know I'm the one that drove it in there because I had just taken it down to Ogla to get something fixed on it. So that was another lie. But we come in and parked in front of the Jumping Bowl house and we were talking to some of the people there about something. These guys just come driving in like they owned the place and they've been right past us, and went down to where the shooting took place.

00:40:37 Speaker 1: Which was about five hundred yards off US Highway eighteen, onto this sprawling private compound. Now remember this is after a nearly three year reign of terror, when these men in plane clothes and unmarked cars which doesn't appear how to identify themselves through their weapons.

00:40:53 Speaker 2: We didn't start it. They started it. We were defending our homes and my responsibility it was getting the women and children out of there.

00:41:03 Speaker 3: Soon, every able bodied person either in the houses or campgrounds on jumping bull ranches doing their part, including Dino Butler.

00:41:12 Speaker 6: I just come out of our teetheet on a jumping bull property. I came out and I heard this brother come running down towards the camp call telling us that brothers, gather up your guns, gather up your weapons, and get up here. They're attacking the families up there jumping bulls. So we all gathered up our rifles and we ran up there. I didn't know who was shooting at us at first, but then I understood later on it was the FBI that were firing at it. Two FBI agents came there and they opened fired on the people, and that that I didn't understand what was going on, why why they were doing that.

00:41:56 Speaker 2: I helped Angie and her babies who were crying, terrified and everything. I helped them get out of there. I let him down to a trail, and you knew that, so I tore to go that way and all us hope they don't kill you. So they hope they don't shoot you, because you got these little kids here, and they did go that way and they got out.

00:42:15 Speaker 5: People I talked to said they were within moments being surrounded and receiving gunfire from all directions.

00:42:22 Speaker 2: When I got back, we could see from the tops we were surrounded. They had swat teams from as far away as Los Angeles, from Minneapolis, and all the cities around South Dakota there within minutes. So they were housed someplace close to the reservation because they were there within ten minutes at the most.

00:42:46 Speaker 1: In addition, there was a small single propeller plane that had been flying around all day that was now surveilling the siege from above.

00:42:54 Speaker 5: And so this massive force comes in and in the processual stunts who a young Native defender within the community was shot between the eyes and two fpigands were killed.

00:43:07 Speaker 2: So I told everybody, all right, come on, we got to get out of here. So we went down to the camp, which was about a quarter of a mile from the house, and picked up what we could carry and everything like this, and we knew there was the highest hill that way, so I said, we got to get to that place. And as we were walking down across the creek, I had no idea who was out there. On the roads, and we knew was surrounded. So I said, we got to get out of here. We got to somehow find a hole to get out of here.

00:43:39 Speaker 6: Leonard wanted to get and get in a vat and run a roadblock and get out of there. And I told Leonard, I think that would be complete suicide. And so we all knelt down and we started praying.

00:43:51 Speaker 2: I told these guys, come on, let's just say a prayer here, asking the Great Spirit to lead us out of there. And all of a sudden, there was a shadow in the trees and there was a like something was big was flying there. And I looked up and I seen it. These eagles took off under the trees. Norman Brown says he also seen it. Everybody else didn't see it, but he heard it too, and he's seen it.

00:44:14 Speaker 6: So Norman said, let's follow that eagle. So we followed that eagle brought us to this calvert that ran under the road, and we all went into that culvert and Leonard went first and I went second, and there was an airplane flying around. It was there since early morning. So Leonard said, well, let's pray pray for that airplane to leave. So me and him started praying, and after we got done, that plane left. It went back to Pine Ridge to gas up. I guess I don't know what, but it left. And when it left, we called everybody out of the culvert and we sent the women up the hill.

00:44:53 Speaker 5: First.

00:44:54 Speaker 2: We had some young fourteen fifteen year old kids with us, and my responsibility is to make sure that they safe, and I believe in the Great Spirit helped us get out of there. How did we find that hole? What? Why did those cops leave that area? I mean it was what three cars I believe it, it's maybe even been four took off from that area where we went under this culvert. I swear on my Shinoopa, I swear to my God. If we hadn't fought back, we probably all got chilled. This was a war.

00:45:29 Speaker 1: And this is where we'll stop in the first of three episodes covering the absolutely insane, wrongful conviction story of Leonard Peltier. And there's so much left to come.

00:45:43 Speaker 2: I sent them ahead of me. I told them, go, I'll take.

00:45:47 Speaker 5: Up the rear.

00:45:47 Speaker 6: I could just feel the bullets buzzing around me.

00:45:50 Speaker 5: They even included at one point every Native man who had ever been in combat in Indo, China on their suspect list.

00:45:59 Speaker 2: Wow, they also included a four year old and we didn't know why we were the ones being accused.

00:46:05 Speaker 6: My little brother, he said, when he woke up an Fbis was pointing a pistol in his head and says, worre's your fucking brother.

00:46:10 Speaker 2: At Marlon Brando gave us a mobile home. I went to Canada of Astra asylum and they were supposed to produce any evidence that they had against me, and very conservative judge said, there is no evidence.

00:46:23 Speaker 5: In the Dino Butler trial, we were able to present members of the community who helped the jury understand what was regarded as the reign of terror.

00:46:32 Speaker 2: If they did that to a white community, they would have been shot too.

00:46:36 Speaker 6: That Leonard Woods to try with us there and see the rapids who would have never been convicted.

00:46:41 Speaker 1: Because Dino and Robert were acquitted, they changed the whole story.

00:46:46 Speaker 5: And the testimony becomes much more definitive.

00:46:48 Speaker 2: I never met her in my life, but she was claiming she was my girlfriend, and that was the beginning of the type of trial I was going to receive.

00:46:58 Speaker 6: There was a kangaroo court all the way.

00:47:01 Speaker 1: Don't forget to tune in for episode two of our coverage of Leonard Peltier's Wrongful Conviction. Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all the Lava for Good podcasts one week early and ad free by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I want to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kathleen Fink, as well as my fellow executive producers Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wartis, and Jeff Kliber The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow me on Instagram at It's Jason Flamm. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number One.

00:47:48 Speaker 7: We have worked hard to ensure that all facts reported in this show are accurate. The views and opinions expressed by the individuals featured in this show are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Lava for Good.

00:48:05 Speaker 2: Sh