BOOKS

STEVE HENDRICKS

 

Dec 15th 2006

John LeKay:When did you first hear about the murder of Anna Mae Aquash and was it this story that inspired you to write this book. The Unquiet Grave?

 

Steve Hendricks: I first heard about the Aquash case some years ago--ca. 1998--when I read Peter Matthiessen's In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. While I was outraged, I didn't do anything about it at the time. I was working on other things. When I decided to write The Unquiet Grave, the impetus originally was the alleged rape of Jancita Eagle Deer by Bill Janklow. I had stumbled onto some things about that story that disturbed me, and at the time, 2003, Janklow had just been elected to Congress and it seemed there was a chance to interest national media in the story. The Aquash story seemed like such a snakepit to me that I wasn't eager to step into it. But it was impossible to write about Eagle Deer's story without writing about the wider struggle between the FBI and AIM, and it was impossible to write about FBI v. AIM without writing about Aquash. One thing led to another, and Aquash became the central thread of my book.

JL:.How long did you work on this book and approximately how many interviews did you conduct for it?
 

SH: I worked on The Unquiet Grave for nearly four years--a bit longer if you count some of my research for an earlier book on Indian affairs that I ended up not writing. I haven't any idea how many interviews I conducted--never counted them. Scores.

Congressman Bill Janklow in court on manslaughter charges in which he served 100 days.

Anna Mae Aquash

 

JL:. After talking to as many people as you have, why do you personally believe she was murdered?
 

SH: Aquash was murdered for many complex reasons, some of which I think I know, others I definitely don't know. In overarching terms, she was murdered because (a) the FBI made AIM so paranoid with its infiltrations and provocations that AIM felt it had no choice but to execute the next informer it found, who happened (incorrectly) to be Aquash and (b) AIM wasn't smart enough to resist the urge to violence, and the group too often and too foolishly resorted to guns and fists to solve problems that guns and fists couldn't solve. As to why AIMers believed Aquash was an informer, I'm not entirely sure. There are all kinds of theories out there, many potentially credible: she knew that Peltier had bragged about killing the FBI agents at Oglala, and AIM feared she would talk to the feds; she was a powerful woman and made other women (and men) bitterly jealous; everywhere she went, it seemed, important AIMers got arrested, so people thought she was not merely an informer but a particularly effective one; and so on. I wasn't able to penetrate the minds of those in AIM who ordered her killing, so I can't say. Perhaps all of the above and more were at play, or perhaps none of the above and something else entirely.

 
JL. Why do you think these who know what happened, have not come forward yet?
 

SH: Most of the people who know firsthand what happened probably fear being prosecuted--assuming, that is, that they want to talk (which they don't). In any case, they were too close to the events, and to talk, they'd need to strike a deal with the feds not to prosecute them. Striking a deal with the feds is repugnant for any AIMer for obvious reasons.

 

A lot of people know secondhand how and why Aquash was killed, and many of them aren't talking because they're afraid of being branded pariahs for speaking about it in public. Whatever you think of Kamook Nichols's testimony at the Arlo Looking Cloud trial, there's no doubt that she has been villainized, and most of the people who have villainized her haven't even bothered to examine objectively whether what she said in court was possibly true or undeniably false. They just hate her for speaking "against AIM"--end of story, and not many people want to take on that kind of hate. As I researched this book, I found that most people are faint of heart. Many are simply cowards. They want to lead a quiet life in front of their TVs, undisturbed and anaesthetized. They don't feel any obligation to their people or to anyone else's people or to history or to a greater good that would compel them to speak. So they remain silent. It is a failure of character and morality. 

 

Lakota woman, Ka-Mook Nichols,
(© Michelle Vignes)

Jancita Eagle Deer 

 

But you're right that they haven't gotten attention. The reasons are complex. Partly it's that the gatekeepers of the media don't know about and don't care about Indians. It's also very hard to interest them in any story that they classify as ancient history"--a story about crimes from 30  years ago, particularly in a flyover state like South Dakota that most editors and producers could barely locate on a map. Believe me, although Anna Mae's case has gotten a lot of attention in Indian Country, it has only just barely penetrated the non-Indian consciousness--and I mean JUST barely. If you can't get people interested in a case where the FBI said a woman with a bullet in her head died of exposure, imagine how hard it is to get people interested in less dramatic cases, however important you and I know they are. Hell, most of the time I can't even interest the left-wing media, like The Nation, in Anna Mae's case, let alone mainstream publications like the New York Times and Washington Post.

Another reason the cases you mention aren't well known is that few reporters at the time covered them. That means that much of the info that you'd need to write about those cases at any length--relevant documents, interview transcripts, whatever--just don't exist. For many years, we knew what we knew about the scandals of Anna Mae's case largely because of stellar reporting at the time by two reporters, Kevin McKiernan foremost and Jerry Oppenheimer secondarily. McKiernan is also largely responsible for creating the record of what we know (or knew, up till my book) about the murder of Byron DeSersa. But one or two or even a handful of reporters can only do so much.

 

Still another reason, of course, is that the authorities never have and probably never will care about those "forgotten" cases. In December 1999, the FBI was confronted in Rapid City at a public hearing of the US Commission on Civil Rights with claim after claim that it had ignored violent crimes on Pine Ridge in the 1970s and that Pine Ridge was still feeling the consequences today. The FBI responded in May 2000 with a whitewash, which I discuss in my book. Almost no reporters covered that whitewash. The local newspapers barely gave a damn--what do they care about Indians? No newspaper in South Dakota, incidentally, has covered my book as of yet, even though my book contains more shocking news about scandals in their state than most papers there carry in six months. And since the locals didn't cover the FBI's whitewash, none of the bigger papers picked it up. So the story just died. To interest national media in any story that is not "hot" is very hard, whether it's about Indians or an endangered snail in Oklahoma. And unfortunately, for most editors and producers, what happened to Indians in the 1970s is about as compelling as the fate of an endangered snail. For that to change would require a long period of education and activism by media-savvy Indians. It's badly needed, but no Indian group today is doing it.

Also, an important clarification: There weren't 100s of these murders on Pine Ridge. More like dozens. I don't want to minimize it. Pine Ridge had the highest murder rate in the U.S. during the "Reign of the Terror"--something like six times the rate of Detroit, then America's most violent city. But people have vastly inflated the number of murders, and unnecessarily. The true number, given the small population of Pine Ridge, is horrible enough. 

 

 

JL: Have you spoken directly with her Anna Maes family about her murder?
 

SH: I've spoken directly with her family, but they refused, through one of Anna Mae's daughters, to be interviewed for the book. They told me that the only way they would consent to be interviewed would be if they got to vet what I wrote. I told them that no self-respecting reporter would agree to that (though some unscrupulous ones would). Would you read a book about the War in Iraq that had been vetted by the Bush Administration? Or for that matter, that had been vetted by the other side? The family also told me that they wouldn't agree to be interviewed for any project that assigned any blame whatsoever, even partial, for Aquash's death to the FBI. The family told me, as they've said often in public, that Anna Mae's death had nothing to do with a political struggle between the FBI and AIM. It was a simple crime with no political overtones. To put it mildly, that's not a theory I subscribe to. 

JL:  What can people do to help with this investigation of her death?
 

SH: I'd suggest that people raise hell. Contact their elected officials and ask them to hold the government's feet to the fire for its many sins. In the Aquash case, for example, why did the FBI say for decades that it couldn't solve the case, that for years it knew almost nothing about the murder at all, when documents I found show that the FBI had been given the basic outlines of the murder--who did it, where, and how--within days of her murder.
 

 

JL: Could Anna Maes investigation also be a diabolical setup by the FBI to nail Peliter, by using people in court to accuse him on the record, so he never gets parole in 2008?  Also to drive another wedge into what is left of AIM.
 

SH: It seems very probable to me that the feds thought, "Well, as long as we're going to court anyway, we might as well dump another shovelful of dirt on Peltier's (living) grave by putting a witness on the stand to say bad things about him." But it seems highly unlikely to me that, as some folks have claimed, the sole reason for bringing the Aquash case was to (further) bury Peltier alive. For one thing, the odds of his parole in 2008 are so slim, it's hardly worth the effort. There was a real chance that Peltier might be pardoned by Clinton back in 2000, and the FBI was definitely fearful of that and mobilized against it. But that fear is past, Bush isn't going to pardon him, and the odds of the parole board doing so are miniscule. So it's hard to imagine their going to all the trouble to prosecute Aquash's killers just to add one more shovel to what's already a huge mound of dirt on top of Peltier.

 

Furthermore, there is much that could surface in the prosecution of the Aquash case that could be very embarrassing to the feds. For example, in all probability somewhere along the way in the discussions inside AIM about whether to kill Aquash, an FBI operative was party to those discussions. If my supposition is true and if that fact came out, it would be very embarrassing to the FBI. My book discusses a few of those embarrassments that I was able to turn up. So the feds ran a risk by bringing the case.

 

My take on why they brought the case (and it is only a "take"; I can't say with certainty) is that the feds were shamed into bringing it. After several people announced the identity of Aquash's alleged killers in 1999, after newspapers and TV shows and so on began covering the story, after, in short, the identity of the triggermen became known to everyone, the FBI could no longer claim it couldn't solve the case--which was their claim for nearly a quarter century. The FBI began to get prying questions (not many, but a few) from Congresspeople, the heat started turning up, and their hand was forced. So the feds brought the case reluctantly. They dawdled a few years, and then the brought the case only against the alleged triggermen, not against the more senior conspirators (where an FBI operative may have been at work). That said, as long as they were going to all this effort, they surely didn't mind looking for and airing testimony that would further incriminate Peltier. And, incidentally, while I believe the feds railroaded Peltier and that he should be freed regardless of whether he shot the FBI agents, I found the testimony of Kamook Nichols that Peltier boasted about shooting the agents credible.

 

Ray Robinson

 

Paul DeMain

 

SH: I haven't heard anything from his wife, who had hoped to search for his remains, nor from anyone on Pine Ridge who might be involved. Last I heard, the federal government had not changed its refusal to look for the remains.

JL:. Had this Robinson death/disappearance, been totally overlooked until you addressed this in your book?
 

SH: I broke the story in a small newspaper on Pine Ridge a couple of years ago. To give credit where it's due, Paul DeMain of News from Indian Country was also on top of the story and could have broken it sooner but decided to hold off because, I think, he felt the story would have more impact if it came from other people. He is, as you probably know, a lightning rod in Indian Country because of his often un-nuanced denunciations of AIM. Paul gave a lot of info about the Robinson case to an Associated Press reporter, who later ran a couple of stories on Ray Robinson. Neither my story nor the AP story got much attention from national media. 

JL: Do you think racism was involved?
 

SH: It's possible. Certainly I came across many Indians in my interviews who were flatly racist against blacks and justified this unjustifiable bigotry by citing the Buffalo Soldiers who had fought against Indians in the 19th century. But I don't know whether it played a role in Robinson's killing.

 

JL:.Stepping back and looking at who gained anything from all of this violence, vigilantism,  paranoia, mayhem and murder.  Who do you see that has profited from any of this?

 

SH: Well, the people who profited the most were the non-Indian ranchers and foresters and miners all across the country whose economic interests would have been deeply disturbed had AIM succeeded in returning Native resources to Native people. The violence, etc. that AIM got involved in sidetracked the group--and the Indian rights movement in general--from advocating for Indian rights. Partly as a result, the exploitation of Indian land by non-Indians continues today with only slight abatement.

JL:. In 1971 Home stake Mining Company obtains license to remove minerals (uranium) from 1,040 acres of state land in Custer and Fall River counties. 1973 In August mineral prospecting permits were issued by the Commissioner of School and Public Lands, cover 21,076,067 acres of state land. 1975, A reconnaissance study was done on Pine Ridge and other reservations. A large uranium deposit was discovered in the Northwestern corner of the reservation.

Do you think that this is could be a valid reason for why the FBI reaching all the way to Nixon, allowed all this murder, madness and mayhem to prevail. As a way of keeping people distracted and focused on other matters while the US government were leasing out land to uranium miners etc.

SH: The economic interests certainly played a part in why the FBI wanted to undermine AIM. Had AIM succeeded in getting some treaty rights restored, non-Indian economic interests would have been upset, as I note above. But the FBI attacked AIM not merely for economic reasons. It went much deeper than that. The FBI had a policy, going back nearly to the birth of the Bureau, of undermining radicals. Any group or movement that threatened the status quo was a threat to the FBI--be they violent or not. The FBI was an agency, bear in mind, that, when it was announced in 1964 that Martin Luther King Jr. would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, sent an anonymous blackmail letter trying to get King to kill himself before the award ceremony. Why? Because the longtime director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, and the men he surrounded himself with believed that anyone who worked for social change was an enemy of the nation. The FBI would have tried to destroy AIM even if AIM hadn't threatened a single economic interest anywhere in the country. 

Martin Luther King was sent an anonymous blackmail letter trying to get King to kill himself before the Nobel peace prize award ceremony

 

JL:. In your dealing with the mainstream media. You made comment about what some editor told you about a two-bit story in a one-bit state regarding the rape of a 15 year old Indian minor named Eagle Deer by a US congress person and man slaughterer. Also known as Wild Bill Janklow. Has this been the overall reaction from national media?
 

SH: Absolutely.

JL:. Did the ex Senator Bill Janklow ever get back to you for the interview? How many days did he serve for manslaughter?
 

SH: No, he never got back to me. He served 100 days. A point of clarification: he was not a Senator but rather a Congressman. 

JL: Is there way for people to listen to the tape recording of Jancita Eagle Deer for educational purposes. As to why an South Dakota attorney general and congress men should not be a child rapist?
 

 SH: The holders of the tape are Mario Gonzales (can't recall at the moment if I'm spelling that right), who's a retired lawyer and lives outside Rapid City, and Sid Flores, who is Gonzales's lawyer and works in San Jose, California. They refused to let me listen to the tape after first promising to let me--I presume out of timidity--but perhaps now that the book is out, if they were approached by other people, they would consent. 

JL. Has your book garnered any main stream medias interest up to this point?
 

 SH: It has taken a while to get the mainstream's attention, but I'm finally getting some book reviews in daily newspapers and such. To date, they've been gratifyingly positive. Links to some of the reviews are at my website, www.SteveHendricks.org. I've also been interviewed by dozens of radio stations across the country, mostly on progressive or thoughtful talk shows, so interest seems to be coming along. 

JL: .What are your thoughts on tribal sovereignty today?  Please also comment on this film clip of our presidents views on tribal sovereignty.

www.heyokamagazine.com/HEYOKA.2.BUSHtribel.htm

 

SH: I'm having trouble viewing the clip--bad web connection here in Italy. But in general, tribal sovereignty is given only lip service by our federal government, and that's a tragedy. It wouldn't solve all tribal problems to restore real sovereignty to tribes, but it would go a long way to helping tribes.

 

JL:. You indicate at the end of your book that AIM wasn't very successful in solving long term economic issues.  Do you think that some of their militant tactics and vigilantism may have alienated some people from wanting to help?
 

SH: Certainly.

 

 

Robert Robideau, Co-Director Leonard Peltier Defense Committee

JL: Robert Robideau, Co-Director Leonard Peltier Defense Committee recently wrote an interesting critique on your book. He also claimed that you had gotten your facts wrong etc. Can you please state any facts that you may have gotten wrong while writing this book?
 

SH: Bob had written me with some questions, initially friendly, ultimately hostile and vicious. When he was being civil, I tried to answer him as best I could. In one exchange of mails after I'd been working a zillion hours straight and I was trying to be charitable (he was claiming that he was right about a few points and that I was wrong), I made some carelessly worded comment to the effect that I no doubt got as many facts wrong as I got right. He took this as the gospel truth, even though he knew it wasn't, and aired it on the web as evidence that I was publishing lies. Obviously, it's not true. What I should have said was that I no doubt got SOME facts wrong, not that I got more wrong than right. No reporter or historian ever writes a 500-page book and gets every fact right. When I published the book, I believed every fact to be true, to the best of my ability to find the truth.

 
 

Since publication, a couple of people have brought some very minor errors to my attention (things like getting a date wrong), and those will be corrected in future editions. As I say in the book, I invite people to tell me about any errors so that I can correct them. But to date, in a book with maybe 5,000 facts, I've only heard of a very few small ones that are wrong. I take that as pretty fair evidence that the book is solid. 

JL. What are your thoughts on Robert Robideaus comments here.  "I submit only a person with an agenda would do so, an agenda offensive to the people he purports to support. Those of us who have dedicated our lives to right the wrongs waged against us strongly condemn Hendricks' campaign to smear and degrade the many sacrifices made in the course of our struggles while pretending to be a friend of native American struggles"

JL: Do you have an agenda of some sort?
 

SH: My agenda is to find and tell the truth as best I can find and tell it--and particularly to tell the truth about what my powerful nation has or has not done to one of its most powerless peoples. Often the truth doesn't make people happy. Bob Robideau, who wants the truth about some of AIM's misdeeds hidden and buried, is one such person. Bob unfortunately has a history of twisting facts or inventing them to serve his own ends. For example, Bob and David Hill teamed up years ago to deceive writer Peter Matthiessen and film producer Oliver Stone in the infamous Mr. X scheme. In that scheme, Hill played a masked Mr. X and confessed on video to Matthiessen and Stone that he, not Peltier, had killed the two FBI agents on Pine Ridge in June 1975, hence Peltier should be freed. It was Robideau who brokered the whole thing. The scheme was a hoax--Hill didn't kill the agents--and was exposed as such, but not before making large headlines that badly hurt Peltier's bid for freedom and that deeply undermined the credibility of Matthiessen's vitally important book about AIM and the FBI, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. A lot of people wondered whether Robideau and Hill intended to sabotage Peltier. (I happen not to believe that.) In any case, having your integrity questioned by Bob Robideau is a bit like having your intelligence questioned by George W. Bush. 

JL. This is also what Robert Robideau had to say about the Peltier case. What are your thoughts on this?

"The FBI thereafter targeted Leonard Peltier, who was unfairly tried, convicted and sentenced to two life sentences. The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals called his conviction "a clear abuse of the investigative process by the FBI" and gave credence to the claims of Indian people that if the FBI is willing to fabricate evidence to extradite a person in this country, it is willing to fabricate evidence to convict those targeted the enemy. As recently as 2003, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit acknowledged: "Much of the government's behavior at the Pine Ridge Reservation and in its prosecution of Mr. Peltier is to be condemned. The government withheld evidence. It intimidated witnesses. These facts are not disputed."

The Eighth Circuit discussed this critical evidence which was withheld by the FBI as "newly discovered evidence indicating [that the government's ballistic expert] may not have been telling the truth," and that the evidence withheld by the FBI created "inconsistencies casting strong doubts upon the government's case." Under our system, if there is a reasonable doubt, then Leonard Peltier is not guilty, yet he still remains in prison after 30 years for a crime he too should have been acquitted and freed.

After Leonard Peltier's attorneys discovered that the government fabricated the ballistics evidence, among other things, the government has had to admit several times in open court that it had no credible evidence Leonard Peltier killed the agents, that it could not prove who killed the agents, and speciously claimed it never tried to prove he shot the agents and that the conviction could be upheld on aiding and abetting grounds. But no one has ever explained who Leonard aided and abetted which is a prerequisite to such a charge. He could not aid and abet Dino Butler or me who were acquitted.

SH: In this statement of facts, Robideau is almost entirely correct. As I say in my book, Leonard Peltier was railroaded. There's no doubt about it. Even if he killed the FBI agents, he was denied the chance to argue at trial, as Robideau and Butler did in their trial, that he did so in justifiable self-defense. He should be freed. 

JL: Why do you think Dick Wilson and the rest of his GOON squad isn't in prison yet?

SH: Well, Dick Wilson is long dead, as are several members of his GOON squad. Of those still living, it's impossible to send someone to prison without trying them, and most of them can't be tried. Short of murder, the statute of limitations has passed on nearly all crimes, so even if prosecutors wanted to charge someone for a crime from 30 years ago (which no prosecutor does, at least not these crimes), unless it's a case where a goon willfully killed someone, it's probably not prosecutable. And of course, some goons, like Paul Herman, whom you mentioned, were already tried and either convicted (as in Herman's case) or not. So they couldn't be tried again away, even a prosecutor thought their case had been a farce back in the '70s.

 

 

JL:  Do you think these horrendous boarding schools shaped the outlook of some of these AIM activists like Russell Means and Dennis Banks?  I mean, do you think it created some righteous anger, resentment and also some prejudice towards whites?

SH: Absolutely yes on the anger and resentment--and understandably. I don't recall that Means spent a lot of time in boarding school, but Banks certainly did, as did a lot of other AIM leaders (and of course thousands of other Indians of that generation and before). Those schools, as you know, were like concentration camps--the rigid curriculums, the senseless beatings, the deprivation of food, the forced labor, the bans on Indian language and culture and religion, and on and on. To survive you were either some superhuman saint (and who of us could claim that?) or you survived by cunning and deceit and fighting. You learned to steal food and to slug back when older classmates bullied you. It's no coincidence that so many of AIM's leaders landed in prison. So, yes, they obviously learned that when struck in the face, you don't turn the other cheek. Eye-for-an-eye thinking is not restricted, of course, to people who went to boarding schools. But it certainly influenced AIM. These guys at the top of AIM (and at the top, in public anyway, they were nearly all guys) were more like Black Panthers--the guys from the hood--than they were like Martin Luther Kings--the college-educated upper middle class, the preachers' and teachers' and merchants' sons (which class practically didn't exist in Indian Country). So the anger, the resentment, and the like are quite understandable. Prejudice, however, while one can sympathize with it, is less excusable. It was certainly widespread in some parts of AIM, including parts of the leadership. But most ex-AIMers I've met have been able to discern (to be overly simplistic) "good" whites from "bad" whites or (to be more nuanced) helpful or well-intentioned deeds by non-Indians from unhelpful deeds by non-Indians.

 

Black Panther

 

 

JL: In your book you seem to suggest that the American Indian Movement is dead or close to it. Do you see another kind of movement forming.  Perhaps a peaceful multi national, cultural movement, that will not result to violence, carry arms, or throw fists etc?
 

SH: Old-time AIM folks have taken exception to my claim that AIM is dead or all but. And they do have a point that in some places (e.g., Denver) there are some events that the local AIM chapter pulls off, for example an annual protest on Indigenous Resistance Day (Columbus Day). But as a group or movement that the federal government has to give more than fleeting attention to, a force that shapes or influences national policy (or even state policy), the many groups calling themselves AIM today have almost zero power. That, to me, is what I mean by dead or all but, even if a few folks are valiantly trying to continue--for which, in most cases, I commend them.

Do I see another movement forming? I can't say that I do in Indian Country--at least, not in the sense that we usually think of "movements." There are, however, myriad groups working for Indian causes whose work is good and whose existence can be traced to the activism of AIM and its predecessors and allies in the 1960s and 1970s. As for internationally, I'm not really qualified to say. Certainly people across the world are fighting the ruthless advance of capital (sometimes called globalization), fighting militarization, fighting a whole flotilla of US-sponsored ills. But they don't seem united to me, which isn't a stain on them, but it's a very tall order to unite across the globe. And as for nonviolence, while most of the global left adheres to nonviolence, I can't say that I've seen much evidence that any progressives out there have found a way to supplant war with nonviolence.

 

 

JL: I read on a website, a statement made in an interview by one of Peliers previous attorneys, who saw similarities, with what he referred to as "the architects at the time", the 1970s, who were Donald Rumsfield, Dick Cheny and Nixon etc. Especially concerning this patriot act and the abolishment of habeas corpus. How he believes these tactics have now been brought into the general population. Wire tapping, violating peoples privacy, and the rest. Do you see any connection between Pine Ridge and now what's going on in the US and its war on terror?
 

SH: I don't see any direct connection--nothing like, "Well this worked on Pine Ridge, so let's do it now here at home in the War on Terror." In fact, the ultimate insult to Indians is that most people in federal law enforcement, including the FBI, know nothing about the Bureau's work against AIM. With the exception of the Peltier case, the FBI just doesn't give a damn about it, and only very, very rarely does anyone force the FBI to give a damn about it. Nonetheless, you are right that many of the same tactics that were used against AIM, the Black Panthers, the Socialist Workers Party, CISPES, various labor unions, and on and on--tactics like infiltrating groups with spies to report on their activities, tapping their phones warrantlessly--are now being used against peaceful anti-war and anti-Bush protestors. And of course, we don't know about ALL the tactics that are being used by the federal government against such groups. Only some of the tactics, we can safely assume, have been made public. Now, I very much doubt (here at home anyway) that Bush's FBI is trying to provoke activist-on-activist murders the way the FBI did with dissident groups from ca. the 1930s through the 1970s. But one can only wonder what we don't know. The old adage seems rather apt that those who forget their past are doomed to repeat it.

 

J Edgar Hoover

Bill Bradley

 

JL. What lessons can activists today learn from your book, in terms of what works and doesn't work and on issues of poverty, human rights abuse, heath care, heating for the elderly, education and treaty issues and so on?

 

 SH: I don't have answers for what works on the specific issues you mention. I do have some ideas about broader lessons activists can learn from AIM. One of the biggest is that it's very hard to beat the U.S. government when you pick up guns. The feds have more guns, more cops, more spies, more prosecutors, more jails, and more money than you. If you turn violent, you're probably going to lose. A related lesson--one understood very clearly by the Martin Luther Kings of the world and less clearly or not at all by the AIMs and Black Panthers of the world--is that if you are a minority group and you want to win big policy changes in a democratic society, you damned well better make sure you have an idea of how to convince a majority (or a very big plurality) of your fellow voters to go along with you. If you're not after policy changes, you might ignore this advice and still achieve some good things. AIM, for example, did win some big attitudinal changes. Indians found a renewed pride in being Indian thanks largely to AIM. You don't need to win a majority to achieve those kinds of gains. But what AIM really wanted was the restoration of broken treaties, and this kind of policy change was well beyond it's reach. It's the same with poverty policy, or land policy, or education policy--you better hatch a strategy that, in the long run at least, is going to win you 50% plus one.

JL:  There is a long history of desecration in this county concerning Indian body parts like Anna Maes hands.. What are your thoughts on the desecration of Geronimos remains?

SH:  My opinion aligns with that of most Indians, which is that removal and desecration of tribal remains without permission is abominable, and they ought to be returned to the appropriate Indian nation.

JL  You mentioned a bill that senator Bill Bradley introduced. Who were the senators that killed this bill immediately.

SH: I don't recall off the top of my head if the bill even made it to a vote in the full Senate or if it was killed in committee. My vague recollection is the latter. But whatever the case, rest assured that the overwhelming majority of senators were against it, but particularly senators from Western states.

For more info and to purchase the book, visit  www.SteveHendricks.org.