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John Graham's extradition
Anna Mae Aquash
Who killed Anna Mae?
by Rex Weyler, Vancouver
Sun, January 8, 2005
In the 1970s, two First Nations
youths, John Graham from Yukon and Anna Mae Pictou from Nova
Scotia, set out to help win native rights. They stumbled into
a violent American maelstrom that cost Pictou her life and left
Graham facing a murder charge.
On February 24, 1976, rancher
Roger Amiotte walked his fence line on the Pine Ridge Indian
Reservation, in South Dakota. The fence ended at a steep ravine,
which had failed to restrain his livestock. Planning to extend
the fence, Amiotte paced the embankment until he rounded a curve
and came upon the body of a young woman.
The rancher stopped twenty
feet from the corpse. She wore blue jeans, a burgundy windbreaker,
tennis shoes, and a single turquoise bracelet. Animals had apparently
gnawed at her ear. Amiotte returned home and called the Tribal
police. Within two hours, a dozen law enforcement officers
Sheriff's deputies, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) police, and
FBI agents combed the scene.
At the Pine Ridge morgue, a
doctor and nurse found blood on the woman's head. However, BIA
pathologist Dr. W. O. Brown, described the case as "awfully
routine," reported no blood, and concluded the woman had
died from "exposure" two weeks earlier, in early February.
On FBI instructions, Brown severed the victim's hands for later
identification and approved a burial.
"It was the darndest thing
I ever saw," said mortician Tom Chamberlain, "an unidentified
corpse buried without a death certificate or burial permit."
On March 3, 1976, the anonymous body rested in a pauper's grave
on Pine Ridge. On that day, the FBI identified the dead woman
as 30-year-old Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash from Shubenacadie, Nova
Scotia, a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM). The Bureau
notified the Pictou family in Canada that Anna Mae had died "by
natural causes."
The family requested another
autopsy, and AIM lawyer Bruce Ellison petitioned the FBI to exhume
the body. On March 11, Dr. Garry Peterson examined the corpse,
noticed "a bulge in the dead woman's left temple and dry
blood in her hair," and revealed the actual cause of death:
a .32 calibre bullet "shot at close range into the back
of her head."
Extradition
Case
The FBI now claims AIM executed
Aquash as a suspected informer. They possess a video confession
from 50-year-old Arlo Looking Cloud, from South Dakota, who admitted
being present when John Graham allegedly shot Aquash. Looking
Cloud remains in custody, convicted of aiding first-degree murder.
The U.S. wants Graham returned
to South Dakota to face the murder charge. His extradition case
opened in Vancouver on December 6 and resumes next week before
Justice Elizabeth Bennett. Canadian Crown attorney Deborah Strachan
represents the U.S.
To prepare this story, I reviewed
court transcripts and evidence summaries from the Looking Cloud
trial, the Vancouver extradition hearing, and other related cases;
FBI memos; and sworn affidavits and public statements by the
interested parties. I interviewed Mr. Graham, other native leaders,
and attorneys in Canada and the U.S., on both sides; and I reviewed
the extensive public record compiled over thirty years.
A U.S. summary of evidence
cites witnesses who claim Looking Cloud, Graham, and AIM member
Theda Clark kidnapped Aquash from a house in Denver, Colorado
in December 1975. Others witnessed Graham and Looking Cloud with
the victim on Pine Ridge Reservation shortly thereafter.
"The Judge in an extradition
hearing has a very narrow scope," Strachen explains. "All
we have to show is that this is the person the requesting state
[the U.S.] is looking for and that, if believed, the evidence
could lead a reasonable jury to convict the accused." This
is a "prima facia" argument that on "first appearance"
the evidence seems adequate. "We do not argue the quality
of that evidence," Strachen said.
Canada's extradition treaty
with the U.S. presumes that evidence supplied is accurate. A
U.S. Attorney in this case Robert Mandel in South Dakota
certifies the evidence. On first appearance, the evidence
against Graham does indeed seem compelling.
However, Graham's attorney,
Terry LaLiberte, pointed out inconsistencies, which he claims
the U.S. "deliberately or negligently" failed to disclose.
Alleged witness Al Gates "had been dead for nine months,"
said LaLiberte, when the U.S. "claimed he was available
for trial." Witness Frank Dillon, to whom Graham allegedly
confessed, claims he did not make the statement attributed to
him.
The only potential eyewitness,
Arlo Looking Cloud, now alleges that detectives plied him with
alcohol and drugs, coerced the testimony from him, and denied
him the right to have a lawyer of his choice. His new attorney,
Terry Gilbert from the Centre for Constitutional Rights in New
York, claims that Looking Cloud's court-appointed lawyer incriminated
his own client. "Looking Cloud was a homeless alcoholic
for more than 20 years," said Gilbert, "vulnerable
to manipulation by the detective in Denver."
Outside the Vancouver courtroom,
LaLiberte recalled that in 1976, Canada extradited AIM member
Leonard Peltier with evidence coerced from a similarly vulnerable
Myrtle Poor Bear, who later testified that FBI agent David Price
frightened her into making false statements.
Crown attorney Strachan says
the Poor Bear incident, "is history. How is it relevant
to this case? Just because the FBI did something once, is not
evidence that they're doing it here." Aquash's daughter,
Denise Maloney-Pictou, agrees. "This is 2004, not 1976,"
she says. "We just want to see Graham stand trial, and for
a jury to hear all of the evidence."
"History is what this
case is all about," replies Matthew Lien from Graham's Defense
Committee. "The FBI wants to rewrite the record. The perpetrators
of this crime are behind the prosecution."
Brave Hearted
Woman
Anna Mae Pictou was born on
March 27, 1945, on the Mi'kmaq reserve five miles east of Shubenacadie,
Nova Scotia. Her mother, Mary Ellen, traded housekeeping for
a room in a small house and earned babysitting money to feed
Anna Mae and two older sisters, Rebecca and Mary. Their father,
Francis Levi, died in 1948, Mary Ellen remarried, and they moved
to the Pictou Reservation on the Northumberland coast.
At the reservation school,
Anna Mae earned straight A's, but at St. John's Academy, off
the reservation, where she endured racial taunts, her performance
slumped. When her stepfather died and her mother left with her
third husband, Anna Mae stayed with Rebecca and her husband.
In 1963, with her boyfriend
Jake Maloney, Anna Mae drifted to Boston, where she gave birth
to two daughters, Denise and Deborah. She earned $200 per month
as a seamstress and felt prosperous. However, when Jake had a
love affair, Anna Mae left with the girls. She volunteered at
the Boston Indian Council, an outlet for her rage concerning
the plight of native people. At her first demonstration, she
met AIM leader Russell Means and devoted her life to native rights.
In 1973, Anna Mae left her
daughters with her sister Mary Lafford and traveled to South
Dakota with Ojibwa activist Nogeeshik Aquash. They joined AIM
activists protesting tribal council corruption and BIA police
violence. The group occupied the hamlet of Wounded Knee, the
site of an 1890 massacre of 200 men, women, and children by the
U.S. Seventh Calvary. During the ensuing seige, Anna Mae Pictou
and Nogeeshik Aquash married in a traditional ceremony.
Anna Mae earned a reputation
as a devoted advocate for native people. At Pine Ridge, she became
known, in the Lakota tradition, as "a brave hearted woman,"
someone who could be counted on to stand up for the weak and
dispossessed. She advanced through the AIM ranks in Boston, Minneapolis,
and Los Angeles.
Pine Ridge
Traditional Lakota leaders
on Pine Ridge Reservation cite their 1868 Treaty with the U.S.
as the basis for a 160,000-square-mile territory west of the
Missouri River. However, after gold discoveries in the Black
Hills, the U.S. reduced Lakota title to five reservations, less
than 10 percent of their treaty land. The "traditionals"
claimed that the BIA further eroded their land base by granting
leases without Lakota approval. In 1972, Richard "Dickie"
Wilson, controlled the tribal council and fashioned his own police
force, the Guardians of Oglala Nation, the GOONS, who harassed
Wilson's opposition with beatings and drive-by shootings.
When chiefs Matthew King and
Fools Crow traveled to Washington D.C. to redress their grievances,
vigilantes sprayed King's modest house with bullets and burned
Fools Crow's home to the ground. "It was those BIA police
and those goons," claimed King.
When traditionals Raymond Yellow
Thunder and Wesley Bad Heart Bull were murdered, the elder women
gave AIM permission to occupy Wounded Knee to expose the violence.
For 71 days, AIM activists armed with .22 gauge hunting rifles,
faced off against the vigilantes and BIA police bolstered by
SWAT teams and U.S. Marshals with M16s and grenade launchers.
Two Indians Frank Clearwater and Buddy Lamont died
from bullet wounds.
The siege ended with a promise
from U.S. Attorney Leonard Garment to investigate the BIA police
and Wilson's goons, but there is no evidence an investigation
ensued. Before 1973 ended, seven more traditional leaders had
died violent deaths, including Pedro Bissonnette, head of the
Oglala Civil Rights Organization, shot at close range with a
twelve-gauge shotgun by BIA policeman Joe Clifford. No charges
were filed against Clifford.
Into this maelstrom walked
Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash and John Graham, two wide-eyed young Canadians
eager to advance native rights.
Armed and Dangerous
While Aquash became a leader
of the movement, successfully raising funds from celebrities
in Los Angeles, Graham became a loyal foot soldier in AIM security.
Graham was born on August 31,
1955, in Champagne, Yukon, the traditional territory of the Aishihik
First Nations of the Southern Tutchone. In the summer of 1969,
he came to Vancouver for a Rolling Stones concert. In 1974, he
joined a "Native Caravan" to Ottawa, and then headed
south, into the U.S., to find his younger sister Joan, who had
been taken from their family and placed in a foster home. He
did not find her, but a year later, Graham arrived on the Pine
Ridge Reservation in South Dakota as a full-fledged member of
the American Indian Movement.
Since the death of Pedro Bissonnette,
fourteen more traditionals had died from gunshots or beatings,
including Pedro's sister-in-law, Jeanette Bissonnette. On March
21, 1975, Edith Eagle Hawk drove toward Rapid City to testify
in a federal court about violence on Pine Ridge, when White rancher
Albert Coomes ran her car from the road, killing her, her four-month-old
daughter Linda, and her three-year-old grandson Earl Janis. The
FBI issued no indictments.
The Traditional Council of
Chiefs signed a unanimous request for AIM to protect them. AIM
had long since crossed the threshold between protest and armed
defense of their people. They established a camp on the property
of Harry and Cecilia Jumping Bull, a stronghold in the heart
of the traditionalist community. Leonard Peltier, Dino and Nilak
Butler, Bob Robideau, and teenager Norman Brown lived among this
hard-core group of defenders. Anna Mae and John Graham visited
the encampment.
The FBI had thoroughly infiltrated
AIM by this time. In June, they transferred approximately 40
agents into South Dakota, including Jack Coler, who possessed
a detailed map of the AIM camps on Pine Ridge. On the morning
June 26, 1975, Coler and agent Ron Williams drove into the Jumping
Bull property, ostensibly to look for a teenager who had allegedly
stolen a pair of cowboy boots. Williams and Coler carried high-powered
rifles and ammunition. A shootout erupted, and by 2:30 that afternoon,
Coler, Williams, and Lakota native Joe Stuntz lay dead.
News reports, quoting the FBI,
claimed the agents had been "ambushed .. dragged from their
cars .. and executed." According to John Graham, he and
Anna Mae heard about the shootout in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. "We
have to go back in," Anna Mae said. Graham says they drove
all night and arrived in Pine Ridge amidst a massive FBI manhunt.
They located Peltier and others hiding in ravines as helicopters
passed overhead. "We made it out of there," Graham
says, "and I helped several brothers get into Canada. Then
I hung out in Detroit and Denver."
Aquash and Graham had crossed
a legal threshold themselves, vulnerable to charges of aiding
and abetting first-degree murder. Both believed the AIM response
amounted to self-defense, but the FBI would not see it that way.
Within days of the shooting, Ottawa RCMP received an FBI report
naming Aquash as a suspect, and an FBI field report described
her as "armed and dangerous."
Arrested
Aquash took refuge at a tent
encampment on the Rosebud reservation adjoining Pine Ridge. Dino
and Nilak Butler camped nearby. On September 5, 1975, she awoke
to shouting, stumbled from her tent half-dressed, and stared
into the barrel of an M16 rifle. "You," FBI agent David
Price said to her, "I've been looking all over for you."
Fifty agents in battle fatigues
ransacked the camp. She later told her friend Candy Hamilton,
"I heard the agents smashing things and laughing, throwing
eagle feathers and beadwork around. They verbally abused me,
accusing me of things I hadn't done."
At the Federal Building in
Pierre, South Dakota agents charged her with illegal possession
of dynamite, which they claimed to have found at the scene. When
she asked for a lawyer, an agent told her, "You're not going
to get a call through unless you talk to us first." They
asked her about June 26th, "where two men were killed."
"Three men," said
Aquash.
The agents insisted that she
had witnessed the shooting of the agents, although Aquash denied
it. She later told AIM lawyers that agent David Price threatened
that if she did not cooperate "you won't live out the year."
"You can either shoot
me or throw me in jail," the FBI account quotes her. "That's
what you're going to do with me anyway."
Dino Butler reported that agents
told him flatly: "Cooperate and live, don't cooperate you
die."
Aquash spent the night in jail,
made bail the next day, and called her sister Rebecca Julian
in Nova Scotia. Speaking in their native Mi'kmaq, she told her
sister that she feared for her life. Rebecca urged her to come
home. She promised she would, but added, "If you could see
the people, they way they're treated here, you'd understand."
The FBI added firearm possession
to their indictment, and Anna Mae faced two felony charges. Court-appointed
attorney, Robert Riter, relayed the FBI's deal: testify against
Dino and Nilak Butler for shooting agents Coler and Williams,
and they would drop one charge and allow her to plead out on
the second charge. Otherwise, she faced a long jail sentence.
Informers
Anna Mae and Nilak Butler fled
to Los Angeles where they organize a vehicle to spirit Peltier
and AIM leader Dennis Banks into hiding. In November, they headed
north in a Dodge Explorer motor home, owned by actor Marlon Brando.
The fugitives included 20-year-old Ka-Mook Nichols Banks, eight
months pregnant and carrying her one-year-old daughter. Friction
had developed among the group. Anna Mae had had an affair with
Dennis Banks, alienating Ka-Mook Banks. More seriously, each
fugitive harboured fears about informers.
Eight months earlier, Dennis
Banks had discovered that AIM security chief, Douglass Durham,
worked for the FBI. Anna Mae had suspected Durham when he arrived
at Wounded Knee claiming to be "one-fourth Chippewa."
She noticed that he died his hair and provoked gratuitous violence.
She had expelled him from the Los Angeles AIM office, but Durham
endeared himself to Banks and infiltrated the Defense Committee
the Wounded Knee trial in St. Paul.
The former Marine had served
as a CIA operative in Cuba and Guatemala. In Iowa, he worked
on the police force while engaged in drug smuggling. The Des
Moines police fired him after a violent fight with his pregnant
wife over his pimping. He boasted that he headed "the largest
criminal organization in Iowa." He flew AIM leaders around
in U.S. Army planes and framed AIM members with violent crimes.
In one chilling assignment,
he seduced Jancita Eagle Deer from the Rosebud Reservation. At
the age of 15, Eagle Deer had reported to her school principal
that reservation public defender William Janklow had raped her.
Janklow denied the charge but the Rosebud Council barred him
from the reservation. Janklow became a U.S. senator and is now
serving jail time for vehicular manslaughter. Eagle Deer announced
to AIM members that she would marry Durham.
In January 1975, she accompanied
him to Gresham, Wisconsin, where Durham instigated a shootout
with local sheriffs, arousing an armed citizen's vigilante group.
When Aquash and others expelled Durham, he fled with Eagle Deer.
She was last seen alive staggering along a deserted road near
Aurora, Nebraska, just before a speeding vehicle ended her life.
No charges were ever filed in her death.
A month later, AIM exposed
Durham at a news conference in Chicago. His disruption of AIM
fit the FBI's strategy, documented in memos from the era, to
"disrupt or neutralize" leftist, black, and American
Indian groups. William Sullivan, former head of FBI Intelligence
stated that, "We were engaged in COINTELPRO [counter intelligence]
tactics to divide, confuse, weaken an organization."
In a 1968 memo, the FBI described
a tactic called "snitch-jacketing," to "create
the impression that leaders are informants for the Bureau."
Ka-Mook Banks testified at the recent trial of Arlo Looking Cloud,
John Graham's co-accused, that by 1975, many within AIM suspected
Aquash was an informer.
The FBI knew about the fugitives
in the motor home, and on the night of November 14, 1975, Oregon
police stopped the vehicle near the Idaho border. Peltier and
Dennis Banks escaped into the night, but Aquash, Ka-Mook Banks,
her daughter and unborn child, and two other native men remained
in custody.
Murder
"My efforts to raise the
consciousness of whites," Aquash wrote to her sister, "is
bound to be stopped by the FBI." She told an Idaho reporter,
"If they take me back to South Dakota, I'll be murdered."
Aquash returned in chains, but was released. Fearing for her
life, she fled west. The FBI filed a ten-count indictment against
her for a variety of violent crimes.
In Los Angeles, she uncovered
information about Douglass Durham's involvement in framing two
AIM members with a gruesome murder. She promised to meet her
journalist friend Paula Griese in Minneapolis in January, but
never arrived. The last weeks of Anna Mae's life are the subject
of the cases against John Graham and Arlo Looking Cloud, and
their counter-charges against the FBI.
Someone shot Aquash in the
back of the head with a .32 calibre handgun, between December
20, 1975 and early February 1976. The prosecution's theory states
that AIM executed her, and that Graham pulled the trigger. The
defense theory is that the FBI killed Aquash, and that David
Price, Douglass Durham, or someone from the Pine Ridge goon squad
pulled the trigger.
U.S. prosecutors claim that
Graham, Looking Cloud, and Theda Clark kidnapped Aquash from
the home of Troy Lynn Yellow Wood in Denver, took her to South
Dakota, interrogated her with other AIM leaders, and executed
her. Yellow Wood and four others witnessed the party leaving
the Denver home. Two of those witnesses recall Aquash bound with
rope, but Irving told a reporter in 1999, "Anna Mae walked
out on her own." Witnesses Cleo Gates and Candy Hamilton
testify that they saw Aquash with Graham on the Pine Ridge Reservation
in December, and Hamilton says Aquash seemed upset. Graham acknowledges
that the four drove from Denver to Pine Ridge, visited Cleo and
Dick Marshall, and travelled to Bill Means' home in Rosebud.
Here, the stories diverge.
Graham says they dropped Anna Mae at safe house on the Pine Ridge
Reservation. The U.S. attorney's summary of evidence states that
Graham told his friend Frank Dillon, "We had to off her."
The summary states that native spiritual leader Al Gates will
testify that Graham admitted being present at Aquash's death.
However, Dillon now claims he did not say this and Gates is dead.
Asked how the U.S. certified
the dead Gates as a witness, U.S. Attorney Jim McMahon, replied,
"I'm not sure how long he's been dead." McMahon would
not comment on the impact to his case of losing the testimony
of Gates, Dillon, and Looking Cloud.
Looking Cloud's eyewitness
account is the evidence that Graham killed Aquash, but he has
recanted and stated that he will not testify against Graham.
AIM is sharply divided over
blame for Aquash's death. Ka-Mook Nichols Banks, Russell Means,
John Trudell, and Bob Robideau have stated that someone in AIM
may have ordered her death, and that they believe Graham might
have carried out the execution. Others, such as Peltier, Vernon
Bellecourt, and Dennis Banks claim that the FBI has intimidated
witnesses, fabricated evidence, and planted media stories to
create this impression. In either case, the FBI has clearly succeeded
in their stated effort to disrupt, neutralize, and divide AIM.
Due Process
"In Canada," said
Graham's lawyer, Terry LaLiberte, "I'd drive a truck through
the holes in this case."
"AIM did not execute informers,"
he says flatly. Anna Mae's biographer, Johanna Brand, concurs,
"There was no precedent for such treatment of informers."
When AIM exposed Durham, they brought him before a public press
conference. They did not execute or harm Bernie Morning Gun,
Virginia "Blue Dove" DeLuce, or any of the dozens of
informers they uncovered. AIM leaders supported Norman Brown,
the teenager whose mother begged him to cooperate in fabricating
evidence.
On the other hand, Brown himself
now believes AIM may have been involved in the slaying. "As
for the Movement leaders," he says, "I have seen them
and experienced their b.s. as so very few people saw and or could
ever imagine."
During the 1975 trial of Dennis
Banks and Russell Means, Judge Fred Nichol found prosecutors
guilty of counseling witnesses to commit perjury, suppressing
evidence, infiltrating the defense team, and lying to the court
about their activities. Nichols grew so distraught, he dismissed
the charges, commenting, "The waters of justice have been
polluted." The following year, a U.S. Commission on Civil
Rights examined Lakota complaints and, according to investigator
William Muldrow, found the FBI guilty of "threats, harassment,
and search procedures conducted without due process of law."
The defense points to the handling
of the Leonard Peltier extradition from Vancouver as a shameful
precedent. In 1976, RCMP and Hinton, Alberta Municipal police
arrested Peltier at the camp of Cree leader Robert Smallboy.
Canada extradited Peltier to the U.S. on the basis of two affidavits
signed by Lakota woman Myrtle Poor Bear, who claimed to have
witnessed the shooting of the two agents.
Myrtle Poor Bear had been a
radio dispatcher for the BIA police at Pine Ridge, a single mother
struggling with alcoholism and depression. Hotel receipts show
that between February 19 and 23, FBI agents David Price and William
Wood held her in a hotel room in Nebraska. Poor Bear says they
bullied her to sign the affidavits against Peltier. Her first
affidavit, from February 19, alleges she was Peltier's girlfriend
and that he confessed to her. The two affidavits signed four
days later claimed she witnessed the murder first hand. Crown
prosecutor Bill Halprin presented the last two versions to a
Canadian court, which sent Peltier back to the U.S., where he
remains in prison today.
Before Judge Paul Benson in
Fargo, North Dakota, Poor Bear testified that she had been coerced,
that she had not witnessed the shootings, had not been Peltier's
girlfriend, and had never met him. "I was forced to sign
those papers," she said. She claims Price and Wood showed
her pictures of the dead Anna Mae Aquash. "The agents are
always talking about Anna Mae about the time she died."
A year later, in Canada, she said, "He [Price] showed me
pictures of the body and said that if I don't cooperate this
is what may happen to me." She claims that agent Wood "said
that they could get away with killing because they were agents."
FBI agent Nicholas O'Hara acknowledged
to the Rochester, Minnesota Post-Bulletin in 1992, "Myrtle
Poor Bear's affidavits were falsely made and were then used to
help extradite Peltier from Canada."
Judge Donald Ross, during Peltier's
appeal in 1977, said the Myrtle Poor Bear affidavits show "the
United States is willing to resort to any tactic in order to
bring somebody back to the United States from Canada."
Canada's Choice
Former Canadian Minister of
Indian Affairs, Warren Allmand, declined to intervene in the
Peltier extradition on the advise that, "justice would take
its course." He now feels "betrayed and insulted [by
the] FBI's deliberate use of fraud." In 1992, fifty-five
Canadian MPs filed a brief to a U.S. court affirming that Canada
had been duped.
Paul DeMain, editor of News
From Indian Country in the U.S., and Anna Mae's daughter Denise
Mahoney-Pictou both claim, "There's no Myrtle Poor Bear
in this case." DeMain believes the phoney affidavits are
irrelevant. "The FBI framed a guilty man," he says
of Peltier.
"That's not how our legal
system is supposed to work," says Graham in Vancouver. He
claims FBI agents visited him in the Yukon in 1989 and urged
him to accuse others of murdering Aquash. "They told me
that if I didn't cooperate, they'd go after me." In 1995,
former BIA policeman Bob Ecoffey visited Graham in Whitehorse
with an RCMP officer present. Graham claims Ecoffey offered him
"immunity," if he cooperated. "Immunity from what?
I asked him."
Ecoffey and Denver detective
Abe Alonzo arrested Looking Cloud in 2003, and a South Dakota
jury convicted him of aiding first-degree murder. Looking Cloud's
new lawyer, Terry Gilbert, says his video testimony was coerced.
An appeal will begin on January 10 in St. Paul, Minnesota. On
October 19 last year Looking Cloud refused to testify against
Graham before a Grand Jury and claims he will not testify against
Graham in the future.
David Seals, with a Lakota
human rights group, interviewed Looking Cloud at Pennington County
jail in South Dakota, and writes that Looking Cloud told him,
"It was a set-up I was drunk. They were giving me drugs
and alcohol." Seals claims the video confession is "almost
incoherent, and the police were asking a lot of leading questions."
In the Vancouver courtroom
LaLiberte said before Justice Bennett, "My lady, you are
being misled by the United States of America. Evidence certified
by [U.S. Attorney] Robert Mandel appears not to exist They have
been negligent, if not deceitful. Canadian courts should and
can demand more." Outside court, LaLiberte declared, "This
whole case has been concocted by Ecoffey."
"Bob Ecoffey was a BIA
cop at the height of the reign of terror on Pine Ridge,"
Graham says. Ecoffey, claims that in the BIA office in 1976,
he heard "a young woman crying" through the intercom
and that a "medicine man" told him this was the spirit
of Anna Mae seeking justice. Janis Schmidt from Pine Ridge claims
Ecoffey is "a fraud. He never said who the medicine man
was. He tried to claim Selo Black Crow as his Grandfather, which
he isn't. Selo said that Bob came around and asked a lot of questions,
even accused him of killing Anna Mae. How does he know the cyring
voice wasn't Jeanette Bissonnette or Edith Eagle Hawk looking
for justice?"
In September of last year,
Ecoffey married witness Ka-Mook Nichols, who has testified that
Aquash feared AIM. At the Looking Cloud trial Nichols admitted
to receiving $25,000 in 2004 in connection with her cooperation
on the case, money she maintains is compensation for her expenses
in traveling to collect evidence.
Amnesty International has not
commented on the details of Graham's case, but has expressed
"concerns about ... apparent efforts by the Federal Bureau
of Investigations to prejudice the fair trial rights of AIM leaders."
Anna Mae's daughter, Denise,
is now the executive director of Indigenous Women for Justice,
seeking resolution in her mother's murder. She believes AIM ordered
the execution and that "John Graham murdered my mother."
Graham's daughter Naneek feels
differently. "My dad never hurt anybody," she said
outside the Vancouver courtroom.
"I don't blame Anna Mae's
daughers," says Graham. "They're being led to believe
that by the FBI. They want justice for their mother. But they
don't know the history of the FBI. This whole thing is a rerun.
If I go back to South Dakota, I'll get railroaded just like Leonard."
Retired Hinton, Alberta police
officer Bob Newbrook, says he now regrets participating in the
arrest of Peltier. "I'm afraid that Canada will get duped
again with the same sort of trumped-up evidence that the U.S.
used to get Mr. Peltier."
In the Vancouver courtroom,
Judge Bennett will decide whether or not the evidence supplied
by the U.S. is sufficient to return Graham to South Dakota for
trial. If she rules that it is, Graham's case will go before
Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler. The Minister has more leeway
than the judge to assess the history and quality of the evidence
before him. In any case, Canada must decide, in light of its
previous experience with Leonard Peltier, if it trusts the U.S.
with the fate of a Canadian First Nations citizen.
Norman Brown, a teenager when
he met Anna Mae, recalls, "the times when she stood with
the warriors, when very many men didn't [they] have no idea the
sacrifices we all made for each other."
One thing we know: Anna Mae
did not deserve what happened to her.
Rex Weyler received a Pulitzer
Prize nomination for his 1982 book Blood of the Land, recounting
the clash between native groups and law enforcement throughout
the western hemisphere. His most recent book is Greenpeace: How
a Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the
World (Raincoast Books, 2004).
Vancouver man may
get bail in case of slain Indian activist
AP, January 13, 2004
SIOUX FALLS, South Dakota --
One of two men accused of killing an American Indian Movement
activist in South Dakota may be released from the Canadian jail
in which he's been held for six weeks.
John Graham was arrested in
early December in Vancouver on a warrant from the United States
that charges him with first-degree murder.
He and Arlo Looking Cloud,
who was picked up in March in Denver, are accused of killing
Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
A rancher found her frozen body in February 1976.
A March indictment accuses
Graham and Looking Cloud in the fatal shooting of Aquash, 30,
around Dec. 12, 1975. Graham is fighting extradition.
His lawyer, Terry LaLiberte
of Vancouver, said a judge will likely release Graham from jail
after a hearing scheduled for Thursday.
The judge wanted a group of
people to come up with $25,000 bail for Graham and that has happened,
LaLiberte said.
Concerns raised over arrest of activist
CBC, Dec 3, 2003
VANCOUVER - A leading B.C.
human rights advocate says Canada will be making a grave mistake
if it extradites native rights activist John Graham to the United
States.
Graham was arrested in Vancouver
on Monday in connection with the high-profile murder of another
aboriginal activist Anna-Mae Pictou-Aquash.
She was shot dead in 1975 two
years after joining native militants at the occupation of Wounded
Knee.
But questions about the FBI's
involvement in her death have never been answered.
Jennifer Wade, the founder
of the Vancouver branch of Amnesty International, was at the
extradition hearing of Leonard Peltier another man connected
to Pictou-Aquash.
LINK: Free
Peltier campaign
In 1976, Peltier was sent back
to the U.S., where he was convicted of the murders of two FBI
agents and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences.
The Canadian government has
since lobbied for the U.S. to release him from prison.
Now Wade says Canada will make
the same mistake if it extradites Peltier's friend, John Graham,
for the murder of their colleague, Pictou-Aquash.
"She was very intelligent
and knew far too much, and I think she was gotten rid of,"
she says."And John Graham definitely feels it was the FBI
that got rid of her, and they're trying to pin the murder on
him."
Wade notes Graham was one of
the founders of the American Indian movement along with Peltier
and Pictou-Aquash.
Wade says she doesn't know
why police decided to move in on Graham this week, because he
had been living in Vancouver for years.
American officials have until
February to file an extradition bid for Graham. In the meantime,
he remains in custody.
Murder suspect waiting
in Vancouver jail for fate
CBC, WHITEHORSE Dec.
3, 2003
A Yukon man is in a British
Columbia jail waiting to see if, and when, he'll be extradited
to the United States on a murder charge.
John Graham, formerly from
Haines Junction, was arrested on Tuesday by Vancouver police
following a 911 tip.
Graham is charged in the 1975
murder of aboriginal activist Anna Mae Pictou Aquash in South
Dakota. She was found shot to death.
Graham is the second man charged
Pictou Aquash's death. Another man, Arlo Looking Cloud is scheduled
to on trial in February for the same murder.
Graham had been in hiding for
years before his arrest.
In an 1999 interview with the
CBC, Graham expressed his concerns about getting a fair trial
in the United States.
"I can't cooperate in
this investigation," he said at the time. "I refuse
to talk to the FBI or the RCMP about this. They're not capable
of handling this case and getting any kind of justice."
An extradition request must
be filed within 60 days.
It will be up to a judge to
decide if Graham will be sent back to the U.S. to stand trial
for first degree murder.
-
- Man wanted in killing
of Wounded Knee survivor arrested in B.C.
Body of Nova Scotia woman found
shot in head, frozen in South Dakota
-
cbc north
A man wanted in the 1975 slaying
of a prominent Canadian member of the militant American Indian
Movement has been arrested in Vancouver, his lawyer said Tuesday.
John Graham, also known as
John Patton, was arrested Monday by city police acting on a warrant,
said lawyer Terry Laliberte.
Graham is wanted in South Dakota
for first-degree murder in the death of Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash,
a Mi'kmaq born in Pictou Landing, N.S., whose frozen body was
found in February 1976. She had been shot in the head.
Pictou-Aquash was among the
Indian militants who occupied the village of Wounded Knee for
71 days in 1973.
A standoff between members
of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and government-backed factions
led to the deaths of two FBI agents, among others.
Leonard Peltier, another well-known
AIM activist, was convicted of the murder of the two agents.
Vancouver police spokeswoman
Constable Anne Drennan said Graham was arrested after police
were tipped in a 911 call.
Graham appeared briefly Tuesday
in B.C. Supreme Court, where Canadian justice department lawyer
Deborah Strachan said the U.S. is seeking his extradition.
He is to appear next for a
bail hearing on Dec. 17.
Graham, described by his lawyer
as an aboriginal from a Yukon band, has been living in Canada
for some time.
Laliberte said he wasn't sure
how long Graham had been living in Vancouver but it was "the
last year for sure."
Graham faces the murder charge
along with American native Arlo Looking Cloud.
Extraditing Graham from Canada
could take time, so prosecutors still plan to try Looking Cloud.
His trial is set for February in Rapid City, said U.S. Attorney
James McMahon of South Dakota.
A March 20 indictment accuses
Graham and Looking Cloud in the fatal shooting of Pictou-Aquash,
30, around Dec. 12, 1975. They would serve mandatory life prison
terms if convicted.
In a 2000 interview with the
CBC show The Fifth Estate, Graham denied any involvement.
The connection between Peltier
and the Canadian woman was renewed last May when Peltier filed
a libel lawsuit over an editor's note that linked his case to
the killing of Pictou-Aquash.
The lawsuit names as a defendant
Paul DeMain, editor of News From Indian Country, a newspaper
based in Wisconsin.
The lawsuit quotes from an
editor's note published in March in which DeMain said, "The
primary motive for the murder of Annie Mae Pictou-Aquash by other
members of the American Indian Movement in mid-December 1975,
allegedly was her knowledge that Leonard Peltier had shot the
two agents as he was convicted."
Peltier, who is serving two
back-to-back life sentences in Leavenworth, Kan., called the
editor's note defamatory.
© Copyright 2003 Vancouver Sun
Long manhunt in U.S. slaying
ends with arrest in Vancouver
Suzanne Fournier, The Province,
December 03, 2003
An international manhunt ended
yesterday with the arrest in Vancouver of a man wanted for the
1975 slaying of American Indian Movement activist Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash.
John Graham, known in AIM circles
as John Boy and John Patton, was arrested at the corner of Broadway
and St. Catherine's after a 911 call.
Aquash, a Nova Scotia Mi'kmaq
and the mother of two daughters, was found on the Pine Ridge
reservation in South Dakota in February 1976. Her frozen body
was wrapped in a blanket and she had been shot once in the head.
Aquash has become an international
cause celebre and the subject of film, theatre and news reports
demanding her killers be brought to justice.
For years, the FBI was suspected
of killing her in a bid to destabilize AIM. In recent years,
more compelling evidence has emerged showing she was executed
by AIM to protect inside information.
Graham, who was 20 when Aquash
died and is now 48, is married with children and has been living
quietly in Vancouver.
He appeared in B.C. Supreme
Court yesterday and was remanded in custody until a Dec. 17 bail
hearing.
Federal justice spokesperson
Pascale Boulay said from Ottawa it will take "at least 90
days" before a decision is made on whether to extradite
Graham to South Dakota.
Graham and co-accused Arlo
Looking Cloud, 49, were charged last March with the murder of
Aquash around Dec. 12, 1975.
Looking Cloud, a former AIM
foot soldier who had become a homeless alcoholic, was arrested
at that time and is in custody in Rapid City, S.D., where he
will go to trial on Feb. 3.
In a 2000 interview with the
CBC, Graham, a member of the Southern Tuchone First Nation of
the Yukon Territory, denied any involvement. "I wasn't there
and I didn't witness it," he said.
Wisconsin journalist Paul DeMain,
who has done more than 100 interviews researching the life and
death of Aquash, the highest-ranking woman in the male-dominated
AIM, told The Province yesterday that he believes the order to
execute her came from the highest circles of what was then an
armed and radical organization.
"The actual killing was
carried out by two low-level AIM foot soldiers, but Anna Mae
was executed because she knew that Leonard Peltier had killed
two FBI agents and she knew about a controversial death at Wounded
Knee," said DeMain.
Peltier, who was extradited
from Vancouver to the U.S., is serving two life sentences for
the FBI murders.
Aquash's two daughters, Debbie
Maloney Pictou, now an RCMP officer in Nova Scotia, and Denise
Maloney Pictou of Toronto, said when Looking Cloud and Graham
were charged that they were glad a conspiracy of silence had
ended.
"We were inspired with
those who chose to courageously stand on their own and honour
our mother's spirit with truth and integrity," the sisters
said then.
They have refused comment since
the two were arrested.
sfournier@png.canwest.com
© Copyright 2003 The Province
Man sought in U.S. slaying
nabbed in B.C.
By AP-CP, December 3, 2003
FLANDREAU, South Dakota --
A second man wanted for the 1975 slaying of Nova Scotia-born
aboriginal activist Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash has been arrested
in Canada, Patrick Charette, a spokesman for the Department of
Justice in Ottawa, said yesterday.
John Graham, also known as
John Patton, has been jailed in Vancouver, Charette said in a
telephone interview from Ottawa.
U.S. attorney James McMahon
of South Dakota said he was told that Graham was picked up in
Vancouver.
Graham is from Canada and has
been on the lam since he was indicted earlier this year in the
United States.
He and Arlo Looking Cloud are
charged with first-degree murder in the killing of Aquash, a
member of the American Indian Movement, on South Dakota's Pine
Ridge Indian Reservation.
Aquash, a Mi'kmaq born in Pictou
Landing, N.S., vanished from Denver in December 1975. Her frozen
body was found in February 1976 near Wanblee, South Dakota. She
had been shot in the head.
"He has been arrested
on what we call a provisional arrest, on behalf of the Americans,"
Charette said.
The United States now has 60
days to file an extradition request and supporting documents.
After that, Canada has 30 days
to determine if the matter should be sent to a Canadian court,
Charette said.
If the case will proceed, it
will go to an extradition judge and be argued in court, he said.
|
Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
