The Border Crossing of John Graham:

in search of Annie Mae Aquash

 PART 1

by antoinette nora claypoole

photo credits  AP/Carson Walker

 

John Graham in Rapid City, S. Dakota, Dec. 2007.

 

 “I would say that John Graham has seen the last of his days in Canada. Justice will have arrived at its half way mark when his trial is concluded.”  --Robert Robideau, Anishanabe, Turtle Mountain and White Earth, ( from letter to daughter of Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, 12.8.07)

Ashland, Or.  Dec. 8, 2007.  A ceremony without medicine is like mining Indians without the warrants to deliver life sentences.  Now.  Striped uniform.  Chains clang and again a room without windows. Again.  We’ve been here before.  “And we’ll be back again”.  John Trudell words come to mind, Iktomi.  Weaver of Life.  Spider.  Indians have cluttered the courts of South Dakota since gold and Custer and Crazy Horse.

No. John Graham, S. Tuchone (Yukon Territory) is neither hero or legend.  But he was a warrior, albeit footsoldier, for the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the 1970’s and risked his life for the right to fight the realties which plagued Indian Country in those days. 

Like small pox in blankets in acts of genocide, boarding schools are where John Graham and his sisters were sent.  In Canada.  Not unlike anything happening in the States. During the 1950s and 60’s.  And then the Bellecourt brothers and Dennis Banks emerge and create a movement-- AIM.  John Graham found his way into the scene while looking for his lost sister. “She was sent to the states somewhere.  Taken from our family”  he explained to some of us. That chilled night in Vancouver, B.C. while awaiting the first of many verdicts regarding his  extradition to  the United States.

 I don’t miss the irony in any of it.

Graham found his sister. And then.  He met Anne Mae Pictou Aquash (1945-1975/6?).  And on the night of Dec. 6, 2007 in a caper more like a drug deal by Yale drop-out rookies,  John Graham was “smuggled” over the Canadian border and handed over to U.S Marshalls. Like a Sitting Bull saga gone bad.  Sent to the States on a charge of the murder of Anna Mae.

But it won’t take a trek into badlands  buttes for anyone to  find him.  Graham is in Pennington Jail, Rapid City South Dakota. A Federal Judge  refused him bail on Dec, 7, 2007, his trial date to be announced next week.   A flight risk the prosecution insists.  Well, yes.  Indians have often fled from the colonizers and their “justice” system.  A system based on white men rule while everyone else hustles for the crumbs of a cake even Marie Antoinette wouldn’t have served for dinner.  Hungry Indians taken into custody in strange jails is nothing new.

Yet.  Much IS different about this U.S. government vs. an Indian scene.

Rapid City Twenty First Century.   John Graham, in this recent extradition represents an era, a time and place most Americans would rather forget then celebrate. Like a bad trip flashback from the  “turbulent” 60’s and  the white Kent State 70’s, John Graham is accused of killing his friend, Anna Mae, M’ik M’aq and he claims his innocence.  While the whole world watches nothing.

Annie Mae was a leader in the movement and Graham explained to me, in an unaired interview for KPFK radio: “She taught me things.  She was older than me and she taught me how to survive.  I learned from her”. 

No.  He claims, “I never killed her”. Graham says he never shot her in the head, as Arlo Looking Cloud claimed Graham did.  In the last dog and pony show, the Looking Cloud  trial in that same Rapid City Courtroom nearly four years ago. 

Looking Cloud claimed that Graham pulled the trigger.  In a videotape filmed as  a “confession”, while he was drunk. High. Out of it, as we used to say.  Later the accusation against Graham was recanted, but by then nobody was listening.  The circus tent had moved on.  And the generation that made civil rights and Bob Dylan our icon reality turned a  Judas Priest cheek away from Indian Country. Big Yellow Taxis replaced.  Comfortable portfolios and small condo takeovers much more  urgent  than  what the Indians are doing, today-- or ever. 

Annie Mae was “living” in a safe house on this exact date 32 years ago.  1975.  The Black Panthers had been infiltrated, SDS was almost a memory and AIM was targeted by the U.S. Government.  In his interview with me, Vernon Bellecourt (1931-2007), one of AIM’s founders, once explained the history of Cointelpro and provocateurs in the movement in detail.  Bellecourt admitted he knew that  Annie Mae was a Federal target and in Dec. 1975 she was thought to be an agent by her own friends and lovers. In the movement.

Robert Robideau

Today, in a letter to Annie Mae’s daughter Denise, Robert Robideau, veteran of AIM and acquitted in the FBI murders at Oglala (1975) explained (this letter  shared with me me when I asked for Robideau’s statement per recent extradition of John Graham). Candidly  Robideau  shares what he believes about Annie Mae’s murder, John Graham and Looking Cloud:

“There are those in AIM leadership left who ordered these two Indian men to do their dirty work.  I would hope that through this trial that their names be exposed, and they be brought foreword to answer for this crime too. John Trudell knows who these leaders are.”

But it gets worse.

Robideau, in an interview with me (2005) explained that he feels a personal responsibility for having “let Annie Mae down” when she asked to be part of Northwest AIM. The camp he and Dino Butler were holding down like cedar limbs pounded into the canvas of tipi caravans.

It seems Robideau never quite cleared a pathway to the portal of their group for Annie Mae and he wondered out loud with me ....“What if she had been with us?  Would she have lived?”  Today he explains as though this was all just yesterday:

Yes, you are correct, I have no good feeling for Trudell, but you should not feel any closeness to him either as you very well know Troy Lynn Yellow Wood phoned Trudell the day Anna Mae was taken to Rapid City. So he had to have known what was happening to Anna Mae from the beginning and certainly knew all the people involved from day one.”

A “safe”  house set up by Troy Lynn Yellow Wood  is where Annie Mae was “living”  32 years ago. Fast forward. Now.  What does safety imply in a nuclear world of Indian Points and uranium still buried on Indian land?

Graham is a warrior who has worked for his people.

And probably had no choice but to do or die himself. He is not a cozy Hollywood Indian posing as a poet and having white women. Who drop perfumed deeds to the land into his objectifying hand.  No.  John Graham lived a simple life “after AIM”.  Fought against uranium mining in Canada during the 1980’s and raised his family with a simple gesture of survival.  When the Canadian Mounties showed up at his home several years ago, he was the warrior Annie Mae met.  Back in S. Dakota before the U.S. Government agent threatened her life.  Graham would not name “her murderers” to those Mounties.  Even when they threatened to “set him up” as her murderer, he refused to lie.  In his interview with me these things were explained.  But one after another, Indian papers, radio stations and book publishers refused to run his words.  About what happened to him. Because  Annie Mae was murdered.  Yes. This happened to him because Annie Mae was murdered. 

Anna Mae