LAND OF THE RED GIANTS OF IXTLAN

Chapter 20 - the face of crime: "Janklow goes to jail"

"I can't tell everything I know to one person. But if

someone follows carefully in my footsteps they will
learn what I know."
- Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash
Miq'Maq Nation

Running one STOP sign too many, on August 16, 2003 Congressman William
Janklow massacred a Harley-Davidson on its way to join hundreds of thousands of its
fellows at the awful Sturgis Classic littering beer cans all over the nearby temple of Bear
Butte; drunkards bumper-to-bumper in Crazy Horse's sacred land pretending to be free
spirits and pagan noncomformists, all in the same black leather outfits and expensive
machinery setting up a deafening din day and night like Valkyries roaring to a bad
wagnerian opera.
The appropriately named Randolph Scott on his black Harley probably did more to
help the moral clean-up after the annual Midsummer's party than all the lawyers and Civil
Rights Commissions investigating Janklow's hegemony, over the years, with his death at
that terrible junction in the road. Scott clipped Janklow's white Cadillac streaking out of
nowhere in front of him and was dead before he hit the ground, out in a cornfield.
Horrified eyewitnesses in other cars and tractors said it sounded like a bomb going off,
and declined to comment on the mangled and bloody remains of the motorcyclist they
saw flying apart in several directions, out of respect for his family from nearby Pipestone
Minnesota (where the red pipestone is quarried for the Pipes of sundancers).
A sickened State Prosecutor, at Janklow's trial for second-degree manslaughter in
December, said the unrepentant politician at the wheel blatantly ran the stop sign without
even trying to slow down. "He was going south at least 70, in a 55 mph zone, while Mr.
Scott was going the speed limit and had the right-of-way west-bound. What kind of
suicidal maniac would drive like that?" Several highway patrolmen took the stand,
testifying that Janklow was exactly that kind of maniac, with so many speeding tickets
over the decades they couldn't even count them. High-powered, expensive defense
attorneys quickly questioned the patrolmen about why they hadn't enforced hardly any of
those tickets, if the defendant was such a menace to society. The prosecutors re-crossed
and sarcastically pointed out a governor can often rise above such petty matters of law
and order, in the execution of the duties of his office. Outside the halls of justice, Indians
protested that the rich got richer and only the poor went to jail. Inside, Janklow
alternately cried about his own misfortune and then defiantly said it wasn't his fault
because he had diabetes, refusing in any case to accept any fault or culpability.
Frantic, like so many drivers anxious to get to work or play (to pay all their bills and
taxes), even in the richest country in the world, the powerful 4-term Governor and 1-term
Congressman was still pleading not-guilty, deep in his heart and on his ugly face before
the obnoxious TV cameras everywhere, and to the judge and his loyal electorate, when
the jury came back in with the shocking judgement of history. "Guilty!" blared a six-inch
headline in the newspaper. Almost everyone had turned against him, especially
the tattooed bikers who paraded all over the state against the disrespect they were
routinely shown by drivers like "The Jank" as they called him.
He had to resign his seat in Congress, after only warming it for a year. South Dakota
was thrown into a crisis from the political vacuum, and went unrepresented in the divided
House for 6 months until a special runoff election, but no one seemed to notice much.
"It's almost a blessed relief," one Man-on-the-street said in a poll, "the government's not
on our side. We're better off."
"Janklow goes to jail" blared the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader in January when the judge
gave him 100 days in the Minnehaha County Jail, even after bigshots from everywhere
testified to his goodness and greatness. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle said, " Bill
Janklow is one of the most honest men I've ever known." Polls showed 80% of the people
did not think he was honest and approved of the verdict. These were the same people
who'd voted for him many times, beginning in 1974 when he rode into the Attorney
General's job on a wave of anti-AIM, post-Wounded Knee, post-Watergate reactions
from these same good folks of The Silent Majority.
Russell Means swooned in his autobiography, "In 1967, Janklow and the other young
Legal Aid lawyers under his leadership were still eager beavers, working hard to
overcome a century of neglect and racism. Janklow and I took an immediate liking to
each other. I considered him a good human being and a close friend."
On March 23, 1976 the Associated Press reported a quote, which Janklow confirmed
as accurate in 2000, in a conversation with Sioux Falls attorney John Gridley about the
American Indian Movement, "I told him that I never met anybody yet that had a bullet in
their head that bothered anybody with a gun again."
Less than a month before that, on February 24, Anna Mae Aquash was found in a
ditch with a bullet in her head.
Just 2 weeks before that, I saw Russell Means in Bismarck being led handcuffed into a
nearby North Dakota highway patrol cruiser, along with a woman who was probably
Anna Mae. That same morning, February 10, Means and David Hill had appeared
together in court before Judge Jones in Custer, along with other AIM people like Alonzo
King, Kamook Banks, Vernon Bellecourt, and Paul Clifford Jr., along with their lawyers,
to face charges on the 1973 Custer courthouse riots. Court documents and a Rapid City
Journal article prove they were there.
Following Anna Mae's steps, according to her own advice, I discovered that Means
had a second court date due that day in Bismarck, for charges stemming from another
shootout and bar fight back in 75 at a nearby border town, according to court records and
an article in the Bismarck Tribune. There's no mention of Aquash or Hill in those records,
but we can prove Hill was with Means at least earlier in the day. It's a short airplane hop
from Rapid City to Bismarck, and Hill, the suspect of Suspects, could very well have
been with them, as my friends and I observed other men also with them, as we ate lunch
across the street.
At the end of that busy day, the Sioux Falls newspaper reports an even more bizarre
link in the episode, as Means has turned himself in to the jail to serve out the remainder
of a 30-day sentence on another charge. It's a short airplane hop from Bismarck to Sioux
Falls. And by March, when Atty. Gen. Janklow is making his observations about law and
order to the AIM lawyer, Means is miraculously cleared of all charges in another murder
case, in which he was facing serious prison time up to a life-or-death sentence, despite
eyewitnesses. Adding to the unbelievable drama, one Mrytle Poor Bear was also signing
FBI affidavits implicating Means' fellow co-defendant Richard Marshall solely in the
alleged murder, in a bar fight in Scenic South Dakota, at the exact same time she was
signing affidavits to get Peltier extradited from Canada to face his own kangaroo court in
North Dakota. Richard Marshall went to prison for many years.
Means and his good friend Janklow walked free, after only a few weeks in the
same comfortable County slammer, in 1976 and 2004, for murder and manslaughter.

SOUTH DAKOTA KEEPS NAMES OF PARDONS SECRET

Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2003, p. A44
Sioux Falls, S.D. (AP) - South Dakota governors
have granted a number of pardons over the last two
decades, but the state is keeping the names secret
under a 1983 law designed to give people a fresh
start.
Among the few known beneficiaries: American
Indian activist Russell Means, convicted in a 1974
courthouse riot.
Over the last few months, as the cases have come
to light, the secrecy provision has been fodder for
talk shows, a bill in the Legislature to modify it and
a lawsuit by three people, listed as John Doe 1, John
Doe #2, and Jane Doe, who were pardoned but don't
want their names released.
Under the law, once a pardon is granted, every
document from arrest to conviction is automatically
sealed. The state won't release the number of pardons
because of the lawsuit.
The two recently reported pardons came from Bill
Janklow, who spent two eight-year stretches in the
governor's mansion before leaving for Congress in
January. The state had two other governors while
Janklow was out of office, from 1987 to 1995.
Janklow signed the bill during his first stint in office,
though he said last month that he didn't know about
the secrecy provision.
News organizations argue that such secrecy
undermines a fundamental tenet of open government.

Enter over 30 years of laissez-faire leadership and legislation assaulting the forests
and buffalo commons, Battlestar aerospace stations and hundreds of secret military
satellites, free cattle-grazing in the Grasslands (which cover 40% of the West), perennial
Drought, drained aquifers, Mad Cows, chronic Indian unemployment addressed by more
prisons, less health care, more child abuse, less clean water, more taxes, less voter
turnout, Jack Abramoff ripping off corrupt Casinos of $80 million or so, Jihad on Islam,
and The Patriot Act declaring "Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and Animal Liberation Front
(ALF) the most extreme terrorists groups in the country." All over Ixtlan, the World Bank
is trying to pigeonhole popularly elected leaders like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and the
Aymaran coca farmer Evo Morales in Bolivia as "leftists", while all the time marshalling
the IMF's and WTO's forces in the international financial community to destroy their
democratic governments, and grab all their prime petroleum, natural gas, and cocaine.

"So the battle lines are drawn. On one side are

the environmentalists, ranging from the big-money
groups like The Wilderness Society and Sierra Club
to the radical Earth First!ers and local mountain
people fighting the front-line battles in the woods.
Tactics being used include tree-sitting, logging
road blockading, and bulldozer dismantling, as
well as the more traditional lawsuits and lobbying.
"On the other side are the big corporations and
the local kulaks who do their bidding. Tactics used
by them have included falling trees into demonstrators,
suing protestors for punitive damages (and winning),
buying politicians, and even attempting to ban the
teaching at a local elementary school of a Dr. Seuss
book, 'The Lorax', which the timber companies say
portrays logging in a bad light."
- 'Timber Wars', by
Judi Bari

"There are currently 1.28 billion cattle populating

the earth [in 1992]. They take up nearly 24 percent
of the landmass of the planet and consume enough
grain to feed hundreds of millions of people. Their
combined weight exceeds that of the human population
on earth.
"The ever-increasing cattle population is wreaking
havoc on the earth's ecosystems, destroying habitats
on six continents. Cattle raising is a primary factor
in the destruction of the world's remaining tropical
rain forests. Millions of acres of ancient forest in Central
and South America are being felled and cleared to make
room for pastureland to graze cattle. Cattle herding is
responsible for much of the spreading desertification
in the sub-Sahara of Africa and the western rangeland
of the United States and Australia. The overgrazing of
semiarid and arid lands has left parched and barren
deserts on four continents. Organic runoff from feedlots
is now a major source of organic pollution in our nation's
groundwater. Cattle are also a major cause of global
warming. They emit methane, a potent global warming
gas, blocking heat from escaping the earth's atmosphere."
- 'Beyond Beef, The Rise and Fall
of the Cattle Culture', by
Jeremy Rifkin