Government Witnesses

Although Means and Banks spent more than twice the amount of time that the prosecution did in opening statements, the government on February 12 began testimony which took ninety-eight days to unfold, while the defense called witnesses and rested its case all in three days.

Within the first week the government called two FBI agents who were not of Indian blood but pretended to be: Agent Stanley Keel (alias “Richard Roundtree”) and Agent Charles Stephenson (alias “Charles Lightfoot”) who had infiltrated AIM meetings. A week before the Wounded Knee occupation had begun, Keel and Stephenson were assigned by the FBI to conduct surveillance of AIM by posing as genuinely interested Indians. Dressed in rough clothes, driving an old and dirty car in poor running condition, and holding South Dakota drivers’ permits, Social Security cards, and Air Force discharge papers all falsely made out in their assumed Indian names, they went to the Mother Butler Center in Rapid City where they met Banks, Means, and Vernon Bellecourt. Stephenson told the AIM leaders that he and his friend had recently been discharged from the military after having been in Vietnam and were bumming around the country. “Well, you fought one war,” Bellecourt responded. “Now you have one more war to fight for your people.” When Stephenson inquired, “We would like to support AIM. How can we help in the support?” Bellecourt replied, “Well, I just told you.”²⁷

The conversation between the AIM leaders and the FBI agents disguised as Indians turned to the plans AIM had, as Stephenson put it, that “50 or 60 AIM individuals would go to Pine Ridge to observe the impeachment against Wilson, the current chief of the Oglala Sioux.” AIM, he said, had been invited for the anticipated victory celebration and would assist in jailing U.S.

Note should be taken that Stephenson employed FBI bureaucratic jargon in his testimony, for instance, “AIM individuals,” and how he revealed an appalling ignorance of the situation a full year later by referring in his testimony to Wilson as the Oglala “chief.” While he might have dropped the jargon during his surreptitious activities, one wonders how he could carry on a conversation of any length with the three AIM leaders when he thought that Wilson was a chief. Even more surprising is that a year later, after all the Wounded Knee events, he continued to think Wilson was a chief

When the priest of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Wounded Knee, Father Paul Manhart, testified, he was engaged by Kunstler during cross-examination in a classic exchange over the nature of religion and the church. In Kunstler’s questions we can see the rational lawyer viewing religion as ideology and the church as an arm of a dominant culture, while in Fr. Manhart’s answers we find a priest believing religion to be a mystery and the church an institution needed and loved by the people in whose midst it lives.

Q. [Kunstler] Is there a feeling among some Indians on the Pine Ridge Reservation that they would prefer the traditional Indian religion to any non-Indian religion?

A. [Manhart] What is known as the traditional religion is commonly felt and thought to be consistent enough with the Christian religion as to be integrated with it, some of it.…

Q. Are there some who don’t want an integration of these religious concepts, who want their own traditional Indian religion, without any embracement by other religions?

A. I cannot state for another religion exactly their position.… The general thinking of the Indian people, and particularly those who are strong in their knowledge of the past, the traditional, [is] that there is a reconciliation somehow between what they know as real solid traditional religion and the Christian faith.… [They are] able and willing to accept that as a proposition, but this is speaking in terms of integration, not antagonism.…

Q.

A. I don’t understand…can’t answer question when based upon my convincing anybody.… Half of the people on the Pine Ridge Reservation are Catholic, and my involvement is deeply with them. Now as far as describing some sort of convincing technique in my mind as a missionary, this does not make sense.… [It is] too much for me to answer…. As a priest, as a minister of Christ, I am interested in sharing with others what I have. Now if you describe that as conversion, all right.

Q. Do you persuade Indians?

A. Nobody becomes a Christian by persuasion. That is the reason I cannot answer your question.

Q. Is it conversion from an ecclesiastical point of view?

A. It rests upon sharing, not trying to convince. It is a work of the grace of God, whatever that change is that takes place which we are defining as conversion and that work, that is God’s work, not my work.

Q. Is not one of those functions [as a priest] to assist in or assist non-Christian Indians where the soil is ripe?

A. To assist?

Q. Coming into the Catholic Church?

A. To assist anybody.

Q. I know that, but I am limiting the question to non-Christian Indians.

A. In Wounded Knee? In Wounded Knee I don’t know any who are non-Christian Indians.

Q. Is it your testimony that everybody in Wounded Knee is a Christian? Every Indian living within the boundary of that hamlet?

A. Very nearly all, yes.

Q. Are there some who are not?

A. That I don’t know how to verify exactly.

Q. Well, how do you verify those who are Christians outside of the ones who attend Sacred Heart?

A. Well, we know a very large proportion are Catholics and Episcopalian. That is almost all of them. Then there are a few Presbyterians; there are a few Body of Christ which are Christians. There are a few Native Americans, and I would call them Christians. I don’t know who else I can find there.

Q. Let me put it this way.

A. I assist in no conversions. Only God assists in that.

Q. I use the term officiate.

A. If I celebrate it, that is a different thing.

Q. I will use the term celebrate. Have you celebrated the conversion of non-Christian Indians on the Pine Ridge Reservation during your pastorate?

A. Not that I can recall.

Q. Never once?

A. Some were already of another denomination. I have assisted some of them into communion with the church.

Kunstler then turned to questions about the Sun Dance ceremony, which Father Manhart said the church did not oppose; “we favor the good that is there and foster it and develop it.” Father Manhart was asked about the Indian drum and the pow-wow, and he agreed that they are parallel to Christian concepts. Kunstler began a line of questioning into whether Father Manhart considered Rose Shot legally married to Ben White Butterfly. He did not. He was asked whether he knew they were married by an Indian ceremony. “I know of no celebration of that union that way.”

Q. Do you believe Rose Shot and Ben White Butterfly are living in any form of sin?

A. That’s between themselves and God.²⁸

The most effective prosecution witness was not from the multitude of BIA officials or FBI agents, who heaped testimony upon weary testimony, but from Agnes Gildersleeve, who with her husband had run the trading post in Wounded Knee for nearly forty years. After she described in vivid terms what the occupation had meant for the residents of Wounded Knee, who had seen the caravan arrive, the trading post and museum looted, and AIM members take over their homes, she told how she had confronted Banks with the question: “Why did you attack these innocent people?” According to Gildersleeve, Banks replied, “You had the food, you had the ammunition; we needed it, and we took it.”

Hurd: Did he say anything else at that time you recall?

Gildersleeve: Well, I was crying around about the Trading Post and he said, what are you crying about a few groceries for? Banks told her that she had undone all the good she had done before by telling senators McGovern and Abourezk that she was still a hostage.

Hurd: Did Banks or Means tell you that because of what you had done you would have to do anything else?

Gildersleeve: Go to the checkpoint and talk to Mr. Clayton, tell him we were no longer hostages.

Hurd: After they told you you were no longer a hostage, did you leave Wounded Knee?

Gildersleeve: No.

When Hurd asked her why, she said that she “wanted to save what was left; our little home, that’s all we had left. They had taken everything else; the store, the museum, and they were started on the garage where we had put all our savings of things all through the years, and we had to store them there, and they were started on that.”²⁹

In a conference at the bench Kunstler pointed out to Judge Nichol that the Gildersleeves had been operating without a license, violating both criminal and civil statutes. Judge Nichol asked, “You mean if I don’t have a license on my home and I don’t pay taxes on my home, somebody could come in and loot it?” Kunstler responded, “In the regulation it states that without a license the goods which they are selling shall be forfeited to the Indians.” Hurd pointed out that this was a matter of law for the court, not the jury, and Judge Nichol agreed that it should be outside the hearing of the jury.³⁰

In cross-examination Mrs. Gildersleeve claimed that she was not prejudiced against AIM, “only what they stand for—destruction and razing, rioting and things like that.” When Kunstler asked her if she remembered accusing AIM of being a Communist organization, she replied, “Yes, sir. Their guard told us that they adopted communist tactics, Chinese tactics and Negro tactics, and that composes AIM.”

Kunstler inquired about a letter she had written to a congressman, telling him that AIM indoctrinated young Indians “so there would be no living with them,” that AIM had set the Sioux back fifty years, and that “before AIM ever came to the Reservation we all lived peacefully, happily; children were all going to school; Indians were going to and from their work, getting paid regularly and living very well like any other community.” She admitted that was what she had written: “Y es,…I just felt sorry for the local Indians that had to readjust their lives after AIM came in.”³¹

The progress of the trial was sidetracked between mid-March and mid-April for an extensive evidentiary hearing, without the jury, on a defense motion to dismiss the indictments because, as they learned, the FBI had secretly monitored conversations on a Wounded Knee telephone during the takeover.

The defense argued that just as Judge Matthew Byrne had terminated the Daniel Ellsberg trial, Judge Nichol should dismiss this trial because of general misconduct and dishonesty. Although Judge Nichol refused to grant the defense motion, he characterized the behavior of the FBI as “negligent at best,” but he could not attribute to them a purposeful intent to obstruct the judicial process. Without dismissing the case, because that would have been the last resort, Judge Nichol said he had come to the brink of dismissal and admonished the government “that this court will continue to be acutely aware of its compliance, or lack thereof, with this court’s discovery order and with the rules of law.”³² In May, two months before the Supreme Court handed down its decision in United States v. Nixon, which led to Nixon’s resignation, Judge Nichol, at the request of the defense, signed a subpoena for the White House to deliver any tapes containing conversations which might be related to the Wounded Knee case. Although the issue dragged on for months, the tapes never came.³³