Louis Moves Camp
The trial’s most dramatic witness, in a surprise appearance as a rebuttal witness for the government, was a 22-year-old near full-blood, Louis Moves Camp. He had grown up on the Pine Ridge Reservation and was a member of both the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization and AIM.
He had joined AIM in the aftermath of the killing of Raymond Yellow Thunder. But because he was “tired of the American Indian Movement ripping off the Indian people, abusing the Indian people,” he had gone to the FBI just two weeks earlier, early in August, since he felt “it would be better for my people if I came and testified.”At the bench Tilsen told Judge Nichol that the defense had had no idea that this witness was coming. Moves Camp testified that at meetings in Rapid City the week before the Wounded Knee takeover, AIM leaders Means, Banks, and the Bellecourt brothers, Vernon and Clyde, used the term, “get it on,” which meant to fight with weapons. He said that he saw Banks at Wounded Knee handle a Russian AK-47 and heard Means say “get it on” before firing at an armored personnel carrier. He claimed that he was a witness to Means’s and Banks’s taking items out of the trading post and to their taking of hostages. Banks, he charged, had argued for the formation of a “suicide squad” to do such things as start fires, and, in fact, after statements by Means and Banks, the Coates ranch was burned down and the cattle killed. When the news came into Wounded Knee that a U.S. marshal had been injured, Moves Camp narrated, “well, Mr. Means stood up, and he was—you know, very happy that the marshal had got shot. You know, he was in serious condition, you know, they were saying that was right on, you know, going through—I don’t know, hysteria or something, I don’t know.”41 The marshal whom Moves Camp referred to was Lloyd Grimm, who a month earlier had testified from a wheelchair because he had been left paralyzed from the waist down by the injury at Wounded Knee.
In short, Moves Camp was the perfect prosecution witness. His testimony connected Means and Banks to most of the charges and, as a former AIM member, he was not, like some of the other prosecution witnesses, unsympathetic to the Indian people. Furthermore, unlike most of the prosecution witnesses, Moves Camp could say that he was on the spot at all the crucial times, linking Means and Banks with the plans to occupy Wounded Knee and quoting Means as saying that they “should go to Wounded Knee and take it over.” Other witnesses said they saw Means and Banks with trading post merchandise, but Moves Camp claimed he took about $1,000 from the safe and gave it directly to Means and Banks. Moves Camp made the same direct connections between the defendants and the shooting of FBI agent Curtis Fitzgerald, the order to build bunkers and roadblocks, and the order to make Molotov cocktails.42
At one point in Moves Camp’s startling testimony, just as Judge Nichol announced a morning recess, Ellen Moves Camp, Louis’s mother, stood up in the back of the courtroom and rushed forward toward her son shouting, “Your Honor, I want to talk to my son. You butcher. Lie. What did they do to you so you’re lying? Get your hands off me. Don’t do it. They’re lying to you. They’re going to bury you. You’re lying, Louie. Leave me alone. You marshals, FBI, what are you doing to my son?”43 Judge Nichol ordered the marshals to take her into custody and called the attorneys into his chambers where he accused the defense lawyers of staging the incident. He was so angry that at first he could not talk with them, and later he could be heard shouting at them while pounding on his desk.44
After the stormy morning recess, instead of returning to Moves Camp for cross-examination by Kunstler, a second rebuttal witness was introduced by the government. Edgar Red Cloud, a 77-year-old grandson of the famous Chief Red Cloud, confounded the testimony of Frank Kills Enemy and Gladys Bissonette.
He favored the 1934 law. He was present at the critical Calico Hall meeting, but he was not consulted about taking over Wounded Knee. He went to the meeting “for the sole purpose to sing, and I didn’t go back there the next day.” When asked by Hurd if he thought the takeover of Wounded Knee helped or hurt the Indian people, Red Cloud answered that it “may have been good for the people who done it, but for us on the outside, we were hurt by it.”45 The defense had no questions.In his cross-examination of Moves Camp, Kunstler asked a series of questions which produced apparent contradictions. When Kunstler pointed them out, Moves Camp, perhaps feeling caught by his own words, retorted: “Now, maybe I did state that Russell had said that at the time and like you got me so confused right now with the little show you put on before we recessed before noon bringing up my own mother in here…”
Kunstler: Your Honor, I ask that…
Moves Camp: You made her come here. You people…
Kunstler:…for that untrue statement.
Judge Nichol: Wait. I’m not sure that it’s an untrue statement.
Kunstler: Your Honor. I think your remark is prejudicial.
This prompted Judge Nichol to order the marshal to clear the courtroom of all persons wearing AIM insignias because “they are the ones that are creating disturbance,” while Kunstler responded by suggesting that Judge Nichol’s remark was reversible error.46
Kunstler continued the cross-examination of Moves Camp, especially asking him about the statement he wrote for the government in which he claimed that the AIM leaders had meetings with representatives of various countries in an attempt to gain financial help and weapons. Moves Camp maintained that he had been directly outside the door where he overheard the representatives who posed as reporters. Kunstler asked him which nations were represented. Red China, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, East and West Germany, Italy, he recalled, but he could not remember when the meeting took place, whether at the beginning, the middle, or the end of the occupation, nor did he recollect any of the names of the foreign visitors.
Kunstler: And both East and West Germany were of the same opinion?
Moves Camp: Yes.
Kunstler: That they were going to help out, or have another meeting to help out?
Moves Camp: Yes.
Kunstler: Do you know that’s the first time that East and West Germany have sat down together and agreed on something?47
At this point, as Hurd rose to object, laughter broke out and Judge Nichol ordered the third row of spectators, where the laughter came from, removed from the courtroom. Vernon and Clyde Bellecourt refused to leave and were carried out. When a fight broke out between a spectator and a marshal, another marshal sprayed mace. This prompted Kunstler to comment that all this had happened because of a laugh. Judge Nichol took exception to his comment, saying, “Mr. Kunstler, one more word, and you are going to join him.” Kunstler threw his pencil to the floor exclaiming, “I don’t care whether I do or not, judge.” Judge Nichol ordered a marshal to take him out, and when Lane objected, he was sent out too. Both attorneys spent the night in jail and were released the next day, Saturday, after they and Judge Nichol agreed upon a joint statement to the jury on Monday expressing their regret at what happened.48
Louis Moves Camp’s mother, Ellen, was introduced by the defense as a rebuttal witness. Judge Nichol had met with her following her outburst and commented to the press that in accusing the defense he “was really wrong in blaming them for the incident.” Mary Hall, a University of Minnesota clinical psychology professor and wife of defense attorney Douglas Hall, had suggested to the judge that he should talk with Mrs. Moves Camp who had been sitting near her. Hall told the press that she was convinced the incident had not been planned, that Mrs. Moves Camp had been trembling during her son’s testimony trying to restrain herself. In an interview with the press Mrs. Moves Camp said she told Judge Nichol “I was sorry about the outburst.
I didn’t mean to do it. I was so angry that he was lying that it just happened.” She told the press that she thought the FBI had bribed her son. “I know how they work. I know they’re brainwashing him. That’s not Louis sitting up there. He doesn’t talk that way. He doesn’t say ?In-dian’; he says ?redskin.’ He’s using words he doesn’t usually use. Everything I’ve heard him say so far is a lie.”49 On the stand under questioning by Tilsen in cross-examination by Hurd, Mrs. Moves Camp maintained that Louis was not at the Calico Hall meeting February 27, as he claimed, and that, while she had been in Wounded Knee from the beginning of the occupation until near its end, her son left Wounded Knee after eleven or twelve days and never returned. Hurd asked her if she had seen weapons in Wounded Knee. She denied seeing any. He then produced a photograph of Mrs. Moves Camp in a group of fifty people, many of them holding weapons. “I never noticed those guns,” she commented.50Louis Moves Camp’s stunning testimony collapsed nearly as rapidly as it happened. He had asserted that he was in Wounded Knee from the beginning of the takeover until May 1, six days before the end. During that time he had been, presumably, standing in all the right places to become a witness to all the acts of Means and Banks which were mentioned in the indictment. However, a series of defense rebuttal witnesses were as dramatic in destroying Moves Camp’s claims as he had been in making them. Three witnesses put Moves Camp in San Francisco as early as St. Patrick’s Day, 1973, in San Jose early in April, and in Monterey late in April. An AIM member told how he and Moves Camp worked to organize support for AIM up and down California. A BIA employee testified that she had hired Moves Camp as a security guard at a San Jose high school Indian Culture Day. The president of a Monterey TV station brought logs showing that Moves Camp appeared live on a program April 23.51 Finally, Gaylene Moves Camp, Louis’s nineteen-year-old wife and mother of their nine-month-old baby, testified about an assault charge pending against her husband in Rapid City and she said he was concerned that he might be “sent up” for a few years.
He told her early in August that he was going to the FBI. “He told me that they would give him a house wherever he wanted it. They gave him $200 a week and then the case is dropped—the assault charges, they would find some way to drop it.… They would find him a job so that he would have a cover-up for the money.”52The Louis Moves Camp dimension of the case took yet another bizarre turn when it came to light that two weeks earlier, August 14 and 15, a week before he testified and while he was being watched by two FBI agents, Moves Camp was accused of raping a high-school girl in River Falls, Wisconsin, and that perhaps the FBI had convinced the local police to drop the charges against their star witness. During in camera testimony FBI agent Ronald Williams explained how he and agent David Price had been assigned to protect Moves Camp. They took him to the J & R Ranch, a resort motel near Hudson, Wisconsin, about twenty miles from St. Paul. Moves Camp and the two FBI agents went bar-hopping in nearby River Falls. Louis announced to the two agents that he planned to take a certain girl back to their motel. She, on the other hand, wanted Louis to leave with her and her friends, saying as she hugged him, “Come home with me.” The FBI agents told Moves Camp that they would not allow him to return with the girl. Finally, they parted, with the agents going back to the J & R Ranch and Moves Camp leaving with his new friend. The transcript does not make it clear how the protecting agents thought Moves Camp would be able to return to Hudson after they had left with the car. The next communication that the agents had from Moves Camp was an 8 A.M. phone call awakening them with the news that their witness had been charged with rape. Agent Price hurried to the River Falls police station where he spent three hours. Later in the week the River Falls Police informed Price that no charges would be filed against Moves Camp.53