Picket action in Vancouver for John Graham, Indigenous prisoner of war
Coast Salish Territory, Vancouver, Canada
On June 26, 2008, the one year anniversary of Indigenous warrior John Graham’s imprisonment in Vancouver and the 33 year anniversary of the Incident at Oglala, about 20 people, Native and non-Native, picketed and gave out leaflets in solidarity outside of the Ocean Plaza office tower in downtown Vancouver where, at least until recently, the Cash Minerals uranium mining company had its operations office. Banners were held up reading, “Free John Graham, Indigenous Prisoner of War”, “No Cash for Cash Minerals, Free John Graham” and “Uranium Kills, Stop Mining Native Land”. After picketing outside the office tower, the solidarity group moved up the block to smudge and say prayers for John Graham, Leonard Peltier, the people and the land, outside the United States consulate. The group also informed each other of Leonard Peltier’s urgent need for a diabetes test kit.
John Graham is a warrior of the Tutchone Nation whose territory is located in the Yukon (northwestern Canada). Cash Minerals is interested in uranium exploration right next to Graham’s home community in the Yukon. The company is also already exploring for uranium in the border area between the territory of the Northern Tutchone and Gwich’in peoples in the Yukon. Cash Minerals has had a registered office in Toronto and an operations office in Vancouver for years. There are indications they may have moved their operations office from Vancouver to Toronto. Either way, one person among their Board of Directors, Basil Botha, apparently still lives in Vancouver, while one of their advisers, Suraj Ahuja, now lives in North Vancouver (according to Cash Minerals’ website).
John Graham fought against uranium mining on Native land in Saskatchewan and British Columbia in the 1980s. In the 70s, Graham helped with security for the American Indian Movement (AIM) at the Pine Ridge reservation on the Lakota people’s territory in South Dakota.
Now Graham is charged by the FBI with killing his friend, comrade and fellow AIM warrior, Anna Mae Pictou Aquash of the Mi’kmaq people. When Aquash’s body was found at Pine Ridge in 1976 the FBI tried to cover-up her true identity and her cause of death, burying her as a Jane Doe and claiming she died of exposure. Her family and friends demanded a second autopsy that showed she had in fact been shot. At the time, an FBI-backed death squad who called themselves the GOONs had killed some 60 AIM members and traditional Lakotas on the reserve. During this time the Lakota’s sacred Black Hills were sold off to the US government for resource exploitation, with a major interest in uranium. Much water, animals and land in Lakota territory is now contaminated with uranium waste.
John Graham is currently in prison awaiting trial in South Dakota after being extradited from Vancouver in December of 2007. He was arrested in Vancouver in December of 2003 and spent 40 days in prison until he was released under house arrest to face his extradition hearings. He was taken back to prison on June 26, 2007, right before the Supreme Court of British Columbia rejected his extradition appeal.
On June 26, 1975, the FBI and their GOON squad attacked an AIM camp at Oglala, Pine Ridge, South Dakota, leading to the deaths of AIM warrior Joe Stuntz Killsright and two FBI agents. Peltier was then fraudulently extradited from Vancouver back to the United States and framed for killing the agents. One of the cops involved in the attack on the AIM camp on June 26, 1975, was Robert Ecoffey. This same cop testified against Peltier at his trial and this same cop in the 1990s became one of the lead so-called “investigators” of Aquash’s murder, seeking to frame-up John Graham and further cover-up the role of police and FBI agents in her death.
John Graham said in the 1980s:
“As a people, our philosophy is respect for all living things. We cannot agree that our resources are being ripped off from us at home. We’re stuck with the waste, we’re contaminated with the waste, and here our resources are going to kill other people in other countries. We cannot agree with that. Our own people and our way of life just does not agree with that.
Today, the uranium mining in Northern Saskatchewan, when our resources, when 99% of all this uranium is leaving the country to come to European countries or go to the United States to build up their nuclear arms. That is in total conflict with our way of life because the Indian way of life is respect and to coexist with everything that is natural.”
Our Freedom (Free John Graham and Leonard Peltier):
https://ourfreedom.wordpress.com
Graham Defense
http://www.grahamdefense.org
Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee
http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/
Leonard Peltier Statement for 2008 Oglala Commemoration:
http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/LP/20080626.htm
Leonard Peltier Update June 26th, 2008 – Medical Alert:
http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20080626122257157
John Graham with the Caravan for Survival, that went from Regina to La Ronge, Saskatchewan, against the proposed Key Lake uranium mine in 1981
Public Statement on Ward Churchill and John Graham
By some of John Graham’s supporters in Vancouver, Coast Salish Territory
December 2007
John Graham and Arlo Looking Cloud, former members of the American Indian Movement, are currently being framed with the 1975-76 murder of AIM leader Anna Mae Pictou Aquash. Looking Cloud has already been convicted and sentenced in South Dakota to life in prison. Graham is in prison in Vancouver awaiting the final word on his extradition appeals. John Graham lives in Vancouver and has strong support from Indigenous sovereigntists here and in other parts of British Columbia. The support campaign for John Graham is one of the main elements of Indigenous resistance organizing in Vancouver.
Ward Churchill has made repeated contentious statements regarding the case against John Graham. On October 28, 2007, a few non-Native anti-poverty activists brought Ward Churchill to Vancouver for a forum on anti-Olympics organizing. These people were not representatives of the Indigenous resistance movement in Vancouver and this event negatively impacted local grassroots Native organizers.
The Anti-Poverty Committee (APC) asked one Indigenous organizer for support of the event beforehand and although APC also tried to contact the John Graham Defense Committee about participation in the event, they did not meaningfully consult key people such as John Graham, his family and his defense committee, or other Natives involved in anti-Olympics organizing. Two other Natives involved in the event were not informed of the contention around Churchill until that night and even then were only informed by those who had come to challenge Churchill.
In 1999, Ward Churchill was part of a press conference in Denver, Colorado, with Robert Branscombe and Russell Means, the purpose of which was for Branscombe to publicly name Graham (AKA John Boy Patton) and Looking Cloud as Anna Mae’s killers.
During the press conference, Branscombe claimed that some AIM leaders, including Leonard Peltier, had been aware of what happened to Anna Mae as far back as March of 1976. Branscombe also admitted to working on the case with Denver police officer Abe Alonzo, while Russell Means admitted to working with long-time law enforcement agent Robert Ecoffey. Now a self-proclaimed graduate of the FBI academy, Ecoffey took part as a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) cop in the June 26, 1975, FBI and BIA attack on an AIM camp at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, leading to the deaths of two FBI agents and AIM warrior Joe Stuntz Killsright. This event became known as the “Incident at Oglala” for which Leonard Peltier was extradited from Canada based on FBI-falsified affidavits and sentenced to two life terms for killing the agents in a frame-up trial in North Dakota. Ecoffey also testified against Peltier at that trial. In 2004, Ecoffey testified as a government witness against Looking Cloud.
Also during the press conference, Branscombe said that he was not an FBI agent as Leonard Peltier had claimed in a recent statement. This was in reference to a public letter Peltier had released in September of 1999, a few days before the Denver press conference, in which Peltier said that Branscombe had visited him in prison in 1998 and offered him his freedom in exchange for signing a false affidavit against Graham, which Peltier refused to do. Peltier wrote that, because of their actions, neither Branscombe nor Ecoffey could be trusted to investigate Anna Mae’s murder, but he did not specifically say Branscombe was an FBI agent in this letter.
Despite these damaging FBI-based accusations and actions against AIM members on the part of Branscombe and Ecoffey, Churchill still went ahead and spoke at the 1999 Denver press conference after Means and Branscombe. Churchill did not counter the FBI-fed disinformation that Branscombe and Means were spouting.
Churchill’s books and writing have also contributed to the FBI disinformation campaign around Anna Mae’s murder. In the 1990 COINTELPRO Papers, Churchill wrote;
“The FBI, apparently proceeding on the belief that the bad-jacketing efforts undertaken against Aquash by certain of the Bureau’s provocateurs (notably Douglass Durham and Darryl ‘Blue Legs’ Stewart) may have caused her death, has consistently – and without success – attempted to build a case that AIM members executed her as a ‘suspected informer.’”
Churchill then made a complete 180-degree turn in the 2002 introduction to the second edition of Agents of Repression;
“Given that Aquash was demonstrably bad-jacketed by FBI provocateur Douglass Durham in the months before her death, it has always been generally understood that she had fallen victim to this most-refined and insidious of the Bureau’s many ‘political neutralization’ tactics. Suspicions have remained rife in AIM circles, moreover, that the role of FBI personnel was far more direct than merely setting the victim up to be murdered.”
He goes on to write that, “Such views were bestowed with a peculiar but substantial appearance of confirmation” when Robert Branscombe held a press conference in Ottawa on September 16, 1999, naming Graham and Looking Cloud as the killers, and when he repeated this at the Denver press conference in November of 1999.
In addition, Churchill’s solidarity network website, wardchurchill.net, used for coordinating his speaking tours, still hosts audio files of two Native America Calling radio shows first aired the days of and after the 1999 Denver press conference, including interviews with Branscombe and Churchill, during which Churchill called for two Grand Juries to be convened on the case. The multiple Grand Juries that were convened before and after the press conference contributed to the 2003 arrests of Graham and Looking Cloud based on FBI fabrications and coercion. Looking Cloud’s 2004 trial was also used by FBI-paid informant and former AIM member Darlene Nichols to accuse Peltier of admitting to his involvement in the killing of the two FBI agents in 1975. After the trial, Nichols married so-called investigator Robert Ecoffey.
The recent Vancouver event with Churchill was supposed to raise awareness of the No 2010 Olympics Convergence. Yet Graham’s supporters and Native anti-Olympics organizers see his case as intrinsically linked to the Olympics. The land struggle in Pine Ridge and the Black Hills in the early 1970s, when Anna Mae and more than 60 other AIM members and associates were killed, was largely over uranium mining and other resource exploitation. Graham participated in resistance there at that time. He also continued to be involved in anti-uranium mining actions and organizing across Canada and Europe in the 1980s. The Olympics is just one claw in a massive government and corporate land grab that has been introduced simultaneously with the acceleration of mining exploration and a lift on the moratorium against uranium exploration in BC.
The No 2010 Convergence (a project of the Anti-Poverty Committee) gave Graham’s supporters 10 minutes at the beginning of the event to challenge Churchill. Chusia Graham spoke about her father’s case while other supporters of Graham attempted to get Churchill to answer to the 1999 Denver press conference and the nature of the investigation carried out by Ecoffey and his FBI partners. Churchill seemed more interested in attempting to belittle and humiliate those who would question him. He has yet to respond directly to challenges about his participation in the 1999 press conference, the dire consequences of the subsequent Grand Juries, or his other writings that support the FBI fabricated story that AIM conspired to kill Anna Mae with Looking Cloud and Graham as the trigger men.
It was the FBI, BIA cops and members of the self-proclaimed “Goon” death squad who initially tried to cover-up Anna Mae’s death as that of an unidentified woman who had succumbed to “exposure”, despite an obvious bullet hole wound to the head that was leaking blood and despite the fact that FBI agent David Price or other people on the reservation who knew Anna Mae could have easily identified her. We must also always remember that Anna Mae was [most likely] one of over 60 traditional Indigenous people killed by the FBI-backed death squad that operated on Pine Ridge in the 1970s and that these murders paved the way for the further corporate theft and destruction of Lakota land.
Honour Anna Mae Pictou Aquash
Free John Graham and Leonard Peltier
Information:
https://ourfreedom.wordpress.com/
—————————————————————
Note received from Convergence@No2010
As an organizer of the 2010 Anti-Olympics Convergence, I wish to clarify the mistaken misrepresentation in this article that the 2010 Convergence is an ‘APC project’. This is misleading & incorrect.
Altho’ some members of the Anti-Poverty Committee are involved in promoting the 2010 Convergence, so too are other groups, including Indigenous organizers.
Dates for the 2010 Convergence were recently announced at a 515 Years of Indigenous Gathering in Vicam, Sonora, Mexico, by Indigenous organizers from ‘BC’. Those dates are Feb. 10-15, 2010. These groups included Warrior Publications and Native Youth Movement.
Gord Hill, Kwakwaka’wakw
see:
http://www.no2010.com
contact:
convergence[at]no2010[dot]com
John Graham’s history of resistance (actions and activities he took part in)
Early 1970s –
– Beothuck patrol by the Native Alliance for Red Power, monitoring police harassment of Natives in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
1974-
– Native Peoples’ Caravan to Ottawa and occupation of abandoned Carbide Mill (Native Peoples’ Embassy).
– Mohawk warriors armed re-occupation of Ganienkeh territory in New York State.
1975 –
– Security at Farmington, New Mexico, AIM convention related to racist murders of Navajos.
– Security and safe transportation for traditionalists at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Lakota territory.
1980 –
– Caravan for Survival from Regina to uranium boomtown, La Ronge, Saskatchewan, to protest Key Lake uranium mine government board of inquiry.
1981 –
– Anna Mae Aquash Survival Camp near Pinehouse, Saskatchewan, on Key Lake road to stop the development of what became the world’s largest uranium mine (John was instrumental in the founding and naming of the camp).
1983-1984 –
– Red Peoples Long Walk from Victoria to Ottawa and Akwesasne for survival and against assimilation.
– European speaking tour against uranium mining.
Also
Uranium (National Film Board, 1990)
Anna Mae Pictou Aquash in her own words (1975)
The Brave-Hearted Women: The Struggle at Wounded Knee, by Shirley Hill Witt (1976)
Chronology of Oppression at Pine Ridge (1977)
Excerpts from Leonard Peltier’s Trial Statements With Regard to Anna Mae Pictou Aquash (1977)
Leonard Peltier Regarding the Anna Mae Pictou Aquash Investigation (1999-2007)
Free John Graham – Honour Anna Mae Aquash | PDF
Event posters in Vancouver, Coast Salish Territory, 2008