From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul, Mission controlled decand most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know, coming to you live from a little thing called the United States. The history of our country, our modern version of this country, is, if anything, I think it's fair to say, a history of protest.
Right.
It was started as a conspiracy by European colonists who protested and rebelled against monarchies. And the history of this country is largely a history of disenfranchised minorities protesting even today, discrimination and other terrible things. And you know what got me about this in general, in theory, it's so it's so strange if you read a textbook after enough time has passed, these protests are often seen as righteous and noble, but only after they have occurred.
Its super common for that to be the case, and the tragic irony here. I don't think is lost on any of us. The idea that you know, the United States was formed as a result of protests in and of itself. But it's almost like only we are the righteous ones, and everyone else that we have to step on to get to our goals is totally fair game.
And any group that wants to protest the government in general has been in the past viewed as enemies of the state, right, anyone who wants to change the current power structures, the way things function. These groups, at least elements within them, have been viewed as as literal enemies.
Women voting terrorism, I say, I don't.
Know about that. The suffrage Did they infiltrate the suffrage movement?
There was no actual infiltration, It was just the vilification.
We're talking, he heard, yeah.
And when we look at I love the points we're raising her. When we look at the events themselves, the protests, the movements for quality themselves, and you look at the times and the context in which these movements transpire, we see over and over again a deep river of conspiracy. Tonight's episode, the United States versus the American Indian Movement, here are the facts this is common knowledge, right. The US did and does treat Native American or Indigenous communities
pretty terribly, right. I think we're all of the age where you could even learn this in your textbooks growing up, right.
I think for the most part, this didn't get a pass in traditional the public schooling, or at least you know what I experienced. I mean, the Trail of Tears, the displacement of around sixty thousand Native people belonging to the five Civilized Tribes between around eighteen thirty to eighteen fifty. Just a mass you know, displacement really, you know, with the zero attention or care paid to what would happen
to them, And even today I think we've talked about that. Finally, it feels like in literature and pop culture, the Native story is finally getting a little bit of air.
Could you tell everybody a little bit what what is meant by five civilized tribes?
That's just the term that's used to describe them. I think they were just organized. They had you know, culture, they had lands, they had leadership, and essentially the US government just said, you know, screw that. We don't care about your history, we don't care about your legacy. We don't care about your culture. We just want your land.
I believe the tribes were the Cherokee, the Seminole, the Muskogee, the Chickasaw, and the Choctaw nations is what they're afrig to because this this, these are long legacy peoples with you know, religions, with belief systems, with government, with of course family and ways of feeding and clothing and taking care of themselves that were unconnected to the larger, you know, civilized world let's call it.
Yeah, And to be clear, and this is an apolitical point, to be clear, Separating those five cultures and communities and calling only them civilized out of the many many tribal or indigenous communities in the US was a move absolutely divide people to mother them.
Yes, And I just just just to wrap up my point at just saying of in the last maybe ten years, we have finally really seen some of these stories come into the four you know, with films like Killers of the Flower Moon and television series like Reservation Dogs. These are stories that I, you know, was not familiar with, and it's it's really interesting to see, you know, a view inside of reservation communities and how rough they have it.
And like basically we just said, you know, as a consolation prize for all the horrific acts we perpetrated on them, here you can have this little kind of you know, also ran piece of land and certain fundings. But they're they're not thriving, you know. Communities.
Yeah, we've hit on a lot of this on this show before, especially when we're talking about tribes that still exist in Alaska and parts of Canada and places where they are the tribe, the human beings within these you know, tribal lands are neglected often and forgotten by power structures that exist around them, which you know, are meant to be separate from these areas and from like the governance
and the policing. But at the same time, it's a weird situation of I would say, in my opinion, a deliberate I was going to say lack of resources, but it's like a pullback of resources.
Persecution by negligence.
There you go. And for me to say these communities aren't thriving, that is not a ding on the communities. It is exactly a reference to what you're saying, a lack of resources, a lack of attention you know, by the government.
I would also say that that passive persecution via negligence transforms to a more active persecution if ever resources are dis governed. Yeah, the small bit of land as left. Talking about the uranium story that hit the news recently.
Yep, oh, the one last thing. Just about that five tribes thing we're talking about, and how othering, like, how othering that was on purpose? I think it's also a way to identify a what would be considered an organized enemy, an enemy that can can and in the eyes of the governor or the people that are calling them, that can and should be fought.
Basically right to define and address, which is always the mission. And also similar to European activities on the African continent, you want to you want to do everything you can to diminish or erase communication, unity and community or common cause between tribes that of course had a very long history of collaboration and conflict, far before even even the vikings came over. Because people have been here for a long long time. What we're all saying here, fellow conspiracy realist,
is something we all know. Hopefully, It is common knowledge that Europeans who arrived in the Americas did horrible, horrible things to the many varied cultures and communities that already long existed here. Pretty much every nasty thing you can think of with the technology at the time was.
Deployed biological warfare. Seriously, but yeah, it was. The indigenous peoples of North America were the first enemies of any kind of organized government that landed from the outside in North America.
Right, those are literally just defending their lands and their people examine faders, you know, I mean, yeah, but.
It's crazy to think just when we're going in time from the moment that the United States has formed, and I mean well before that, when they're just colonies here, these groups are and people's are the enemies of the establishment.
Well, and the Indian removal actors. What led to the trailers tier as well. It wasn't exactly putting them in camps per se or lining them up and having them executed. It by many accounts of historians and scholars, was an example of genocide or ethnic clensing, just by virtue of the fact that many of them, thousands of them, did not make it to their destination because of disease.
You know, it was just a starvation, at least partially by design. Yeah, you don't have to look forward to learn the history massacres, disease, as you said, genocide, forced relocation, assimilation, which would be cultural erasure. And the overall theme is an unending line of broken promises treaties, the consequences of which continue in the modern day. And folks, we're here
with you. Many of our fellow conspiracy realists, our first tribe, Native American, Indigenous, or you share ancestry from indigenous communities, like several of us on the show, so for many of us this is familiar. There is a quote I found that gives us a snapshot of the present day that kind of sums up everything we said. It's from a bit of a problematic source with an agenda, but I think it's interesting to quote from this problematic source
because even they recognize a problem. So I want to give this quote in like a professorial voice.
This is from the Foundation for Economic Education. And yes, one of the reasons the United States became the most prosperous nation in the history of the world can be found to the institutions created to protect individual liberty, free markets, and private property rights, all of which incentivize entrepreneurship and innovation. Unfortunately, the prosperity that exists due to the institutions created by the Founders is not afforded to all American citizens.
We're going to stop it there, because that's about as far as they get in terms of stuff we all agree with. After that, they get into how amazing deregulation will be, and that is just cartoonishly incorrect.
Well, in the name of entrepreneurship and innovation, we must end regulator regulatorist ship.
That's what the Founded fathers, who had all kinds of proposed regulations, would surely have wanted. They were more occupied with stockings and wigs. The statistics are there for anybody who cares to look. For instance, some of the best numbers come from about four years ago. The Native American poverty rate in the United States was north to twenty five percent twenty six point two percent in twenty twenty,
almost double that of the rest of the US. Forced relocation has also led to another consequence people don't often think about, which is the United States purposely pushed these people by hook or by crook, into land that they thought was worthless. Hard arid land, very difficult to survive, you know, and as a result, of that in the modern evenings, these communities are much more vulnerable to climate change, and did someone think about that, maybe, but did they
care absolutely not. This is where we have to talk about termination policy, which was a real name, not from some sort of eighteen hundreds manifest destiny crap, but from nineteen fifty three. Termination policy is a real thing the FEDS did.
Termination policy is when the government, as you said, in nineteen fifty three, decided by itself, hey, we'd no longer recognize a lot of tribes, like one hundred or more tribes, and they made people in tribes that they no longer recognized leave the areas that they push them to in the first place. Historically, it's just insane.
M Yeah, I said, well, you know, we know that we did recognize you as like, we recognize your culture, we recognize you as a people with and we know we have this whole thing earlier with inalienable rights. But you guys got to get out again. You got to go to like Chicago or Milwaukee or Minneapolis, just you know GTFO.
Well, yeah.
The weird thing that I don't understand with this is did they make all of those people who were members of tribes once now American citizens, Like, is that what they did? They said, Hey, guess what, you're a citizen now, congratulations. I honestly don't know.
Well. What they did try to do through an actual infrastructure, I guess was assimilate them without really giving them the
same rights afforded to you know, American citizens. And I guess this is as good a time as any just to mention a new story that just came out from the New York Times about these Indian boarding schools that from the eighteen hundreds to as late as the nineteen sixties, US government actually removed Native children from their homes and families and sent them to these boarding schools where they
were taught to be Americans. Essentially cultural erasure. Spent about around twenty five billion dollars by today's measure on this effort. And there's a report that came out very recently. This article from the Times is from July thirtieth, that nearly a thousand American, Indian, Alaskan, Native and Native Hawaiian children died while attending these Indian assimilation boarding schools.
And do check out our earlier episodes on these sorts of operations. These conspiracies. Sometimes north of the of the US border. In Canada, they were called residential schools. But though the names in the nomenclature may change, the goal of these terrible operations is the same. Many people under termination policy did move, in some cases because they could not afford not to move due to the carrots and
sticks employed against them. And when they did move to these cities, they found there were no jobs, there were no educational opportunities, and they were heavily profiled and persecuted by local law enforcement of the time like Heavy Heavy, And as a result of this, this chaos, this continuing aggression, the American Indian Movement Arises, or AIM as it was
typically called in some co Intel pro documents. It's founded in nineteen sixty eight in Minneapolis, one of those cities that people were pushed to under termination policy, and it's generally the brainchild of four people Ojibwe activists George Mitchell, Dennis Banks, Eddie Benton, Benai, and Clyde Bellacourt. Their original purpose is to provide aid to Native people's members of
these communities that apparently don't existent according to Congress. And they say, we're going to help these people who got forcibly displaced again in the modern day. And as they continued they met with success. Their goals grew to encompass an entire spectrum, a monopoly of native demands that have
been going on for generations now. Economic independence, recognition of traditional culture, protection of legal rights like hey, maybe enforce one of these treaties at some point, and autonomy over tribal areas. The big one, the big sticky one for the FEDS, the restoration of lands that had an aims perspective, been illegally seized and also, by the way, in the perspective of pretty much any legal scholar, have been illegally seized.
But doesn't it just show how a lot of these treaties are kind of just optics, and you know, we're not fair dealing, you know, with these tribes, with these groups, because we don't view them or historically didn't view them as equal, or there was almost a desire to like
put one over on their leadership. I just I don't know, I just when I see things like this and these kinds of treaties that is time and time again not honored, I just feel like things like this are toothless and just sort of like to absolve the oppressor, you know, of responsibility, rather than to actually do something positive for the oppressed.
Dude, Okay, there's a connection here. I agree with you. The connection is the Civil rights movement and black power movements. So let's go back to because we said that the American Indian Movement or AIM, was founded in nineteen sixty eight in Minneapolis, let's jump to Oakland, California, nineteen sixty six.
That's when Huey Newton and Bobby Seal formed the Black Panther Party for Self Defense that has a lot of the same goals, and it was viewed immediately as a negative thing, a threat to the establishment, to the United States government. And I can only imagine that when the American Indian Movement forms their eyes on like at least from certain areas of the Virginia Washington DC area.
How diplomatic, Yes, certain areas of Virginia, Ames leaders did, You're absolutely right, man, AMES leaders took inspiration from the Civil Rights movement and the policies of nonviolent confrontation, nonviolent protest. As time went on, as we will see, this strategy evolved,
perhaps out of necessity. AIM was involved in many many protests, some of which will get to the occupation of Alcatraz, which does have a little bit of levity to it, The Trail of Broken Treaties demonstration in nineteen seventy two, that's the big one, right, that's one of the big ones. Yeah, And the occupation of Wounded me Or Reservation in nineteen seventy three. This is all just the tip of a proverbial iceberg. Let's consider the context as we're saying the
nineteen seventies. Like, as we said at the top, this can sound strange in twenty twenty four, this bevy of conspiracies, We get it, but we have to understand that in the nineteen seventies, the public is still reeling after the assassinations folks like doctor Martin Luther King Junior Robert Kennedy. The US government is still intensely concerned. From their perspective, any civil rights movement might be affront for a foreign power Kauugh cough, Soviet Russia kauf cough, or a home
grown threat to the status quo. So what may seem to us to be a very American impulse to push for equality and more rights could to the powers that be seem a lot more like a domestic terrorist organization, even if they don't use those phrases.
You're saying that it was seen as potential for opportunists to co opt the movement and kind of infiltrate it and use it and bend it to their own aims, or sort of be masquerading as members of this protest movement but actually be attempting to, you know, seek aims that are that are unrelated to that movement.
Well, keep in mind, let's I mean, that's an excellent question. No, let's keep in mind that the US is acutely aware of the possibilities of these tactics because at this point they have deployed them in Latin America, right, Yeah.
They have exactly well, and they're also at this time, right as all of this is occurring, the FBI has an active quote rabble Rouser Index that they've been tracking for years of people, individuals within organizations that they think might be a threat. And the individual is a specific threat because they're either really good at talking to other people, or they're really good at whatever it is they do within that organization.
Or they have a perceived web of connections exact and those connections may be the problematic piece question tonight, how did AJ This is a bit of a softball. How did agencies like the FBI and CIA react to Aim? How did the US respond to these demands for quality, equity and justice. We'll tell you after a word from our sponsors. Here's where it gets crazy. Uncle Sam eventually totally tried to crush AIM, similar to the techniques applied
against the earlier civil rights movement. We're tacking blackmail, We're talking trying to turn people, get some moles in there. They from pretty much from the jump. They regarded Aim in a, if not antagonistic light, in a very skeptical, distrustful light. But their first responses seemed surprisingly reasonable, especially if you from the perspective of twenty twenty four's incredibly
hostile and devisive climate. The Nixon administration ran into something that is absolutely going to have to be a full ridiculous history episode. They helped occupy Alcatraz Island. You guys remember Alcatraz Island from like when Sean Connery got caught up in there?
Yeah, the rock Rock, Yes, that's yeah, all those green balls, man, look out.
I went on a tour of Alcatraz when I was really little, and it made an impression on me. I mean, it is a really interesting kind of you know, museum at this point. There is some interesting history to it, of course, but what it represented was the just the iron fisted grasp of the United States, you know, hegemony, I guess, the ability to contain the bad elements, you know, on this island instapable unless you're, of course, Shuck Connery and Nick Kay's with the green balls. Yeah.
The Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, it starts being a prison in nineteen thirty four and it shuts down in nineteen sixty three. When it shuts down in sixty three, Native American organizations start lobbying and they say, hey, look, you're not using this. Can we redevelop this island as a Native American cultural
center or school, you know, and or school. And in March of sixty four, just the year after the prison shuts down, five members of the Sioux community attempt to seize the island to take physical possession of it under an interesting treaty, the Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty eight, which technically, if the US ever enforced it would allow Native American communities to appropriate surplus federal land.
Wait a minute, Wait a minute, constitude, what constitute surplus though, guys, I mean we we've got bit, We're planning an arcade. We're gonna put a David Busters there. This is not surplus.
Well that that project that you're speaking of has not. It's not gone across the table yet, so they are unaware of any plans for a giant Dave and Busters on Alcatraz. So theoretically, at this moment it is surplus.
Right right. And also we know the game. Treaties in the US work in one direction. Shout out to Iran, you know what I mean? Like that has always been the great game.
Shout out to one direction, you know, masters of diplomacy and new direction.
Oh, early efforts do fail. But because of this, the island becomes a focal point, a symbol of government indifference towards the Indigenous, and sober claiming it amidst these communities is a powerful rallying cry, Let's get the rock. A fire destroys the American Indian Center in San Francisco in October in nineteen sixty nine, and a new activist group rises. Indians of all tribes. Dennis Banks and other members of AIM are part of this grand coalition. It's like a supergroup.
It's like the Avengers of this activism. And at first they send a handful of protesters to the island on November ninth in nineteen sixty nine. They're led by a college student from the Mohawk community guide him Richard Oaks. They last maybe like around twenty four hours. They're there, around twenty four hours. They get forced out, but they see it as a success. And Oaks has a great quote about this from the San Francisco Chronicle.
Well, it's a success and that people are noticing that it's taking place, and they can't help but notice what it represents. And he said, if a one day patient by white men on Indian land years ago established squatters' rights, then the one day occupation of Alcatraz should establish Indian rights to the.
Island, reciprocities to show a drug to shame. It did work, but it did. I love your point there. It didn't work in terms of physical occupation, but it did work in terms of what I would call mental occupation and awareness. It actually raised awareness. And this is a lesson that a lot of those are SATs fundraisers from the very wealthy who are like, oh, we're throwing this opulent ball to raise awareness of people we've never met and don't
really care about. That's a lesson you could take philanthropists. Yeah, I walked down the street from that one. But it is irritating the protesters do make another attempt to seize Alcatraz. This is the big one, Paul. If we could get some conspiratory oriole adventure music pulsing the rock, you know what we're talking about, like the Escape from Alcatraz kind of stuff. Perfect, all right, It's November twentieth, nineteen sixty nine.
It's the wee hours pre dawn and occupation force of eighty nine men, women and children sail through San Francisco Bay under the cover of darkness. They landed Alcatraz. They claimed the island for all the indigenous tribes of North America. They issue a manifesto addressed to the Great White Father and all his people, and they say, look, we're going to do what we said we're gonna do. This is going to be a school, it's going to be a
cultural center. We're going to be We're going to make a museum as well, and they said, look, we know the rules. We'll do what you guys said, Alcatraz is ours by rights of discovery.
Hell yeah, dude, no, come on. They sailed there and they discovered.
That thing, right and as American as hell? Yeah right, I mean serious. By the way, is the great white father Nixon? Who is the great white father in this man It's like the idea of white power. Yeah, okay, got it.
And they also said, this is my favorite part. This is part of why we're telling this story because we need some levity here. The group said, Alcatraz, you know, it's definitely ours, but if you want, we'll buy it from you. We'll give you twenty four dollars worth of glass beads and some red cloth.
Oh this is seek trolling, right yeah, which is supposedly the same price that Indians received for the entire island of Manhattan, which we know America has gotten some real bang for that buck. So once again too shee, I say. The activists say there said they didn't mind that the island was underdeveloped, and they were even cool with the
lack of fresh water. Most of them had already I mean to our previous point endured far worse conditions on the reservations that the United States so graciously bestowed upon them.
Let's really think about, like the work it would take to make a running working all of the stuff that this group wanted to do on Alcatraz, just setting up the supply lines and everything. Mike, I mean, if you're willing to do that, then as a US government, you should be like, Okay, that sounds great, take care of this problem it. Yeah, it's a huge opportunity, but it's just going to be so much work.
What I mean by an opportunity is an opportunity to show collaboration and working together. And maybe it could even be it could have been seen as a good pr move because the onus of getting the work done is on them. So what do we have to lose. We give them the island, say go for it, and then if they do do it, then that's an example of Native American ingenuity that has been bolstered by the magnanimous acts of Uncle Sam.
Uh huh do do?
First?
Secondly? Secondly, agreed, agreed. The issue we have to remember from from the federal perspective, at this time, this was close to capitulating to terrorism. Right. It was seeming both statisqut.
It just seems so short sighted.
Well, who are we to who are we to judge good folks like Hoover and Nixon.
The conspiracy boy we are, Well how did Nixon respond?
Yeah? Thank you? They the set up the Yeah, the administration opted to buy their time. They said, look, we are not gonna this might be a bit of a lose lose Kobayashi Maru, but the lesser loss is to not interfere. The greater loss is violent intervention, a siege of Alcatraz. So they said, as long as these protesters remain peaceful, eventually they're going to run out of stuff. They're like, we all know about this isle. Eventually, to the point we're making about supply chains, we're going to
run out of support there. These folks leave, This will also exit the news cycle. Yet celebrities joined in. This is around the time that we see this ground swell of like Jane Fond of Marlon Brando support. The band Credence Clearwater gave the protesters their own boat to help with supply lines.
It was called the clear Water Thank God. Credence is in the mix, y'all. You know that's when you know things are taking the bizarret available. He was unavailable for seven reasons. Sorry, I guess I when I was talking earlier about like it could have been a pr opportunity, I guess the US did sort of act in the way that I was describing. They didn't like stage a siege of the protests. You know, they didn't intervene with violence. They basically left them to their own devices for a time.
But I guess that did not go on forever.
Yeah, which is a very long time for an occupation. It's quite extraordinary, actually, And even as the protest was still underway in let's say July of nineteen seventy, then President Nixon gave a speech saying his version of like, oh good. He said, the time has come for a new era in which the Indian future is determined by
Indian acts and Indian decisions. Now, a lot of activists would argue that was the original era of Native American communities, but the US government did later return millions of acres of ancestral land to indigenous communities. They passed a bunch of legislative proposals. And be careful how I say this.
That seemed to support tribal autonomy, which led to some of the stuff we're talking about now, like or we mentioned earlier, you know, the idea of tribal police, the idea of a government within a government on a reservatione.
So isn't he essentially saying like, we would like it to go back to you guys governing and taking care of yourselves without us having to help you similar So it seems like that's the vibe, like here, we'll give you back some of this stuff that we took, but we are now basically more or less washing our hands of you.
There were lights, well there were let me be clear, there there were concrete pieces of legislation here that that did provide means of support and transition to.
Being too hard, I mean it's hard not to be, especially given the first half of the podcast and all of the gnarly stuff we did and how long it took to act. So I apologize if I'm going a little too hard on old uncle Sammy Boyle.
I don't think is necessary.
Yeah, just you.
So the Indian rights organizations continued, however, because a promise from the American government, as you might assume, is treated a little bit skeptically by these communities. Why is that, Well, you know, they're Google search away, folks. So Indian rights organizations also were galvanized by the imperfect yet clear success
of the Alcatraz occupation. We saw a later protest at Plymouth Rock about Rushmore, at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, d C. Dozens and dozens of other sites. Should we talk a little bit about that BI A occupation.
Yes, I think we should, because this happened in the heart of Washington, d C. Which, as we know, the FBI don't take kindly to people who mess around in Washington, d C. In their neck woods. And this act what occurred here is in my opinion at least guys, what galvanized the a lot of the FBI movement to really crack down on the American Indian movement and all of these movements that are occurring at this time. So yeah,
let'slet's dive in what exactly did they do physically. They're at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
So this is a culmination of some earlier protests, some traveling protests, and when they arrive, when AIM arrives in DC inside the Beltway, they take over the US Department of the Interior building. This is the reason they do it is because this is what houses the Bureau of Indian Affairs. And they occupy it from November three to
November ninth, nineteen seventy two. In a peaceful way. Okay, so they're not busting heads, they're not zip tie in folks and you know, throwing around nooses and stuff like that.
But it's going to internal FBI memos. They are violent and they stole a bunch of documents and broke a bunch of stuff inside.
My god, my diary.
Well, just from the FBI's perspective, they're like, oh, this is super violent and dangerous.
Yeah, and they said, look, we'll leave this building after the White House promises to address most of their concerns. This is around the time they release something called the twenty Points, which primarily addresses violations of other treaties or previous treaties, and inner Agency Task Force is going to
be created. The Nixon administration works with them, They negotiate with them, and they say, okay, we'll have some folks from the Nixon administrations, representatives from the White House involved with you know what name the Indian activist organizations you want, we will have them with us at the table. Everybody will have a seat at the table. We're also going
to have more legislation offering more autonomy to tribes. But that's not the end of the story, because folks, if you've listened this long, you know what kind of show we are.
Yeah, so we said that occupation ended on November ninth, nineteen seventy two. On November eleventh, nineteen seventy two, there was a memorandum sent within the FBI that identified the American Indian movement as a dangerous threat and they were now going to treat them as they had been treating the Black Power movement and the other civil rights movements exactly. And you can read these documents online. You can find them. There's a great section where I'm just going to read
this really quickly, guys. This is an internal memo that was sent by W. Mark Felt, the acting Associate Director of the FBI, to the special Agent in charge in Albany, New York, and he said each Special Agent in charge should have a survey conducted and following data should be
furnished to headquarters. Approximate number of Indians residing within the division, number of reservations, including the number of Indians residing therein, identity of tribes within the division, and identity of any known extremist organizations or extremist individuals active within the Indian community, including the Bureau file number if any.
So this is just short of placing them on a domestic terrorist watch list, right, essentially the same thing. It is the same thing, Yeah, okay, And.
That's just a couple days after that occupation ended, and I think it's because it was at the heart of DC.
And you could smell it on the wind. Things were turning violent. We're going to take a pause for a word from our sponsors and then we'll get further into this, and.
We're back, guys really quickly. I'm sorry, no, I don't want to get political here, but what happened on January sixth, You know, with these folks that literally invaded you know, government buildings and absolutely smashed stuff up and injured you know, personnel, it feels like the reaction to this Native American protest in DC is treated much more harshly than those good white folks that smashed up you know, government property.
While that's a weird thing because that you know, you read in the news there are people getting jail sentences for their actions they took on that day.
Just continue divide. There's a divide. I guess it's more rhetorical divide. So maybe maybe I'm overthinking it a little bit, but I don't know. It's just it's it's weird.
I would just point to the actions specifically that the FBI took back then in nineteen seventy two. One of the primary ways that they wanted to get that information that we referenced before the break in that memo was to create informants within the movements. Like that was their primary goal, get people who will snitch within the organization. It's the same thing they did with the Civil rights movement.
Think about what was his name, William O'Neil, who was working like right next to Fred Hampton, and you know, at least arguably caused Fred Hampton's death and then took his own life. And there were you know, there are other there are all kinds of infiltrations of groups like this, And I'm sorry, I didn't mean to go down this rabbit hole, y'all, but like, I don't even know how I got here.
Oh, I dug, I dug the hole. I dug the hole with the insurrectionist question.
First, I would also check out our earlier episode is the FBI Manufacturing Terrorist. That is a darkly hilarious story. Second, can you guys catch me up January what what?
Well?
Yeah, I don't know if you guys saw that. There's a viral song that came out about how nobody gives an f about January sixth. It is very funny. You should find it. I don't know what it's called. Who the artist? Is very funny but and poignant actually, But I was I was kind of going all of that way to get to our exploration of the FBI and other groups, infiltration of like white supremacist, white nationalist movements and other movements like that, like far right extremists, just
like far left extremists. There was a great piece in Rolling Stone recently about the work of agent Scott B. And I'm doing that with quotation marks, who was an actual FBI agent, not an informant, who went undercover for decades in a group in various groups like that, Neo Nazi groups, white nationalist groups. I would say that that kind of infiltration into groups that were probably present on
January sixth. Is one of the reasons why there's so much information that so many people are going to jail.
It's also one of the few I'll say it, I should be careful about this, but it's also one of the few viable human too operations that you can do now. And the folks who are doing those of operations, just to be clear, they are risking their lives. Actually you could say they're losing their lives in some sense either way.
And you know, we have to remember that regardless of what you may think personally about a given organization that is being infiltrated in this way, the aim of those agents, or i should say the goal of those agents is is anewable cause. They're hoping to save lives, and they're usually when they move past monitoring to intervention, it's typically in an effort to curtail a mass casualty event. Just to be absolutely sometimes and sometimes you lose the way. Mission creep is real, right, think.
About the infiltration of the SELC and and you know, there are a lot of lives about.
The modern day to be I'm not talking about the crazy racist go and tell prost.
Yeah, I got you.
No, I'm totally with you. I just I think about the stuff the alleged informants that were all around Martin Luther King Junior right towards the end of his life. Well, there are some that are alleged that are known figures that are not out as an informant right now, at least in the zeitgeist.
Just got some sweet pundit and publishing deals.
Well yeah, yeah, And we also think about we mentioned William O'Neil, who I'm sorry to derail us again, guys, but if you think about the way that an informant can be created, if you think about William O'Neill, who was eighteen years old and got caught driving a stolen vehicle across state lines by an FBI agent and they immediately swooped in, like when he's eighteen years old, and they said, hey, you know, this can all go away.
We'll even give you a little stipend every month if you just tell us what's going on within your organization. And that's kind of how it can happen. And it's for me that freaks me out. And when I'm thinking about the American Indian Movement, and you know, as we're moving through time here, just the potential for this that kind of intervention, specifically by the FBI or by like Homeland Security or some other group like that.
You want to leverage a problem because ultimately you want to control an asset. It's okay to pay somebody, but you can't really trust somebody if you're just paying them,
And it's tough to trust somebody just for ideology. So one thing the US and Russia have historically been very successful about at domestically and abroad is stuff like honey traps, stuff to where you get somebody to say yes to something, and then you you normalize that and you expand that over to window of action right such to such such that the asset, the mole, the informant, whomever, must always play ball, because now the consequences for not playing ball
are far worse. Right, that's what you want to do. You want to get your hooks in them, and it happens around the world because it's a tremendously effective strategy. So I think those are really good points. Earlier, we were talking about how things turned violent in the case of the American Indian Movement to Uncle Sam post dc as who pointed out even before DC to be honest with you, AIM and similar Native American activist organizations have
moved from inconvenience to threat. Alcatraz was probably one of the fulcrum points for that because it lasted for more than a year. The US suppression of AIM throughout these multiple protests, some of which were violent, like in the Dakotas,
they sowed the seeds for this. For this seventy one day siege in February of nineteen seventy three, the AIM leader at the time, Russell Means, and his organization took over a small Native American community of wounded in South Dakota, and they were protesting enormous local tensions right further discrimination against the Native population. FBI agents are immediately dispatched to remove the occupiers. They cordon off the area, they refuse
to allow the press inside. There's a standoff, a siege really, that goes on for seventy one days. People are firing, there is live fire. All told, two Native American activists are killed, fourteen or wounded, two g men, two FBI agents are killed two or wounded. One guy disappeared, and people still aren't sure what happened to him. His name is Ray Robinson, African American civil rights activist, you know, is an ally for this cause. He's believed to have
been murdered. But I think even now, as we record in twenty twenty four, the question is still open, is that correct?
Yeah?
So altoll twelve hundred people are arrested at the conclusion of this siege, including the Dennis Banks, whom we mentioned earlier, co founder of AIM. The leaders get tried in a court in Minnesota. The trial last eight months and they get acquitted of everything, which is pretty unusual to be quite honest, I'm sure there were many members of the US public who are saying, hey, no, lock them up or whatever.
Well, it's intense, especially considering four people died.
Yeah, and there's so much more of this story. These events don't just echo the earlier events of the civil rights movement. They also foreshadow government approaches to other standoffs, you know. I mean the Waco disaster would be an example.
Yeah, and I think about Ruby Ridge too. I think those are the two things that at least in America, maybe we think about it from stuff we've learned in school, but it is astonishing to imagine that this went on for over seventy days, when something like Ruby Ridge went on for only ten days. And I have never heard of this before, and there.
Is so much more for us to get to. In fact, we earlier in the course of our mutual research, we made the decision to follow up with an episode entirely about Leonard Peltier, who, as of July second, twenty twenty four, was again denied parole. There's so much this story, It's going to be another episode in the future.
Do you uner just give a mini background on who that person is so people can look into it if they want to and or wait for our episode.
Yeah.
Yeah, So Leonard Peltier is alive, a member of the American Indian Movement was He is officially convince two counts of homicide first degree murder of two federal agents, Ronald Arthur Williams and Jack Ross Kohler, both special agents for the FBI. His trials enormously controversial. A ton of the witness testimony is wonky. Allegations of conspiracy are as our
pal Frank would say, wide rife. Yes, right. We also know that many of the people who are involved in his initial trial, who are involved in his conviction have later renegged on their conclusions and believe that this was a stitch up by the Feds.
Dude.
It reminds me there's so many connections here to the American Indian movement and the civil rights movement. It reminds me of our interview with Mossy Secret his show Radical, where we talked about himam Jamil Abdullah Almehan, who was well was formerly known as h Rap Brown, a black power activist who is accused of killing a police officer right and has been in jail and is and has been denied parole and all that stuff so many times. It's really interesting how close that connection is at what
important point for us to bring home? Folks, fell a conspiracy realists. It's something you may deal with on this show. It's something we deal with constantly. You don't have to personally agree with someone's ideology or their aims or you know, whatever their weird vision board is to clock when there
is a conspiracy afoot, you know what I mean? The law should apply equally to all people, which should well, and the allegations and thoughts of a potential conspiracy are not aided when the FBI is actively a conspiring conspiring yeah so, and they were doing the same thing with the Islamic with various Islamic communities around the world, especially if you think about the early two thousands.
I mean, just h it.
It really bothers me.
Well.
The other thing we should note, by the way, is that right after a lot of this stuff that we were talking about in nineteen seventy six, we were talking about the infiltration of the American Indian Movement by the FBI. In nineteen seventy six, the Church Committee and the Pike Committee both came back with their findings and they basically outlawed most of those activities, the autonomous spying on Americans by the FBI, right like, just we do it on
our own and no oversight, nobody knows. And then that's around the time when FISA courts come around and all that stuff.
Which were great for the rubber stamped industry.
Oh well yeah, they're also it's also great when you create an entirely new department like the Department of Homeland Security, which is still a dumb name, because now they can just spy on people.
Yeah, shout out to five eyes. Here's what we can tell you. If you want to learn more about Leonard Peltier, an example in advance of our episode entirely about this story, check out his memoir from nineteen ninety nine prison writings, My Life is My Sun Dance. The American Indian Movement continues today. They've got a website, they've got a numbers of social media accounts. They ally with a lot of other protests and activist organizations. You learn more about them there.
The fight for regardless of how you feel about the events of the past or protest pasting current, the fight for rights of Native Americans is inherently it's the fight that every American should agree with. It continues here in the United States as well as in Canada, and it will continue because the consequences of the past themselves continue in the present day. I think we can all agree,
even in our divisive times. Pretty much every American knows the government harbors a lot of stuff they don't want you to know, and we'd love to hear your thoughts. We try to be easy to find online.
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