Bob Ecoffey Has a Dream, Pt 2

Bob Ecoffey Has a Dream
By
Janis Schmidt

The FBI came in the 70’s and helped create a Reign of Terror. Those days are gone, but the FBI is still here. And so is Public Safety. Dick Wilson and the Feds had a lot to do with changing the role of Public Safety in people’s lives. And it hasn’t been for the good. You have to ask yourself, how did we go from 2 police officers to handle a whole reservation to a force of hundreds of Robo cops?

Bob always wanted to be a cop. He grew up in the 60’s, playing games that countless other kids play: cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians. How fortunate for Bob that he had a whole lifetime to play those games! From US News & World Reports: ‘Today, at 49, Bob Ecoffey is a big shot, a quietly confident bear of a man who runs the government’s programs for 635 Indian reservations nationwide.” What a dream come true! To be able to play cowboys and Indians for real! And get paid a big income for it! What a dream job!

What a dream come true! To be able to play cowboys and Indians for real! And to direct all the cops!

I remember talking with Tony Black Feather, who told me that back in the 60’s, he used to be a cop, he and another guy. My goodness! I couldn’t believe it! “How did you do it?” I asked.

Tony said, “When I got a call, I went into the community and asked the elders what the problem was. I worked with them. I was there to help. I was their friend, and we all wanted what was best for each other. I couldn’t have done it without their help. I relied on them, and they one me. A lot of time I went into homes and had soup and coffee. People talked to me—told me what was going on. I never used it against them, but to serve and protect.”

Up until his dying day, Tony was protecting and serving his people, the Lakota nation that he was devoted to. Tony had a sense of justice that was rare. He was the UN representative for all of the Teton Sioux nation, and he spoke for indigenous people around the world. People loved him. He inspired confidence and good will. He was a Treaty man through and through. He carried on the traditions and the old ways.

I’m just really missing Tony. And I know some of you are too. He was so caring, and wise, and just. It’s exactly what we are missing today. We lost Tony this summer when he died of cancer, but insisted on living and functioning at home. Not only did he show us how to live, he courageously showed us how to die.

What we have instead, is a whole new breed of cops, trained and schooled by the Feds, and directed by someone like Bob Ecoffey, Jr. People are being stopped by Public Safety for no reason. And there seems to be a huge force of robo cops backed up by our Tribal courts. The judges seem to have selective prosecution, and officers are always cleared of wrongdoing.

One cop never goes anywhere by himself. One poor little drunk takes 2 or 3 officers to take him in. And no one stops for coffee. Why would anyone invite someone in of coffee when they have just kicked the door in? People don’t trust the police. I certainly get a funny feeling when the police come around. It seems like their job is to harass and cover up.

Cars are being stopped for no reason. The car is searched. Someone had a TV and VCR coming back from Rapid. Cops stopped them and checked for drugs. When they found none, they accused the couple of trying to make pornographic movies.

One Public Safety officer had a wife and a dog. The wife took off with another man, who we will call John. Wife gave dog to John. After 5 months, wife returns to officer. John still has the dog. One day, John and his brother Jake took the dog in Jake’s pickup for a little ride to White Clay. John and Jake were sitting with the dog in the pickup drinking a few cold ones on a hot day last summer.

Unknown to Jake or John or the dog for that matter, they were being watched by the police. When Jake took off with the dog back to Pine Ridge, the officer followed, provoking Jake to run from him, resulting in a high speed chase into Pine Ridge and ending up with a 3 vehicle accident at the 4 way, endangering the lives of many people who were standing around. Walking up to the pick up was the Public Safety officer, who got his dog and walked away, with total disregard to any injuries that others may have sustained. And John ended up sitting in jail in Pennington County. The wife got her man back. And the dog got a bone.

Now this sergeant has ordered his officers to arrest, detain, chase or otherwise stop certain individuals he doesn’t like. This is not an isolated incident; it happens all the time.

Officers are going to sweat lodges to harass people, claiming they are looking for drunks. More than one sweat lodge has been targeted by the police. The police drive up, jump out of the car, shine flash lights in peoples faces, even shine a light into the sweat lodge, demand that people come out of the sweat lodge. Police claim they are looking for people with warrants. A man who follows traditional ways asked me, “Does someone commit a murder and then go right away to a sweat? Is that how they are protecting and serving the Oyate? And what about the DJ who plays the “Bad Boys, Bad Boys” theme and all of a sudden you hear sirens and ambulences going. And police are going into high speed chases.”

The whole justice system on the Reservation has become nothing more than a Gestapo situation. The police take their orders from the judges. Unsound decisions, decisions made without hearings, orders given to police without hearings, hearing cases of complaints that people have against her.

Complaints have been made about the justice system. Petitions have circulated to remove Judge Lisa Cook and to reform the judicial system. All to no avail. People have taken their complaints to the Tribal Council, only to have the Council run from the people as fast as they can. And nothing is done. These judges were all appointed instead of elected.

So, you have judges making decisions without holding hearings, you have crimes going uninvestigated, you have innocent people being threatened and harassed by the police, you have people ending up in prison on the say so of the police only, and not on evidence. You have the new and improved police force which Bob Ecoffey helped fashion.

And you also have the Feds telling the story of how it all happened. Last week, we were taking a closer look at Bob’s story and the dream he had which lead him to the murderer of Anna Mae. With the help of a grandfather, who just so happened to be a medicine man, who had a ceremony for Bob, (all of this heresay, unsubstantiated evidence) Bob divined his suspect who, very conveniently happened to be Arlo Looking Cloud or so he said. Now there’s a real piece of detective work for you. Or should we call it Freud and the interpretation of dreams?

You know, the Feds have a real way of putting words in someone’s mouth. Quite amazing how they do that. One thing you should know is how the FBI plants its spies and informants among the Indians.

{excerpted from Rex Wehler's Blood of the Land: The Government and Corporate War against the American Indian Movement, pp.167-168}
As its history shows, the FBI is highly skilled at this public relations game. Even after the McCarthy era hysteria damaged our country so deeply, it took until 1975 to abolish the House on un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that ruined the lives of so many good people. It's name was then changed to "Committee on Terrorism." Wilkinson explains that the FBI now violates first amendment rights under the guise of fighting terrorism. Same old wolf, but with new clothes. Same FBI behavior, but new public relations rhetoric.

They drew increasingly on manuals based on the British colonial experience in Kenya and Northern Ireland, which teach the essential methodology of COINTELPRO under the rubric of "low-intensity warfare," and stress early intervention to neutralize potential opposition before it can take hold.
The Native American Movement: 1970s FBI attacks on resurgent Native American resistance have been well documented by Ward Churchill and others.[f-44> In 1973, the Bureau led a paramilitary invasion of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota as American Indian Movement (AIM) activists gathered there for symbolic protests at Wounded Knee, the site of an earlier U.S. massacre of Native Americans. The FBI directed the entire 71-day siege, deploying federal marshals, U.S. Army personnel, Bureau of Indian Affairs police, local GOONs (Guardians of the Oglala Nation, an armed tribal vigilante force), and a vast array of heavy weaponry.

In the following years, the FBI and its allies waged all-out war on AIM and the Native people. From 1973-76, they killed 69 residents of the tiny Pine Ridge reservation, a rate of political murder comparable to the first years of the Pinochet regime in Chile.[f-45> To justify such a reign of terror and undercut public protest against it, the Bureau launched a complementary program of psychological warfare.

Central to this effort was a carefully orchestrated campaign to reinforce the already deeply ingrained myth of the "Indian savage." In one operation, the FBI fabricated reports that AIM "Dog Soldiers" planned widespread "sniping at tourists" and "burning of farmers" in South Dakota. The son of liberal U.S. Senator (and Arab-American activist) James Abourezk, was named as a "gunrunner," and the Bureau issued a nationwide alert picked up by media across the country.

To the same end, FBI undercover operatives framed AIM members Paul "Skyhorse" Durant and Richard "Mohawk" Billings for the brutal murder of a Los Angeles taxi driver. A bogus AIM note taking credit for the killing was found pinned to a signpost near the murder site, along with a bundle of hair said to be the victim's "scalp." Newspaper headlines screamed of "ritual murder" by "radical Indians." By the time the defendants were finally cleared of the spurious charges, many of AIM's main financial backers had been scared away and its work among a major urban concentration of Native people was in ruin.

In March 1975, a central perpetrator of this hoax, AIM's national security chief Doug Durham, was unmasked as an undercover operative for the FBI. As AIM's liaison with the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee during the trials of Dennis Banks and other Native American leaders, Durham had routinely participated in confidential strategy sessions. He confessed to stealing organizational funds during his two years with AIM, and to setting up the arrest of AIM militants for actions he had organized. It was Durham who authored the AIM documents that the FBI consistently cited to demonstrate the group's supposed violent tendencies.

Prompted by Durham's revelations, the Senate Intelligence Committee announced on June 23, 1975 that it would hold public hearings on FBI operations against AIM. Three days later, armed FBI agents assaulted an AIM house on the Pine Ridge reservation. When the smoke cleared, AIM activist Joe Stuntz Killsright and two FBI agents lay dead. The media, barred from the scene "to preserve the evidence," broadcast the Bureau's false accounts of a bloody "Indian ambush," and the congressional hearings were quietly cancelled.

I wonder his Bob has had any dreams about Joe Stuntz Killsright or Jeanette Bissonette?

The FBI was then free to crush AIM and clear out the last pockets of resistance at Pine Ridge. It launched what the Chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission described as "a full-scale military-type invasion of the reservation"[f-46> complete with M-16s, Huey helicopters, tracking dogs, and armored personnel carriers. Eventually AIM leader Leonard Peltier was tried for the agents' deaths before a right-wing judge who met secretly with the FBI. AIM member Anna Mae Aquash was found murdered after FBI agents threatened to kill her unless she helped them to frame Peltier. Peltier’s conviction, based on perjured testimony and falsified FBI ballistics evidence, was upheld on appeal. (The panel of federal judges included William Webster until the very day of his official appointment as Director of the FBI.) Despite mounting evidence of impropriety in Peltier's trial, and Amnesty International's call for a review of his case, the Native American leader remains in maximum security prison.

A little background on Bob from the transcripts of Arlo Looking Cloud’s trial:

DIRECT EXAMINATION BY MR. MANDEL:
Q. Sir, would you please state your name?
A. My name is Robert G. Ecoffey.
Q. Where are you from?
A. Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Q. Is that where you are originally from, sir?
A. No, I am from Pine Ridge, South Dakota.
Q. What is your occupation?
A. I am the Deputy Director for the Office of Law
Enforcement Services for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Q. How long have you held that position, sir?
A. Approximately three years.
Q. Can you give me a recap of your law enforcement
background and training, sir?
A. Yes. I have approximately 28 years in law enforcement
starting back in 1975, and I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in
criminal justice from Chadron State College, graduate of FBI
National Academy. I have hundreds of hours in terms of
investigative homicide courses, in terms of forensic homicide
investigations, crime scene investigations, and sex crimes
investigations.
Q. Over the course of years what law enforcement positions
have you held?
A. I first started my law enforcement career on the Pine
Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975 as a law enforcement trainee
working for the Tribe under the SETA program. I was assigned
to work with the Bureau of Indian Affairs police department
there in 1975. 1976 I started my official career with the
Bureau of Indian Affairs as a supervisory guard at the Pine
Ridge jail. From 1976 to 1977 I worked as a guard. From 1977
to 1981 the Oglala Sioux Tribe contracted the program there, I
switched over from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, went to work
for the Oglala Sioux Tribe where I served as the training
officer and captain of police. From 1981 to 1983 I was a
Special Agent with the Bureau of Indian Affairs on the Devil's
Lake Sioux reservation in Fort Totten, North Dakota. From
1984 to 1986 as a Special Agent again on the Pine Ridge
Reservation with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, stationed
there. Then from 1986 to I think 1989 I was a Special Agent
with the United States Forest Service on the Black Hills
National Forest and the Nebraska National Forest. Then in
1990 I got out of law enforcement for a couple of years, I
went back to work on the Pine Ridge Reservation at the Pine
Ridge agency as administrative manager for two years. Then in
1994 during President Clinton's first administration I had the
opportunity to be appointed as the first Indian United States
Marshal in the history of the Marshals service. I served in
that position for two years. 1996 I left that position,
returned back to Pine Ridge, and served as agency
superintendent for five years on Pine Ridge until taking this
job as the, originally was the Director of the Office of Law
Enforcement Services until about two months ago the Bureau of
Indian Affairs went through a reorganization and changed the
title to Deputy Director.
Q. In terms of your current job, Mr. Ecoffey, do you
supervise BIA law enforcement on reservations throughout the
United States?
A. Yes, I do.

(I really would have loved to ask a question here of Mr. Ecoffey. And it would have been, “So, with the 60 some murders on the Reservation between 1973 and 1975, Anna Mae’s murder is the only one you solved? What about Jeanette Waters Bissionette who was also murdered at that time? What about Pedro Bissonette, Jeanette’s brother-in-law and important local AIM leader who was shot in the back after he got out of his car? Are you getting any closer to solving these murders? Or were you only interested in Anna Mae? Why all this attention on Anna Mae? Not to take anything away from Anna Mae, but don’t the other 60 lives count? Weren’t these others just as courageous as Anna Mae?)

Q. When did you next get involved in the investigation?
A. My actual involvement was in 1993 when I really got
involved in the case when information came forward when I was
the administrative manager at the Pine Ridge Agency.
Q. What type of information came forward at that time?
A. Individual by the name of Gladys Bissonette came to me
at the agency, I was friends with her, had been friends with
her for a number of years. She was heavily involved with the
Wounded Knee occupation and with the American Indian Movement.
I worked with her on some issues there at the agency, and then
I had asked her if she had any information pertaining to the
murder of Anna Mae Aquash. At that point in time she provided
me with the name of an individual that would likely cooperate
with me and come forward and provide additional information.

(Doesn’t this spark off a few questions in your mind? And Arlo’s court appointed attorney, Tim Rensch, never cross examined, just let it slide. Bissonette. How was Gladys related to Pedro and Jeanette? What kind of issue did Bob help Gladys resolve, as administrative manager of the Pine Ridge Reservation? Wasn’t it a land issue? Do you find that helping people with their land issues, also helps loosen their tongues? Were you also instrumental in May of 2004 in helping someone with her land issue? )

Q. Who was that individual?
A. Al Gates.
Q. Who is Al Gates?
A. Al Gates is a elderly gentleman who lives in Denver,
Colorado. He was a family relative of Gladys Bissonette. He
came forward, it was actually on June 11 of 1993 when Gladys
came forward with the information. Then on June 18 I had
asked her, I said will Mr. Gates cooperate with me and provide
information about Anna Mae's murder? And she said yeah, I
think he will. That was on June 11, 1993. On June 18, 1993

Then, without pressing forward on this, Mandell instead went on for pages on some little markings on Anna Mae hands, trying to manufacture evidence that Anna Mae had been tied up. In fact, no one really questioned who Bob’s informants were. All we have is a dream as told by Paranormal News.com:

The work of a few men driven on by the spirit of a woman. One man, an Indian, would dedicate much of his life to the probe; another, a non-Indian, would risk his career. It had been said that Anna Mae couldn’t rest until her killers were brought to justice.

Neither would they.

A crying voice

The young officer was sure he heard it: a woman, crying, over the intercom.


The Bureau of Indian Affairs' top law enforcement official volunteered to be reassigned, an agency spokesperson said on Wednesday, according to Indianz.com.

With the ongoing investigation into poor conditions and deaths at BIA detention facilities, speculation was that Bob Ecoffey was removed as head of the Office of Law Enforcement Services. But he offered to move positions and "we were able to accommodate him," said spokesperson Nedra Darling.
Beyond that, Darling would not comment, citing personnel reasons. She said Ecoffey, an Oglala Sioux from the Pine Ridge Reservation, would be returning to South Dakota to serve as deputy director for Indian services at BIA's Great Plains regional office.
Ecoffey was appointed to run law enforcement for the BIA two years ago. He has served a number of positions at the BIA, including superintendent of the Pine Ridge agency.
Ecoffey is credited with keeping the pressure on the FBI to solve the murder of American Indian Movement activist Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash. Two men were indicted for her 1975 death -- one was convicted and the other is awaiting extradition for a trial.

So we end up with more questions asked, than answers. Will Bob still be able to play Cowboys and Indians? Who gave Bob all the tips that lead him to the discovery of Arlo? How can a dream be so powerful that it can send a man off to prison in the absence of facts? Who is that crying woman?

It took 27 years to interpret a dream that put Arlo away. I guess we could take a few weeks to do our own investigations into that dream and other mysterious informants. Does Bob finally get his man? Or woman, as the case may be? To be continued next week.