Another Leonard Peltier Scandal in the Making

U.S. Extradition Attempt of John Graham for Allegedly Murdering Anna Mae Aquash

By Kahentinetha Horn
From MNN Mohawk Nation News
2007

John Graham, an Indigenous man from the Northwest Territories in Canada, is being accused by the U.S. authorities of participating in the murder of Indigenous woman, Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash, another “Canadian”. This happened more than 30 years ago. Both were members of the American Indian Movement [AIM]. Since when did the U.S. ever go after someone for killing an Indian? What’s behind it? John Graham is currently awaiting an extradition hearing in Vancouver, scheduled for May 17th, 2007. He has been under house arrest there since his apprehension in December 2003.

John Graham is well known for his lobbying on Turtle Island and Europe against Uranium mining in Canada and the Black Hills in South Dakota. This could be a factor in his being victimized by the U.S. and the FBI. They want to destroy an articulate Indigenous spokesman. Due to his strict bail conditions he can’t work. His main resource is worldwide support for his advocacy.

Forgotten by the U.S. and FBI is the reign of terror in the 1970s on Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. This was after the take over of “Wounded Knee” by the Lakota and their supporters. There has never been an investigation into the deaths of 64 native people. Many of these cases have been well documented and made public since then. Authorities have done nothing to try to achieve justice in these cases.

Just like the Leonard Peltier case, true to form, U.S. government agents are not using real evidence against Graham because they have none. Their case is based on hearsay “evidence” concocted by coerced witnesses. Peltier was convicted over 30 years ago for allegedly killing two FBI agents in a shoot out on Pine Ridge reservation. It’s all been discredited. This time they are relying on testimony of another Indigenous man even though it is “so full of big holes you could drive a truck through it,” as John Graham’s lawyer has put it.

A well known FBI tactic used as part of COINTELPRO [counter intelligence program] was “bad-jacketing” where AIM members were falsely accused in order to cause internal conflict. Other well documented FBI tactics are infiltration, also with the purpose of causing internal conflict, and falsely charging and jailing innocent people. One of the first rumors initiated by the FBI was that Anna Mae was an FBI informant. This was ridiculous! After her death, the FBI then spread the rumor that she was killed by AIM.

A lot of people know John. No one has seen any evidence that he is capable of violence. No matter what our people do, we don’t have a tradition of killing our own. We are not Europeans.

There are all kinds of weird issues like the two autopsy reports. After the first autopsy, the FBI said she died of exposure. The family insisted on a second autopsy, which clearly showed she was shot in the back of the head. There have been lots of violations of due process. Canada has not even asked to look at the evidence.

Why is Canada so anxious to turn John Graham over to the U.S.? Is it to legitimize an unethical extradition treaty? It’s a standard tactic to tie people up in court, take their resources and keep them from doing resistance work. This reflects the Canadian government’s racist approach. Canada is taking an unexamined approach to this case, passively following the U.S. lead.

The US and Canada have essentially agreed to rely on a handshake and a brief procedural review of the documents. Canada pretends to assume the US Government will act in good faith when prosecuting a case against a Canadian citizen. The lawyers are not allowed to see the evidence, even though they have raised many important issues which are not being addressed.

It is unconstitutional and a violation of international law for the Canadian Government to uphold only the rights of the United States in these proceedings. These practices do not allow Canadians to be protected as in other court proceedings. In this case, as an Indigenous person who never agreed to become “Canadian”, John isn’t a “citizen”. He’s deemed to be a citizen by the colonial state of Canada.

Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms and sovereignty are in question when it allows a foreign nation with such an evil history of prosecutorial abuse to override its laws. Canada fears defending this individual against the foreign government's claim, even though there is plenty of reason to expect that the charges are false and malicious.

At the very least the Government of Canada, and the Ministry of Justice should make sure there is hard evidence submitted that can withstand reasonable scrutiny; that John Graham be provided with sufficient funding to mount a complete defense; and that the proceedings for extradition be open and accountable to the public.

The U.S. is in the habit of walking all over Canada. They’ve done it time and time again. Amnesty International has condemned the FBI for using false evidence to extradite Leonard Peltier from Canada in 1976. He’s been in jail every since. Amnesty International has called for his immediate release on the grounds that he no longer has adequate recourse to justice.

Once again the US authorities are presenting questionable evidence, this time to extradite John Graham. Violations of established legal standards seems to have become habitual in the U.S. Note the international outcry over U.S. violations at Guantanamo Bay Cuba. We have to wonder why Canada is pandering to a known human rights abuser.

Amnesty International in 2003 demanded that “there must be scrupulous respect for due process and fair trial proceedings…” They demand to know about “possible political interference in the course of justice”.

This case is another example of what the U.S. does. They want to destroy Indigenous opposition by publicly crucifying us. They know we have the legal interest to the land and resources and will protect it. This is a tactic to scare us, by extraditing us and putting us on big public trials and a media show to try to paint us as criminal and unworthy people. The U.S. way relies on fascist policing and terrorizing the opposition.

The world community has to get involved. Human Rights organizations, First Nations Chiefs, trade unions and other groups have expressed their concern about John Graham's case. Please add your voice now in defense of justice by emailing or writing to the following:

The Honourable Robert Douglas Nicholson,
Justice Canada
East Memorial Building, 4th Floor, 284 Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1A 0H8
Telephone: (613) 992-4621 Fax: (613) 990-7255
E-mail: nicho.r@parl.gc.ca

Honourable Peter MacKay, Minister of Foreign Affairs Canada
E-mail: MacKay.P@parl.gc.ca

Contact: The John Graham Defense Committee, 15 Firth Road, WHITEHORSE Yukon Y1A 4R5 CANADA Phone 001 – 867 – 456 – 4340 info@grahamdefense.org
website: www.grahamdefense.org



Film Review: Unrepentant - Kevin Annett & Canada’s Genocide

By Brent Erickson
From Briarpatch Magazine
2007

“Their reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in a very brief time and thus rise to a high estate, disproportionate to their merits. It should be kept in mind that their insatiable greed and ambition, the greatest ever seen in the world, is the cause of their villainies.”
- Bishop Bartolomé de Las Casas, from Brief Account of the The Devastation of the Indies, 1542

When Kevin Annett accepted the position of Minister at St. Andrews United Church in Port Alberni, BC, in 1992, he was a little naive. After leading his first service he asked a colleague why no First Nations people attended the church, considering that over one-third of the city’s population was First Nations. Unsatisfied with the answer he received, Annett began a journey of discovery that would get him fired and physically assaulted, and destroy his reputation and marriage, but would produce a film that is of monumental importance to our country’s efforts to come to terms with its own history.

Unrepentant: Kevin Annett and Canada’s Genocide is a 106-minute documentary that chronicles the deliberate genocide of Canada’s Indigenous people, from early colonization and the first use of biological warfare, to church-run residential schools, to the ongoing theft of resource-rich Native land. Solid historical information and first-hand testimonies of residential school survivors are interwoven with Annett’s own story to create a powerful and educational film.

Unrepentant is based on Kevin Annett’s self-published 2001 book Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust, an important and moving work in its own right. The Unrepentant project was a completely self-funded, grassroots effort, and the low budget is evident in the production quality of the film. Unlike other recent political documentaries, Unrepentant is not witty, cute, or campy. It has no ironic music, clever editing or technical wizardry, just a straightforward, stark, and often disturbing account of a people who survived over four hundred years of ethnic cleansing, and of a man willing to sacrifice everything to help tell their story.

It may be difficult for many non-Native Canadians to come to grips with the information presented in Unrepentant, as it has been long suppressed and denied. Beatings, electric shocks, forced sterilization, medical experimentation, starvation, rape, and the deaths and disappearance of more than 50,000 First Nations children in residential schools-Annett’s film exposes the depth of Canada’s savagery towards Aboriginal people.

Unrepentant draws on personal testimony and eyewitness accounts to bring this history to life, while drawing upon Annett’s own experiences to demonstrate the systematic denial of the historic and ongoing violation of Aboriginal people. “I witnessed the murder of Maisie Shaw,” testified Harriet Nahanee, Native Elder of the Pacheedaht Nation (1935-2007). In December 1946, Alfred Caldwell, then Principal of the Alberni Residential School, kicked fourteen-year-old Maisie Shaw down a flight of stairs to her death. Annett reported the Maisie Shaw murder the day he learned about it, in December 1995, but encountered a familiar resistance when requesting an investigation. “They had the same response to any of the deaths I reported, year after year. Complete refusal,” he says.

But Kevin Annett wasn’t fired for helping to expose the murders of First Nations people. Instead, it was his exposure of the colonial lust for land and resources, which continues to define our society’s relationship to its Aboriginal people, that provoked such severe censure. As Annett states, “The Achilles heel here is the issue of the land.”

In the course of my work with residential school survivors while I was still a Minister in Port Alberni,” he explains, “I stumbled over the fact that the church had engaged in the theft and speculation of Aboriginal land in Ahousat, B.C., in order to profit its corporate benefactor, the logging company MacMillan-Bloedel.” In October 1994, Annett wrote a letter to church officials expressing concern about the issue of stolen Native land. “A week later,” he says, “Presbytery officials began meeting secretly with my church board to arrange my removal as Minister at St. Andrew’s.”

“Unrepentant is many things, but for me it is a mirror, held up to my own Euro-Canadian culture and people,” he states. For Annett, our antipathy towards the original people of this land represents a deep and abiding disrespect of life itself. “I am counseling and speaking to the dying in this film: to the members of a collapsing culture whose ways are causing their own planetary self-destruction in the wake of their extermination of millions of Indigenous people.”

With the film recently garnering a Best Director Award at the 2006 New York Independent Film and Video Festival, and winning the award for Best International Documentary at the 2006 Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, Annett’s efforts are finally being recognized.

Unrepentant can be ordered from www.hiddenfromhistory.org, and the trailer can be viewed online at video.google.ca.