Arlo Looking Cloud, A Forgotten Man

This example of justice in American leaves more questions than it answers. After 28 years, what’s the rush? Why were only FBI agents called to testify? Why was Arlo not told of his rights? The right to have an attorney of his choice? Why did Rensch lie to the newspapers about his firing? Why did Rensch not put Arlo on the stand? Why did Rensch instead use a videotaped ‘confession’ extracted from Arlo when he was not of sober mind? Why did Rensch play this for the jury when Arlo was sitting right there with a clear mind? Why did Rensch blow off expert legal assistance offered by Barry Bachrach, Leonard Peltier’s attorney? Why did Rensch tell the family and Arlo that they had no choice but to stay with himself (Rensch) , and that he would appeal? What is there to appeal, considering that no evidence was presented? Arlo and the family have a lot of questions about the way Arlo’s trial was handled. The court has done everything possible to keep Arlo and the family misinformed as to what Arlo’s legal rights are. I just want to say that I, Janis Schmidt, have lived on the Pine Ridge Reservation for 12 years, and in that time I have suffered the loss of a job, have had all my belongings stolen, have been detained by the police for no reason, in short, I have been treated like any other Indian. I have become friends with many of the Lakotas. Some who are close relatives of Arlo have asked me to write in his defense, since no one else is doing that. I do not have any political connections, nor am I a journalist. I am an artist, a painter. As an artist, I promised I would do my best for Arlo, for justice, and that I would leave no stone unturned to find out the truth, no matter how long it takes. I will be taking my time. There is no rush job here. Should you wish to know more about me, you may go to my website at www.lakotaperspectives.com I wish to thank everyone who has come forward with e-mails of support and information. We live in very treacherous times, where we are being told that black is white, that right is wrong, that we are in eminent danger of being attacked by an onslaught of terrorists, that we need to trust Bush to ‘rid the world of these evildoers’, that America is the home of justice and democracy. Most of all, I want to thank the people on the Pine Ridge reservation, especially the unimportant people, the ones without the good jobs, the ones who are quietly upholding what little is left of the culture, the ones who have experienced the jails and the justice system, the ones who have been told to shut up and get out, that the justice system doesn’t have to listen to you, to these people, I say thank you. I listen to you and in telling Arlo’s story, I realize I am telling your story, too, the story that the State and American history has swept under the rug, so as to sanitize the home of the free and the land of the brave, America, where the Indian has never been invited to sit at the table of justice. Arlo’s story has really struck a chord with some of you readers out there. I wish to thank Barbara who sent me this following e-mail. I think this is a good example of how justice works in America. Barbara told me that she was not afraid to come forward, that she just didn’t care anymore about the trying to protect herself from the corrupt system. The corrupt justice system is a sham and intended to grind the poor person further into the dirt. The following are her words: I have been following the trial as much as possible and I am really concerned about the crookedness of this country. Living in America, a white female, I see it everyday. A judge comes to my home and threatens to lock me up for filing bankruptcy. (One of the businesses I filed on was his.) A man that raped his sister, I witnessed it, when we were kids, is a sheriff now. A judge threatened to lock me up for taking child support for the first 7 years of my daughters life, she is now 19, and she took her rich daddy back to court recently and she settled out of court because she was afraid I would get locked up for taking child support. He still owes her 100,000 dollars. The sheriff in my county was having an affair, his wife supposedly killed herself over it, and before the state investigator got there, the sheriff made prisoners in jail clean the scene up. A policeman is selling drugs out of his home and the chief of police knows it. A judge's grandson and the policeman take 15 year old girls to a house and show porno movies and get the girls drunk and have sex with them and the chief of police knows it. The FBI has been called and nothing has been and probably nothing will be done about it. I am one step from being homeless because I am disabled and can't find a home to rent. The Native Americans and poor white folks haven't got a chance. I sympathize with the Native Americans and wished I could help, but it's going to get worse I'm afraid. Thank you, Barbara for coming forward with that story. You are a brave woman. By speaking up, you are giving voice to all the poor people in America who are being oppressed by the corrupt system. What is being done to Arlo, is being done to the poor and downtrodden. Because you are a poor person who has been kicked around by the justice system, you have a good idea of the kind of justice Indian people are receiving. We thank you for standing up for Indians and objecting to their continued mistreatment by the Federal government. For the Lakotas living on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Arlo’s conviction without evidence is very personal. Everyone has been put through the humiliation of having their rights denied by the very authority who is supposed to protect those rights. Arlo’s outcome being much more serious, of course. I was talking with Tony Black Feather, respected Lakota elder and UN representative about Arlo’s trial. He said, “I knew John Looking Cloud, his father. He was deeply involved in Indian rights and Treaty law. He was a good man.” One big difference between Lakota culture and American culture, is the Lakota’s interest in relatives. It is very common for Lakotas to trace their ancestry back to prereservation days. Lucy Bull Bear told me that her grandfather, Thunder Bull, a medicine man, used to sundance with Sitting Bull. Thunder Bull is also Arlo’s grandfather. If you wish to understand the importance of the family and what happened that led up to the reservations in the first place, please go to my website www.lakotaperspectives.com Click on the Story of Sitting Bull. The family was always very important to the Lakotas, as it was to all Indian tribes. Aunts were considered mothers. Cousins were called sister or brother. All older relatives were called grandfather. Babes and children were sacred as were women, as was life itself. Tony went on to say, “The U.S. is the world problem. Everywhere in the world, there is fighting. People are fighting each other, killing each other. Everywhere there is killing, the U.S. is involved. The U.S. is master at turning one group of people against the other. Then, while people are busy killing each other, pointing fingers, the U.S. is busy stealing their resources. They think they have a right to kill anyone. They enjoy killing. Arlo was put in jail so that the U.S. can kill some more Indians and steal their land. The U.S. wants to fight Wounded Knee again. The 7th Cavalry still want revenge for Sitting Bull having defeated the U.S. military.” (See www.lakotaperspectives.com and look under the Story of Sitting Bull.) In the days before reservations, the Chief and his warriors would protect the Tribe, would provide for their needs. The greatest of warriors, did not kill his enemy—no, he touched his enemy, thereby showing that he could have killed him, but honored life more. How far would an American soldier get if he practiced this Lakota tradition? This and many other ways, make Indian tribes very different in their thinking from the American dominant society. Because it was not in the nature of the Lakota to be a cold-blooded killer, it made him an easy target for the white man to almost succeed in totally extinguishing the Indian off the face of the earth To quote from the book , WHY DO PEOPLE HATE AMERICA? By Sardar and Davies , p. 158: ‘By the manipulation of old ideas, the New World could be brought within European conventions. The native peoples and their possessions could also be appropriated, subsumed and removed to create the actual, philosophic and legal space for the idea of America and its birth in innocence to be established. And then there was the most repugnant triumphalism of all. The pilgrim settlers soon found that native populations were dying at an alarming rate. The great pathogen invasion of new diseases—introduced by European settlers, and to which they had no natural resistance—devastated whole communities and peoples. Disease and death seemed to be opening up the country, making the land available. It was understood in the writing of the pilgrims as the Hand of Providence operating to advance the ‘zealous work’ of the ‘chosen people’. It has been estimated that at the time of first contact there were between 20 to 50 million native inhabitants of the land that became the United States. (Noam Chomsky puts that figure at 50 to 60 million.) By the 1890’s., at the end of the Indian wars and after the cataclysm of disease and the depredations of taming and settling the wilderness, the Native American population numbered 250,000.’ Kind of makes Hitler look like a boy scout, doesn’t it? What Sardar and Davies left up to the reader’s imagination is that the white man has declared a continual war on the Indian and his culture ever since Columbus first arrived. At one time, the U.S. government even put a bounty on Indians. All one had to do was bring in a scalp as proof for payment. It didn’t matter if it was man, woman, or child’s hair. Settlers liked to mutilate Indian bodies by cutting off their private parts and displaying them as souvenirs. Hitler only killed 9 million, whereas America killed over 30 million and called it Divine or Manifest Destiny that the white race should kill off the Indians and steal his land and resources. No wonder Americans have such a fascination with Hitler. They share a lot in common. If we are to understand anything at all, we must realize the American culture and Native culture are vastly different. There is no ‘melting pot’ possible here. And the sad truth is that America wanted to totally annihilate the Indian so as to steal his land and resources. When America couldn’t quite accomplish this goal, a massive attack was mounted against the Native culture. If all the Indians couldn’t be killed off, then the Native culture had to be assassinated until the Indian is finally assimilated into extinction, and American can finally lay that case to rest due to lack of evidence that the Indian even existed. It must get kind of embarrassing for America to set itself up to be the leader of democracy, the protector of human rights, the beacon of justice, when other countries question, how did you treat your Indians? America has a lot of blood on its hands, hands that will never be washed clean no matter how many people they kill. Just like the way Arlo was convicted without any evidence, so does America want to get rid of the Indian, put them away. The real tragedy is that Native peoples had a true democracy, a fair justice system, a strong sense of family, a religion that respected everyone’s right to life. This, most of all, is what America wants to destroy. In my next article, I will hopefully have an update on Arlo. And I want to tell you the differences between American culture and Native culture. Should you want to know how you can help, I say that you must first fight for your own freedom and dignity to live in peace upon this earth. Join civil rights groups. Don’t have one? Then, form one. It starts with 2 or 3 people getting together and asking themselves, what is the nature of a just society? Invite more people to join you. I am convinced that America is on the verge of a huge fall, and is now lashing out at everyone to prop up the corrupt system, the one that was flawed from the beginning. Should you have any information about Arlo, or the Wounded Knee of ’73, you may contact me at jlschmidt@gwtc.net, phone 605-455-2239 or call Lucy Bull Bear at 605-455-1138. I would encourage you to protest, ‘justice for Arlo’ ‘civil rights for Indians’ ‘civil rights begins with myself’ Start having little house parties that spread into the streets. Start standing up for you rights, and the rights of others. Speak out against injustice. When I first wrote this article so many months ago, little did I know that I would end up the victim of a vicious attack on myself, and my writing in an attempt to prevent me from saying anything further about Arlo or to comment on the injustice that Indian people receive. I was arrested , jailed, banned from the reservation, and had all my property and belongings confiscated. This crime was inflicted upon me through laws and the justice system. All authorities can do nothing about this. I am just supposed to accept the loss of everything I own and move on.