February 3, 2004
Rapid City, South Dakota

Perhaps just like a storm over the prairie Kamook Banks aka Darlene Nichols imagines she was arriving to help. But sometimes lightening kills and sometimes snows can bury drivers in their cars like bodies exposed to the winters here. So. This is what the courtroom was like today, in Rapid City. My eyes still aching from tears I never expected to shed. For the loss of yet another Indian warrior woman happened right there for Judge and jury, old and new AIM family to see.

Today in the courtroom of Rapid City's Federal building, life's realities became a deception. Just like so many things about this complex and brutal murder trial. Kamook Banks admitted to working for the FBI, taking FBI relocation money which adds up to $42,000 in the past six months, and wiring herself for the FBI as she visited her former husband Dennis Banks. Back in 2002. Not so long ago as stories and lives go.

Today Darlene was one of a series of Indian women called to the stand today by the prosecution. She -- in her cry me a river presence -- selected for the jury and observers a psychic connection to what it feels like to watch a warrior die. And that is what happened today. To Kamook Banks. She was no longer the AIM woman who claimed sovereignty for Indian people. She is now Darlene the woman dressed as a man in short hair and polyester blazers who with sullen resolve kisses into the schemes of a government she once knew would as easily murder her as any one of her best friends.

Kamook spoke of her current relationship. With the FBI. Talked of how they help her out, spoke with disdain about Leonard Peltier and revealed she cooperated full heartedly with a wiretap of her good friend Troy Lin. With something like a mutant monotone voice Darlene said she believed her husband, Dennis Banks was involved in the murder of Annie Maeî. Ever since he phoned her about it back in Feb. 1976. Finally , she confessed, "she had to do something.î So she turned into the very thing that Annie Mae was accused of being. By the man who was lovers to them both. Kamook bedded down with the FBI that threatened the life of her best friend, her children and lover.

Probably the intensity of this transformation of radical to FBI snitch/collaborator was only softened by the fact that the defense attorney, Timothy Rensch, did try -- however rookie-like to challenge the way the prosecution was trying shamelessly AIM instead of the defendant. Rensch continually objected to hearsay evidence (mostly to no avail). And did succeed in getting a ruling about hearsay evidence in the testimonies, which is all the prosecution really has turned up thus far.

Rensch as also able to finally challenge Special Agent Wood, FBI agent involved in investigating Annie Mae back in the day when she was walking with us here. But what will still the slow rumble which shook many of us like a 4.5 in northern California was Kamook Banks statements about working with the Feds. The courtroom silenced, even the laptop keyboards of New York Times reporters quiet as Darlene revealed not a shred of Kamook left inside of her heart.

Dennis Banks was phoned by the New York Times during a court break for comment. He did not come to the phone today. Maybe tomorrow will be a better one for him. The father of Darlene's four children. Has muted their relationship. She spoke today like a Catholic girl to her confessor, kissing the ring of the bishop prosecutor, telling the sins of silence, selling the sacredness of woman strength to the white men who examined her life. When she spoke about Annie Mae the portrayal was one of a pitiful scared woman who was captured and overpowered by the people around her. Kamook Banks aka Darlene has become the snitch Annie Mae never was. The eerie paradox of this feels like some kind of a legend written with the wrong ending.

Yet many of us know differently about Annie Mae, and though this trial has little to say of Annie Mae alive and brave, Troy Linn Yellow Wood, another witness in the collection of Indian women presented today, Troy Linn did her best to defy the prosecution and talk of Annie Mae as a woman who defied her accusers. "Either kill me off or defend me" was what Troy Linn remembers Annie Mae saying to her accusers, while Mathalene White Bear remembered Annie Mae as someone who cared deeply for her daughters, her family. And then relayed to us the story of the silver ring. Which might just top Tolkien's classic for mysticism and symbolic liberation. If it had a different ending.

The courtroom and jury heard the silver ring story without the ending. The one about how John Trudell came to get a silver ring, in Santa Monica near the sea. A ring Annie Mae had sent as a sign of distress. But White Bear implied Trudell never bothered to protect Annie Mae from the death threats the ring was meant to signify.

"I hope the next time you see this ring it is on my finger. But if it comes to you any other way, you'll know I'm in trouble. Then you should call this phone number." Annie Mae's words to White Bear sometime in the Fall of 1975.

"The phone number was that of John Trudell who was fine brother to us back then. I called him when the ring arrived in a small white box through the mail. No letter or anything. He came and got the ring within a day and I never heard from him again. I spent 28 years of hell waiting to find out what happened."

Maybe we all feel that way today. But a worse nightmare would be that another quarter century goes by with the wrong person(s) accused.

Today, having mentioned COINTELPRO and the operatives placed in AIM to set up Annie Mae, the defense offered a sense that not everyone has forgotten the atmosphere of murder which pounded in the veins of agents back when Annie Mae defied them. As some of those same agents sat in the back row of the courtroom today thinking they had taken yet another line of Indian women down as they testified against the movement they once believed in, I longed for just a glimpse of their souls. Take a photo of their conscience. Sell it to the National Inquirer. Then give them mirrors to places which have windows to fertile arroyos instead of lying walls.