Richard Two Elk - I would say more than likely because the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/ Offense offices were there and everything was, that was a central hub at the time, Minneapolis was not a central operational area in that period, it was Rapid City. Does that help?

Paul DeMain - The credibility of Russell’s, and I guess we’ve already elaborated on that a little bit, Russell’s saying that there’s this real direct phone call from Vernon to Clyde at Bill Mean’s home, there’s other people that are telling me that John Boy and Arlo and Theda were at Bill Mean’s that morning, that Arlo was lit up, that John Boy never got out of the car, that it was only Theda and Arlo that came in the house. Is that basically how you understand from talking to Arlo the occurrence that there was some kind of a phone call made there?

Richard Two Elk - Well there was a word, you know, I don’t know if it was a phone call, and I wasn’t certain whether it was a word that somebody was there and said go ahead with it or they had gotten a phone call. When Means came out and did the discussion on the phone call at the Denver press conference, I was highly suspect of that.

The nature of the containment program that AIM runs down is that they’ll give you a fish to try to catch and when you catch the fish it vaporizes, o.k., and that’s how they control the flow of information, so if they focus everybody’s point on a phone call and who made the phone call in this communique, then everybodies going there and then later on, you pick up something and say well, we know the phone call and then ha, the phone call never existed, then you’re standing there holding a blank piece of paper, wondering what the hell happened, right, o.k., so that’s significant in the way that they tried to handle the whole situation and the sense that I got from Arlo was that word was given.

So I didn’t know of a specific phone call that took place and who made the phone call and passed the word, the sense that I had was that it was not a specific person who gave the authorization, but that it was several people who signed off on it, if you will, o.k. because it wasn’t, Arlo didn’t, the chain of command if you will, within the organization at the time, places Arlo getting directives from Russell, more than from Vernon, Troy Lynn’s association with Russell, the Oglala click that existed in Denver at that time and the people who were part of that click....

Paul DeMain - Including Theda?

Richard Two Elk - Including Theda, has more to do with the chain of command and the route of an order, than Bellecourt would play, Bellecourt wasn’t in Denver at the time.... he wasn’t someone that we’d really be dealing with at the time, but he could sign off on something, if enough of the different leadership agreed on a given point, then all they’d need to do is hear that and then we could go forward with it, o.k., but the sense that I got from Arlo was that somebody had sent word, but I didn’t know that that word was in the form of a phone call. When Means was talking about a phone call at the press conference, I started to suspect it because it had one of those curious, why don’t you come chase this one, things about it, o.k. and I didn’t really, I didn’t feel that’s what happened, it wasn’t my sense of what happened o.k.

Richard LaCourse - ....We find people in the area that are asserting are true, but they conflict with FBI reports that we have, not necessarily with the autopsy, which is, was she wrapped in a blanket? And then, maybe, physically moved to the edge of the canyon and then dropped in, do you know anything about that, separate from federal government reports.

Richard Two Elk - The sense that I have is that.... they got out of the vehicle, somebody at first said they had to go to the bathroom, then they got out and they were going to go off the road, they were walking off the road, the three of them, she had a blanket on and that’s when Arlo gave the gun to John Boy and nodded at Anna Mae, then he just put the gun beside her and pulled the trigger. She went down, they turned around and ran back to the car, o.k., so, they left her where she fell. I don’t think she was dead, I think she was still alive, and in the process of being still alive, she pulled the blanket and tried to go, you know, what the hell do you do at that point, you know?.....

I figured that she probably crawled, trying to get there, she was trying to get to somewhere, you know, you can imagine the state that you’re in, if you’re still alive, you know, what are you trying to do? You’re either trying to get up or get some help or get somewhere, and that’s as far as I can tell, and I do have a background in criminal investigation, I do have a background in medical, I was a combat medic in the Army. I worked in the EMS system in New York City and I’ve been in crime scenes. That’s the best that I could formulate from the case, was that after they left and she fell, that she tried to move and inadvertently went over, o.k.

Paul DeMain - ....I’ve had people tell me that the reason she was executed was to protect people at the Jumping Bull compound, because someone became convinced that she was going to go to the FBI and tell them who actually shot the agents.

Richard Two Elk - Right. Well, you had to look at different people, I think that there is a foundation to that and that’s the whole purpose of it, the foundation, because the role of Butler and Robideau in dealing with her and a role of her situation in Denver AIM, clearly what it does is it demonstrates, and there were a lot of people at the time, we’d get pissed about they were doing this, or not doing that or whatever, and then we’d speak out on that and I think that it was her general consensus was that things were not right and they needed to be made right and that’s part of what was getting her in trouble with Denver AIM because she wasn’t just going with the program, and that was the opportunity that presented itself that allowed the women to zero on her, because of her nature of saying things, whereas they might feel (th)em but they wouldn’t say them, she would say them and then they could kind of, you know, whisper to each other and it kinda like snowballed, everybody didn’t just have a sense of who she was or what was going on, and she was outside the click.

So I know that Butler and Robideau, and I know both of them, I know Butler and Robideau were interested in containing the information about the FBI shooting. I don’t think, from what I know, that Peltier was directly the one who shot or hit the FBI, but a fire fight is a fire fight. They say Peltier was the only one with the AR15, but if you were in South Dakota at the time, that’s so far off the line of thought of what was going on, a lot of people had AR15s. A lot of people had AR15s, I had a 223, you know, it doesn’t work like that.

Minnie Two Shoes - Where were you when Jumping Bull went down?

Richard Two Elk - I was in Denver.....thank you......(laughs) no, I’m serious, I got married the day before in Denver and then the next day and then it was like the next day that Arron came to me and said, hey man, this shit went down.

Paul DeMain - Was Arlo at Jumping Bull compound?

Richard Two Elk - No, no, he was in Denver.

Paul DeMain - ....My question has to do with the relationship between Dusty Nelson and Theda Nelson, I have basically said from time to time that there were people acting in regards to this to protect certain people at Jumping Bull compound. Dusty Nelson is Theda Nelson’s grandson as far as we know?

Richard Two Elk - I don’t know what the exact specific relationship is, what I do know is that Dusty was always one of Theda’s boys. They were so connected, they were even more connected than Arlo or any of the other guys that worked with Theda, so I didn’t know what their specific relationship was, but I knew that he was a Nelson and he was part of that family. I remember Dusty and Dusty knows me.

Richard Two Elk - It may or may not have been, I remember that Lester Jones statement. I don’t know, he (Dusty) definitely had a lot of firearms, he was definitely moving back and forth and he was definitely involved in the process. I’ve had people from the rez come forward and tell me that Joe Stuntz did the hit, was the one that killed the FBI agents and it’s kind of like, well, you’ll never know, they can do that forever and then some and that’s the whole strategy that’s important to understand is the security that exists within the Indian community and the nature of the way things are done.

We really never will know for sure, all we can do is take what we have and run with it, so that’s why I’ve taken the position that I’ve taken, because I know from the people I’ve talked and from what I’ve seen and experienced and witnessed myself, what this case is, I can’t sit there and argue some of the particulars of the case from an evidenciary point of view, but I can say, I know that this woman was killed, I know that she was killed by AIM and I know that AIM leadership made the call and I know that they need to be held accountable and responsible for it, and what I’ve done is I’ve taken my pipe, my feathers and the medicine and I’ve moved forward with that. Because if I had a political agenda, if I had a philosophical agenda, they would literally eat me up, because I couldn’t operate at the level that I need to operate at to be able to survive the barrage.

So what I’ve done, because it was my brother, I’ve taken my pipe, I’ve taken my medicine, and because of some of the appointments that I’ve been given from the grandmothers on Pine Ridge as Chink-sa-lou-ha and A-kee-chi-ta then what I’ve decided is we need to take these actions to help, so what I’ve done is, I’ve taken my pipe and my medicine and I’ve gone forward and I’m making these calls and saying, I don’t know about the FBI, I don’t know about evidence, I don’t know about charges, I don’t know about proof, what I know is that you guys were involved in this and you need to come forward and help us deal with this, that’s all.

Richard LaCourse - Richard, you told us something here today which is the very first time I’ve heard this, for as long as I’ve tried to concentrate on this in detail, which is the FBI interviewed Arlo in 1994. That’s very recent, that’s after Robert Ecoffey at Pine Ridge did all his work with the marshals and then the BIA and became superintendent at Pine Ridge and then the beginning of the active work by the Denver detective, Abe Alonzo. What do you know about that interrogation, is it subject to Freedom of Information act?

Richard Two Elk - Excellent. I don’t know but if you could make it that I think it would be very valuable.

Richard LaCourse - Has he talked to you about it? The path of the inquiry and so forth?

Richard Two Elk - Well, I’ll tell you what happened. He did time and I’d have to look at the record, and you could see when he did time. He did time in CDC, Colorado Department of Corrections and he was in prison in Colorado for vehicular assault or some other charge, and when he was in prison, he used to call me collect and we’d visit. I don’t know if I was the only person he called collect or if I was the only person that would accept collect calls from him and talk to him for half an hour just because I was his brother. We had this ongoing relationship and then he finished his sentence and they let him out, and I believe that probably was ‘93, ‘94 something like that.

When he got out of prison, I’d have to get out a calender to do a time run to see how long, but he was out of prison for quite a while, he came up, we visited, we talked, we hung out and did a lot of stuff and then all of a sudden, I believe it was the summer of 94 and again the record would demonstrate the specific dates but, he just disappeared and he’s always disappearing so people didn’t really think that much of it. I run checks on him on an ongoing basis and I’ve always been doing that for as long as I can remember. I started running checks on him and nobody could tell me anything and about a month went by and I didn’t hear from him, nobody had heard from him, so I couldn’t figure out where he was.

He had come down to Panama City Florida one time and he got in trouble over here and I don’t know if you were aware of that but he got arrested and did time in Panama City for a weapons charge and so I thought maybe he’d done something like that again, went some where and got crazy and got thrown in, so I wasn’t sure what was going on, I just knew that he was gone. And then I got another collect call, you know they say somebody from department of corrections wants to make a collect call and it gave his name Arlo Looking Cloud and I said yeah, I took the call, I said what the hell, what’d you do, did you get busted again or what. He was kind of quiet for a while and he said, well you know, he says, you remember Anna Mae? I said yeah, yeah, I remember. He said, they got me in on that, I said what? He said, they got me in on that charge, they want to charge me with her murder.

I said wait a minute now, they want to charge you with her murder. He said yeah. I said, well how the hell did that come about. Over a process of about 3 or 4 month period, he made phone calls to me of a similar nature, even though the phone calls came from a different location each time he called me. He called me one time from El Reno, he called me another time from Lompoc, he called me from McCalester, he called me another time from Jefferson county jail out in Golden where the FBI has one of their regional detainment offices. Each time he called me, they were doing this interrogative process with him. Because of, he knew that I’d been in the military, he knew that I have a security clearance, he knew that I knew something about how these things worked.

And so he called and asked me for help and so our conversations over the period first, he asked me well, what should I do, after I thought about it a while, I asked him for myself, to tell me what he knew and to tell me as much as he could about the case. So we’d be talking and he’d have to go back in to holding or something and I started developing a sense of where we were going in terms of this whole conversation and I started going for particulars in terms of the case and what happened and that’s when I started reading all the information and trying to lock in, getting him to divulge as much as he could, from an inside point of view. He also would ask me about lie detector tests, he would ask me about the interrogative process, he would ask me about the likelihood of charges, and at that point I basically advised him and I feel that that’s how he arrived at where he is, because I advised him that he needed to be straight forward, he needed to think about his overall statement, he needed to be truthful and tell as much as he could, as much as he knew, without divulging a whole lot of other peoples names.......

Paul DeMain - And he’s been granted some kind of immunity.

Richard Two Elk - As the result of that process, he was given immunity but a very restricted immunity, only in the context of of the specific statement that he made on record at that time. So the extent of his immunity is on that and nothing beyond that, so he doesn’t have immunity and that’s where it gets, that’s why he isn’t going to talk anything beyond, because if he goes out and he does anything else or says anything else, there’s a high likelihood that he will get charged based on the information that he divulged, so he’s on very hairy ground in that sense, so what happened was. I knew of the investigation, I knew the particulars, I knew what had happened, but the magnitude of it was so unsettling and mind boggling that all I could do was just walk away and try to digest it for a while, that’s when I went to him after he got out of jail and said stay away from my, stay away from my kids, my family, I gotta figure this out. It was hard for me to sit there through those years and try to handle that information and sort through the information and try to figure out as much as I could and find out as much as I could and to watch the larger investigative process going on, without stepping forward. And so, that’s why I didn’t share that information with anybody until last summer when I established contact with Robert Branscombe. And the whole reason I established contact with Robert Branscombe was because I was watching the whole thing play out, and I knew what the next step was that they were going to flush his ass down a big commode, and they were going to set him up.

Paul DeMain - What’s our next step. What are you expecting us to do and how do you want us to, I mean this is on tapes, on video, we’re journalists, we’re ready to publish and print. What do you want out of this from us?

Richard Two Elk - Well, from what I understand about the process here is that when I started to put it together and understanding, why the hell I ended up standing where I was standing, in essence, o.k., I began to realize that it was something bigger than a political process, it was something bigger than an investigative process, what it really had to do with, is it had to do with the medicine and so that’s when I basically picked up and started carrying forward and I’ve been able to take the actions that I have and make the statements that I make because of the fact that I hold that medicine in front of me and I stand firmly behind it.

So, what I’ve done now, I’ve been given the position of being in charge of security at one of the most traditional Lakota sun dances at Pine Ridge and I’ve been given this task for two years already and this will be my third year and so a lot of the people that are at that sundance are relatives of mine, a lot of the people that are there are relatives of Arlo and they know Arlo. I’ve talked to a lot of them about this and what I’m doing this year.

I’m going back to that Sundance and I’m presenting this, to the medicine there. Tree Day is 4th of July, so I’ve talked to Frank Dillon, I haven’t told Arlo directly but I’ve sent word to him that both he and Frank are called to come to that Sundance to help me with security and that’s my way of telling them that they need to come and face the medicine.

And so, what I’ve told them is that they need to come and help me with the Sundance, the option that they have is to come, if they come, then I put them before the medicine and we surrender them to the medicine.... So I’ve given them the opportunity for them to face the medicine, in the same way for the past year, I’ve created ample opportunities for national AIM leadership to come forward and deal with this.

And so, having given that, I know that with the medicine, I’m going to go to the Sundance and present this regardless of whether they come or not. I’m going to present that from the context of my initial statement that my brother is a Lakota war leader, who wasn’t supposed to be a criminal, he was supposed to be something else.

But because the American Indian Movement used him and then cast him aside, he became established as a criminal and not the war chief that he’s supposed to be known as, and so that’s what I’m presenting to the people and that’s what I’m presenting to the medicine. I’d like to take a recording of my statement, if I can get a copy of it, and I’m going to also have it translated into Lakota. I’m going to take my recorded statement along with the translation and we’re going to run it on KILI, o.k. Tree Day is the 4th of July, I’m going to arrange to run it on KILI prior to Tree Day, so that I’ll be there on the reservation at that Sundance within seven days of this word going out, and so, what I understand is, that I believe that the medicine guides us all and I believe that Anna Mae knows the truth of it and guides us all and as much as we might not want to, know some of the things that are truths in this case, we have to arrive at that point regardless.

And I believe that if we stand behind the medicine and we take these kinds of steps, that it will take care of it all, o.k. So what I’d like to do is, if you could take and look at everything that we have and let me know what each of you think, because we each have a different perspective on how things go, if you see something about what we’ve talked about that you think is a point of emphasis or a strong point or a focal point then I’ll follow you, o.k. because it isn’t about one person or any group of people, it’s something that belongs to us all, and that’s how it should be in the end, it belongs to us all.

Somebody has to be able to go forward with that and that’s what I have accepted as my part, and so whereas, I’m able to do that, then the support that I’m seeking is that we allow and we open the door and create the opportunity for Indian people to freely express what they’ve known for at least two decades in reference to the American Indian Movement, in reference to AIM leadership, and in reference to the crimes of the American Indian Movement and AIM leadership, o.k.

Because, thousands of Indians have experienced that in one way or another, most of them are incredibly terrified because of the thuggery that’s characteristic of the American Indian Movement. Most of them are incredibly terrified of ever saying anything, they won’t. If someone is willing to get up and publicly acknowledge and state, that these things exist, that these conditions are present, then the people themselves will affirm that, I know that.

So it isn’t anything different than you might do at a ceremony, where the people who are direct participants are there and they’re participating in a ceremony and I am part of the support element and so facilitate their ceremony and so that’s all I do in this regard, is facilitate the ceremony that heals.

The American Indian Movement belongs to the people, it doesn’t belong to Vernon Bellecourt or Russell Means or Clyde Bellecourt or Dennis Banks, it’s preposterous, to use one of Vernon’s words, that one person in AIM leadership could say another person in AIM leadership is or is not AIM, none of them are AIM. None of them are.

The grassroots people have always been the American Indian Movement and we continue to be the American Indian Movement, we don’t have an official organization, we don’t have an official capacity of officers, we have what I call AIM heart and AIM heart is what moves us forward against those things that would threaten or harm us and it’s already become popular opinion on the Pine Ridge among the Oglalas that the AIM leadership should have been turned over long ago, to the young people and I’ve heard from several youth who have expressed their desire for this leadership to remove them self and surrender that to them.

That’s a part of what we’re doing. A part of what we’re doing is we’re restoring our self to the point to where we got cut off. When Anna Mae came, what was supposed to happen with the evolution of Indian Movement in this country was that, the women, we were supposed to hand the staff to them. All of our societies, all of our tribal governments, all of our counsels were governed by women, we’re matriarchal by nature.

It was the Wasicu that came and created the patriarchal mentality. We were blessed with the golden opportunity in the 70’s to recognize that and realize that and to surrender the power to who it belonged to, which is the women.

Incredibly enough, because of the insanity of the times, the women, turned on themselves and each other, and the men tried to destroy that one opportunity we had as Indian people to go forward. And so the whole purpose of bringing resolution to this case and bringing an end to the question, is to do that.

So not only do I call for them to come forward, but I call for them to step down, and to surrender on a national level the control of the American Indian Movement to Indian women.