Transcript of The FBI and Indigenous Movements with Nick Estes

I'm Jess Cossabeto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series, Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult.

And I'm Clea gray, former member of 7M Films and Shoshana Church.

And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me For I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and Shoshana Church.

Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

There's so much beauty in Mexican culture, like mariachis, delicious cuisine, and even Lucha Libre. Join us for the new podcast, Lucha Libre: Behind the Mass, a 12-episode podcast in both English and Spanish about the history and cultural richness of Lucha Libre. I'm your host, Santos Escobar, Emperor of Lucha Libre and a WW Superstar. Listen to Lucha Libre: Behind the Mask on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you stream This is Snaffe, a show about history's greatest screw-ups.

I'm Ed Helms. This past season, we covered the daring heist that uncovered a colossal FBI snafu. Today, we're back with our final bonus episode of the season. But before we dive in, I just want to add, even though it's our final bonus episode, do not fret, because there's a new season coming Very soon. Plus a whole lot of other cool stuff. So stay tuned. Okay, now back to it. As listeners will probably recall, CointelPro was officially shut down after being exposed in 1971, and J. Edgar Hoover actually died in 1972. But sadly, it would take a little longer for actual reform to kick in. For a number of years, the agency was still upholding many of Hoover's dirty tricks. Nowhere was this more evident than in their interactions with the American Indian Movement or AIM, as well as the greater Native American community. To help us understand how CointelPro's legacy, unfortunately, endured in this way, we're honored to be speaking to nick Estes. Nick is an assistant professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and hosts the Red Nation podcast. To start out, I would love for you to introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about your background and what it is you do.

My name is nick Estes. I am a member of the Lora Brule Sioux tribe. I was born and raised in South Dakota. I'm currently an American Indian Studies Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota, and I'm currently working on a book about the history of the American Indian movement.

What led you down this path?

Well, two of my grandfathers others were writers. One published the first history of the Lora Braulceau tribe in 1963, and the other published another history in 1972. In some ways, it's a family tradition. But also, I was an anti-war protester back when the United States invaded Iraq for the second time, and I just stayed in school after that. Went on to get a PhD.

Right on. Well, as you know, this season of snafu goes into considerable depth about the status of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI in the 1970s, and many of the ways that it was overtly nefarious, oftentimes operating fully outside of the law. This Of course, exemplified by Cointel Pro or the counterintelligence program, the FBI surveillance program in the '60s and '70s that targeted various political groups such as the Black Panthers, anti-Vietnam protester, civil rights demonstrators, et cetera. But I'm really excited to talk with you today about how the Native American community experienced the FBI at that time and really throughout the 20th century, which is quite fascinating and complex. Let's start at the beginning. The FBI's origin story actually dovetails with a major incident in 20th century Native American history, the Osage murders throughout the 1910s, '20s, and '30s. Now, a lot of people will be familiar with this story from the recent Martin Scorsese movie, Killers of the Flower Moon. Tell us a little bit about the early interactions between the Bureau and Native Americans, and also, what did the film get right and/or wrong?

Many people have probably seen this film. I started watching it, but I couldn't watch it. It's hard for me to watch the killing, rape, and torture of Native women over and over again on It's not something I find very entertaining, but I do think that the movie itself gets to this, or at least is trying to get to this history of murder, missing Indigenous women. I think what's missing in that film, at least from my perspective, is the advocacy of people like Zincala Shah, who was born as Gertrude Bonnen. She was from the Yankton Sioux Reservation. She was an advocate, a native woman who worked in Congress, who was a lobbyist, who was an activist, who actually interviewed some of the Osage women who had been targeted by these men, and really brought attention to this issue. And that's not in the film. It's also propaganda for the FBI because the FBI sees itself as this crime fighting unit. It has a particular history with Indigenous activists. But also the FBI, according to its own people, was a political police force. It was about surveiling primarily Eastern European immigrants who were forming left progressive trade unions and parties, the Communist Party, Socialists, Anarchists, et cetera.

And it was really about surveying jailing them and policing them as an internal threat. And in fact, the precursor to the FBI, I think it was called the Bureau of Investigations, surveilled people like Zinkkala Shah and people who were Indigenous leaders advocates in an organization called the Society of American Indians, because at that time, American Indians were not citizens of the United States, but were advocating for rights within a constitutional framework. Some of them were pushing for citizenship, but they were very outspoken against the participation of American Indians in World War I. They said, Why is it that we should volunteer and fight for this country when we're not even citizens? We don't even have Fifth Amendment rights. We can't even stand trial and bring treaty rights. So they were very critical, and they wrote these newsletters, and it got to J. O. Hoover's desks, and he sent people out to investigate these people under crimes of sedition, things like that.

And this was in... When is this exactly? This is in the '10s or '20s?

Yeah, the late 1910s, early 1920s.

And this It was all contemporaneous with the Osage murders.

Oh, yeah. I think Zine Kalash'a is somebody who gets written out of this history because she was a native woman. She was an advocate. She was interviewing these people. She wrote a report to Congress. She was threatened by the similar violence that was being enacted on Osage people. I think that's a much more compelling story because it shows that on the one hand, native people just hapless victims of violence, that they were trying to navigate the channels of power that existed.

Why is a story like that less visible in the historical narrative than a big story like the Osage murders?

Well, I would hope that someday they would make a movie about Zincalashah and the fact that a lot of people in this country don't even know who she is. If people know natives from that time period, they probably know somebody like Jim Thorpe, who was an Olympian, a multi-gold medal winner. I think it's important to know this particular history because on one hand, it also shows these are the precursors to something like Red Power, that Red Power didn't just emerge from the mists of history, but it was drawing from this long tradition of activism at the grassroots level and thinking about things like treaties, but also drawing the attention in the eyeer of the FBI.

All right, let's jump to the middle of the 20th century. That's when we see the emergence of the American Indian Movement or AIM, which ultimately would become a point of considerable friction with the FBI. Tell us what the American Indian Movement is and why it formed.

The American Indian Movement formed officially in 1968 in Northern Minneapolis. It originally called itself Concerned Indian Americans, but the acronym was CIA. So they changed it to the American Indian movement. But the cofounders of it, people like Eddie Benton-Benet, Clyde Belcourt, Dennis Banks, were all incarcerated at one point in time together at Stillwater Prison. So they would argue that the American Indian movement, the idea came out of the prison movement, and they created this group called the Culture Group. And they made commitments that once they left prison, they were going to change their lives. And so they went into to Minneapolis. At that time, there was a lot of native people who were part of the union movement like the Teamsters. There was the Teamsters Rebellion in Minneapolis in the 1930s. Native people were part of that. Native people are part of unions. They're part of working class history. And so there was also a lot of community organizations that were centered around the family. And so when these men arrived on the scene, there already existed an infrastructure and a complaint, so to speak, or an injury that native people felt in Minneapolis because Minneapolis turned what is known as the East Phillips neighborhood into a slum.

Things are being shifted around. Termination is happening at the same time where the federal government is trying to end its federal responsibilities with native people. They're enticing native people to leave their reservations on a relocation program. They found themselves in low income slum housing. They found themselves being targeted by these police raids that were happening on the weekends where a Pattiwagon would literally just pull up to an Indian bar on Franklin Avenue and just start loading people in once the bar closed. People were getting beat. People were getting discriminated against. Native children were being taken from their families and put into white foster care systems or into white homes. One study that came out in the 1970s found that between 25 to 35 of native children had been taken from or removed from their families and placed into non-native homes. That's quite a bit. It was three things. It was child removal, police violence, and urban poverty that led to the foundations of the American Indian movement. And it wasn't just about a confrontation politics, even though that's what one aimed the headlines at the time when they began to confront police and began filming them and following them around as they patrolled the Indian bars on the weekends.

But they also began to form what were called survival schools, which was literally just native families pooling together what small resources they had and setting up a formal school system because it was at public schools that native children came under the surveillance of state officials, whether it was through the Department of Social Services. And that was the place where they began these child removal processes. So It is known through the media and its representation by the FBI as a confrontational militant social movement. But that overshadows the community work that it was doing on the ground and what wanted a lot of respect by community members themselves.

You spoke in some depth about some of their initiatives. Is there an overarching mission of the American Indian movement? And does that also have some misconceptions in the public discourse?

In 1972, the American Indian movement, as well as a coalition of various grassroots native organizations, some of them even from Canada, like the Canadian Indian Brotherhood, participated in it. They drafted a 20-point policy framework called The Trail of Broken Treaties. In it, it lays out point by point what was being advocated for. Number one priority was abolishing the Bureau of Indian Affairs. At that time period, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was largely responsible for plundering native lands and implementing this termination system, assimilation, et cetera. We saw the outcome of the 2011 Cobell lawsuit that showed that the Bureau of Indian Affairs had been mismanaging, I think it was over $175 billion of what they could count on paper of native assets. There was also the program of reestablishing a treaty relationship with the United States government, ending every act or going back to 1871 when treaty making was formerly abolished with native nations. That treaty commission, so to speak, would replace the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Native people would elect their own leaders. Today, we have the Secretary of Interior, who happens to be native herself, Deb Holland, but that's not somebody we elect, but nonetheless has still to this day, has arbitrary authority over the livelihoods and resources of native people.

We're in the same department as wildlife, still to this day. Those were the broader policy frameworks that they were pushing, but also at a grassroots level, they really wanted self-determination and community control. Those are the broad brushstrokes of what they were trying to accomplish.

I'm Jess Casovedo, executive producer of a hit Netflix documentary series, Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Tok Cult.

And I'm Clea gray, former member of 7M Films and Chicana Church.

And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me For I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and LA Bay Shoshana Church, an alleged cult that has impacted members for over two decades.

Jessica and I will delve into the hidden truths between high control groups and interview dancers, church members, and others whose lives careers have been impacted, just like mine.

Through powerful in-depth interviews with former members and new chilling first-hand accounts, the series will illuminate untold and extremely necessary perspectives. Forgive Me For I Have Followed will be more than an exploration. It's a vital revelation aimed at ensuring these types of abuses never happen again.

Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

When you think of Mexican culture, you think of avocado, mariachi, delicious cuisine, and of course, Lucha Libre. It doesn't get more Mexican than this. Lucha Libre is known globally because it is much more than just a sport and much more than just entertainment. Lucha Libre is a type of storytelling. It's a dance. It's tradition. It's culture. This is Lucha Libre, Behind the Mask, a 12-episode podcast in both English and Spanish about the history and cultural richness of Lucha Libre. I'm your host, Santos Escobar, the Emperor of Lucha Libre and a WWI superstar. Join me as we learn more about the history behind this spectacular sport, from its inception in the United States to how it became a global symbol of Mexican culture. We learn more about some of the most iconic heroes in the ring. This is Lucha Libre, Behind the Mask. Listen to Lucha Libre, Behind the Mask as part of my Cultura podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you stream podcasts.

How do you feel about this Hi, I'm Akilla Hughes, and I'm so excited about my new podcast, Rebel spirit, where I head back to my hometown in Kentucky and try to convince my high school to change their racist mascot, the Rebels, into something everyone in the South loves, the Biscuit.

I was a lady rebel. What does that even mean? The Boone County Rebels will stay the Boone County Rebels with the image of the Biscuit.

It's right here in black and white in the print. They're lying.

An individual that came to the school saying that God sent him to talk to me about the mascot Switch is a leader.

You choose Hills that you want to die on.

Why would we want to be the losing team? I just take all the other stuff out of it.

Segregation academies. When the civil rights said that we need to integrate public schools, these charter schools So we're exempt from that.

It's bigger than a flag or mascot.

You have to be ready for serious backlash.

Listen to Rebel spirit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So the American Indian Movement isn't actually mentioned by name in the cointel profiles, but that's a little misleading because in reality, there was no shortage of interaction between the FBI and the American Indian Movement that reflected the tactics and ethos of cointel pro, especially right after Hoover's death. So tell us what was happening in the early 1970s between the FBI and AM.

The break-in at the FBI field office and the revealing of these CointelPro papers, it was a huge embarrassment to the FBI. They were exposed. J. Edgar Hoover dies shortly after these revelations come out, and the FBI says that it's formally ending counterintelligence programs. And so they were under a lot of scrutiny by the time the American Indian movement began drawing a lot of public attention, negative attention from law enforcement, but also lawmakers themselves, the attorney general, Nixon's administration. So by 1972, when the Trail of Broken Treaties happens in late 1972, around the presidential elections, the Contell program had, quote, unquote, formally ended, right? And so when you look at the FBI documents of surveillance of the American Indian Movement, they're even cautious. At one point, the LA field office is like, Hey, we can run the counterintelligence program. And I don't remember who was field director at the time, but writes back and says, Hey, we don't do that anymore. But the tactics, just because that program ended, maybe in the paper trail, you couldn't say cointel pro anymore. It doesn't mean that the tactics or the actions formally ended. And so I think that's the bigger point here.

It just moved to a different category. So instead of being counterintelligence program to disrupt and defame the American Indian movement, the American Indian movement became categorized within what is called EMAIS, AM, which is extremist matters. It actually the nature of the FBI changes-It's culture. Yeah, it's changes. Yeah, exactly.

I would love to dig into that more. In particular, it's very important to point out The FBI was the FBI, and there was still a legacy of J. Edgar Hoover's, the culture that he had set up, and the church hearings wouldn't happen for another few years. Those hearings would significantly improve government oversight of agencies like the FBI, at least in that moment. But leading up to that, there was still a huge amount of friction between the Native American community and the FBI. Let's jump into the Wounded Knee occupation of 1973. Can you walk us through that event?

Sure. After the Trail of Broken Treaties, this really put the American Indian Movement on the map, so to speak, and got a lot of attention, both positive and negative. The negative side, tribal leaders in places like Pine Ridge saw the American Indian Movement as not only a threat, but outside agitators that could come to the reservation and potentially overthrow the tribal government. The FBI had to function as a federal police force because reservations, specifically in South Dakota, fall under federal jurisdiction. So it's the jurisdiction of federal police, like the FBI or the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Police Agency or the US Marshal Service. And so by 1972, the tribal council President of Pine Ridge, Dick Wilson, begins to badmouth aim and says, You're banned from the reservation. There's already a chapter in Pine Ridge at this time. So in February, things escalate, and there's the Custer Courthouse riot, where the American Indian movement leads this really raucous riot against this man, this white guy who stabbed Wesley Badhart Bull in a bar room fight, and he ended up dying, and they ended up burning down the chamber of commerce and having open fist fights with Billy Clubs, et cetera, with the South Dakota State Patrol, as well as other local law enforcement agencies.

So there's this brewing tension that's happening at that time. Also locally in Pine Ridge, people who were discontent with Dick Wilson, who was seen as an authoritarian leader, began to organize things called the interdistrict councils. They have opposition through the tribal council. They have several elected leaders. But then a lot of grassroots people, mainly middle-aged women like Ellen Moveskamp, Gladys Bissenet, and others, begin to form these public hearings where people come forward and issue grievances against the tribal council. In response, the tribal council creates what the locals called a Goon Squad. That was initially an accusation, a derogatory term, which the Goon Squad later turned towards the Guardian. They said, Oh, it's an acronym for guardians of the Oglala Nation. But essentially, they were like deputized.

That was so Orwellian.

Yeah. They were like deputized vigilantes who would go around and terrorize Dick Wilson.

At the behest of Dick Wilson.

Exactly. And the FBI, sensing this brewing tension, there was a failed impeachment attempt of Dick Wilson in February, and they created the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization as a opposition, which invited the American Indian movement to Pine Ridge in late February of 1973. And on February 27th, they led the occupation of Wounded Knee. At that time, the FBI had already been on Pine Ridge. They had been specifically tasked with jotting down the license plate, the numbers of off-reservation supporters of the Oglalasoo Civil Rights Organization, anyone who's coming and going from out of state, etc.

Dick Wilson's title was what exactly?

The President of the tribe. He was elected President.

Of the Tribe. Okay, so there's a lot of discontent with Dick Wilson's leadership of the tribe. Aim is brought in to assist in the resistance to Dick Wilson and how he's running the tribe. Is it fair to say that there was a sense that Dick Wilson was in cajoots with the federal government in ways that were undermining the Native American community there?

Well, on many reservations, the main employer tended to be the federal government, whether it was through federal grants, you work for the tribe, you work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. If you're the President or you're on council, typically that leads to nepotism. There's a cornering of resources, housing, things like that, access to employment that he was seen as gifting out. He has been accused and found plausible that he stole a lot of money from the tribe, but also was making deals to sell off parts of tribal land for exploratory uranium mining that was happening in the northern part of the reservation. You have to remember that part of the reservation was actually confiscated by the federal government during World War II to use as a bombing range. It was the northern part of the reservation. Actually, there were, I think it was around 50 or so families who were forcefully relocated from that area. And the tribe was trying to get it back, and it was happening through grassroots protests that people were trying to get this back. And there was allegations that Dick Wilson was making Sweetheart deals with outside contractors, outside the industry.

To open that up for exploratory uranium mining.

Wow. We're just going to take this land just for bomb practice. Yeah.

Sometimes it's like we have land that they see as resource-rich. Yeah, right.

There's oil here. Let's get the oil.

Exactly. Sometimes it's valuable because it's wasteable.

Yeah, there you go. Okay, so there's an emergency purging tension among members of the tribe against Dick Wilson, the tribal leadership, who is seen as being in cajoots with federal government in some not good ways. What do they do?

They take over the Wun Di Nì Massacre site, which listeners may have heard that name, but in 1890, just several days after Christmas, the seventh Calvary, which is George Armstrong Custer's former regiment, essentially massacred around 300 Lakota people who were surrendering at this particular time under the leadership of, or more commonly known as a Chief Bigfoot. From what I can tell from interviews I've conducted, I don't think they actually planned on staying there for very long, but it ended up turning into a 71-day occupation. It's fascinating for a lot of reasons. One is that the day that the occupation happened, a general named Volny Warner, who's actually South Dakota native, gets a call from Nixon's administration. He said, There's a 20th century Indian uprising. We need to deploy somebody from the Department of Defense. So he flies to Ellsworth Air Force base, the base that was used to bomb Bomb, just decades before, bomb the reservation. Flies to Ellsworth Air Force Base, and there he meets Joseph Trimbock, who is the special agent in charge of the FBI. And then he also meets Tom Top US Marshal Wayne Colborne. And in this initial meeting, it was like three o'clock in the morning on the next day, Joe Trimbock, the special agent in charge, basically asks the colonel.

He was a colonel, later became promoted to general, but he was a colonel at the time. He asked Colonel Warner. He said, Can you send in the 82nd Airborne and just end the siege right now?

How far into this occupation are we at this point?

Hours, hours, like mere hours. This is like 3:30 in the morning the next day. So they began the occupation at nighttime. So the FBI was put into this position, and you can read this through Joe Trimbach's own words in his own perspective. He was put into this position of turning the FBI into this paramilitary police force. Because you have to remember Hoover's guys, when Fred Hampton was assassinated, it wasn't at the hands of FBI agents. The FBI didn't have shootouts with the Black Panthers. It was typically other law enforcement agencies that would have shootouts with these organizations. They were the behind-the-scenes guys who were always a step back. And in fact, I even interviewed a former FBI agent named named Coleen Rowley, and I asked her straight up, I said, Why would any FBI agent want this job? And she says, Because it's easy. Imagine you're going after hardened criminals who are like, murder is their occupation, and then you get assigned to go tail a political activist. There's not much risk in doing that at that time. The image of the FBI is that they're these suit and tie, slick investigators. They have these techniques, but they're investigating.

G-men. Yeah, they're They're an investigative unit. They're not really armed like that we see today with the paramilitary, armed with assault rifles, doing all these tactics. To put it bluntly, Trimbach was pissed that he was putting his agents out on the line, and his agents were pissed.

So just to paint a visual picture here for our mind's eye, what was the town of Wundenee like exactly? What would it look like to drive by or drive through?

Wundenee at that time was a village, and a trading post. Like, literally less than a dozen houses in the town of Wundenee. There was a church, a very visible white church at the top of the hill where the mass grave, where Unpongleska's people were buried and the massacred Ghost Dancers.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit philosophically about the idea of occupying land as a form of protest and/or peaceful resistance.

So the FBI It had this narrative that it was because of outside agitators like the American Indian movement, that the arm takeover of Wundani happened. It was like their idea. But as a lot of the locals said, it was like, No, that was actually our idea. And in fact, I told you about the bombing range. Initially, back, I think it was 1970, locals occupied what was known as Sheep Mountain, which is that bombing range. And later on, when they couldn't get an audience because it's on the reservation, you have a protest reservation, who's going to show up in the middle of nowhere? So they decided, and it was a group of grandmothers, people like Muriel Waukazoo and Lizzie Fasthorse, who decided, Hey, let's go to some place more famous and more iconic. So they decided that they were going to occupy Mount Rushmore in 1970 to raise the issue of the taken bombing range lands at Sheep Mountain. So they took over Mount Rushmore, and it was several occupations and a multi-year process. But this was also part and parcel to other federal property takeovers, like at Alcatraz Island in 1969 to 1971. Alcatraz was a prison island that was abandoned by the federal government.

It was also a place where Hopi people were sent because they refused to send their children to boarding schools in the late 19th century. So it has this notorious history. We see that movie, that Nicolas Cage movie, The Rock. Or was it Nicolas Cage?

Yeah, and Sean Connery.

Yeah, Sean Connery. People might know it as like- The Rock. The Rock. Yes. Nicolas Cage is like, you think that guy's career might be on the tail end, but it keeps coming out with bangers, man. Yeah.

No, he is crushing it. He never stops crushing it. Tell us what unfolded at the Wounded Knee occupation and what role the FBI played.

Maybe Instead of giving a play by play because it's 71 days and there's different ebbs and flows. But when we look at history, we tend to think of things with, Oh, it led to this. I think a lot of people didn't know it was going to lead to this. Over the course of 71 days, the FBI pumped in about half a million rounds into this tiny Hamlet. It's important to remember that the people on the inside, they were portrayed by the FBI as these armed militants, and many of them They were combat veterans. I've interviewed several people who were Vietnam veterans, so they did have combat experience, but everyone said they didn't have ammunition. Most of their rifles were rusted out, like 22s. They didn't have a machine gun. There was an AK-47, but that was smuggled from the jungles of Vietnam by somebody, but nobody had an ammunition for it. But it made a good image for the FBI to say, Hey, look, this Communist-inspired Chinese-inspired uprising. They have an AK-47, which that became the symbol for armed revolutions throughout the world at that particular time. But on the inside, Wun Di Ni, they declared the independent Oglala Nation.

They made people citizens of this new nation, even non-native people. They proposed a succession plan to what would happen once the tribal government relinquished its power or was formally abolished, that they would return to the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and the governing principles of traditional Lakota culture. A lot of these AIM members had never really encountered indigenous spiritual life. There's also this renewal that was happening on the inside. Wow. It was really you ask people, it's like, yeah, there was this immense danger. I interviewed a Madonna Thunderhuck, and she said, yeah, it was the freest time of my life. Even though we were completely surrounded. There wasn't a lot of food. It was cold. We didn't have electricity, all of those things. She brought in her 10-year-old son with her. She said this to me on multiple occasions that the American Indian movement, if anything, was a movement of families. It wasn't this militant, like violence prone organization led by men. It was actually families were the heartbeat of the movement itself. If you read the FBI files, if you read read the media reports, it gives us a complete different point of view because they only saw men as the leaders.

On the federal police side, Colonel Warner, he was in charge of essentially bringing in military equipment to arm the US marshals, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, police officers, the FBI, and later it was revealed, the Goon Squad themselves were getting these military-grade assault rifles, right?

Wow.

So the FBI was taking on, according to its own words and report, a paramilitary function, something that it had not done before. In the field, it was teaching agents to use shoulder mounted assault rifles, to use grenade launchers, to launch tear gas canisters, to train in tactics. So the difference between the US marshals and the FBI at that time was that the US marshals tended to come from non- College-educated working class people So they had so many of their officers or marshals were Vietnam veterans. So they had combat experience. They knew how to use these weapons of war. Whereas the FBI, they were highly educated urbanites who are not used to being in the field in this way. And so it was for them, a lot of them was a traumatic experience. And if you read some of the US marshal reports, they're like, we have to control these FBI guys. They keep freaking out at the line. They're being overly hostile to the native families who's who live in this area. They're being violent there. So it created this cauldron of violence, so to speak, that was concentrated in this area. One US marshal was shot and paralyzed from the waist down.

And two occupiers, a man named Frank Clearwater, who was not native, was shot and killed while he was sleeping in one of the... Or not in one of the bunkers, in one of the buildings. And then a Vietnam veteran and a local from Pine Ridge named Buddy Lamont was shot in the heart by a sniper's bullet after they had declared a ceasefire. And this was towards the end, I think it was in late April, towards the end of the occupation. And it was Buddy Lamont's death that really ended it for people on the inside because they were like, We don't want anymore people to die or to get hurt. Yeah.

Sorry, but what was precipitating these outbursts, these fire fights? Were they just periodically shooting into a wounded knee? I don't remember how many rounds of ammunition you said at first. Half a million or something? About a half million. That's a lot of gunfire over a long period of time.

Yeah. And according to the documents, most of the fire fights, as they were called, happened at night time. And it could be, depending on which side you read or which source you read, the FBI, the US marshals would blame somebody for taking a pot shot, and then it would erupt into a firefight. And people would say the night would literally be illuminated with flares to spot the occupiers on the inside. They were using tracer rounds. And also the goons themselves put up their own roadblock at the behest of Dick Wilson. And they instigated some firefights, almost getting into a crossfire with the FBI and the US marshals who didn't like their presence because they were very aggressive.

I'm Jess Cossabetto, executive a producer of the hit Netflix documentary series, Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult.

And I'm Clea gray, former member of 7M Films and Chicana Church.

And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me For I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and LA Bay Shoshana Church, an alleged cult that has impacted members for over two decades.

Jessica and I will delve into the hidden truths between high control groups and interview dancers, church members, and others whose lives and careers have been impacted, just like mine.

Through powerful in-depth interviews with former members and new chilling first-hand accounts, the series will illuminate untold and extremely necessary perspectives. Forgive Me For I Have Followed will be more than an exploration. It's a vital revelation aimed at ensuring these types of abuses never happen again.

Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

How do you feel about Biscuitz? Hi, I'm Akela Hughes, and I'm so excited about my new podcast, Rebel spirit, where I head back to my hometown in Kentucky and try to convince my high school to change their racist mascot, the Rebels, into something everyone in the South loves, the Biscuitz.

I was a lady rebel. What does that even mean? The Boone County Rebels will stay the Boone County Rebels with the image of the-It's right here in black and white and prints.

A lion.

An individual that came to the school saying that God sent him to talk to me about the mascot Switch is a leader.

You choose Hills that you want to die on.

Why would we want to be the losing team? I just take all the other stuff out of it.

Segregation academies. When the civil rights said that we need to integrate public schools, these charter schools were exempt from that.

It's bigger than a flag or mascot. You have to be ready for serious backlash.

Listen to Rebel spirit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm David I'm a gentleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three-pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret? When should you not trust your intuition? Why do brains so easily Why do they fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, I want to shift gears into more recent events. Listeners will likely be somewhat familiar with Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests that went on in 2016 and 2017. It seems like that was a contemporary example of everything we've been talking about regarding FBI surveillance and infiltration. It represents some of the ways that the bureau has and has not evolved in its interface with the Native American community.

So 2016 was a very similar year to 2024. It was a presidential election. You have an outgoing Democrat, Trump.

Trump is running.

Trump is running again. And so 2016, what preceded that was the successful defeat of the Keystone XL pipeline under the Obama administration. This happened through Indigenous-led protests. So there was a high point at that particular moment. Of course, Trump later reversed Obama's decision and reinstated the Keystone XL pipeline, only to have it reversed again by the Biden administration. But there was a high point, and there was grassroots organizing happening at that time. And to be honest, the Dakota Access Pipeline wasn't really on the radar of a lot of people. They had just defeated this major Tar Sands pipeline that would be pumping Tar Sands from Alberta, Canada, down to Oklahoma, cross our treaty territory in Western South Dakota. So there wasn't the attention to the Dakota Access Pipeline. But nonetheless, the Standing Rock tribe, not just grassroots organizers, but the tribe itself had been steadfastly opposed to it from the very beginning, especially when it was rerouted from upriver from North Dakota to downriver to North Dakota, so that it would impact the tribe more than it would impact the predominantly white community that was north of it. This was decision made by the Army Corps of Engineers.

So in April of 2016, after a contentious meeting with the Army Corps of Engineers, a group of San Rock activists got together and created the first camp that later evolved into multiple camps, the Ocheti Shalqomi Camp, Sacred Stone Camp, et cetera.

To be clear that this pipeline presents a massive danger to our water system in the event of it possibly failing or leaking or any natural disaster, which we've seen from the oil and gas industry rampantly throughout its existence. So any possible failure of this pipeline would have devastating consequences to the ecosystem there on tribal land.

Yeah. Mini-shoshé, which is what we call the Missouri River, is the main drinking source for millions of people in the watershed. Even downriver flows into the Mississippi, which goes into the Gulf of Mexico. So it wasn't just a native issue, it was everyone's issue. Even Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, the Mandan Hidatsa and or a tribe who has a very lucrative oil and gas industry, whose oil would be going through that pipeline said, This is a bad idea. Even the people were profiting from it. They were like, This is a bad idea. We oppose this. The fundamental issue is tribal sovereignty, right?

It's not just about, Hey, this pipeline would be so annoying to have in our backyard. It's like, Oh, no, this is an existential threat also. Then on top of it is the fundamental underlying issue that you just mentioned, tribal sovereignty.

It's like if France decided they're going to build a pipeline in Germany, the Germans would probably be mad about that.

Okay, how many people are now protesting this construction?

I think that the height of the encampment itself or the encampments is one of the top 10 largest cities in North Dakota, if it could be counted as a city. So it's quite massive. And yeah, the Obama administration didn't, I wouldn't say stopped it, but they definitely put up some obstacles in trying to revisit the environmental impact review process through the Army Corps of Engineers. Of course, Trump was just like, now we're going to take any protections off this and just fast track it through. So it was a measure to block it, but I think it was It's also understood that it could be reversed. I think that's important to point out because it's still flowing to this day. I haven't heard anything from the Biden administration about the status of it, even though the tribe has won some strategic lawsuits that basically say it's flowing illegally, but the energy transfer partners are just willing to pay the fine for it to continue to flow illegally. You have an organization, a private security company called Tiger Swan, that is operating hand in glove with the Morton County Sheriff's Department. You have a federal emergency management legislation called EMAC, which allows states to solicit the support of other jurisdictions, local county Sheriff's departments.

I think there was 92 different law enforcement jurisdictions that were sent to Standing Rock to help police the protests. And that was widely covered in the media at that time about the private security and whatnot. But what wasn't covered so much was the role of the FBI.

Walk us through the FBI's connection to the Standing Rock protest. Then even though it's like 50 years later, do you see any particular echoes of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and cointel pro.

Yes. Reporting by Eileen Brown through GRIST revealed that the FBI, at any given point in time during the height of the protests, was operating anywhere between one to 10 informants. And in fact, in one of the depositions, one of the FBI agents, Jacob O'Neill, this FBI agent, was called to the stand. It was the first time that it was actually revealed in a public record that there were FBI informants, and he even admitted that one of these informants had been arrested. It wasn't just people observing on the outside. I would say probably people who are deeply embedded within the movement itself, probably native people. I don't know. We can only guess by what limited information. If you even look at this deposition, O'Neill is more concerned about the sources of income that are going into the Standing Rock protest. He's like, But yeah, we're just gathering intelligence. But it raises the question about In a criminal investigation, you're finding evidence to charge somebody out with an actual crime. But this is not an actual crime to just get money from people, right? There were gofundmes that were set up. So you're not investigating crime. So what are you doing?

In some ways, it's creating a chilling effect to say now your personal privacy, if you decide to go to a protest and you do a gofundme or you get a gas card or something like that, or you do a fundraising event, you might be targeted with FBI surveillance for exercising a First Amendment right. They're looking at resources, they're tracking people. I don't know how many times they stole Vernon Belcourt's briefcase, but it appears multiple times. They stole at least three briefcases of this man. He was a leader of the American Indian Movement, but they were gathering intelligence. That was their justification. They're gathering intelligence because they never brought charges against him after stealing his briefcase because he wasn't engaged in a criminal act. I think we have to ask ourselves, what are those lines? Because it's very unclear to people. I think it's having even been subpoenaed myself and the questions that I was asked by the attorneys from the North Dakota side about whether I had witnessed illegal activities. I said, yes, of course I've witnessed illegal activities. That's why I was there. You guys were fighting the leading Article 6 of the Constitution that says that treaties are the supreme law of the land.

We shouldn't have been there in the first place.

That was the illegal activity that we were all standing there looking at.

Yeah, exactly.

They're like, Wait a second. But what about you guys? Weren't you guys doing... Didn't you see you guys do some illegal stuff?

Yeah, so that was- It's striking how similar that is to so much of what Hoover's FBI was up to.

Have we learned anything? Are we any better off?

I think you have to go back to what the people who were targeted by these investigations were actually asking. You mentioned the Church Commission. The The Search Commission skipped over the FBI surveillance, the CIA surveillance of the American Indian Movement, because they were supposed to have a hearing, just by chance, happened after the shootout in 1970. '85. The attorney general decided that it just wasn't a good idea because it might compromise that investigation of the killing of two FBI agents. And so following this reign of terror, Oglala people had been calling for a congressional investigation investigation of the role of the FBI in its participation in this time period and what it did, what it knew. There's also the botched investigation of the murdered American Indian movement activist, NMA Alkash. That could be a whole another podcast episode, but it's been revealed through FBI documents that the FBI knew within almost a week of her assassination, who did it, when it happened, and where it happened. She was murdered in December of 1975, but didn't formally identify her body until March of 1976 of the following year, and then never charged anybody out for it until 30 years later.

That's a pretty poor track record, if you think about it. If you knew at the time who did it, when it happened, why weren't they prosecuted? There's so many questions that need answering, and I'm not the person to answer those questions. That The ball is in FBI's court. I would say the ball should be in Congress's court to provide actual oversight of this institution.

I mean, full circle, help our listeners understand where the Native American movement stands today.

The Water Protector Movement was a watershed moment, no pun intended.

But appreciated.

I'll try to bring a little bit of lightness to the serious topic. You're a comedian. How do you do serious How do you do a serious podcast?

Well, the podcast is fun, but I do find myself just getting pulled into the gravity of these situations. Hats off to you because I appreciate the levity that you've also been bringing to this conversation. We both agree that nick cage movies are fantastic, and that might be the main takeaway from this conversation.

Just to get back to your question and to answer in a serious way, I think there's a qualitative impact of the water protector movement, meaning that it really raised the consciousness of a generation of native people. But there's also the quantitative impact of the water protector movement. There's a study that came out several years ago by Oil Change International and the Indigenous Environmental Network that found that Indigenous-led movements challenging fossil fuel extraction, pipelines, etc, from all stages of the fossil fuel life cycle, accounted for challenging a quarter of carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions from Canada and the United States, two of the largest per capita polluters or emitters. And that's a huge impact, right? We're punching well above our weight class. We're like the minority of the minorities, but yet pulling a challenging at least a quarter of carbon emissions. It's pretty impactful, right? So it can be measured in that sense. And I think that's something to be proud out about. I write this in my book, Our History is the Future, this interview that Madonna Thunderhawk did with a young Pablo activist named Jennifer Marley. And Madonna had been through it all.

Fbi surveillance, she was at Woundani. Every major event of the Red Power era, all the occupations, Alcatraz, et cetera, was asked by Jen Marley, Why would you do all these things? It's obviously caused strain in your political life. And her answer without hesitation was, Because I want to be a good ancestor to future generations. And I think there's something really compelling about that, that everyone who walked through the gates of Standing Rock wasn't necessarily an Indigenous person. The movement was grounded in Indigenous values. But nonetheless, Water Protector is not an Indigenous identity. It's a universal identity, and it's one that is future-oriented. And I think it can become really dark in these moments. If we think about the price that people had to pay, losing your life, losing your losing your family, it's important to recognize those sacrifices, but it's also important to think about this is something that is not just a moment. It's a moment within a larger movement of history. I think there's some comfort in that, and it gets us beyond this really cynical and dark electoral cycles that we tend to fall into every four years and to think about generations and not just election cycles.

Wow. Very well said. Nick Estes, thank you so much for joining us here in the Snap Universe, if I may coin an incredibly stupid word. But no, it has been really a privilege to learn from you today, and I really, really appreciate the conversation.

Thanks, Ed. I'm really honored to be on this podcast.

Snapoo is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company, in Association with Gilded Audio. This season of Snapoo is based on the book The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI, written by Betty Metzger. It's executive-produced by me, Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Valbo, Whitney Donaldson, Andy Chug, Dylan Fagen, and Betty Metzger. Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Producer is Stephen Wood. Our associate producer, Tori Smith, edited this bonus episode. Nevin Kalapali is our production assistant. Facts Checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Editing, Sound Design, and Original Music by Ben Chug. Engineering and Technical Direction by nick Duhly. Theme Music by Dan Rosato. Special thanks to Allison Cohen, Daniel Bill Welsh and Ben Rysack. Additional thanks to Director Joanna Hamilton for letting us use some of the original interviews from her incredible documentary, 1971. Finally, our deepest gratitude to the Courageous Citizens Commission to investigate the FBI. Bill Davanon, Ralph Daniel, Judy Feingold, Keith Forzith, Bonnie Reines, John Reines, Sarah Schumer, and Bob Williamson.

I'm Jess Casavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series, Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult.

And I'm Clea gray, former member of 7M Films and Shoshana Church.

And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me For I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and Shoshana Church.

Listen to to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three-pound universe in our heads. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life, because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.