A Father’s Day 
Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
Free Richard Lafuente!
Did the kid from Plainview really drive his El Camino over Eddie Peltier on a North Dakota Indian reservation in 1983? Nobody on the rez thinks so, and neither will you. So why is he still in federal prison?
Connie says: I have relatives that live on the SLN reservation, I am from South Dakota, and an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Out of curiosity one day I stumbled on to Cat West’s website which also brought me here to this site. I am saddened by how our people are potrayed and sad but true, reservation life is this way. How can this go on like this for so long? Eddie’s death, I mean. It is just sad, and I feel so badly for his family, and the family of those whom are falsely accused of his death. This is 2011! We should be able to do something to solve this. And if it is due to a bigger corruption, how can this not be ignored?! It is outrageous! My heart goes out to Eddie’s family, Richard’s family and other family members who have lost because of this. I applaud Cat West for standing up for those who couldn’t and didnt have a chance to do it themselves’, Eddie and Richard, for getting thier stories out there. And to this paper for writing this story. (June 7th, 2011 at 2:30pm)
(Page 2 of 6)
Around midnight on August 27, after he and the others at the Dunn house had watched An Officer and a Gentleman, Richard called his wife and went to sleep. The next day he heard that a body had been found out on Highway 57 and that the police were looking for a yellow car spotted at the scene. Neither he nor John had ever met Eddie, but the Dunns knew him, so they all went to the wake. “I’d never been to an Indian wake,” Richard told me. “They put the casket on a wagon pulled by a horse, and we walked to the cemetery. Afterward we went to his mother’s house and had stew.” John, who today lives in the North Texas town of Vernon, remembers meeting Gladys Peltier, Eddie’s mom. “She served us dinner,” he says. “She was kidding with me. She said it was dog stew.”
Eventually, Richard took out a bank loan, bought John a bus ticket home, and set about trying to sell the El Camino, which needed repairs. At the end of September, he left the car at a Devils Lake service station and hitched back to Texas, promising to return for it. He went back to work in Plainview, driving trucks for Mrs Baird’s Bread and Dolly Madison Bakery and taking care of his wife and two young daughters. On January 2, 1986, the police called and asked him to come to the sheriff’s office, where he and John were arrested by federal marshals on murder charges. Both men were released on bond and given a week to return to North Dakota. They drove up in Richard’s pickup and were arrested again.
Richard has been behind bars ever since. “Everything that was said to have happened at trial—none of it happened,” Richard told me, his voice surging with anger. “I’m in here for a story James Yankton made up. He got those girls to say it, and then I got indicted for murder.” When I told him I was going to the rez to talk to some of his old acquaintances, he smiled and said, “Be careful up there. The Yanktons ain’t no joke.”
Coffee and a Prayer
FORT TOTTEN IS SEPARATED from the bustling town of Devils Lake—where you can shop at a Wal-Mart, eat at a McDonald’s, or sleep at a Comfort Inn—by only thirteen miles, but it might as well be in a different country. In a sense, it is. Fort Totten is the largest of several towns on the Spirit Lake Nation (formerly the Devils Lake Sioux reservation), which is just that: a sovereign nation, subject to U.S. rather than state law, since Indian reservations are federal land. Most reservations are poor, and this one is no exception: The unemployment rate is 70 percent, and one third of the 6,339 people live below the poverty line. Most Fort Totten residents live in trailers or small government housing units that are usually only a couple of blocks apart. Here on the “moccasin telegraph,” word travels fast. “Within an hour of something happening,” a defense attorney told me, “it’s all over the rez.” Family members crowd into the homes, whose yards are often overgrown with grass and weeds. Dogs run free.
In June I spent three days on the rez, following three days reading court transcripts and talking with lawyers in Fargo and Grand Forks. The Indian way is, to put it mildly, different from the white one of urban North Dakota, especially when it comes to the law. “The Indians have a problem with the adversarial system,” one of the defense attorneys in the Peltier case told me. “They don’t like confrontation. It’s not part of their makeup at all.” In one transcript, a judge had spoken of a particularly frustrating cultural difference: the Indians’ “softness of expression and unwillingness to be assertive.” Several attorneys told me that, in essence, you can get Indians to go along with whatever you want them to say.
My first morning on the rez, I went to the Spirit Lake Casino and Resort, which sits, brown and windowless, high on a hill over the lake. I’d hoped to talk to James Yankton. The former Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officer, who left the rez police force in 1993, is now the casino’s head of security. Twice the week before, I had called his office, identified myself, and asked to speak to him. Each time the man who answered the phone relayed what I said to someone else in the room and then told me that Yankton was, respectively, “in a telephone conference” and “in a meeting.” Now, at eight-fifteen, humming along with Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds,” which was blaring on the speakers out front, I walked past the dozen retirees playing slots and asked the man at the security desk if Yankton was there. He picked up his phone and called someone else, who—after asking me who I was—said, “He’s busy right now.”
So I drove to meet my guide. I’d known how hard it would be to get anyone to talk to an outsider from Texas; reporter Pat Springer, of the Forum, in Fargo, who’d covered the trial, told me that without help, I’d be “chasing shadows.” I had interviewed Dwayne Charboneau, one of the eleven defendants, on the phone, and he’d agreed to take me around the rez. I had liked Dwayne immediately; he was matter-of-fact and not bitter about his experiences. I was surprised when I met him. He’s 47, one quarter Chippewa and the rest French, with light skin and short, frizzy hair; he looks like Claude Rains in Casablanca. (The rez is Sioux, but there are plenty of Chippewa and mixed bloods.) Dwayne lives in a trailer on the southern edge of Devils Lake and drives trucks for a living. Like many Indians, he’s a young grandfather; his ex-wife, Edith, is Eddie Peltier’s sister. I had e-mailed him a list of people I wanted to talk to: the two witnesses who had recanted, some of the other defendants, and various people who might know something about the case. Now, with our cell phones, we set out across the rez.
We drove west through Fort Totten, toward the small town of Oberon (population: 81), about fifteen miles away. It was beautiful out there: long, rolling hills with large ponds and lone farmhouses or trailers out past the fields. Dwayne explained that one third of the land was owned by the tribe and the rest by the government or private citizens. “It’s a checkerboard,” he said. Like many people I would meet on the rez, Dwayne is calm and low-key; he speaks slowly, pausing often. We talked about some of the cultural differences between Indians and the outside world. I asked about the concept of “Indian time,” for instance. “Apparently,” I said, “Indians have less ambition to be—”
“At a certain place at a certain time?” Dwayne finished the sentence for me, laughing. “Yes. The casino has a problem with that as far as employees getting to work on time.”
One of the people I wanted to talk to the most was Shirley Greywater, also known as Beasley, the first witness to recant and say openly that James Yankton had intimidated her into lying on the stand. We called her father- and mother-in-law, Paul and Loretta Stensland, who live down the street from her, and they told us to drop by. But when we arrived, they said Beasley didn’t want to talk. Her high-school-aged daughters had recently had a scare. “Somebody chased those girls through Crow Hill,” said Loretta, “and tried to run them off the road.” Beasley had been threatened by Yankton family members for years after recanting, Loretta told me; now, her husband theorized, “I think she thinks those Yanktons are finally leaving her alone.”
We sat around the kitchen table drinking coffee, hoping Beasley would change her mind. The Stenslands are in their sixties: She’s a light-skinned Sioux, he’s a light-skinned Norwegian. Their trailer was decorated with American flags and an autographed photo of George W. and Laura Bush. We talked about that night in 1983. Initially, Loretta said, everyone thought it was a hit-and-run accident, but soon there were stories that Eddie had been killed by human hands—maybe accidentally, maybe not.
Their friend Tom Jetty, a large man with a tattoo of a heart on his right forearm, came in and joined us at the table. “I knew there was more to it than what people were saying. Hearing people talk—there was no party at Bernice’s.”
We lingered over our coffee, listening to the birds outside. “Let’s just pray that the truth comes out,” Loretta said. Paul and Tom took off their hats and put them on the table, and we all bowed our heads as she prayed for Dwayne and me. “Let every jaw be unlocked,” she said. “Give them the wisdom, knowledge, and discernment they need.”
The Big Break
JEROME EDWARD “EDDIE” PELTIER WAS 24, handsome, and popular. He loved to shoot baskets and play guitar and sing with his band. He was, several people told me, a cousin of Leonard Peltier’s, who was famously convicted in 1977 of killing two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge reservation, in South Dakota. He and his wife had two children. Unlike a lot of Indian men, his mother told a reporter, Eddie was goal oriented. He had served in the Army and had also been a policeman in Devils Lake; at the time of his death, he had just been accepted by the North Dakota Highway Patrol, a job he had always dreamed about.
My Library
