The Metanarrative of Suspicion in Late Twentieth-Century America

Sandra Baringer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135876906
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Narratives of suspicion and mistrust have escaped the boundaries of specific sites of discourse to constitue a metanarrative that pervades American culture. Through close reading of texts ranging from novels (Pynchon's Vineland, Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Pierce's The Turner Diaries ) to prison literature, this book examines the ways in which narratives of suspicion are both constitutive--and symptomatic--of a metanarrative that pervades American culture.

Chapter One

Crucifying the White Man

Douglass Durham's Reinvention of the American Indian Movement

It is unlikely that the April 2003 arrest of homeless Denver man and accompanying issuance of a fugitive warrant for a Canadian will put to rest the controversy over the murder of Anna Mae Aquash. Though a total often assorted FBI, BIA and local sheriff personnel immediately gathered at the creekbed where the body was found on February 1976, their interest in anything except getting the body into the ground fast initially seemed to dissipate until they decided to exhume the body within a week after burial for a second autopsy. The BIA pathologist who conducted the initial investigation had concluded that she died from exposure and inebriation, failing to notice the bullet hole in the back of her head. He cut her hands off her corpse and sent them to Washington, D.C. for identification. After the second autopsy the FBI returned the hands in a wide-mouthed jar to attorney Bruce Ellison (Brand 13–20, Matthiessen 255–62). That was the end of any substantial law enforcement investigation into her death at the time.

Even though persistent questions about Aquash's death eventually resulted in the recent indictments, the only new evidence is likely to consist of conflicting stories from various suspects. It has long been known that the two people indicted were among those Aquash was last seen with when she left the Denver area in 1975 headed for Pine Ridge. But the prevailing view among American Indian activists was probably best articulated by a friend of the arrested man at the time of his arraignment when she stated, “There's never going to be anybody looking into what the feds did—how they had their hand in all of this.” (Abbott, “Second Man Sought”).¹ Since Douglass Durham had been outed by AIM as an FBI informant almost a year prior to when her body was found, it is unlikely that he was directly involved in the events that lead to her execution, but that probability marks the beginning, not the end, of the story. Jordan S. Dill, whose web page on Durham calls for a Congressional inquiry into Aquash's death, argues that Durham's military and CIA connections should be, in the long term, more significant to Indians than his relatively brief FBI association: “Indian people should be especially interested in Army Intelligence, because—Army v. Indians, traditional, ya know. They are still in the field.”²

In the 1939 John Ford movie Drums Along the Mohawk, the patriot frontier militiamen are surrounded by Mohawks fighting for the British; they must send a messenger to a nearby fort for reinforcement. The first messenger is returned by the redskins, his arms and legs tied in a crucifixion posture across the top of a haywagon which the savages then set on fire before the horrified gaze of the besieged townspeople. This image is replicated in Durham's narrative, three years after the supposed incident, of the mock crucifixion of a white man on Easter Sunday by the American Indian Movement during its occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. Durham's crucifixion story resurrects the frontier narrative of the savage beast in the wilderness lying in wait for the white man. But it is Durham himself who took on a new life during those three years between Wounded Knee and his final debriefing before a right's wing senatorial subcommittee in 1976.

Douglass Durham's otherwise dubious career is notable due to the high position of trust and power to which he rose in AIM: chief of security and ‘second-in-command’ in the sense that he had become Dennis Banks's closest advisor. While Durham played a large part in making AIM one of the most paranoid of activist organizations at a time when at least some degree of suspicion was necessary for such groups to survive, his statements about AIM were to become paranoid narratives in themselves, shaped along the course of his speaking tour for the anti-communist John Birch Society during the year following his exposure.³ A newly discovered hearing transcript of Durham testifying in an obscure federal venue in May 1975 helps elucidate how, when, and why Durham's story changed.

Durham has been portrayed by scholars sympathetic to AIM as a wife-beating, misogynistic pimp whose real career is with the CIA. However much of this characterization may be true, it tends to imply that his motivations toward AIM were malevolent. But it can be argued that his attitudes about AIM were complex and changed over time. The psychology of the long-term undercover operative is necessarily ‘abnormal. ’ Living in a close, almost familial grouping with people when one's mission is to betray them is not a situation conducive to functional human relationships, as former FBI undercover agent Cril Payne explained with remarkable lucidity in his account of his investigation of the New Left in the Pacific Northwest. Durham never wrote a book about his experiences, though apparently he had intended to;⁴ one must interpret his state of mind through his testimonial narratives. These narratives are important in themselves as significant pieces of the metanarrative of suspicion in which activist politics have been embedded since the McCarthy era (with roots much earlier). Moreover, an understanding of the individual psychological operations that may be performed upon information about a collective ‘significant other’—particularly a racialized ‘Other’—can enhance our understanding of the dynamics of scapegoating and collective paranoia.

Durham was born September 26, 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska. The son of a telephone company employee, he lived in several places before graduating from Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, Iowa in 1955 (Lamberto). According to the interview with Lamberto in April 1975, he spent several years in an Indian elementary school in Hayward, Wisconsin, though by the time of his Congressional testimony a year later this had shrunk to several months (United States Senate 16). After several years in the Marines which included some time stationed in Cuba (according to Durham), he was employed by the Des Moines Police Department from 1961 to 1964. His career began to unravel when his pregnant wife died in 1964 from cerebral edema, a condition that would almost undoubtedly have occurred from a blow to the head. The police department conducted an investigation and though it found no evidence of foul play, Durham was discharged from the police department in October 1964 on the basis of a psychiatric report declaring him “unfit for office involving public trust” (Giese 3).⁵

Documentation of Durham's pre's AIM history is problematic. Virtually all of the information on Durham's background recounted in AIM histories—Johanna Brand's The Life and Death of Anna Mae Aquash (1978), Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall's Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (1988, 1990), Peter Matthiessen's In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983, 1991), and Rex Weyler's Blood of the Land: The Government and Corporate War Against the American Indian Movement (1984)— rely primarily on two sources: a lengthy article by Paula Giese and Durham's self's reporting. Giese, a reporter for the northern Minnesota alternative newspaper North Country Anvil in the mid's seventies, had worked as a legal investigator for the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee (WKLD/OC) during the 1974 Minneapolis trial of Dennis Banks and Russell Means for activities related to the Wounded Knee occupation of 1973. Interestingly enough, biographical information about Giese in the list of contributors for the North Country Anvil in a late 1975 issue does not mention her WKLD/OC background, though the articles she was contributing concerned AIM issues and a large amount of unattributed copy in Akwesasne Notes during this period appears to have been written by Giese. Rather, she is identified as “a former wire service reporter and University of Minnesota humanities professor” (16:70). Giese's primary article on Durham, “Secret Agent Douglass Durham and the Death of Jancita Eagle Deer,” appeared in 1976 in the North Country Anvil (a condensed version appeared in Covert Action in 1985). Her article was based in part on Durham's own commentary, tape recorded when Dennis Banks, Vernon Bellecourt, and lead WKLD/OC counsel Kenneth Tilsen confronted him at a meeting in a Des Moines hotel room on March 7, 1975. Also present at the hotel meeting as a mediator was John P. Adams of the United Methodist Church and National Council of Churches, who wrote the most comprehensive account of Durham's story in an article in Christian Century (reprinted in Akwesasne Notes). Kenneth Tilsen, who viewed Durham's story as “all bullshit,” threw away the tape and gave the transcript to a now-unidentifiable journalism student (Northcott).⁶

Giese died in 1997. Her 1976 article tells a sordid tale of gun-running for the CIA in preparation for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, “‘running’ a string of ‘girls’ ” from a 24's hour café on Des Moines' North Sixth Avenue called the Why Not?, later running an “automated call-girl service” enhanced by his skills as a photographer, and “fronting for Mafia interests” (2–3). Much, if not all of this information seems to have come from the March 1975 press conference and subsequent published interviews with Durham. Unfortunately, Giese does not cite her sources and some of her facts are unverified. For example, she claims that a police investigation into the death of Durham's first wife was triggered by his marriage three weeks later to “one of the Why Not? girls” (2). Durham's wife Donna Exline died on July 5, 1964, and Polk County courthouse records of Durham's divorce from his third wife (in 1977) give the date of his third marriage as July 24, 1965 (though Durham characterized this marriage as his second to reporter Lamberto).⁷ Giese remarked in her 1976 article that “Wife No. 2 seems simply to have disappeared” (11), though it is unclear to whom she refers; Durham was married to the same woman from 1965 through 1977, and his son from his first marriage still lived with his third wife at the time of the 1977 divorce. A greater problem occurs with the report that Durham was “convicted of larceny in an odd Mafia-political case in 1971” (Giese 3). This statement was made in connection with a colorful narrative of “mov(ing) rapidly up in the Midwest hierarchy of organized crime … operat(ing) several restaurants, fronting for Mafia interests …‘I was considered (by local law enforcement officials) to be head of the largest criminal organization in the state of Iowa,’ he boasted to AIM attorneys in tape-recorded, witnessed interviews conducted March 9–12 [1975] in Chicago” (Giese 3).⁸ Giese's error as to where the interviews took place—they were held in Des Moines, Iowa and Des Plaines, Illinois (Lamberto)—is minor and understandable since the press conference on March 13 was held in Chicago, but the more serious problem is that no conviction appears in either federal or state court records for the area. Durham was charged on June 23, 1970 with the crime of “false pretense.” According to the information (charging document) in Des Moines Municipal Court (#70–12893), he “did wilfully and feloniously and by false pretense obtain money to the value of more than $20.00 from Tom Greesaman with the intent to defraud.” He was released on $1,000 bond and the case was bound over to the Polk County grand jury, which reviewed the case on December 2, 1970 and did not issue an indictment. The charge was “ignored” along with a companion case, meaning that the case was dismissed.⁹ Apparently Durham invented the conviction as part of his story to Ron Petite and Harvey Major of the Des Moines AIM chapter; according to Dennis Banks, when Petite and Major recommended Durham to Banks “they told us that he was a former pig, busted for burglary and dismissed from the police force” (Matthiessen 120).

Giese spent a lot of time with Durham in the summer and fall of 1974 when they were investigating the rape charge of Jancita Eagle Deer against William Janklow. This endeavor was tangential to the defense team's presentation of evidence of prosecutorial misconduct in the Dennis Banks/Russell Means trial. It is not entirely clear why Giese and Durham continued with the Eagle Deer matter after the defense team declined to present Eagle Deer's testimony in connection with their motion to dismiss; WKLD/OC felt the matter's relevance to the Wounded Knee issues was at best attenuated. The investigation did result in getting Janklow disbarred from the Rosebud tribal court following Dennis Banks's petition and Eagle Deer's testimony in October 1974, but it is widely believed that public perception of the charge as a smear campaign contributed to Janklow's election as South Dakota's attorney general in November 1974 (Matthiessen 108–109). Karen Northcott, a WKLD/OC legal investigator who is still a legal investigator in Minneapolis, stated that Giese “may have had a personal relationship” with Durham during this time, and that Giese's article in the North Country Anvil over a year later was her own project and not produced under color of any association with WKLD/OC. Northcott characterizes Giese's narrative as exemplary of AIM at its most paranoid. Though Northcott's remark about Giese and Durham may be speculative, it is fairly well established that Giese was working with Durham at a time when other AIM and WKLD/OC women apparently had as little use for Durham as he did for them. For one thing, some of them had noticed that he dyed his hair black. They saw him as “Dennis's boy”: an arrogant sycophant who appointed himself as gatekeeper to Banks; Northcott told Matthiessen, “He never talked to the Defense Committee staff except to give orders … we were just too lowly. Doug Durham was full of himself…” (111).

It is possible that Giese and Durham had in common personal conflicts about their own ancestry. Durham claimed while with AIM that he was one-quarter Chippewa; immediately after his exposure he revised this to a “smattering” of Indian blood on his father's side and several years at a Chippewa Indian elementary school (Adams 490); two months later, testifying at a motion hearing in Lincoln, Nebraska, he denied all Indian ancestry. Giese was characterized by Matthiessen as white, but the website Giese created in 1995 states that her Indian ancestry is Canadian; another website displaying a logo designed by Giese identifies her as Anishinabe, i.e. Chippewa or Ojibwe.¹⁰

At any rate, Durham became involved with Jancita Eagle Deer soon after tracking her down in Iowa. Giese's article reports extensive personal knowledge of Durham's abusive relationship with Eagle Deer, and the main thrust of the article is to implicate Durham in Eagle Deer's death.¹¹ Durham has also been accused both by AIM leaders and by several responsible journalists and scholars of complicity in the deaths of Harvey Major (Des Moines AIM leader) and Anna Mae Aquash, the most influential woman among the national AIM leadership.¹² Jordan S. Dill's internet accusations are viewed by some as paranoid fantasy (most notably the South Dakota-based newspaper Indian Country Today), but his statement that Durham had lived in a born-again Christian commune in Dallas, Texas is supported by divorce records in Polk County, Iowa at least insofar as the fact that Durham was living in Dallas in 1977 and was still living there in 1982. Even Dill distances himself from the rumor that the commune is actually Satanist (the web page says that Durham “lives in some sort of born-again Christian communal house, that was said to be a cover for Satanists [I don't have anything definite on this]”), but the general scenario described is not inconsistent with the sort of assignment a career federal informant might be involved with in the nineties. Right-wing ‘Christian’ communes are at the nexus of contemporary conspiracy radar, both receiving and transmitting.

Though it is primarily Durham-fictional embellishments and distortions which are the subject of this discussion, there are at least some facts about his association with AIM that are not in dispute. His contact with AIM began when he was asked by a Des Moines alternative newspaper Pax Today to accompany him to the Wounded Knee occupation as a photographer, where his FBI connections helped in getting through the roadblock.¹³ He was only inside Wounded Knee for a few hours, a factor which becomes significant in analyzing his later testimony. Upon his return to Des Moines he was asked by the FBI to attempt to make some contact with the Iowa AIM chapter, a project aided by his published Wounded Knee pictures. Des Moines AIM members were impressed with his photography and writing skills; Aaron Two Elk said “Durham's background sort of gave us a special insight about the way the police worked … and he was a pretty good writer, was able to raise money and all sorts of stuff, so we looked at him as a real asset in those early days” (Churchill 213).¹⁴ But by then, Two Elk said, Durham was already ‘bad-jacketing’ another AIM member, i.e., spreading the rumor that he was an informant (213). By and by, Durham gained the confidence of AIM leader Dennis Banks and rose to a national leadership position as head of security for AIM. As the FBI moved toward prosecution of Banks in connection with the disturbance at the courthouse in Custer, South Dakota, Durham accompanied Banks to the Northwest Territories in Canada where Banks remained a fugitive but ev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE Crucifying the White Man
• CHAPTER TWO Lynching the White Woman
• CHAPTER THREE Women's Work?
• CHAPTER FOUR Motherhood and Treason
• CHAPTER FIVE Motherhood and Terror
• CHAPTER SIX Beyond the Foucauldian Complex
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index