'A humiliating process': Former Club Q employees struggle to claim money raised in their names

Lindsey Toomer, Colorado Newsline
February 27, 2023

coloradonewsline.com

Former Club Q employees don’t want to return to the club when it reopens after they say they received “a small fraction” of the money raised specifically for club staff and victims of the deadly November mass shooting in Colorado Springs.

According to accounts of several staff members, Club Q owner Matthew Haynes has given most former employees less than $1,000 while others did not receive anything from a GoFundMe that raised more than $55,000 for staff and performers after the shooting.

Hysteria Brooks worked at Club Q as a show producer and drag performer for the past two years and arrived at Club Q as first responders were triaging victims. She said in the days following the shooting, Haynes gathered with his staff at a club manager’s house and told them he would take care of everyone.

“He was going to make sure that we were all OK financially, and we trusted him,” Brooks said. “For many Club Q employees, they entrusted that wholeheartedly and they were refusing help in the first month or two months.”

Tiara Latrice Kelley also worked as a producer and drag performer at Club Q and started her own GoFundMe for a benefit show she was hosting for victims and survivors shortly after the shooting. But because the GoFundMe had Club Q in the title, she said Haynes asked her to sign it over to him, which she did because he agreed to distribute the funds fairly.

Kelley noted, though, that prior to the shooting, most Club Q staff didn’t even know what Haynes looked like, as he lives full-time overseas in the United Kingdom.

“The fact that now he shows up and tries to act like he’s been on the forefront of this, he’s this community guy, and he’s not, he really isn’t,” Kelley said.

Right before the holidays hit at the end of 2022, though, Brooks said former staff started to wonder if they would get any funding before Christmas, as Haynes was “leaving everybody in the dark.” Through her role with the United Court of Pikes Peak Empire, the oldest LGBTQ organization in southern Colorado, Brooks said other members of the organization’s chapters throughout North America donated to support the local court following the tragedy, which led to staff members each getting $500 before Christmas.

After the holidays, Brooks said Haynes was still traveling around the country without communicating when the staff would receive help. She said people needed money as they were out of work and racking up new bills for therapy and doctor appointments.

Former staff soon learned from a Club Q Facebook post in mid-February that Haynes planned to distribute funding to employees based on their average earnings over a three month period. Brooks and Kelley both said the amount of money staff received under Haynes’ three-month average salary system is “laughable,” with most employees receiving less than $1,000. Kelley said the funding she got was closer to the amount she’d earn for three shows, not including tips.

“He genuinely thinks that this money is supposed to make up for the physical trauma, the emotional trauma, the mental trauma that followed the three months of the shooting, and it’s supposed to keep us going for months,” Brooks said.

Haynes did not respond to multiple requests from Newsline for an interview or comment on plans to reopen and distribute money raised for staff and victims.

‘A lot of disconnect’

Ashtin Gamblin was working the front door at Club Q the night of the shooting and was shot nine times in both her arms, resulting in broken bones on both sides. She said she isn’t healing, and that she isn’t in the mindset to work even if she could, with her continued inability to use one of her arms.

“The only reason I don’t have any bullet wounds in my torso is because Daniel (Aston) was in front of me,” Gamblin said. Aston was 1 of 5 people killed in the Nov. 19 shooting.

He genuinely thinks that this money is supposed to make up for the physical trauma, the emotional trauma, the mental trauma that followed the three months of the shooting, and it's supposed to keep us going for months. – Hysteria Brooks, former Club Q show producer and performer

Gamblin received $981 from Haynes’ GoFundMe based on his three-month salary estimate, and her only consistent income is the $183 she gets from workers compensation every two weeks. She doesn’t think total funds distributed from ownership across all employees is more than $10,000, she said. She also said Haynes hasn’t given any money from the GoFundMe to the families of the five people who died the night of the shooting.

“It wasn’t my owners that called my husband or my mother,” Gamblin said. “They didn’t come see me in the hospital. They didn’t try … There’s a lot of disconnect with how they sound like they want to look like they care, but there isn’t that full connection of them actually caring.”

Speaking out about the issues that victims are facing with accessing funds raised in their names is all that is making Gamblin feel better lately, she said.

Seeking help elsewhere

Soon enough, former Club Q staff members connected with Bread and Roses, a queer-led nonprofit legal center based in Denver. Brooks said the organization has helped “tremendously” with supporting staff and victims, particularly with accessing money from the Colorado Healing Fund.

“We have a pretty clear sense that when horrible things happen, there are people who are totally generous and who will do anything they can to help, and then there are also people who will use it as an opportunity to either make money or cause harm,” said Z Williams, co-founder and director of client support and operations at Bread and Roses.

The partnership between Club Q staff and Bread and Roses resulted in a joint letter asking Haynes to release 75% of the funds raised in a lump sum for staff to distribute according to the system they created. The letter says Haynes informed staff they were no longer employed at Club Q through a Facebook post announcing future plans to renovate and reopen.

“This is but one of many slaps in the face for his grieving employees and contractors as well as the community at large,” the letter reads. “Matthew chose to reopen Buddies — a bathhouse that shares the wall with Club Q — a mere 3 weeks after the shooting. Patrons have to step over the Club Q memorial to access the bathhouse.”

Brooks said Haynes has kept the reopening of Buddies out of the public eye because he “knows that he would receive backlash for it.” Kelley said Haynes directly told her that he needed to reopen to make revenue and that there was a community who wanted Buddies to reopen.

Since the attack on Club Q, Williams said working with victims and survivors has become the largest part of their job. Bread and Roses also started a mutual aid fund called Queers for Q that’s raised over $100,000 so far, which the organization uses to support victims with no strings attached.

“People ask for it and we provide it … We believe that survivors know what they need and it’s our job to make sure they get it,” Williams said. “Surviving a tragedy is very expensive, both in terms of the cost of health care and mental health care, but also in terms of, sometimes you don’t feel like cooking and you need to be able to DoorDash, or you need to get out of town and see your loved ones.”
The official Club Q GoFundMe, organized by owner Matthew Haynes, says it’s for “Employees, Performers,” as well as a memorial and the club itself. (Screenshot)

Kelley said the fact that other places were supporting former staff was another reason Haynes gave for not immediately distributing the money.

“We shouldn’t have had to go anywhere else to have people help us out. He had the means and the resources,” Kelley said about Haynes. “Second of all, it doesn’t matter who else helped us out — when people donated money to those causes, they donated it for the staff, the victims and the families, not for building, not for Matthew to stack his pockets. They donated it for us, so it’s just right that it should go to us.”

Brooks said that the GoFundMe from which Haynes continues to hold funding was advertised by Club Q as the official GoFundMe “to support staff, performers.” The GoFundMe’s description says it is managed by Club Q directly and will ensure staff “don’t suffer financial hardship due to this horrific act,” and that remaining funds would go toward an official memorial for Club Q victims and remodeling.

... When people donated money to those causes, they donated it for the staff, the victims and the families, not for building, not for Matthew to stack his pockets. They donated it for us, so it’s just right that it should go to us.

– Tiara Latrice Kelley, former Club Q show producer and performer

Williams said they’ve heard “pretty clearly” from families who lost loved ones in the shooting that they don’t want a memorial built at Club Q, especially without their input “and not in this way.”

“A memorial is for the loved ones of the people who died. It’s not public art for business or anything like that,” Williams said. “I’ve heard and I’ve seen really clearly a desire for the employees to also make sure that those who died are honored in the right way.”

All Club Q staff — with the exception of one who Brooks said is Haynes’ “right-hand person” — came to a unanimous agreement on how they would distribute the funding if they receive it, with a tiered system giving the most funds to those with the most severe injuries and medical bills. Brooks said all the staff are on the same page in wanting to make sure that those who need to be taken care of are taken care of.

“The people that gave money to that GoFundMe did it because they were under the impression that it was going to the staff and employees first, that we were going to be taken care of first and then whatever was left over for the building,” Brooks said. “Matthew has since switched that — the building will be taken care of first and then whatever is left over has gone to the staff and employees.”

Kelley said Haynes could have better handled the situation by directly speaking with his employees and finding out what they wanted and needed.

“It was obvious to us pretty quickly after the tragedy that Matthew didn’t really give a s*** about what we had to say,” Kelley said. “He could have really just listened to us.”

Accessing Colorado Healing Fund donations

Jordan Finegan, executive director of the Colorado Healing Fund nonprofit, said her organization doesn’t actively fundraise, but it exists for people to donate to victims of specific tragedies like the Club Q shooting.

The Healing Fund brought in over $50,000 within 24 hours of the Club Q shooting and over $200,000 within three days, Finegan said. Now, the healing fund has brought in around $2.2 million, with $1.9 million already distributed to 85 people including victims, family of victims and Club Q staff.

The money that has yet to be distributed, Finegan said, will be held for when survivors need continued long-term support. She said experts have typically found that the first, third and sixth years after a tragedy like the Club Q shooting are “extremely difficult times,” and if all the funds go out at once there won’t be any left for those who need it later on.

Finegan said the Healing Fund works with victim advocates and organizations with more “boots on the ground” like the nonprofit Colorado Organization for Victim Assistance to distribute funds. She said that ensuring victims only need to maintain contact with one person — the advocate they have already been in contact with — provides a sense of security and familiarity.

“The Healing Fund is not a direct service provider, and when it was created it was determined by the 20 plus experts that it will be faster and easier if the money goes to the direct service provider so the Healing Fund isn’t having to sort through every request, when we are a one person operation,” Finegan said in an email.

When Gamblin was being treated for her injuries, she said the hospital lost her wedding ring, which had been passed down from her great grandparents. She also had to buy additional supplies for her pets, who are all registered emotional support animals, as she wasn’t able to take care of them as she previously could without full mobility of her arms.

When she went through COVA to access the Healing Fund, Gamblin said she was denied reimbursement for the pet supplies and wedding ring. She said she had to argue with COVA over what is and isn’t covered after they had questions about what she was purchasing.

“One of the things that made me feel kind of normal again was to have a ring on my finger, and so I desperately wanted another ring, so I spent $700 on a band” Gamblin said. “They’ll tell the public that they can’t approve or deny an expense, but they do.”

Mari Dennis took over as executive director at COVA at the start of December. She said COVA doesn’t have its own victim advocates, but partners with advocates within local law enforcement departments and even at the state level when necessary.

She said advocates will bring her a form stating what kind of assistance a victim needs and how much, and then get a check either to the advocate or directly to the victim. For Club Q survivors, Dennis said she’s worked with advocates through the Colorado Springs Police Department, Bread and Roses, and the Colorado Health Partnership.

Dennis said the Healing Fund board wanted to know the kind of needs people wanted covered early on, and she kept them updated on monthly expense requests as they came in for their approval. She said if there’s a particularly unique request that comes in outside of a monthly expense, she goes to the Healing Fund for clearance. Dennis said she herself doesn’t have the authority to approve or deny any one expense.

Finegan said general requests are approved right away as long as there are funds to provide.

“Ninety-nine percent of requests have been and are fulfilled,” Finegan said. “But if they are out of the ordinary, we look at how it is connected to the incident and if there are other ways to pay for it initially if possible.”

Other ways could include payment by the hospital, workers compensation or victims compensation, Finegan said.

“We do not have unlimited funding, so requests that may not be granted for those various reasons ensures we’re able to provide as much support to as many victims as possible,” Finegan added. “But also this is why we issued this most recent large cash distribution so individuals can use it as they need.”

Sending the money to nonprofits is not sending the money to survivors — that is not synonymous. And what happens is that those nonprofits then become gatekeepers between survivors and their money.

– Z Williams, of Bread and Roses

Williams said the Healing Fund is a “failed model of response” to tragedies like the Club Q shooting, creating a “paternal relationship between survivors of violence and the resources they need to survive.” They said nobody knows better what survivors need than the survivors themselves, and holding back money to be used later is not in their best interest.

“Sending the money to nonprofits is not sending the money to survivors — that is not synonymous. And what happens is that those nonprofits then become gatekeepers between survivors and their money,” Williams said.

Part of their job at Bread and Roses is helping victims fill out the request forms so they can access these funds, and Williams said it’s “a humiliating process.” They said survivors are required to send financial documents so the Healing Fund can approve what the funds are being used for.

Finegan said if someone has additional needs recovering from the tragedy being fundraised for, “all they have to do is request the support through their advocate.”

Williams said there is no expert in any one person’s trauma, and having a panel of people deciding what to do with the funding is a disrespectful process that leads to retraumitization and revictimization. They also said the healing fund needs to be more transparent, as it hasn’t released any reports about what it does with the funding it receives and why.

“Their entire system is based off of ‘someone else knows better what people need,’ and I just fundamentally disagree with that and I’ve watched how much it changes people’s lives when you just give them the money,” Williams said. “One of the most important things that we can do is try and give (victims) as much a sense of autonomy back: You have the freedom to move, you have the freedom of safety, you have the freedom of choice.”

Building back the community

Club Q long held the title of the go-to spot for the LGBTQ community in Colorado Springs. Since the shooting, though, the community has found support in new places.

“For the longest time, Club Q has been the safe space for the Springs for the LGBTQ community, and I think that in a lot of ways, Matthew depends on that being the case,” Kelley said. “But also, what I would like for our LGBTQ community to know is that there are other safe spaces and that we don’t have to be dependent upon Matthew and his mess.”

While Brooks hasn’t found a job, she’s continued performing shows, which she said has been difficult with her anxiety and PTSD. She’s also prioritized helping her friends and community make sure they have what they need to survive in the short-term.

“I don’t necessarily feel like I’ve grieved yet,” Brooks said. “I feel like I’ve just kind of been advocating for my community and advocating for my bar staff and contractors to ensure that they all have everything they need to grieve and to be able to make it to the next month. I feel personally like that’s my responsibility right now as a pillar in my community.”

Kelley said she’s also just been trying to keep her head above water, and that thankfully there are many other venues that have been booking shows for her and other former Club Q performers to make some more cash.

Brooks said the Luxe Daiquiri Lounge opened not long after the Club Q shooting and started making a name for itself as the new queer spot in town. She said many of the former Club Q producers and entertainers have found a new home there, along with some of Club Q’s regular customers.

“The owners of Luxe are incredible people,” Brooks said. “They have taught us what it’s like to actually care about people from an owner’s perspective, because they have implemented security measures that ensure everyone’s safety. They have made sure that the staff and employees have a say in what security measures would make us feel safe.”

Williams reiterated that a bar just being a gay bar doesn’t inherently make it special. It’s the people who bring in regulars and make sure patrons have a good experience who do.

“A gay bar is not in and of itself a precious place,” Williams said. “It becomes that when it’s filled with people, and the people who worked there, who were the bartenders, the other staff who produced the shows and entertained — those are the people that made Club Q such an incredible place, and many of them right now are struggling just to know how they’re going to pay rent or get by while they’re also trying to recover from serious injury, trauma and the loss of their families.”

I know a lot of us are ready to wash our hands of Matthew and Club Q as soon as we receive the funds that were donated in our name.

– Hysteria Brooks

Brooks said most of the former staff don’t want to return to work at Club Q if it does reopen.

“Without the staff, without the people, I don’t want to go back,” Gamblin said. “They’re the reason I started working there, the reason I wanted to keep working there.”

Kelley said she can’t wrap her head around the idea of reopening the club at all, and that if it does she couldn’t bring herself to go back.

“I know a lot of us are ready to wash our hands of Matthew and Club Q as soon as we receive the funds that were donated in our name,” Brooks said. “The only thing that we want to see from Matthew is him releasing the funds to us for us to distribute in a way that we’ve all decided.”

Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on Facebook and Twitter.

Trump's former Catholic priest adviser hit with sex misconduct accusations: Reports
Mary Papenfuss
February 26, 2023

Frank Pavone (Facebook)

Donald Trump's former Catholic priest religious adviser and head of anti-abortion group Priests for Life has been hit with multiple sexual misconduct accusations, according to reports by the Catholic media outlet The Pillar and the Daily Beast.

Vehement anti-abortionist Frank Pavone was ousted from the priesthood — defrocked — by the Vatican in December after he repeatedly disobeyed orders from his bishop to stop posting unspecified "blasphemous" messages on social media. He often posted incendiary political messages, and posted videos of an aborted fetus on an altar.

Now at least four women have reportedly accused Pavone of sexual misconduct.

The complaints concern "inappropriate workplace" behavior, dating from 1999 to 2018, and allegedly included non-consensual touching, lewd suggestions and unwanted sexual advance, according to The Pillar and the Beast. One of the women who accused Pavone of inappropriate behavior is a freelance writer for the Daily Beast who once worked for the priest when she was 22.

When contacted by The Pillar in January about the accusations, a spokesperson for Pavone said that “any complaints Father Frank was made aware of” were “resolved satisfactorily.”

At least two former prominent members of the advocacy group Priests for Life have condemned Pavone and called on him to resign from the organization.

Father Stephen Imbarrato, a pastoral team member at Priests for Life from 2015 to 2019, told the Daily Beast in an interview reported Sunday that a woman had complained to him about Pavone's alleged sexual harassment in the workplace in 2017. He said he counseled her until she quit her job.

Imbarrato also said he reported the accusation to the board of directors of Priests for Life. He told the Daily Beast that the group's sexual harassment committee was headed by Pavone — "so it was neither safe nor independent," he noted.

“I only had direct knowledge of one victim, the woman I counseled over a long period of time,” Imbarrato told the Beast via email. “That there were other victims over the years, were to me, suspicions that I could not verify. But I do believe these women who came forward and they are now proof of those suspicions.”

Andrew Smith, who served on the board of Priests for Life from 2014 to 2021, has also called for Pavone's resignation and for an independent investigation into the accusations.


“I have been very surprised to see the reaction from Priests for Life has been solely one of victimization and self-aggrandizement,” Smith told The Pillar.

Priests for Life said in a statement to the Daily Beast that the group was "enormously saddened by recent efforts of some to revisit old accusations that contain numerous inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and mistruths, that have already been addressed." Pavone's bishop "investigated these claims over a decade ago and subsequently confirmed him to be in good standing and fully suitable for ministry," the statement added.

Priests for Life called the allegations by Imbarrato “further falsehoods," according to the Daily Beast.


You can read more about the accusations against Pavone in the Daily Beast here, and in The Pillar here and here.

'I strongly disagree': Fox News host speaks out after company bans reporting on Dominion lawsuit

David Edwards
February 26, 2023

Fox News/screen grab

Fox News host Howard Kurtz revealed on Sunday that his employer had forbidden him from reporting on a lawsuit brought against the company by Dominion Voting Systems.

"Some of you have been asking why I'm not covering the Dominion voting machines lawsuit against Fox involving the unproven claims of election fraud in 2020," Kurtz explained on his Media Buzz program.

"And it's absolutely a fair question. I believe I should be covering it," he continued. "It's a major media story given my role here at Fox, but the company has decided that as part of the organization being sued, I can't talk about it or write about it, at least for now."

Kurtz added an objection: "I strongly disagree with that decision. But as an employee, I have to abide by it, and if that changes, I'll let you know."

Dominion sued Fox News for $1.6 billion after on-air talent pushed the false narrative that then-President Donald Trump lost the election due to hacked voting machines. But court filings have shown that Fox News employees privately doubted the claims they were airing.

Watch the video below from Fox News or at the link.

Service changes have made it 'impossible' to track politicians' embarrassing and deleted tweets

ProPublica
February 26, 2023



Politicians haven’t stopped deleting some of their most cringeworthy tweets, but Politwoops, our project that has tracked and archived more than half a million deleted tweets from candidates and elected officials since 2012, is no longer able to track them.

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the platform has disabled the function we used to track deletions — and the new method that Twitter says should identify them appears to be broken. We have been unable to find anyone who can help us, and with Twitter surprising developers by announcing a move to a paid model for gathering tweet data, it’s no longer clear that Twitter is a stable platform on which to maintain this work. It seems fitting to give Politwoops a sendoff, a farewell to not exactly a friend but an odd part of our national political discourse for a decade.

Originally built by the Sunlight Foundation, Politwoops always had a tenuous existence. Born in 2012, it received its first eulogy just three years later after Twitter pulled the plug, only to come back just in time for the 2016 presidential election. (Now-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy welcomed it back, then deleted that tweet.) When Sunlight closed up shop, ProPublica took over the app, which is when I started to maintain it.

Politwoops was built on the idea that what elected officials and candidates said on Twitter mattered, at least a little. Like most users of Twitter, politicians usually tweet pretty mundane stuff: celebrations of victories mixed with jeers for opponents, some local flavor and attempts to jump into trending conversations. Most of the deletions are for mistakes any Twitter user could make: typos, forgotten or incorrect images, bad URLs. The occasional seems-like-a-toddler-grabbed-the-phone posts. Truly forgettable stuff.

But for those politicians who really embraced Twitter as a place where they could be themselves, the deletions sometimes spoke volumes. Some deleted posts are hard to forget, like one from then-President Donald Trump in the early evening of Jan. 6, 2021, not long after a mob invaded the U.S. Capitol and assaulted police officers in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election:

Trump had perhaps the most-watched Twitter account during my time running Politwoops. While he was in office, Trump’s tweets got a ton of attention, but they seldom were a departure from other things he said in public. I would often get emails from reporters asking whether he had, in fact, deleted some alleged tweet they had seen, and mostly he had not; other accounts would post images of fake tweets that never appeared on his timeline. Politwoops became an integral resource for checking whether viral (and often poorly photoshopped) tweets were fake.

All the while, other politicians were posting — and deleting — interesting, newsworthy and bizarre things on the platform. Running Politwoops for the past six years has, strangely enough, made many elected officials seem more human to me. They, and not Trump, are what I’ll remember most about the site.

Sometimes deleted messages appear to be offhand remarks that politicians have instantly thought better of: When political scientist Larry Sabato wrote, “You have to admit, Biden is on fire,” referring to then-Vice President Joe Biden’s debate performance against Republican Paul Ryan in October 2012, Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn retweeted it. And then deleted it 11 seconds later.

Other examples of this genre include Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie’s deletion of this somewhat cryptic tweet about men and war a minute after posting it, while New York Democratic congressional candidate Nate McMurray did the same for this hot take about The Buffalo News in October 2020.

In other cases, it was harder to tell why a tweet was deleted. Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, famous for his use of abbreviations and sparsely worded posts, is a known booster of the University of Northern Iowa, his alma mater. In November 2021 he posted that UNI was trying to recruit a local volleyball player. Fourteen hours later, he deleted the tweet. That athlete did, in fact, sign with UNI a year later.

As Twitter grew in popularity among politicians, its use became more professional, with staffers posting news and pictures. That led to some interesting conversations as staffers who had access to multiple accounts, including their own personal ones, sometimes clicked the wrong button. I’ve gotten more than one email or phone call asking if a tweet posted by mistake to the wrong account and then deleted could be removed entirely from Politiwoops. (Answer: We don’t do that.)

In December 2020, I got an email from someone who worked on the campaign of then-Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y. The congressman had posted and deleted a tweet that showed up on Politwoops, and would we consider removing it? It’s very rare that we would do that — that’s the whole point of the site — but when I brought up the deleted tweet I saw why he was asking: Maloney had mistakenly sent a public tweet that should have been a direct message, because it included his personal cell phone number. After some conversation, we decided to redact the number.

You can sometimes tell when it’s the actual politician and not a staffer who has posted a deleted tweet. If there’s swearing involved, it’s usually the politician. One of the basic conventions of politician Twitter is that swearing is usually a bad idea, but if you’re going to do it, don’t do it from your official government account, like Rep. Chuy Garcia, D-Ill., did last summer. (And probably don’t lash out at random users, either.)

After the 2016 election, when Twitter became an important part of fundraising for political campaigns, I started to notice a very strange pattern: some accounts, especially long-shot candidates running against high-profile incumbents, dramatically increased the number of their deletions. A good example of this was Kim Mangone, a California Democrat then running against McCarthy for a House seat. Mangone’s deletions consist mostly of her own retweets, which seems like a weird thing to do until you discover that Twitter prevents users from reposting identical tweets or retweets over and over in a short time span. The only way around that restriction is to delete the earlier post and then repost it.

Perhaps the most interesting political deleter is Sen. Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat active on the platform. Like many of his colleagues, Schatz deleted typos and some retweets of others’ posts. But he often posted an informal message — almost always without a link or mentioning other accounts — that gave you a glimpse into his actual thinking. Here’s an example where Schatz could have tagged some of the pundits he was criticizing, but didn’t. And another one in that vein. Or this one with early COVID advice on mask-wearing. Sometimes he’d even acknowledge the deletions, or provide an explanation for doing it. Most politicians do not do this.

Other senators are famous for their folksier tweets — Grassley excels at this — and there are some lawmakers who can be equally blunt on the platform. But I’d like to believe that I learned something about how Schatz thinks that would be hard for me to know otherwise, given that we’ve never met.

That’s one of the things I’ll miss most about running Politwoops: getting a glimpse behind the carefully crafted images that politicians present to the public. ProPublica would be happy to continue running this service, so if anyone at Twitter wants to help out, please get in touch. That includes you, Elon. 

politwoops@propublica.org

Tulsi Gabbard says Biden cabinet based on 'geneticist principles embodied by Hitler'

David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement
February 26, 2023

Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, photo by AFGE 

Former Democratic U.S. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard stunned a far-right Fox News host Friday night, falsely claiming President Joe Biden has chosen his cabinet members based solely on factors of "genetics" and "race" – while comparing Biden to Hitler.

In a segment attacking President Biden's cabinet, as The Daily Beast reported, Gabbard, a Fox News contributor, suggested he was "proud" to be "hiring people, selecting people...based on genetics, race, based on your blood, your genes. And where do we see that connection? Well, these are the very same geneticist core principles embodied by Nazism and Adolf Hitler."

President Biden put together one of the most qualified Cabinets in history. He also promised his Cabinet, unlike his predecessor's, would be as diverse as America itself.

"President Biden’s proposed cabinet would be the most diverse in U.S. history," The New York Times reported one day after his inauguration, "comprising more women and people of color than any cabinet before it — which, in many ways, fulfills Mr. Biden’s campaign promise to select a team that 'looks like America' and modernizes the predominantly male, white institution."

“'Building a diverse team will lead to better outcomes and more effective solutions to address the urgent crises facing our nation,' he said in a speech in December when announcing some of his cabinet nominees."

The Times also pointed to some "notable firsts" in Biden's Cabinet:

"In addition to the barrier-breaking Vice President Kamala Harris, there will be America’s first female Treasury secretary (Janet Yellen), its first openly gay secretary (Pete Buttigieg, for the Department of Transportation), its first Native American secretary (Deb Haaland, for the Department of the Interior), the first woman to serve as director of national intelligence (Avril Haines) and the first immigrant to lead the Department of Homeland Security (Alejandro Mayorkas), to name just a few."

Gabbard shared with Fox News host Jesse Watters her theory that "what we're seeing here is [Democrats'] philosophy, identity politics. And this is one of the main reasons why I left the Democratic Party because you seeing how their agenda of identity politics is directly undermining the traditional Democratic values that were expressed so beautifully and clearly, by Dr. Martin Luther King, that we should judge each other not based on the color of our skin, but based on our character."

It's demonstrably false to claim President Biden considered only diversity factors to build his Cabinet, which is comprised of people with tremendous experience and accomplishments. A look at their extensive biographies exposes Gabbard's claim as false.

Watch Gabbard below or at this link.

Trump is taking advantage of the Ohio disaster in a way that’s eerily reminiscent of 2016

Conservative dog-whistling about how white people in red states are pariahs was a tactic that helped Trump win a presidential election

Tayo Bero
Thu 23 Feb 2023 

As residents of East Palestine, Ohio struggle to pick up the pieces after a freight train carrying hazardous chemicals was derailed there nearly two weeks ago, rightwing media has seized on this moment to launch baseless conspiracies about why the government’s response has been so poor.

According to them, the Biden administration has abandoned East Palestine because the people living there are white, poor and working class.

“East Palestine is overwhelmingly white and it’s politically conservative. More than 70% of the voters in the surrounding counties supported Donald Trump in the last election. That shouldn’t be relevant but as you’re about to hear it pretty much is,” Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson said ominously on his show.

Donald Trump, being no doubt well-practised in how to capitalize on the grievances of the marginalized, took the chance to visit East Palestine on Wednesday and to commiserate with its residents about the Biden administration’s “betrayal” of them.

It’s the kind of political rabble-rousing that’s become typical in the aftermath of any American disaster. But the race and class-baiting happening here is also eerily reminiscent of the Republican party’s poor-white-victim strategy of 2016.

Back then, conservative dog-whistling about how white people in red states are pariahs in their own country who need to beef up their political muscle in order to ensure their own survival was a tactic that helped Trump win a presidential election. And I’m ruefully reminded of that period as I watch him and his supporters take advantage of East Palestine the same way.

But democrats aren’t taking this lying down. “Congressional Republicans and former Trump administration officials owe East Palestine an apology for selling them out to rail industry lobbyists when they dismantled Obama-Biden rail safety protections,” said the White House deputy press secretary, Andrew Bates, following Trump’s Wednesday visit.


And even as both administrations lob blame for what happened back and forth, it’s important to remember that the derailment is a symbol of much larger problems, ones that go far beyond the partisan quarelling we’re watching play out. As Greg Sargent notes in the Washington Post, this is really about “profit-driven rail companies underinvesting in safety [and] lobbyists weakening rail regulation”.

Look, there’s no doubt the people of East Palestine have a lot to be upset about. The government completely dropped the ball both in protecting them from an incident like this, and in responding to it after the fact.

Labour advocacy groups say this could have been prevented had it not been for weakened regulatory standards and cost-cutting measures by railroad companies (which occurred under both Democrats and Republicans) that have left staff stretched thin. The controlled burning of some chemicals following the derailment – a decision made by authorities to avoid a massive explosion – has also been a point of contention for residents, thousands of whom had to evacuate, and are still unclear about just how dangerous the fallout from this is going to be. And then to add insult to injury in their eyes, Biden has yet to come into town, but was just in Ukraine commemorating the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of the country, something the East Palestine mayor called a “slap in the face”.

Still, what’s clear is that the derailment and its repercussions have way more to do with decades of federal government disinvestment in small, poor communities like East Palestine, than anything to do with race.

And, Carlson’s suggestion on his show that places like Philadelphia and Detroit are “favored cities,” and that Black Americans are the “favored poor,” is laughable when you take even a cursory look at what’s happening in cities with a significant Black population like Flint, Atlanta and Chicago.

The people of East Palestine should be able to move on from this without being used as pawns in an endless political battle.

Tayo Bero is a Guardian US contributing writer

Hundreds protest new proposed election law in Baghdad

By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA

Protesters they wave Iraqi flags during protest against planned changes in electoral law, near the Iraq's parliament in Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, Feb. 27, 2023. Hundreds of protesters took to the streets in Baghdad to voice their dissent against a draft elections law that would increase the size of the country's electoral districts. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

BAGHDAD (AP) — Hundreds of protesters took to the streets in Baghdad on Monday to denounce a draft elections law that would increase the size of the country’s electoral districts, potentially undermining independent candidates.

The current legislation, under which the 2021 election was held, breaks up each of the country’s 18 provinces into several electoral districts. The law, which was a key demand of mass anti-government protests that kicked off in late 2019, was seen as giving independent candidates a better chance at winning.

Last week, Parliament debated the draft, which would return Iraq to having one electoral district per governorate. Independent lawmakers who objected to the proposal, walked out of the session, which ended early due to losing its quorum.

The Parliament was set to discuss the proposed law again in its session on Monday, but lawmakers voted to postpone the discussion until Saturday.

The return to a single district per province is backed by the Coordination Framework, a coalition of Iran-backed parties that forms the majority bloc in the current parliament, and which brought Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani to power last year.


Monday’s protests took place as heavy security forces surrounded the Parliament and closed off Joumhouriya Bridge on the Tigris River that leads to the government areas of the heavily fortified Green Zone.

Maryland Gov. Moore testifies for faster minimum wage boost

By BRIAN WITTE

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Comptroller Brooke Lierman listen during a panel discussion with business owners on Monday, Feb. 27, 2023 in Annapolis, Md., about Moore's proposal to accelerate an increase of the state's minimum wage to $15 in October, instead of waiting until 2025 and indexing future increases annually to inflation. (AP Photo/Brian Witte)

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Maryland Gov. Wes Moore pushed lawmakers on Monday to increase the minimum wage to $15 this year — instead of waiting until 2025 — and allow annual increases that are tied to the cost of living.

Part of the measure that would tie future increases to the Consumer Price Index beginning in 2025 is coming under particular scrutiny. During a panel discussion with some business leaders who support the Democratic governor’s proposal, Moore acknowledged the challenge of persuading lawmakers to support it.

“Now, we know this is going to be a fight. We know this is not going to be simple. We know that this is going to take some convincing,” Moore, a Democrat, said. He noted some other states, including ones controlled by Republicans, already have moved to add automatic cost of living adjustments to minimum wage increases.

Eighteen states have approved automatic increases tied to some type of index, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“They’ve adopted indexing already because their household income will keep pace with inflation and, importantly, businesses will get predictability,” Moore told the House Economic Matters Committee. “Index increases in wages are smaller. Business owners know when they are coming, and they can plan around them." 

The bill would increase the minimum wage to $15 in October, instead of Jan. 1, 2025, for businesses with 15 or more employees.

Maryland’s minimum wage went up to $13.25 in January. Under a law approved in 2019, it’s scheduled to reach $14 on Jan. 1.

Moore’s plan includes a hedge “against severe economic turmoil” by including a 5% cap on indexing, he told lawmakers. Also, the Maryland Board of Public Works can temporarily pause increases if necessary.

“But make no mistake, without indexing Maryland families will fall further and further behind over time,” Moore said.

Still, Republicans expressed wariness at the indexing component, which they are concerned could hurt businesses.

Del. Jesse Pippy, a Republican who is the House minority whip, questioned whether the measure would cause prospective employers to question whether they would want to come to Maryland.

“I think we have the same goals, but I’m concerned, I think with some of my colleagues here, that the indexing of the minimum wage could make it less attractive for an employer to want to be here, to want to do business here,” Pippy said.

Melvin Thompson, who represents the Restaurant Association of Maryland, said laws that increase costs of labor affect the restaurant industry disproportionately.

“Accelerating the phase in of Maryland’s $15 minimum wage will place additional burdens on restaurants and make it harder to fully recover from the pandemic on top of higher food and product prices due to inflation and ongoing supply chain issues,” Thompson said.

The indexing proposal was initially considered in 2019 in Maryland, when lawmakers approved phasing in increases over several years, but it was not included in the legislation that passed.

Senate President Bill Ferguson, a Baltimore Democrat, told reporters last week that “indexing is a tough issue.”

“I think that something will move forward, but I don’t think it will look the same way as it was introduced,” Ferguson said of the bill, adding that lawmakers are “trying to figure out a way forward that makes sense for both employers and employees.”

Maryland is one of 30 states with a minimum wage above the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour.

TikTok banned on all Canadian government mobile devices


By ROB GILLIES

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau answers questions at an announcement in Mississauga, Ontario, Monday, Feb. 27, 2023. Canada announced Monday it is banning TikTok from all government-issued mobile devices, reflecting widening worries from Western officials over the Chinese-owned video sharing app. Trudeau said it might be a first step to further action. Ontario Premier Doug Ford is at right. (Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press via AP)


TORONTO (AP) — Canada announced Monday it is banning TikTok from all government-issued mobile devices, reflecting widening worries from Western officials over the Chinese-owned video sharing app.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said it might be a first step to further action.

“I suspect that as government takes the significant step of telling all federal employees that they can no longer use TikTok on their work phones many Canadians from business to private individuals will reflect on the security of their own data and perhaps make choices,” Trudeau said.

The European Union’s executive branch said last week it has temporarily banned TikTok from phones used by employees as a cybersecurity measure.

The EU’s action follows similar moves in the U.S., where more than half of the states and Congress have banned TikTok from official government devices.

Last week, Canada’s federal privacy watchdog and its provincial counterparts in British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec announced an investigation to delve into whether the app complies with Canadian privacy legislation.

TikTok is wildly popular with young people, but its Chinese ownership has raised fears that Beijing could use it to collect data on Western users or push pro-China narratives and misinformation. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company that moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2020

TikTok faces intensifying scrutiny from Europe and America over security and data privacy amid worries that the app could be used to promote pro-Beijing views or sweep up users’ information. It comes as China and the West are locked in a wider tug of war over technology ranging from spy balloons to computer chips.

Canadian Treasury Board President Mona Fortier said the federal government will also block the app from being downloaded on official devices in the future.

Fortier said in statement the Chief Information Officer of Canada determined that it “presents an unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security.”

The app will be removed from Canadian government issued phones on Tuesday.

“On a mobile device, TikTok’s data collection methods provide considerable access to the contents of the phone,” Fortier said.

“While the risks of using this application are clear, we have no evidence at this point that government information has been compromised.”

Recent media reports have also raised concerns about potential Chinese interference in recent Canadian elections, prompting opposition parties to call for a public inquiry into alleged foreign election interference.

“It’s curious that the Government of Canada has moved to block TikTok on government-issued devices—without citing any specific security concern or contacting us with questions—only after similar bans were introduced in the EU and the US,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a email.

The company is always available to discuss the privacy and security of Canadians, the statement said. “Singling out TikTok in this way does nothing to achieve that shared goal,” the email said. “All it does is prevent officials from reaching the public on a platform loved by millions of Canadians.”

Legacy of Wounded Knee occupation lives on 50 years later

By KALLE BENALLIE, 

INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY

Madonna Thunder Hawk, 83, sits in her home near Rapid City, S.D., on Feb. 9, 2023. She was one of the four women medics during the occupation of Wounded Knee, which started on Feb. 27, 1973 and ended May 8, 1973. “I would crawl out there every night, and we’d just be out there in case anybody got hit,” she recalls. (Kalle Benallie/Indian Country Today via AP)


WOUNDED KNEE, S.D. (AP) — Madonna Thunder Hawk remembers the firefights.

As a medic during the occupation of Wounded Knee in early 1973, Thunder Hawk was stationed nightly in a frontline bunker in the combat zone between Native American activists and U.S. government agents in South Dakota.

“I would crawl out there every night, and we’d just be out there in case anybody got hit,” said Thunder Hawk, of the Oohenumpa band of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, one of four women assigned to the bunkers.

Memories of the Wounded Knee occupation — one in a string of protests from 1969 to 1973 that pushed the American Indian Movement to the forefront of Native activism — still run deep within people like Thunder Hawk who were there.

Thunder Hawk, now 83, is careful about what she says today about AIM and the occupation, but she can’t forget that tribal elders in 1973 had been raised by grandparents who still remembered the 1890 slaughter of hundreds of Lakota people at Wounded Knee by U.S. soldiers.

“That’s how close we are to our history,” she told ICT recently. “So anything that goes on, anything we do, even today with the land-back issue, all of that is just a continuation. It’s nothing new.”

Other feelings linger, too, over the tensions that emerged in Lakota communities after Wounded Knee and the virtual destruction of the small community. Many still don’t want to talk about it.

But the legacy of activism lives on among those who have followed in their footsteps, including the new generations of Native people who turned out at Standing Rock beginning in 2016 for the pipeline protests.

“For me, it’s important to acknowledge the generation before us — to acknowledge their risk,” said Nick Tilsen, founder of NDN Collective and a leader in the Standing Rock protests, whose parents were AIM activists. “It’s important for us to honor them. It’s important for us to thank them.”

Akim D. Reinhardt, who wrote the book, “Ruling Pine Ridge: Oglala Lakota Politics from the IRA to Wounded Knee,” said the AIM protests had powerful social and cultural impacts.

“Collectively, they helped establish a sense of the permanence of Red Power in much the way that Black Power had for African Americans, a permanent legacy,” said Reinhardt, a history professor at Towson University in Towson, Maryland.

“It was the cultural legacy that racism isn’t OK and people don’t need to be quiet and accept it anymore,” he said. “That it’s OK to be proud of who you are.”

A series of events in South Dakota in recent days recognized the 50th anniversary of the occupation, including powwows, a documentary film showing and a special honor for the women of Wounded Knee.

___

“THUNDERBOLT’ OF PROTEST

The occupation began on the night of Feb. 27, 1973, when a group of warriors led by Oklahoma AIM leader Carter Camp, who was Ponca, moved into the small town of Wounded Knee. The group took over the trading post and established a base of operations along with AIM leaders Russell Means, of the Oglala Sioux Tribe; Dennis Banks, who was Ojibwe; and Clyde Bellecourt, of the White Earth Nation.

Within days, hundreds of activists had joined them for what became a 71-day standoff with the U.S. government and other law enforcement.

It was the fourth protest in as many years for AIM. The organization formed in the late 1960s and drew international attention with the occupation of Alcatraz in the San Francisco Bay from 1969-1971. In 1972, the Trail of Broken Treaties brought a cross-country caravan of hundreds of Indigenous activists to Washington, D.C., where they occupied the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters for six days.

Then, on Feb. 6, 1973, AIM members and others gathered at the courthouse in Custer County, South Dakota, to protest the killing of Wesley Bad Heart Bull, who was Oglala Lakota, and the lenient sentences given to some perpetrators of violence against Native Americans. When they were denied access into the courthouse, the protest turned violent, with the burning of the local chamber of commerce and other buildings.

Three weeks later, AIM leaders took over Wounded Knee.

“It had been waiting to happen for generations,” said Kevin McKiernan, who covered the Wounded Knee occupation as a journalist in his late 20s and who later directed the 2019 documentary film, “From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock.”

“If you look at it as a storm, the storm had been building through abuse, land theft, genocide, religious intoleration, for generations and generations,” he said. “The storm built up, and built up and built up. The American Indian Movement was simply the thunderbolt.”

The takeover at Wounded Knee grew out of a dispute with Oglala Sioux tribal leader Richard Wilson but also put a spotlight on demands that the U.S. government uphold its treaty obligations to the Lakota people.

By March 8, the occupation leaders had declared the Wounded Knee territory to be the Independent Oglala Nation, granting citizenship papers to those who wanted them and demanding recognition as a sovereign nation.

The standoff was often violent, and supplies became scarce within the occupied territory as the U.S. government worked to cut off support for those behind the lines. Discussions were ongoing throughout much of the occupation, with several government officials working with AIM leaders to try and resolve the issues.

The siege finally ended on May 8 with an agreement to disarm and to further discuss the treaty obligations. By then, at least three people had been killed and more than a dozen wounded, according to reports.

Two Native men died. Frank Clearwater, identified as Cherokee and Apache, was shot on April 17, 1973, and died eight days later. Lawrence “Buddy” Lamont, who was Oglala Lakota, was shot and killed on April 26, 1973.

Another man, Black activist Ray Robinson, who had been working with the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization, went missing during the siege. The FBI confirmed in 2014 that he had died at Wounded Knee, but his body was never recovered. A U.S. marshal who was shot and paralyzed died many years later.

Camp was later convicted of abducting and beating four postal inspectors during the occupation and served three years in federal prison. Banks and Means were indicted on charges related to the events, but their cases were dismissed by a federal court for prosecutorial misconduct.

Today, the Wounded Knee National Historic Landmark identifies the site of the 1890 massacre, most of which is now under joint ownership of the Oglala Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes.

The tribes agreed in 2022 to purchase 40 acres that included the area where most of the carnage took place in 1890, the ravine where victims fled and the area where the trading post was located.

The purchase, from a descendant of the original owners of the trading post, included a covenant requiring the land to be preserved as a sacred site and memorial without commercial development.

And though internal tensions emerged in the AIM organization in the years after the Wounded Knee occupation, AIM continues to operate throughout the U.S. in tribal communities and urban areas.

In recent years, members participated in the Standing Rock protests and have persisted in pushing for the release from prison of former AIM leader Leonard Peltier, who was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder despite inconsistencies in the evidence in the deaths of two FBI agents during a shootout in 1975 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

___

A NEW GENERATION

Tilsen, now president and chief executive of NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led organization centered around building Indigenous power, traces the roots of his activism to Wounded Knee.

His parents, JoAnn Tall and Mark Tilsen, met at Wounded Knee, and he praises the women of the movement who sustained the traditional matriarchal system during the occupation.

“I grew up in the American Indian Movement,” said Tilsen, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. “It wasn’t a question about what you were fighting for. You were raised up in it. In fact, if you didn’t fight, you weren’t going to live.”

Tilsen credits AIM and others for most of the rights Native Americans have today, including the ability to operate casinos and tribal colleges, enter into contracts with the federal government to oversee schools and other services, and religious freedom.

He said the movement showed the world that tribes were sovereign nations and their treaties were being violated. And when AIM and spiritual leaders such as Henry Crow Dog, Leonard Crow Dog and Matthew King joined the fight, it became intergenerational.

“It became a spiritual revolution,” he said. “It also became a fight that was about human rights. It became a fight that was about where Indigenous people aren’t just within the political system of America, but within the broader context of the system; of the world.”

Tilsen appreciates that his parents were willing to participate in an armed revolution to achieve one of their dreams of establishing KILI radio station, known as the “Voice of the Lakota Nation,” which began operating in 1983 as the first Indigenous-owned radio station in the United States.

The Dakota Access Pipeline protest in 2016 became a defining moment for him and his brother. They had wondered, he said, what would be their Wounded Knee?

“What made it so powerful and what made it different was that you actually had grassroots organizers and revolutionaries and official tribal governments coming together, too,” Tilsen said. “I think that Standing Rock in particular actually reached way further than Wounded Knee because of how the issue was framed around ‘water is life.’”

Alex Fire Thunder, deputy director of the Lakota Language Consortium, said the occupation of Wounded Knee and other activism helped revitalize Indigenous languages and cultures. His mother was too young to have participated in the occupation but he said she remembered visits from AIM members in the community.

“The whole point of AIM, the American Indian Movement, was to bring back a sense of pride in our culture,” Fire Thunder, Oglala Lakota, told ICT.

___

FUTURE GENERATIONS

For Thunder Hawk, the issues became her lifelong work rather than momentary activism.

She joined AIM in 1968 and participated in the occupation at Alcatraz, the BIA headquarters, the Custer County Courthouse and Wounded Knee, as well as the Standing Rock pipeline protest in 2016.

She said work being done today by a new generation is a continuation of the work her ancestors did.

“That’s why we were successful in Indian Country, because we were a movement of families,” she said. “It wasn’t just an age group, a bunch of young people carrying on.”

She hopes her legacy will live on, that her great-great-grandchildren will see not just a photo of her but know what she sounded like and the person she seemed to be.

It’s something that she can’t have when she looks at a photo of her paternal great-grandparents.

“Hopefully that’s what my descendants will see, you know?” she said. “And with the technology nowadays, they can press a button, maybe, and it’ll come up.”

Frank Star Comes Out, the current president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, also believes it’s time for the previous generation’s work to be recognized.

Some of his family members strongly supported AIM, including his mother and father. He said it’s important to fight for his people, who survived genocide.

“That’s why I support AIM, not only on a family level,” he said. “I have a lot of pride in who I am as a Lakota. … Times (have) changed. Now I’m using my leadership to help our people rise, to give them a voice. And I believe that’s important for Indian Country.”

___

ICT producer Stewart Huntington, based in Colorado, contributed to this report.

AP WAS THERE: The occupation at Wounded Knee


By TERRY DEVINE

1 of 20
 A man holds up a rifle in Wounded Knee, S.D., in February 1973. On Feb. 27, 1973, members of the American Indian Movement took over the town, starting a 71-day occupation on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. 

(AP Photo/Jim Mone, File)

EDITOR’S NOTE — On Feb. 27, 1973, members of the American Indian Movement took over the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, starting a 71-day occupation on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

The standoff with the federal government grew out of turmoil within the Oglala Sioux Tribe as well as a protest of the federal government’s treatment of Native Americans. It became violent at times, and two Native American men were killed.

The siege left a lasting impact on members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the future of Native American activism.

On the 50th anniversary of the start of the occupation, The Associated Press is republishing this 1973 story by reporter Terry Devine, in the language and style used by journalists of the era.

Russell Means is pictured in Wounded Knee, S.D., in February 1973. Means, an American Indian Movement leader, said they were well armed. “We have high-powered rifles, shotguns, explosives and 14 hand grenades." (AP Photo/Jim Mone, File)

___

WOUNDED KNEE, S.D. (Feb. 28, 1973) — Militant Indians who took over this small town continued to hold 11 hostages Wednesday after one exchange of gunfire and unsuccessful attempts at negotiations, authorities said.

Gunshots were exchanged between the Indians and federal marshals earlier in the day, according to a Bureau of Indian Affairs official, but there were no reports of injuries.

An FBI spokesman said there were 11 hostages, ranging in age from 12 to 82.

John McCardy, an FBI agent at the scene, said attempts had been made to reach agreement on release of the hostages. However, he said, “At this time, there have been no meaningful negotiations.”

The Indians, who were demanding to see two U.S. senators concerning a list of demands, repeated earlier assurances that the hostages would not be harmed.

Spokesmen for the Indians also said a cease-fire had been arranged with the FBI.

Dick Wilson, president of the Oglala Sioux tribe that lives on the reservation, issued a statement accusing American Indian Movement members of “mob rule” and trying to “overthrow the tribal government.”

Wilson, 38, said the takeover of the historic community should be regarded as a criminal act and the demonstrating Indians should be “held responsible and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

The brief flurry of shots had come when a car carrying several Indians from Wounded Knee stopped about half a mile from a roadblock set up by the marshals, the FBI spokesman said.

He said the Indians, whose leaders said they were well-armed, emerged from the car firing rifles at the officers, and the marshals returned fire.

Indian leaders said there was other gunfire when Indians warned off cars that came too close to the village. Federal officers at the scene refused to discuss the shots and say whether they were returned. Another FBI official said only the Indians fired.

Marshals had personnel vehicles equipped with machine guns transported to Pine Ridge, 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Wounded Knee, Wednesday, but the marshals declined to say if the vehicles would be taken to the site of the demonstration.

Spokesmen for the Indians said the occupying force had grown from 200 when the trouble started to 400 by Wednesday.

The takeover of the community, site of a bloody battle between the U.S. Cavalry and Sioux in 1890, began at about 10 p.m. EST on Tuesday. By the middle of the afternoon Wednesday, an FBI spokesman in Washington said, “The Indians are in charge of the town, hostages are there, roadblocks are up, the demands are the same.”

Clyde Bellecourt, of Minneapolis, a leader of the American Indian Movement, said the exchange of gunfire occurred when Indians fired warning shots over cars that came within a quarter of a mile of the village of about 100. He said federal marshals returned the fire.

Carter Camp, of Ponca City, Oklahoma, a national coordinator of AIM, said warning shots were fired by Indians at a low-flying airplane, but claimed it was not hit. Camp said the cease-fire was agreed upon before 2 p.m. EST.

Camp said the hostages would not be hurt unless authorities — who had surrounded the village — came too close.




- American Indian Movement leader Dennis Banks leans into the casket of an AIM member killed by U.S. marshals in Wounded Knee, S.D., in February 1973. (AP Photo/Jim Mone, File)

The Indians — including members of AIM and of the Oglala Sioux tribe — held nine members of one family and a Roman Catholic priest. They demanded that Sens. Edward M. Kennedy, of Massachusetts, and J.W. Fulbright, of Arkansas, both Democrats, come to the 2,500-square mile (6,475-square kilometers) Pine Ridge reservation to discuss the Indians’ grievances.

The trouble allegedly started when the Indians broke into a trading post in the town 140 miles (225 kilometers) southeast of Rapid City and armed themselves with weapons and supplies. Their demands included an investigation of the dealings of the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs with the Oglala Sioux. They also sought an ouster of the current leaders, including Richard Wilson, tribal chairman, who has feuded with AIM members in the past.

Bellecourt and Russell Means, another AIM leader, said the Indians were well armed. “We have high-powered rifles, shotguns, explosives and 14 hand grenades,” Means said.

“The government has two choices: either they attack and wipe us out like they did in 1890, or they negotiate our reasonable demands.”

Wounded Knee was the site of the last major confrontation between Indians and whites in the campaign to settle the West. More than 200 Indian women, children and old men were massacred on Dec. 29, 1890, by troops of the 7th Cavalry. That was the regiment led by Gen. George Custer that was annihilated 14 years before at the battle of the Little Big Horn in Montana.

 A child stands in front of sayings written on a wall during the occupation of Wounded Knee, S.D., by members of the American Indian Movement in 1973. (AP Photo/Jim Mone, File)

Memories of Wounded Knee reflect mixed legacy after 50 years

By STEVE KARNOWSKI

1 Dwain Camp of Ponca City, Okla. speaks Friday, Nov. 16, 2007 in Oklahoma City, during the Oklahoma Indians Survival Walk and Remembrance Ceremony near the state Capitol. Camp, a member of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, was in California when his younger brother, Carter, called to say he and other leaders of the American Indian Movement took a group of activists into Wounded Knee in 1973. “He was telling me they were in a hell of a fight,” Camp, now 85, recalled. “I heard the gunfire and that was all I needed. I went up there and stayed for the duration of the standoff.” 

(Jaconna Aguirre/The Oklahoman via AP, File)

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Tensions that had been smoldering on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota flared up 50 years ago Monday, when activists from the American Indian Movement took over the town of Wounded Knee.

In the view of the protesters, Oglala Sioux tribal chairman Dick Wilson was in cahoots with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other federal authorities, and used threats of violence to intimidate his critics. But the 71-day occupation quickly morphed into an outpouring of anger with the federal government over decades of broken treaties, the theft of ancestral lands, forced assimilation and other injustices dating back centuries.

Two Native Americans died in the fighting, and a U.S. marshal was left paralyzed.

Wounded Knee had already been seared into history as the site of an 1890 massacre by U.S. Army cavalry troops in one of the last major military operations against Native Americans on the northern plains. Accounts vary, but the massacre left around 300 Lakota dead — including children, women and older people. Congress apologized in 1990.

Ahead of the 50th anniversary of the occupation, The Associated Press reached out to people who were at Wounded Knee or involved from a distance to hear their stories.

DWAIN CAMP

Dwain Camp, a member of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, was in California when his younger brother, Carter, called to say he and other leaders of the American Indian Movement took a group of activists into Wounded Knee.

“He was telling me they were in a hell of a fight,” Camp, now 85, recalled. “I heard the gunfire and that was all I needed. I went up there and stayed for the duration of the standoff.”

Their brother, Craig, a Vietnam veteran, also joined them. Camp said the rifles and shotguns the occupiers took from the trading post in town were no match for the weapons and armored vehicles the feds had.

“We were going to make it very expensive should they go ahead and roll in,” Camp said. “It didn’t come to that, thank goodness.”

Camp remembers the occupation with pride as “a very vital time” that changed his life. He said he experienced “the freest feeling that I could ever imagine.” He met AIM leaders who became famous, including Dennis Banks,Clyde Bellecourt and Russell Means. It was also a spiritual awakening for many occupiers and visitors, he said, with sweat lodge ceremonies providing a chance for prayer and learning about their traditions.

And it helped change the way Native Americans across the country saw themselves, Camp said.

“The Native people of this land after Wounded Knee, they had like a surge of new pride in being Native people,” he said.

Camp said the takeover was a catalyst for policy changes that had been “unimaginable” before, including the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, the Indian Child Welfare Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, to name a few. And it provided a focus for his own activism.

“After we left Wounded Knee, it became paramount that protecting Mother Earth was our foremost issue,” he said. “Since that period of time, we’ve learned that we’ve got to teach our kids our true history.”

Camp sees the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline — which drew thousands of Indigenous people and supporters to the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota in 2016 and 2017 — as a continuation of the resurgence fueled by Wounded Knee.

“We’re not the subjugated and disenfranchised people that we were,” he said. “Wounded Knee was an important beginning of that. And because we’re a resilient people, it’s something we take a lot of pride in.”

Camp said he wished he could return to Pine Ridge for the 50th anniversary observances, but traveling isn’t easy at his age. Instead, he plans to get together with his surviving brother, Craig, who lives near him in Ponca. They’ll burn some of the sacred sage that family members bring back every year from South Dakota.



JIM HUGGINS

FBI Special Agent Jim Huggins was on the other side of the roadblocks. He was one of several agents from the Denver FBI office who went to Wounded Knee to back up their colleagues.

“It was a dangerous situation,” recalled Huggins, 83, who’s retired and lives in Frankfort, Kentucky. “The people that took over the town of Wounded Knee were a group of militants, mostly out of Minneapolis. ... They were dedicated members of the American Indian Movement and were very anti-FBI.”

Huggins said there was often an exchange of gunfire between the two sides.

“Every time you were out on the roadblocks, you could anticipate a shot coming your way,” he said. “You could hear them whizz by pretty close sometimes. ... It seemed like every night just after sunset a few shots would ring our in our direction.”
MORE ON WOUNDED KNEE ANNIVERSARY– AP WAS THERE: The occupation at Wounded Knee

Unlike Camp, Huggins doesn’t think much good came out of the occupation.

“I think it was totally unnecessary on their part,” he said. “I base that on interviewing several Native Americans who lived for years on the reservation. They were totally against the takeover.”

And Huggins believes the ongoing tensions between AIM and authorities led to the killings of two FBI agents in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation two years later, one of whom was a good friend of his. AIM activist Leonard Peltier maintains he was wrongly convicted in their deaths, but successive presidents have denied requests for clemency.

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PHIL HOGEN

Phil Hogen was chief of staff to new U.S. Rep. James Abdnor, whose district included the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, when the occupation began just a few weeks after they moved to Washington.

“We were sort of on the front page of the Washington Post for 71 days while this was going on,” Hogen recalled. He said Abdnor “did not look kindly on that disruption. He was all for resolving differences.” But he said they worked hard to try to find a resolution, consulting with the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Hogen, 77, who lives off the reservation in Black Hawk, South Dakota, now has mixed, but mostly negative, views on the occupation.

“It was regrettable in many respects,” he said. “That is, the disruption of government, the confrontation, the loss of lives. I don’t know that all of those wounds have yet healed. But at the end of the day there was a greater awareness of American Indian/Native American concerns and injustices they had been exposed to.”

As a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Hogen said he could identify with some of their concerns.

“But it didn’t start out from my perspective as a national confrontation, rather a national confrontation looking for a place to happen,” he said. Tribal leader Wilson “sometimes ruled with an iron hand, but sometimes on Pine Ridge that was necessary.”

Hogen went on to serve as U.S. attorney for South Dakota under President Ronald Reagan.

If any lasting good came out of the occupation of Wounded Knee, Hogen said, it was that it “reminded the whole country about what a tragedy the original massacre was, and how those concerns or wounds were probably never appropriately addressed. It probably steered some resources toward solving some of those problems. ... But it left a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of people, so it cut both ways.”

Hogen said it’s also unfortunate that relatively little has been done with the massacre site, which was mostly private land until last fall.

“It’s the site of a national tragedy, and its regrettable that it isn’t better memorialized there than it is,” he said.

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JIM MONE

Jim Mone had been a photographer with The Associated Press in Minneapolis for about 3 1/2 months when he was sent to cover the takeover. He packed a couple hundred pounds of equipment — including photo transmitters, a complete darkroom and a bulk pack of black-and-white film — and got on a flight to Rapid City, South Dakota.

The closest available motel room was in the town of Martin, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) east of Wounded Knee. He set up his darkroom in the bathroom and mixed his chemicals. His editor soon arrived and said, “Let’s go to Wounded Knee.”

But that wasn’t easy. The FBI and AIM had erected roadblocks. So they took backroads to get as close as they could, ditching their car about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) away, and started walking. Soon they came upon surprised AIM members who let them keep going.

“They were courteous enough to tell us how much farther we had to go,” said Mone, 79, of of the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington.

Entering Wounded Knee, they saw a ransacked church where activists and journalists had gathered — and men with rifles. But Mone said he developed good relations with AIM leaders in the seven weeks he was there.

“They knew they needed the media, so I don’t think any media people got hurt,” he said. “You could get inches away from them, and photograph them. They treated us quite well and respectfully.”

The most worrying moments, he said, included firefights when he could see tracer bullets overhead, and a when a jet buzzed the town just a few hundred feet overhead.

To get an edge on his competition, Mone said, he practically crawled into a packed tipi where AIM activists and federal authorities smoked a peace pipe to mark the deal to end the occupation. He developed his film using equipment in his trunk before driving back to his motel, where he used a bulky transmitter connected to his room phone to send in the key picture, which Mone said was used by The New York Times the next day.

Mone said the atmosphere as the deal was signed was courteous, tense and businesslike all at once, and he believed that the fact the final negotiations were conducted in a tipi was “a sign of respect to the Native Americans.”

Retired Associated Press Photographer Jim Mone sits with prints of his photos taken from his coverage at Wounded Knee, Friday, Feb. 24, 2023, in Bloomington, Minn. On Feb. 27, 1973, members of the American Indian Movement took over the town of Wounded Knee, starting a 71-day occupation on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Mone was there to capture images of the standoff as it stretched into weeks. 

(AP Photo/Abbie Parr)