From Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall.

Not to reduce John Trudell to one moment in his life, but this is worth remembering.

One a side note: This is also the reason I think the argument that the right to bear arms is irrelevant is hopelessly naive. Not to mention ahistorical. Yeah, you may not need to. But others have.

The Peltier assassination effort appears to be only one of several abortive but deadly FBI counterintelligence operations directed at the remnants of AIM during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Another, even grimmer example concerns the death of the family of AIM’s last national chairman, John Trudell:

In February 1979, Trudell led a march in Washington, D.C. to draw attention to the difficulties the Indians were having. Although he received a warning against speaking out, he delivered an address from the steps of the FBI building on the subject of the agency’s harassment of Indians . . . Less than 12 hours later, Trudell’s wife, Tina, his three children, and his wife’s mother were burned alive in the family home in Duck Valley, Nevada – the apparent work of an arsonist.