Documentary Movie Reviews
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Incident at Oglala (1992)
Rate:
5
Viewed:
9/25, 9/25
9/25:
I'm always leery when it comes to documentaries about murderers currently in prison and there's lot of
"he said, he said" stuff being thrown around.
To cite a couple of examples, there was a documentary called
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills
and a movie called The Hurricane starring Denzel Washington. Both had
a specific agenda that wanted me to be convinced that these guys were wrongfully convicted for something they
never did because of this or that reason. But both narratives turned out to be 100% false. In other
words, they actually committed the murders.
Yet killers in both cases eventually went free. Why? There were enough believers including celebrities and,
more importantly, money that set the wheels in motion. Their acquittals wasn't because of innocence but for
technical legal reasons which meant they were still guilty of the murders. That's how I felt while watching
Incident at Oglala.
There's too much obfuscation of the truth by Leonard Peltier's supporters that I had to research the case deeply
afterwards and see what exactly the story was. At the same time, there were three aspects of the case that
bothered me a lot: the cowboy boots being the chief reason how the whole thing got started, the "Mr. X,"
and the "Mr. X" driving away in a red pickup truck scot-free afterwards. The more I found out, the clearer
that Leonard Peltier did commit the murder of at least one FBI agent; if not, he's at least guilty of aiding
and abetting Robert Robideau and Darrelle "Dino" Butler the entire time.
If it was so...so...so obvious that the three men got railroaded by the U.S. government in 1975, then surely
people would've wised up to that fact in the ensuing years, yet all appeals, which numbered more than twenty,
had been reviewed and denied and every single U.S. President refused to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier
until this year when Joe Biden finally did it [I would take that with a huge grain of salt because he had
been obviously senile for many years and was being treated as a puppet the entire time].
Let's begin with the first and the most important question: what actually happened on June 26, 1975? That
shouldn't be hard to answer, but the documentary made it so, thanks to Michael Apted who's quite poor at
this sort of thing that he actually fucked up the entire mission of the
Up series. Okay, here it goes:
In separate unmarked cars, FBI Special Agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams drove into the Jumping Bull
Compound on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota at approximately 11:50 AM since they had the
jurisdiction and warrant to arrest Jimmy Eagle, whom they spotted driving a red pickup truck (really a suburban)
with a white top, after receiving a report that he was involved with three other men for the kidnapping, robbing,
and beating of two individuals on June 23. Immediately, they were shot upon after three men
(Leonard Peltier, Norman Charles, and Joe Stuntz who eventually died in the battle) exited the suburban (Robert
Robideau and Dino Butler joined in soon since they were at nearby camp) which came to be at least 125 bullets
in total versus the FBI agents' 5, rendering them virtually defenseless. Minutes later, at point-blank range,
Jack Coler was shot twice in the head, and Ronald Williams put his right hand out in a defensive position and
was shot through it to his head. Before that, they had been shot and lain wounded.
Here's the issue: if Robert Robideau, Dino Butler, and Leonard Peltier were claiming self-defense and they're
(as a matter of fact, there were at least four more others involved) were at least 200 yards away when the
gunfire battle happened, then why kill the two FBI agents after they had been already shot? In other words,
there couldn't be any self-defense when threat of them had been successfully eliminated.
A witness testified these three were the only ones who walked to the FBI agents lying on the
ground along with a confirmed fingerprint match of Robert Robideau inside Ronald Williams' car. Dino Butler
eventually refused to play along with the "Mr. X" theory, having officially rejected it outright in 1995 and
calling Robert Robideau and Leonard Peltier liars by saying:
"Well, there is no 'Mr. X.' There was no man coming to our camp that day bringing dynamite...to create this lie
to show that someone else pulled the trigger. The final agreement in that meeting was that the 'Mr. X' idea
wouldn't be used because it was a lie...that was all totally false. Totally untrue. That never happened."
Also, Robert Robideau confessed to committing the murders years later and, had it happened again, said, "Those
FBI agents would be dead again." He also added, "They were shot in the head at close range." Therefore, his
statements proved all three were guilty of murdering FBI Special Agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams.
Regardless, Leonard Peltier kept changing his version of what happened so many times to prove his innocence
that they ended up contradicting each other. In 2002, the Indian community admitted to knowing he did
it. And let's not forget that Leonard Peltier, along with other American Indian Movement (AIM) members,
ordered the murder of Anna Mae Aquash because he mistakenly thought she was an FBI informant on top of
confessing to her what he did on June 26, 1975.
During three trials for the murder of Anna Mae Aquash, Ka-Mook Nichols, who's Dennis Banks' ex-wife, testified
what Leonard Peltier said to her once: "The motherfucker [Ronald Williams] was begging for his life, but I shot
him anyway." Others had supported it as well. By the way, Leonard Peltier was the only one carrying an AR-15
rifle, and at least three bullets, namely .223, were fired in close range from that gun.
American Indian journalist-founder Paul DeMain of News From Indian Country had defended Leonard Peltier
for years but changed his position completely based on the "result of his own investigations and the numerous
people with knowledge about the case who he says came forward and implicated Peltier."
As for the murders that happened on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation prior to June 26, 1975, former FBI agent
Joseph Trimbach said that dozens of so-called unsolved murders on the reservation were mostly fabricated
by AIM's top leaders in an attempt to discredit the FBI and also added, "Many of the murders that did actually
occur were solved and were attributed to things like accidents, the weather and fights and alcohol-related
causes, not the FBI. And some of the murders were attributed to AIM."
All in all, Incident at Oglala isn't credible but serves a good starting point for those who aren't
aware of what happened and should be advised to perform further due diligence.
9/25:
I rewatched Incident at Oglala, and it's more clear now.
However, they've made what happened so murky that the documentary is obviously slanted. Yes, I agree that
what the FBI did with Myrtle Poor Bear was illegal, but Leonard Peltier was being wanted for a lot of crimes,
besides what happened at the Jumping Bull Compound, including shooting at an off-duty police officer in Milwaukee.
The last thirty minutes is basically nitpicking over technical stuff. It doesn't matter anyway because on
September 22, 1991, Leonard Peltier admitted to 60 Minutes that he fired at the two agents on
June 26, 1975.
All in all, like I said before, Incident at Oglala doesn't tell the full story on purpose.