Goonies

Pirate Ballerina has a fascinating excerpt from a chapter by American Indian "activist" David Seals in the forthcoming Eating fire, tasting blood: Breaking the great silence [sic] of the American Indian holocaust. In it Seals claims that Ward Churchill "snitched him out" (or "bad-jacketed" him) with the "feds," was in fact a "fed" himself who spied on and attempted to disrupt the American Indian Movement (AIM).

Yeah I know: the Leninist National AIM and Churchill's Trotskyite Colorado AIM have been accusing each other of being Cointelpro plants for decades. It would be funny if people hadn't ended up dead because of it. But it's not really surprising.

No, what I noticed was the tinny sound of Seals' swashbuckling-70s radicalism:

I called an emergency AIM Security meeting at Green Grass, and ended up getting interrogated all day by some bad-asses who'd also heard the rumors from colorado and california, and didn't know whether to believe it or not. I'd been involved in acts of eco-sabotage and political robbery since 1973, and they didn't know what to think about my impending arraignment and major charges of felonies. It was a very tense and terrible time. I'd already learned that jail was death. The loss of freedom, I'd learned, was my greatest fear. It loomed like the blackest cloud of my life.

"I left out one charge," I explained to the grim, dark faces glaring at me. "A bank robbery only a cop would know, and not even a local or state cop at that. Only a fed would know it. I didn't even tell my lawyer, when we went in to plead guilty to the police station and enumerate all the other charges, so they might go easy on me. I pled guilty." "You didn't confess to this one job?" "No. No one knew about it but me.

"But Ward Churchill knows it?

"Yeah."

Yeah. At least we can be thankful that the warfare between the two AIMs engendered, besides some dead bodies and endless reams of self-absorbed socialist crap, the near-perfect acronym, GOONs.

Update: Check out how the blurb at Amazon for Eating fire, tasting blood begins:

As you walk out of your front door tomorrow morning, look down. Look to your left and to your right. Touch the earth: the concrete, the sidewalk, or whatever surrounds you. Undoubtedly you will be touching the layered coverings of the remains of indigenous peoples. Not arrowheads, not broken pieces of pottery —
but the very DNA of the first peoples of this continent.

Time for another blogger cliche: Eeeeeyyyewwwwwwwww.

Update II: I bet author and editor Marjo Moore collects those velvet Indian princess paintings.