PART III

BISMARCK, N. D. – Red Fawn Fallis’ recent sentencing to federal prison was the closing of a criminal court proceeding here, but also the opening of a curtain covering a frame-up of hundreds of indigenous water protectors like her who support the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s ongoing litigation against permitting the Dakota Access Pipeline, according to her legal team.

“There’s still a lot to come to the light of day regarding Red Fawn’s case,” team member Bruce Ellison told the Native Sun News Today.

A North Dakota judge sentenced Red Fawn on July 11, 2018, to 57 months in prison, stemming from a bargain to plead guilty to one count of civil disorder and another of arms and ammunition possession. The charges date to an Oct. 27, 2016 officer-involved weapons discharge during the mass arrest of 142 pipeline resisters who call themselves water protectors.

Ellison sustains that she is a survivor of an orchestrated joint corporate-government operation casting the water protectors as armed extremists to justify their removal from spirit camps set up to foil private pipeline construction across the Missouri River that violates treaty rights and threatens contamination of downstream drinking water.

“By Oct. 27, they had already arrested at least 140 people, and they arrested another 140 more that day. None of them had firearms,” he said.

The arrests were among more than 800 that took place as part of a seven-month militarized police operation launched Aug. 10, 2016, under the unauthorized supervision of Afghan and Iraq War military intelligence and counter-insurgency surveillance contractor TigerSwan, at the behest of Fortune 500 pipeline construction parent company Energy Transfer Partners.

Testimony and court documents showed security contractors and law enforcement officers walking through camps never snapped a picture of a gun among campers until FBI informant Heath Harmon planted a firearm registered to him in the pocket of a jacket he put on Red Fawn minutes before her arrest.

It was the weapon recovered at the arrest scene where three shots from it bit the dust between her legs as officers pushed and held her head and body to the ground while struggling to cuff her hands behind her back, according to the proceedings.

Harmon testified that Red Fawn was his ticket to get into the camps, which the FBI paid him to infiltrate. As she was grieving the recent deaths of her mother and grandmother, she was vulnerable to his advances and became romantically involved, her sister Red Dawn Foster told the judge.

“It stinks from so many levels, beginning with the incredible abuse of this woman just so they could get a provocateur in and amongst water protectors,” Ellison commented. Red Fawn is trying to rise above her history as an abused child and partner in womanhood, “like too many native and other women from their respective communities,” he noted.

“It’s outrageous,” he said. “If she had wanted to go to trial, we would have filed a motion to find outrageous conduct, which is defined as something that shocks the conscience of the community.”

Native rights advocate Leonard Peltier, who like Red Fawn is an American Indian Movement constituent, used the outrageous conduct argument against the FBI but is still in prison on weapons charges dating to the movement’s 1973 armed occupation of Wounded Knee. Amnesty International considers Peltier the world’s leading political prisoner.

“The last thing Red Fawn wanted was to see anybody get hurt,” Ellison said. “I believe the evidence reasonably shows she was targeted for arrest that day to fuel the wet dreams promoted by law enforcement and other authorities.”

Her defense was successful in moving her trial venue from Bismarck to Fargo on the grounds that “government and corporations used news releases drafted by a sheriffs’ association-hired public-relations firm to create a climate of fear, distrust and disinformation that did result in violence against water protectors,” he said.

“What was being put out to the public and to minds open to the false inflammatory information war was that water protectors were armed and had guns in the camp,” he said.

The court record establishes that “the National Sheriffs’ Association, in collaboration with the public relations firm Off The Record Strategies, was active in efforts to discredit water protectors by portraying them as violent and criminal.”

Representatives of the dozens of agencies and businesses hired to put down the dissidence met regularly throughout the state-declared emergency at offices established to facilitate joint operations, known as SLICs (State and Local Intelligence Centers), a remnant of governmental response to 9-11 terror attacks.

Involved were tax-supported agencies including Montana Analysis and Technical Information Center, Minnesota Fusion Center, North Dakota State and Local Intelligence Center, South Dakota Fusion Center, Washington State Fusion Center, Illinois Statewide Terrorism & Intelligence Center, Iowa Division of Intelligence and Fusion Center, Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the Transportation Security Administration.

In December 2017, they issued a Field Analysis Report concluding: “We assess suspected environmental rights extremists exploited Native American causes in furtherance of their own violent agenda during a campaign to halt construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.”

That and recommendations to beware of future pipeline opposition by “environmental rights extremists” can be accessed by the public, thanks to Freedom of Information Act requests by the muckraking investigative journalism outlet The Intercept.

The tactics used to legitimize use of force resulted in depiction of Red Fawn as an “agitator” and “instigator”; widely-viewed social media posts from the Morton and Cass County Sheriff’s Offices suggested that she committed attempted murder, according to court documents.

The documents also relate several comments describing Red Fawn as a “terrorist” who “should be imprisoned for life.” Yet the defense argument that attitudes like these created a prejudicial jury pool did not win a decision to move the case out of the North Dakota district to ensure a fair trial.

As a result, Red Fawn “is a political prisoner of the resistance at Standing Rock, in my opinion, and will remain so as long as she is under the jurisdiction of the court,” Ellison said. “This is her sacrifice.”

Also claiming her as a political prisoner, her support committee Free Red Fawn stated: “She stood up for justice, against environmental genocide, encroachment of our land and water. We all can act on her behalf by taking part in frontline rallies, marches and divestment campaigns.”

(Contact Talli Nauman at talli.nauman@gmail.com)