Twilight Inferno: The Extradition of an Indian

A jury in S. Dakota trying an Indian for killing an Indian is like a Black Man in a white woman’s novel been freed for killing a mockingbird. It just doesn’t happen. Harper Lee knew that. And so our stories and movies tell us something.

I sit in W. Hollywood, visiting a friend. News arrives. That John Graham, Southern Tuchone from the Yukon Territory. Will be sent to S. Dakota and tried for the murder of a woman he claims he knew but never killed. Anna Mae Pictou Aquash. He will be sent to a fate no film in this industry town has ever dared describe, I wonder at how someone would write the script. For all this. Twilight Inferno: The Extradition of John Graham
by antoinette nora claypoole

“…the American Justice system is not color blind…”

-- Barack Obama
from a debate at Howard University
June, 28, 2007



A jury in S. Dakota trying an Indian for killing an Indian is like a Black Man in a white woman’s novel been freed for killing a mockingbird. It just doesn’t happen. Harper Lee knew that. And so our stories and movies tell us something.

I sit in W. Hollywood, visiting a friend. News arrives. That John Graham, Southern Tuchone from the Yukon Territory. Will be sent to S. Dakota and tried for the murder of a woman he claims he knew but never killed. Anna Mae Pictou Aquash. He will be sent to a fate no film in this industry town has ever dared describe, I wonder at how someone would write the script. For all this.

OPENING: Camera circles a camp like wagon trains at sundown. Surrounding hides. Drying in the summer sun. Dreams dead as chokecherries in nuclear winter.


June 26, 2007. John Graham ordered extradited to the United States. To S. Dakota from Vancouver, British Columbia. Indicted for the murder of Annie Mae. Losing his appeal for extradition. Graham enters the corridors of rusted justice. For Annie Mae’ s brutal death warrants resolve but is not necessarily unearthed with the extradition of Graham to S. Dakota, a racist state who can’t be trusted with it’s own memory of Wounded Knee and massacre of children. It slays history, bending facts to suit the guilt it would rather nuke at Diablo Canyon than admit exists. That is, acknowledging acts of violence toward Indians has been neither sustenance nor necessity. In S. Dakota.

Though some say Graham killed Annie Mae and will “find justice” now, gold diggers have never been known for their honesty. Consider broken treaties Red Cloud. The list is longer than the history.

Guns fire into the twilight of an inferno. Children hide under formica table tops like their grandmothers once hid inside the folds of hollowed earth. Hoping to survive attack. Sound like Iraq? Or an old tour inside Universal Studio’s back lot? Yes. But it’s not.

This picture is the petroglyph of tribes throughout “America” since the arrival of Europeans. And just like any one day in the history of indigenous people, June 26, 2007 holds it’s own macabre story. Like it’s sister date of June 26, 1975 Lakota are involved. MicMaq are in the scene. And Southern Tuchone from the upper Yukon Territory. Converging to freeze frame time. And survive the bullets cutting into the lives of everyone who dare cross the demands of a government founded on revolution. Some dreams die young. As do their keepers. Their players and the plot.


FINAL SETTING Dim. People scattering. A city in fire.

In this script, this twilight. There would be no happy ending. It would be Babel in reverse. The village would be armed by the doctors who kill the patients they can’t save. And I am not afraid to say that the beautiful woman who is murdered brutally leaves traces of who her killers were but no one really listens. In the end a man is taken to trial but the lookely loos of this case cannot erase the facts. Racist places have an agenda. Killing Indians any way they can,

John Graham and his self-proclaimed innocence will be muted. Not by justice but by those who know little else than Covington’s “the only good Indian is a dead one”.

Taking the audience to a back room where evidence of truth lives. Is like film laying on the edit floor. The cut is deep. The editors asleep. Someone always forgets to save the best for last. Gunshots scattered the cast and at some point we are all hiding from the past. Shrapnel some call it. The past. A mine field. Shrapnelled vets abound.


EXIT all characters. The set is empty.

Broken chairs, empty shoes. There is no evidence. Of human existence. Truth. Compassion. Love. Are words in a circus song playing in the background. On an old stereo. Black vinyl. The needle broken. Stuck on repeat.

Flashback to dead. Young Woman. Children crying. In the background. Circus song still playing.

antoinette nora claypoole
June 28, 2007
Pasadena, Ca.
www.wildembers.com