John Graham (b. 1944)
John Graham is a Champagne Aishihik First Nations citizen. When he was eighteen, he was in the 1973 Council for Yukon Indians’ delegation that presented the need for a land claims settlement to Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau.1)
Graham travelled to Minnesota and got involved with the American Indian Movement (AIM) and their Indigenous rights movement. In the mid-1970s, Dennis Banks and others were at the top of the movement, and they were backed by Leonard Peltier and others. John Graham, Arlo Looking Cloud, and Thelma Rios were below them in the organization. Reports say that more than sixty people were murdered on the reserve between 1972 and 1976 when tribal leaders carried on a war against AIM and the Indigenous people who had allied with them. This was fuelled by FBI infiltrators.2)
In 1977, Peltier was extradited to the States on information now recognized as perjured. He was sentenced to life in prison for the 1973 murder of two FBI agents. In 2021, that conviction was put in doubt when a former US attorney admitted that his department used extreme bias and questionable tactics in prosecuting Peltier. John Graham, Looking Cloud, and Rios were charged with the kidnapping and murder of Canadian activist Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash and this case was linked to the Peltier case, thirty years earlier, as many of the same witnesses were called in both cases.3)
Before his extradition, Graham was living quietly in Vancouver, a family man and father of eight children. He was charged in the United States in 2003 and extradited in December 2007.4) In February 2022, a British Columbia Court of Appeal ruled that the Canadian Government erred in consenting to the extradition which allowed the US to charge Graham with a more serious crime with a harsher minimum sentence. The focus on reviewing Peltier’s case may mean the release of both Leonard Peltier and John Graham.5)