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Lawsuit alleges Bureau of Indian Affairs officers “executed” unarmed Shoshone-Paiute man in Idaho
(ictnews.org)
This story was originally published by InvestigateWest.
Melanie Henshaw
InvestigateWest
The family of an unarmed Shoshone-Paiute man who was shot and killed by Bureau of Indian Affairs police in March 2024 after a prolonged chase in southwestern Idaho has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit over his death.
The lawsuit accuses two unnamed BIA police officers of chasing Cody Whiterock outside of their jurisdiction, before shooting him multiple times in the face, back and chest. The officers then “falsified or withheld evidence to escape accountability,” the lawsuit says. The agency has not identified the officers involved and declined to comment for this article.
“The two BIA officers essentially executed Cody after an exhausting 80-minute chase through the snow,” the lawsuit says.
InvestigateWest reported last year on the killings of Whiterock and his cousin, Kirby Paradise, at the hands of BIA police.
After a ranch owner called 911 reporting an unwanted person on private, non-tribal land on March 2, 2024, two BIA officers found Whiterock, a father of two, trying to leave in his car alongside a rural stretch of Idaho Route 51 in Owyhee County, about 15 miles south of Riddle, Idaho. His car became stuck in the ice, and Whiterock ran from the officers. One officer chased him through a snowy sagebrush prairie for the next 80 minutes, according to law enforcement records.
Whiterock’s family and lawyer cast doubt on the circumstances of the chase.
The officer who chased Whiterock said the two got in an altercation that knocked him on his back, and Whiterock “continued aggressing him” and “kept reaching for his waistband.” The officer said he then hit Whiterock with the muzzle of his rifle, which was slung over his shoulder, “a movement virtually impossible from his position on the ground,” according to the lawsuit.
The officer also said he shot Whiterock four times at close range in the chest and face. A death certificate said that Whiterock was also shot twice in the back, and found lying face-down in the snow.
Whiterock’s family said he was unarmed — no weapons were recovered — and posed no immediate threat.
“Curiously, despite the reported length of the pursuit, at its end Whiterock’s dead body was located only about 200 yards from the roadway,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit is seeking an injunction against further alleged Fourth Amendment violations by the BIA against tribal citizens, and states that at no point did the pursuit and eventual killing of Whiterock cross onto tribal land.
The BIA is a small federal agency that is responsible for the fulfillment of some of the United States government’s treaty obligations to federally recognized tribes, which can include law enforcement — meaning BIA officers patrol a reservation rather than tribal or state police. The BIA provides direct policing services to roughly 200 tribal communities, including the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, where Whiterock lived.
The suit is filed against three Bureau of Indian Affairs police officers — the two “unknown” officers involved in the killing of Whiterock as well as their supervisor.
InvestigateWest’s reporting found that the agency did not report the deaths of Whiterock and Paradise to the U.S. Department of Justice, as required under the Death in Custody Reporting Act, a federal law meant to track in-custody deaths. The law requires states and federal agencies to report the number of deaths that occur in their custody, including arrest-related deaths, to the federal government.
Deaths at the hands of BIA police are rarely reported publicly, particularly if they occur on tribal land. A lack of media attention means many killings of Native Americans by the BIA and other police agencies go unacknowledged publicly.
The lawsuit claims that BIA police lacked legal authority to pursue Whiterock outside the boundaries of the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, noting the agency had no memorandum of understanding with local law enforcement in Idaho. Since the BIA lacked jurisdiction, any use of force against Whiterock was “unreasonable and unlawful.”
“It’s the first time in my career where I’ve had a case where the officers may not have had any jurisdiction at all,” Idaho-based attorney T. Jason Wood, who is representing Whiterock’s family, said in an interview.
The lawsuit says that the BIA officers patrolling the Duck Valley Reservation lacked training regarding jurisdictional limitations.
Critics have argued that the agency operates without sufficient oversight, with a 2021 internal audit showing serious issues with how the agency tracks and treats in-custody deaths, particularly at the jail facilities it oversees.
The agency recently settled a civil rights lawsuit over a separate killing by one of its officers. The lawsuit claimed that Arlin Bordeaux, a Northern Cheyenne man and father of two, was killed by a BIA police officer after the officer tased, pepper-sprayed, beat him with a baton and shot him three times in the back in Lame Deer on the North Cheyenne Indian Reservation, which shares geography with Montana. Federal authorities declined to prosecute the officers who caused his death. One of those officers, Murrell Deela, was charged in October with sexually assaulting a Northern Cheyenne child, and eventually banned from the reservation by the Northern Cheyenne tribal government.
“They killed my son like a dog,” said Kenneth Bordeaux, the man’s father, a former police officer on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
Wood says the agency refuses to release a report on Whiterock’s autopsy. He added that InvestigateWest’s reporting was critical to his ability to file the complaint.
The FBI has declined to investigate Whiterock’s death. But as InvestigateWest has reported, the FBI is in charge of investigating in-custody deaths that occur under BIA’s watch, according to a memorandum of understanding between the agencies.
Instead, Idaho State Police conducted an inquiry into Whiterock’s death. It’s unclear why the FBI, which declined to comment, did not investigate, and the BIA did not respond to requests for more information from InvestigateWest. Idaho State Police did not return a message Friday asking the status of the inquiry.
The lawsuit is seeking to uncover the identities of the involved officers, and also seeks damages.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct Whiterock’s tribal affiliation.
InvestigateWest is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Visit investigatewest.org/newsletters to sign up for weekly updates.
The post Lawsuit alleges Bureau of Indian Affairs officers “executed” unarmed Shoshone-Paiute man in Idaho appeared first on ICT.
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When Billie Eilish told Grammy audiences that “no one is illegal on stolen land,” she ignited a small firestorm that went beyond celebrity discourse, revealing deep fault lines in how America confronts its own history.
Critics accused her of hypocrisy, pointing out that her multimillion-dollar Los Angeles home sits on Tongva land. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas invoked her line in a Senate hearing, calling the entertainment world “deeply corrupt.” Meanwhile, pundits and commentators spawned online backlash and memes. And The Washington Post published an op-ed defending property law and dismissing land restitution.
“No, Billie Eilish, Americans are not thieves on stolen land,” op-ed authors Richard Epstein and Max Raskin wrote on Thursday. Only days before, Eilish responded to ongoing Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and killings by pointing to America’s history of violent colonialism and genocide directed at Indigenous peoples. The Washington Post authors argue “it’s time to put Eilish’s theory of property out to pasture,” arguing, “it is easy to call land stolen, but what about the innocent purchasers who acquired in good faith in the interim? Are they thieves?”
This language, these arguments, are reasonably predictable. They appear when Indigenous dispossession is pushed into the public eye.
But there are countless examples throughout history of Indigenous peoples being forced to cede land under threat of violence, take for example, what is currently Washington State. Between 1854 and 1855, territorial governor Isaac Stevens pressured tribes in the region into ceding much of the West Coast to the United States. His warning to Yakama Chief Kamiakin was explicit: “if you do not accept the offer … you will walk in blood knee-deep.” The threat was not rhetorical — less than a decade earlier, the California gold rush brought settlers west and culminated in what California Governor Gavin Newsom would later call genocide. “No other way to describe it,” Newsom said in 2019. “That’s the way it needs to be described in the history books.”
The U.S. frequently combined economic pressure, unequal bargaining power, and the threat of military force in treaty negotiations, and establishing Minnesota was no different. The federal government withheld rations promised to tribes after previous land cessions, and allowed settlers to violate previous treaties — which are federal law — in order to hunt and claim land in agreed-upon Indian territory. With the treaties of 1851, signed at Mendota and Traverse des Sioux, the Dakota Nation was forced to cede 35 million acres — nearly the entire bottom half of what later became Minnesota. Tensions eventually led to the Dakota War, a five-week conflict that forced the removal of nearly all Indigenous peoples from the state. Those actions, that war, have also been called genocide by Holocaust and Genocide scholars, as well as the act’s direct beneficiaries: the Minneapolis and St. Paul City Councils.
A handmade sign marking Ute land stands near Blanding, Utah in June 2016. Rick Bowmer / AP Photo
In The Washington Post, Epstein and Raskin refer to the land acknowledgements that spring from these histories as “accepting generational guilt,” adding that statements of apology, like those by the state of California, “thankfully” don’t transfer title backward to the original owners, “for if they did, civilization would collapse.”
Scholars of settler colonialism have long documented how the U.S. has framed whiteness as synonymous with “civilization,” while casting Indigenous peoples as obstacles to progress — a racist framework where owning property becomes the key marker to civilization. Epstein and Raskin’s argument operates squarely within this tradition. By treating property titles as the foundation of civilization, it obscures the history that made them possible: war, forced removal, forced assimilation of children, and policies that historians and government officials have described as genocide.
Take for instance the Morrill Act of 1862, which used land taken from tribal nations to fund the land-grant university system: nearly 11 million acres taken from more than 250 tribes to establish 52 universities.
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Tristan Ahtone, Robert Lee, Amanda Tachine, An Garagiola, Audrianna Goodwin, Maria Parazo Rose, & Clayton Aldern
Then there are state Enabling Acts, laws passed by Congress that authorized the formation of a state government and allowed for admission to the Union. As Indigenous homelands became territories and territories became states, newly-formed state governments carved land out of their newly acquired “public domain” through their enabling acts to fund state institutions, services, and public works. Those lands are now known as state trust lands.
The primary purpose of state trust lands was education and has remained so to this day. Land-grant colleges, for instance, opened their doors with the help of the Morrill Act, then states stepped in with more income from state trust lands. Grist investigations have since identified 14 land-grant universities still benefiting from more than 8 million acres of land taken from 123 Indigenous nations through 150 Indigenous land cessions. This land generated approximately $6.6 billion in profit between 2018 and 2022.
Nearly 25 percent of state trust lands that benefit land-universities are designated for mining or fossil fuel production. In Montana, oil and gas extraction, timber, grazing, and other activities on state trust lands generated $62 million for public institutions, with a majority of that cash going to K-12 schools. Ten states use nearly 2 million acres of state trust lands to fund state prison systems. In 2024, those lands disbursed an estimated $33 million in funding to carceral facilities. At least 79 reservations in 15 states have state trust lands within their boundaries, an estimated 2 million acres, that provide revenue to support public institutions and reduce the financial burden on taxpayers. “Every dollar earned by the Land Office,” said New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard in 2019, “is a dollar taxpayers do not have to pay to support public institutions.”
In at least four states, tribal nations pay states for access to those lands despite being within their own territorial boundaries — an estimated 11,000 acres. The Ute Tribe paid the State of Utah more than $25,000 to graze on those trust lands in 2023 alone. While critics have been quick to point out that institutions like K-12 schools benefit everybody, it’s important to remember that many tribal members don’t attend state-run schools at all, they enroll in Bureau of Indian Education schools that receive funding from the federal government.
But return of those lands remains mired in bureaucracy. In 2024, Grist reported that more than 90,000 state trust lands inside the Yakama reservation — the reservation created under threat of walking knee deep in blood — were mistakenly carved from the Yakama Nation due to a federal filing error. The tribe has fought for its land to be returned for nearly seven decades, but Washington has refused to let them go: American property law says the state’s ownership over those lands is legal because the state holds the deed.
Read Next
A filing error put more than 90,000 acres of Yakama Nation land in the hands of Washington state
But Washington acknowledges that this is an injustice, and that that land should be returned to the tribe. However, then-Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz, argued that righting that wrong would take revenue away from beneficiaries like K-12 schools. The state, therefore, would need to be compensated for their loss of revenue, even though those lands were wrongfully taken in the first place. Between 2021 and 2023, those state trust lands generated about $573,000 for state beneficiaries — less than 1 percent of all revenue from all trust lands across Washington state.
In The Washington Post op-ed, the writers say that “the effort to undo the past would involve trillions of dollars in transfer payments and coerced title shifts that would unsettle every home mortgage, every mining and oil lease.” They are correct. To return land to tribal nations would be to unsettle — pun intended — the very foundations that drive climate change and threaten life on the planet. A fact echoed by more than 600 scientific and conservation studies over the past 20 years that say Indigenous land return offers significant environmental returns with serious implications for tackling climate change.
Ultimately, the controversy surrounding Eilish’s remark reveals less about celebrity or even property than the limits of America’s moral imagination, including at influential media outlets. Democracy may die in darkness, but America was built in daylight, and in America, oppression and injustice don’t need shadows to thrive — they need champions.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Billie Eilish, stolen land, and the climate cost of America’s dispossession on Feb 6, 2026.
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The ICT Newscast for Friday, February 6, 2026, covers the Minneapolis Native American community stepping up, an underwater discovery in Wisconsin, the Super Bowl this weekend, and more. Check out the ICT Newscast on YouTube for this episode and more.
- Powwow Grounds coffee shop is ground zero for helpers in Minneapolis.
- U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement encounters Phoenix protesters.
- NDN Collective Founder and Chief Executive Officer Nick Tilsen’s day in court ended in mistrial.
- The first Native American woman to compete in the Winter Olympics remembers her Salt Lake City competition in 2002.
- It’s Super Bowl weekend! Learn about Native athletes on the field, including flag football for Native girls.
- Ancient canoes are discovered underwater in Wisconsin.
- Art as resistance bolsters ICE protesters.
- DJ AO, or Austin Owen, spins his way from hiphop to special celebrations.
View previous ICT broadcasts here every week for the latest news from around Indian Country.
The post ICT NEWSCAST: ICE protests take different forms, the big weekend for sports and more appeared first on ICT.
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Sandra Hale Schulman
Special to ICT
SANTA ROSA, California — Decades in the making, the never-before-seen archives of the late Floyd Red Crow Westerman are on exhibit at the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center in California now through July.
Westerman, 1936-2007, was a boarding school survivor, a Marine veteran, an American Indian Movement activist, a protest folk singer, an artist, and a noted actor whose breakthrough role came in his 50s with the role of Chief Ten Bears in “Dances with Wolves” in 1990. He was also a Sisseton Dakota tribal member.
The “One Man’s Journey” exhibit includes his film scripts with handwritten notes, his signed acoustic guitar he played for 50 years, rare photos, stage clothing, and his bronze artwork. The show expands his life and times with items from his friend comedian Charlie Hill and panels on AIM history.
“Most Americans think of Floyd from his acting and having seen him on television and in the movies,” said Kevin Gover, under secretary for Museums and Culture at the Smithsonian and a citizen of the Pawnee Tribe of Oklahoma. “But in Native America, Floyd was a singer and an activist, and certainly, for people my age had very much to do with our understanding of the place of Indians in American society and how that needed to change. He was, I daresay, the poet laureate of Indian activism in the early 70s.”
Gover said that today’s young Native people can sing some of Westerman’s songs. He knows many elders and people his age who often talk about Westerman’s album, “Custer Died for Your Signs,” released in 1969 which “really gave us the opportunity to have a voice about what was going on in Indian Country.”
He continued of Westerman: “That to me is Floyd’s major accomplishment. Not only was Floyd a talented artist and musician and actor, but he was a good guy and he was somebody that so many of us knew we could just walk out and chat ‘hey, how are you doing,’ and Floyd always remembered you and always had a good word.”
Westerman’s music is being heard by a new generation as he has songs in “Dark Winds” and appears on the tribute to Peter La Farge with “Drums” along with Keith Secola and John Densmore of The Doors.
“Floyd was a mentor to me,” Densmore told ICT. “He hung with Muhammed Ali, Buffy St. Marie, Stevie Wonder, and Marlon Brando, at a concert protesting for rights for Native Americans. He channeled Johnny Cash through his music. I was pleased when his shamanic character in ‘The Doors movie’ objected to Jim’s [Morrison] self-destruction. I was honored to share with Floyd the vocal on the video of ‘Drums’ by Peter La Farge.”
In a famous photo, Westerman is pictured with Ali, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Stevie Wonder, Marlon Brando and actor Max Gail for the culmination of the March on Washington, D.C., in 1978.
“It started with a ceremony at Alcatraz and Buffy and Charlie Hill, they went over to Sacramento and had a big rally there, and then they headed off on the walk to Washington,” Gail told ICT.
The Longest Walk was a 3,600-mile protest march from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., in the name of the Native rights.
“I joined up with them again in Washington and they had a press conference for People Magazine. There’s a big demonstration every day and then a concert at the end with Buffy and Stevie Wonder,” Gail said. “They said we don’t have a picture of everybody that’s part of this march to give to People magazine. We got everybody assembled but Marlon Brando had not come down from his room.”
Floyd Red Crow Westerman with Marlon Brando. Credit: Courtesy of the Floyd Westerman Estate
At 2 a.m., Gail said he had to get Brando from his hotel room for the photo. Once he came down, Brando said, “Let’s get the picture.”
“So everybody’s standing around not knowing what to do, and Buffy says, ‘Oh for crying out loud, I’m sitting here, Ali you sit there.’ She directed everybody where to go. It was quite a bunch to be with,” Gail recalled.
He said there were several important African American figures even for this specific Native American rights march. A march that was Dennis Banks and Sainte-Marie’s idea because of the 11 bills introduced in Congress that would strip Native people of their water rights and violate treaties, Gail said.
The march started at Alcatraz due to its history, including the occupation in the 70s.
“They walked across the country and walked into Washington. It was successful — those bills did not pass and we got the picture run in a big magazine,” Gail said.
Westerman went on to have a remarkable career touring the world with Sting, Kris Kristofferson, and Joni Mitchell.
He made many films and was on several TV shows including “X-Files,” “Roseanne,” “Dharma & Greg,” and “Renegade.”
He made powerful bronze sculptures of Sitting Bull and Geronimo from his home studio in Los Angeles.
An archive photo of Floyd Red Crow Westerman on set in the 1990s. Credit: Courtesy of the Floyd Westerman Estate
Quiltman Sahme, who is from the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and Hopi, frequently collaborated with Westerman on music.
He remembered meeting Westerman in the 70s in Minneapolis while playing pool in the Bears Den on Franklin Avenue.
“Floyd, Bill Means, Clyde Bellecourt and I used to have a few and play pool,” he said. “Floyd used to pull out his calendar and show us the festivals and shows he was flying to perform. I remember thinking he had a great life, but then he was a great guy.”
They ran into each other over the years even when Westerman moved to Washington, D.C.
Westerman “would always answer the phone call and show up with his guitar and entertain. No matter when or where, Floyd always supported the cause,” Quiltman said.
“Many times, Floyd and Sainte-Marie helped make the struggle easier through the years. In his movie acting times, Trudell, Charlie Hill, Max Gail, and I hung out at his home in Venice. He was a great human being,” he said. “The last time I saw him was at ceremony at Pine Ridge. He took his journey not long after. I sure miss him and think of him all the time. He is hard to forget.”
Westerman died of complications from leukemia in 2007. A memorial was held with several of his famous friends.
Secola said they came together to honor Westerman at the San Francisco Palace of the Fine Arts on November 13, 2008, during the American Indian Film Festival.
“The evening was magical. The frybread sisters wore flowers in their hair. Javelinas jammed, Jack Elliott rambled, Bonnie Raitt prayed, John drummed, Charlie Hill laughed, Katari cried, Max crooned, Dennis Banks and Michael Spears sang an honor song, Rosie Westerman spoke,” Secola said. “Floyd’s boys in the band, and handpicked misfits, were there. In the distance seals barked and heels walked to parked cars near the wharf with graffiti saying honor an artist by singing their songs. We did that night, 18 songs.”
IF YOU GO…
What: Floyd Red Crow Westerman: One Man’s Journey exhibit
When: January 2026 through mid-July 2026
Where: California Indian Museum and Cultural Center (5250 Aero Dr., Santa Rosa, CA 95403)
Museum hours: Monday – Friday, 12 p.m. – 4 p.m.
Admission fee: $7 adults, $5 children, and $5 for seniors
More information: California Indian Cultural Center website
The post A closer look into Floyd Red Crow Westerman’s life appeared first on ICT.
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