Jancita Eagle Deer

Jancita Eagle Deer (1952 – April 4, 1975) was a Brulé Lakota who lived on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She was notable for accusing future governor William Janklow of having raped her in January 1967, when she was about 15 and he was a poverty lawyer and Director of the Rosebud Sioux Legal Services program on the reservation. She had worked as his babysitter.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) did not prosecute the case, although the alleged crime was within their jurisdiction.

In October 1974 Dennis Banks acted on her behalf as the tribal attorney to revive the charges. Janklow was then a candidate for state attorney general. Eagle Deer in 1974 did succeed in having Janklow disbarred from practicing in the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Court.

No federal charges were ever brought against Janklow in the alleged rape case. In 1975, he was appointed by President Gerald Ford to the national board of the Legal Services Corporation.

Eagle Deer died the night of April 4, 1975 in a purported hit-and-run accident in southern Nebraska. No one was prosecuted in the homicide. She had been seeing former American Indian Movement (AIM) activist Douglass Durham. He was discovered in late 1974 to be an FBI informant and expelled from AIM in March 1975.

Janklow was elected governor of South Dakota in 1978; he twice served tenures of two terms.

Early life and education Jancita Eagle Deer, a Brulé Lakota, was born in 1952 and grew up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. She attended local schools, including the Rosebud Boarding School on the Reservation.

On January 14, 1967, Eagle Deer reported to her school principal that William Janklow, head of legal services at Rosebud, had raped her at gunpoint the night before. He had been driving her home from her work as his family's babysitter.

The principal took her to the hospital, where a doctor and nurse examined her. In his memoir years later, Dennis Banks, an AIM founder who became involved in the case in 1974, when he was working as tribal attorney, said his review of the records showed the medical personnel said the girl was in shock. He believed that she had been assaulted.

Because the alleged crime was within federal jurisdiction, the BIA police conducted the investigation on the reservation. The FBI did not think there was sufficient evidence to prosecute.

Eagle Deer testified at court. Janklow failed to appear in response to a BIA summons served through a US Marshal.

In the fall of 1974, soon after her return to South Dakota, Jancita Eagle Deer started seeing Douglass Durham, an AIM activist.

Jancita Eagle Deer continued to see Durham. On the night of April 14, 1975, she was struck and killed by a car while on a rural road in southern Nebraska, 200 miles from home. The journalist Hendricks wrote that she had last been seen in the company of Durham. The writer Hendricks referred to the case as an unsolved murder.

Janklow was later convicted of vehicular manslaughter for killing a motorcyclist in South Dakota in 2003. He died of terminal brain cancer on January 12, 2012.