Jacinta Eagle Deer

Who was Jacinta Eagle Deer?

Jancita Eagle Deer was a Brulé Lakota who lived on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. She was notable for accusing William Janklow of having raped her in January 1967 when he was a poverty lawyer and Director of the Rosebud Sioux Legal Services program on the reservation. She had worked as his babysitter. At the time the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not prosecute the case.

In October 1974 Dennis Banks acted on her behalf as the tribal attorney to revive the charges, as Janklow was a candidate for state attorney general. Eagle Deer in 1974 had Janklow disbarred from practicing in the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Court. No charges were brought against Janklow in the alleged rape case and in 1975 he was appointed by the White House to the national board of the Legal Services Corporation.

Eagle Deer was killed at night in a hit-and-run accident on April 4, 1975 in southern Nebraska. She had been seeing former American Indian Movement 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, and twice served tenures of two terms.