'Domestic terrorist' label reopens wounds

I studied at Fort Lewis College as an out-of-state Indigenous student from 1999-2002. While there, I was the object of a criminal libel prosecution under a statute that was a relic from 1800s Colorado. 

My case was eventually reduced on appeal, and the libel statute I was convicted under repealed as uncon-stitutional. After my release, I returned home, but my confusion and trauma remain.

Indigenous students are the majority at FLC, Alaska Natives a plurality. As an FLC journalism major, I was openly critical of police abuse of Natives and the inequality I saw in feminist studies, which at the time seemed to focus almost exclusively on Anglo women.

FLC professors and Durango police reported me to the FBI as a “domestic terrorist” in 2003, in response to a column I wrote for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

The January killing of Alex Pretti, a kindhearted VA nurse – who, like me, was trying to negotiate the nuances of the First Amendment – touched a nerve, as did Kristi Noem’s immediate labeling of him as a “domestic terrorist.”

The name-calling is especially absurd in my case, as in Alex’s. I’m Native on my mother’s side, a member of the Sons of the American Revolution on my father’s, and a veteran.

I have never been convicted of a violent crime and don’t deserve a hateful label for expression protected by the First Amendment.

My prosecution in many ways foreshadowed ICE, Trumpian doublethink, business-as-usual racism, selective application of constitutional rights, and the weaponization of “justice” increasingly common today.

In addition to the “terrorist” label, Durango police on another occasion seized my computer and printer after a letter to the editor was published in The Durango Herald. The letter criticized police for constitutional violations. Nobody registered the irony.

I am a disabled Tlingit veteran with service-connected PTSD, encephalopathy, major depressive disorder and terminal liver disease exacerbated by a stay in Colorado prisons that lacked medical care. I’m often treated at VA hospitals.

Staff are always warm and attentive, so I feel I knew Alex personally.

My mother, Ernestine Hayes, is a Tlingit memoirist, professor emerita, American Book Award winner, and former writer laureate. FLC professors took offense when I bragged about her, and police mention her myriad times in their reports. Her books are required reading in some FLC courses – another irony.

Injustices currently unfolding across the country have been present in Durango for decades, but few have noticed, because the establishment has used it to maintain a self-serving hierarchy.

– Dave Stephenson, Juneau, Alaska

Editor’s note: Former Fort Lewis College student Dave Stephenson was convicted in 2006 of 26 felonies, including criminal libel. At his trial, prosecutors said Stephenson used falsehoods, Internet posts, fake posters and phony documents to sow fear among his victims, including jail guards, an FLC professor, a landlord and police officer, according to a report in the Durango Herald. He was released from prison in 2015 in a deal with the 6th Judicial District Attorney’s Office. In the deal, he agreed to drop his claim that he received ineffective counsel in exchange for a reduction of his 23-year sentence. In the time since he was sentenced, the Colorado State Legislature has decriminalized libel.

As an aside, Stephenson was banned from the Telegraph’s letters section in 2003 for telling former editor Will Sands to “grow a pair.”