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.