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When
Christopher Columbus set foot on the island of Hispaniola in 1492, he began a process
of genocide which would last until modern times. Since Columbus’s fateful voyage, Native
American peoples have faced an onslaught of European disease, war
technology, and trade that has irrevocably altered their cultures and
resulted in the loss of their lands and lifeways.
In
the 19th century, Euro-Americans pushed Westward in a drive
to disinherit indigenous peoples of their land so that it could be put
to cultivation and converted to private property to drive the expansion
of capitalism. The clash of races was a cover for the clash of two
profoundly different economic systems: what Marx called primitive
communism, where all land and resources were held in common and managed
for the good of the people, and the new system of agrarian capitalism,
which needed to destroy the former to expand itself and create a
willing paid workforce. The racist banner of capitalism was Manifest
Destiny, an ideology which lasted into the history textbooks of the 20th
century. It said that Whites were a superior race ordained by God to
“civilize” all the lands of the American continent—meaning convert it
to private property for purposes of White ownership and trade.
In
1890, the “frontier” was declared extinct and “allotment” became
policy, which deprived indigenous people of the right to control even
the resource-impoverished postage-stamp reservation lands left to them
by the U.S. government. In the late 19th
through mid 20th centuries, the government attempted to
exterminate indigenous culture through the mass kidnapping of
indigenous children, who were forced into boarding schools run by
Christian churches. There they were not allowed to speak any language
but English and beaten if they displayed any “Indian tendencies.”
Native
Americans did not become recognized as U.S. citizens until 1924, and it
is only within the last few decades that they have been successfully
able to assert some of the treaty rights they were cheated out of for
over a century. Indigenous activists have had to fight hard for every
gain both in the courts and through mass action such as protests, civil
disobedience, land occupations and even armed insurrection. Groups such
as the American Indian Movement and leaders such as Leonard Peltier have played pivotal roles in the movement
for Native rights. Just as in the struggle for Black civil rights, many
Native activists have had to sacrifice their personal freedom or even
their lives to gain more freedom for their people.
Indigenous
peoples have never taken the White onslaught lying down. The Indian
Wars and insurrections that took place in North America in the 18th and
19th centuries resulted in loss after loss for indigenous
tribes, as they fell before the superior weapons, greater numbers and
sheer brutality of the White invaders. Beaten militarily, their lands
stolen through legal and extralegal treachery, treaty after treaty made
then broken, most indigenous people fell into desperate poverty on
reservations. Many moved off reservations and into cities to look for
work.
Things
began to change in the 1950s. In 1953, the U.S. Congress approved what
was called “Termination Policy,” a policy ostensibly meant to improve
living conditions for Native Americans on reservations, but one that
turned into yet another tool for dispossessing them of what little
advantages they were left with. The government’s goal was to end
federal supervision of tribes and assimilate tribal members into
mainstream American society, in essence to “terminate” tribal identity.
Practically, this meant ending U.S. aid to tribes and selling
off lands held in trust for the tribes. Two states, Wisconsin and Oregon, also attempted to use
Termination to deprive Native Americans of their hunting and fishing
treaty rights.
The
new policy was tried on several reservations. It sparked a backlash of
protests among tribal members who found themselves faced with the
choice of giving up their tribal membership and moving away to cities
or staying put and starving for lack of government food assistance,
which they had been forced into dependence on. Lawsuits brought to the
Supreme Court by tribes in Wisconsin and Oregon succeeded in re-asserting
native hunting and fishing rights, even for those who had abrogated
their tribal membership.
At
the same time, the civil rights movement was awakening the pride of
African-Americans, whose ancestors had been kidnapped and brought to
the United States to work as human mules on
Southern plantations, and subsequently “freed” from their masters only
to be re-bonded as sharecroppers or low-paid urban workers and denied
the basic rights afforded to Whites. Many indigenous people recognized
themselves as a similarly oppressed nationality, with common interests
with Blacks, and were inspired by the Black struggle for liberation.
Calls by the most militant African-Americans for “Black Power”
resounded with Native American youth, who rebranded
the slogan “Red Power” to express their own drive for liberation.
Out
of this cauldron of radicalization was born the American Indian
Movement. The group was formed in the summer of 1968 at a meeting of
some 200 Native activists in Minneapolis, brought together and
subsequently led by Dennis Banks, George Mitchell and Clyde Bellancourt. These young people first focused
largely on problems faced by urban Native Americans, including police
brutality, slum housing, high unemployment, poverty and institutional
racism—problems also faced by the Black community. But they also fought
for a change in Indian policy at the federal level and to re-assert
treaty rights. Embedded in the anti-colonialism of AIM were appeals to
Native spirituality and cross-tribal ethnic unity—the renewal of an
“American Indian” identity.
In
1969, AIM supporters from several tribes gained national attention by
declaring Alcatraz Island, in the San Francisco Bay, reclaimed Indian land and
occupying it for 19 months. The occupiers, hailing from many different
tribes from around the country, took the name “United Indians of All
Tribes,” and set up an independent government operated by consensus.
Although the occupation ultimately ended with the Indians’ removal by
Federal marshals, this bold action awakened the political consciousness
of many Native Americans and their supporters, and played a key role in
subsequent land victories.
In
1970, 71 and 72, AIM activists conducted several takeovers, including
abandoned air base property in Minneapolis and a hydroelectric dam on
the Lac Court Orielles Reservation near Hayward, Wisconsin. They took over a Mayflower
replica on Thanskgiving Day at Plymouth Rock,
and briefly held Mount Rushmore. In 1972, AIM and other groups
conducted the Trail of Broken Treaties, a caravan from the West Coast
to Washington, D.C., which ended with the takeover of the federal
Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters. Native activists presented a
list of twenty demands to President Nixon, which included abolition of
the BIA, ending treaty rights violations, restoration of 110 million
acres of land to Indian control, and Indian self-determination.
Taking
part in the Trail of Broken Treaties was a 27-year-old AIM activist
named Leonard Peltier. Peltier
was born in 1944 in Grand Forks, North Dakota, to Ojibwe
and Lakota parents. He spent much of his childhood with his father’s
family on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. At age 9, he
was forcibly shipped off to an Indian boarding school 150 miles from
home, where he stayed through ninth grade.
As
a teenager, Peltier became radicalized by
participating in protest actions against Termination Policy. An
awakening experience for Peltier took place
one harsh winter, when BIA social workers came to the Turtle Mountain
reservation to investigate reports of people starving because the
government had cut off aid. Peltier went
around to houses before the BIA workers arrived to tell the families to
hide what little food they had, only to be told at each house he went
to that there was nothing there to hide.
Peltier worked for a time as a migrant farm worker. In
1965, he moved to Seattle, where he co-owned an auto body shop that
employed Native Americans and served as a halfway house for Native
ex-prisoners. After his company folded, he began to travel to different
cities and reservations, doing construction work and community
organizing among Native communities. He joined AIM in Denver, the last city he stayed in
before taking part in the BIA occupation.
The
actions of AIM activists including Peltier
succeeded in winning some gains, most notably the reversal of
Termination Policy in the 1970s. But their effectiveness earned AIM the
ire of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and the group became a prime target of COINTELPRO,
the FBI Counterintelligence Program that attempted to smash radical
organizations by any means possible.
The
most violent battleground between AIM and the FBI soon took shape on
the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota. In February 1973, a group
of AIM activists led by Russell Means arrived in the small town of
Wounded Knee, near the site of an 1890 massacre of Lakota Sioux by
federal troops. They came for a meeting with local “Traditional” Lakota
who opposed corrupt tribal chairman Dick Wilson. Wilson was supported
by mixed-blood pro-assimilation residents and the White ranching
community, as well as the BIA and FBI. He was rumored to be getting
kickbacks to approve contracts for uranium mining.
Within
a couple hours of the AIM activists’ arrival at Wounded Knee, FBI agents and Federal
Marshals surrounded the town and began to arrest anyone leaving. This
led to a 71-day standoff, in which both sides traded gunfire daily. The
government brought in armored personnel carriers, grenade launchers, automatic
rifles, flares, and 133,000 rounds of ammunition. Two Native Americans
were killed and a Federal Marshal was paralyzed.
The
Wounded
Knee
incident began a three-year period of intense political violence
against AIM activists and their supporters on Pine Ridge. FBI agents
were authorized to engage in “paramilitary activity” with AIM. Tribal
chairman Dick Wilson used tribal funds to deputize vigilantes
self-described as “GOON squads” (GOON nominally stood for “Guardians Of
the Oglala Nation”). The Goon squads
conducted beatings, drive-by shootings, and executions, resulting in
over 60 murders of Traditional tribal members and AIM activists. Only
one of these murders was ever prosecuted (the resulting conviction of
an AIM activist in 2004 should be considered highly suspect as key
witnesses were paid by the FBI—more on this later). The FBI supplied
the Goons with intelligence on AIM and in at least some cases,
ammunition.
Peltier answered the call to assist the Traditional people
of Pine Ridge in the struggle against Wilson’s goons and the FBI. He
arrived with a group of AIM activists, who set up camp on a ranch owned
by an elderly couple, the Jumping Bulls. While there, the AIM activists
advocated sobriety and helped organize traditional religious
ceremonies, self-sufficiency projects, and community activities, as
well as security for tribal members endangered by the cops and Goons.
On
the morning of June 26, 1975, two FBI agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, drove into the Jumping
Bull compound. They were ostensibly in pursuit of a red pickup truck
driven by Jimmy Eagle, a young Lakota accused of stealing a pair of
cowboy boots from a White rancher. Over 40 AIM and tribal members were
at the compound at the time. AIM members Bob Robideau
and Norman Brown testified that the agents—who they did not know were
agents at the time—fired on the camp, and they returned fire. A major
shootout erupted which resulted in the deaths of Coler,
Williams, and a young Lakota named Joseph Stuntz.
The bullet that killed Williams was fired at close range and went
through his hand before entering his head. Coler
was also shot in the head at close range after being injured. Stuntz was shot in the forehead, but his death
never received an investigation.
The
camp was soon surrounded by 350 U.S. Marshals, FBI agents and
BIA cops. They began a manhunt for Bob Robideau,
Darrelle Butler, Jimmy Eagle, and Leonard Peltier, who fled the scene and were charged with
aiding and abetting the agents’ murders (no witnesses came forward to
identify the agents’ shooters). Butler, Robideau,
and Eagle were soon apprehended. Peltier fled
to Canada and was apprehended there on February 6, 1976. Bob Robideau and Darrelle
Butler were tried together, and were found not guilty by reason of
self-defense. The case against Jimmy Eagle was subsequently dismissed.
But because the extradition of Peltier was
delayed, once he was extradited to the U.S., he was tried later. By
that time, the FBI was out for vengeance.
The
cornerstone of the U.S. case for extraditing Peltier was a set of three affidavits from a woman
named Myrtle Poor Bear, who was believed by many who knew her to be
mentally unstable. The affidavits were inconsistent with one another,
one claiming she had not been at the Jumping Bull compound, and two
others claiming she was there with Peltier as
his girlfriend. Poor Bear has since recanted the affidavits, saying she
had never met Peltier and claiming FBI agents
threatened to take away her daughter and to “put [her] through a meat
grinder.”
Nevertheless,
the affidavits were enough for Canada to extradite Peltier, and he was tried in early 1977 in Fargo, North Dakota before an all-White jury
and anti-Indian Judge Paul Benson. The prosecution’s main witness, FBI
agent Mike Anderson, changed his previous account and claimed that it
was Peltier, not Jimmy Eagle, who agents Coler and Williams had been in pursuit of, and Peltier got out at the compound and single-handedly
shot the agents to death. The jury was shown a .223 shell casing from
an AR-15 rifle traced to Peltier that they
said had been found in Coler’s trunk. Judge
Benson repeatedly ruled against defense attempts to introduce evidence
and barred key defense witnesses, including Myrtle Poor Bear, from
testifying. Peltier was convicted and
sentenced to two consecutive life terms.
Several
appeals attempted to introduce evidence repressed by the FBI. The most
damning piece of evidence was a ballistics test conducted soon after
the shootout that concluded that Peltier’s
gun had a different firing pin than any of the shell casings found at
the scene and could not have been the weapon used to kill Coler or Williams. In fact, not one witness who was
not an FBI agent identified Peltier as the
actual shooter. Three teenage witnesses who testified against Peltier later said they were forced into testifying
and recanted.
In
a case connected to Peltier’s, homeless
Lakota Fritz Arlo Looking Cloud was tried in
2004 for the execution-style murder of fellow AIM activist Anna Mae Pictou Aquash. The
prosecution claimed that Aquash was executed
by Looking Cloud and two other AIM members because they thought she was
an FBI informant. The ex-wife of AIM leader Dennis Banks, Darlene “Kamook” Nichols, claimed during the trial that Peltier had confessed his guilt to a group of AIM
activists including Aquash and her in 1975.
Nichols acknowledged she was paid $42,000 by the FBI for her
cooperation in the trial, and soon after the trial she married Robert Ecoffey, the Director of BIA Law Enforcement.
Aquash was a prominent AIM activist and a thorn in the
FBI’s side. When Aquash’s body was discovered
frozen in 1975, FBI agents who knew her well processed the case. They
failed to identify the body, declared her death due to exposure, cut
off her hands to send to Washington, D.C. for fingerprinting, and
buried the body as “Jane Doe.” After she was identified by
fingerprinting, AIM members exhumed the body and demanded a second
autopsy, which discovered the gaping bullet hole in her head. Despite
the FBI’s cover-up and their shady dealings at the 2004 trial, Looking
Cloud was convicted of the shooting and sentenced to life in prison.
The
FBI is not finished using the Aquash case to
go after other AIM members. John Graham and Dick Marshall, the latter
once a bodyguard for Russell Means, are both jailed and awaiting trial,
charged with aiding and abetting Aquash’s
murder. Unfortunately, the case has succeeded in sowing division and
uncertainty in the AIM leadership, an outcome surely hoped for by the
FBI.
As
for Peltier, despite numerous appeals he has
never been granted a new trial. Eighth Circuit Court Judge Gerald Heany admitted in 1991 that “there is a possibility
that the jury would have acquitted Leonard Peltier
had the records and data improperly withheld from the defense been
available to him in order to better exploit and reinforce the
inconsistencies casting strong doubts upon the government's case.” The
government prosecutor, Lynn Crooks, even admitted in court that year
that the government had no proof that Peltier
was the killer, though she defended his imprisonment by arguing that
aiding and abetting the agents’ murder was just as bad as pulling the
trigger.
Peltier has received the support of dozens of members of
Congress, Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, Rev.
Jesse Jackson, the National Congress of American Indians, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Amnesty International, The
U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights, several European Parliaments,
and many other individuals and groups. He has been nominated for the
Nobel Peace Prize and run for president. Yet he remains behind bars,
thanks largely to the concerted interference of the FBI, who do not
want the truth of their racist vendetta against AIM revealed to the
public.
In
2000, the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee
appealed to outgoing President Bill Clinton to grant clemency.
Thousands of people made phone calls and sent letters of support. But
in the face of strong FBI opposition, Clinton declined, choosing instead
to pardon billionaire tax-evader and Clinton campaign financier Marc
Rich. (Where were the FBI protests over the pardon of a man confirmed
beyond a doubt to have cheated taxpayers out of millions of dollars?)
Subsequently,
Peltier was moved from Leavenworth
Penitentiary to Lewiston, Pennsylvania. This past January, he was
transferred again to USP-Canaan, near Scranton, PA, where he was reportedly
assaulted by other prisoners in what may have been an FBI setup. He has
been kept in solitary confinement since then and placed on meal
restrictions. He is not in great health, suffering from diabetes, high
blood pressure and a heart condition. But he continues to work as an
artist, earning his defense committee up to $6,000 each for his
paintings. He has written poetry and books, including the memoir
“Prison Writings: My Life is My Sun Dance.” He has continued to promote
scholarships for Native youth and prisoner art programs, as well as
donating to battered women’s shelters and the Pine Ridge Christmas
drive.
Leonard
Peltier’s is a clear-cut case of a man
convicted of fighting government persecution against his people. After
32 years behind bars, the FBI still seeks to make an example of Peltier for others who would stand up for the
liberation of indigenous people and the return of their stolen lands
and livelihoods. He deserves our support, he deserves freedom, and he
deserves recognition for his heroic acts and positive influence on so
many Native communities. Socialist Action stands for a world free from
oppression and persecution, for reparations to indigenous peoples and
their self-determination, and for freedom for political prisoners like
Leonard Peltier. Thank you.
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