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[Nonviolenza] Non muoia in carcere Leonard Peltier. 113
- Subject: [Nonviolenza] Non muoia in carcere Leonard Peltier. 113
- From: Centro di ricerca per la pace Centro di ricerca per la pace <centropacevt at gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2024 05:39:12 +0100
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NON MUOIA IN CARCERE LEONARD PELTIER
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Foglio a sostegno dell'appello a scrivere al Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America affinche' conceda la grazia che restituisca la liberta' a Leonard Peltier
A cura del "Centro di ricerca per la pace, i diritti umani e la difesa della biosfera" di Viterbo
Supplemento a "La nonviolenza e' in cammino" (anno XXV)
Direttore responsabile: Peppe Sini. Redazione: strada S. Barbara 9/E, 01100 Viterbo, e-mail: centropacevt at gmail.com
Numero 113 del 3 dicembre 2024
Sommario di questo numero:
1. Una lettera ai mezzi d'informazione: dieci buone ragioni per concedere la grazia a Leonard Peltier
2. Che fare adesso per la liberazione di Leonard Peltier
3. Michele Bollinger: Leonard Peltier and the Indian struggle for Freedom (2009) (parte prima)
1. INIZIATIVE. UNA LETTERA AI MEZZI D'INFORMAZIONE: DIECI BUONE RAGIONI PER CONCEDERE LA GRAZIA A LEONARD PELTIER
Vi inviamo la seguente lettera che alcune persone amiche della nonviolenza hanno inviato dall'Italia al Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America Joe Biden.
Vi saremmo assai grati se voleste dare ad essa ulteriore diffusione.
*
Egregio Presidente,
mancano meno di due mesi al termine del suo mandato presidenziale.
In queste settimane lei decidera', come e' consuetudine, di concedere la grazia ad alcuni detenuti.
Le scriviamo per chiederle di concedere la grazia a Leonard Peltier e ci permetta di elencarle alcune buone ragioni a sostegno di questo suo atto non solo di umanita', ma di verita' e di giustizia.
1. Leonard Peltier ha ottanta anni ed e' in prigione da 48 anni per un delitto che non ha commesso: non ha mai ucciso nessuno, ed anzi si e' sempre adoperato in difesa della vita delle persone, dei popoli, della natura.
2. Leonard Peltier ha subito un processo viziato da "testimonianze" dimostratesi false e da "prove" dimostratesi anch'esse false; autorevoli magistrati e numerose personalita' delle istituzioni del suo paese hanno riconosciuto che la sua condanna e' stata ingiusta, frutto di una persecuzione, palesemente contraria al diritto.
3. Leonard Peltier e' un uomo anziano gravemente malato: che possa tornare alla sua famiglia in questo poco tempo che gli resta da vivere.
4. La liberazione di Leonard Peltier e' stata chiesta da personalita' benemerite dell'umanita' come Nelson Mandela e madre Teresa di Calcutta.
5. La liberazione di Leonard Peltier e' stata chiesta da alcune delle maggiori autorita' morali e religiose mondiali: come il Dalai Lama e papa Francesco.
6. La liberazione di Leonard Peltier e' stata chiesta da prestigiose associazioni umanitarie, come Amnesty International e il Movimento Nonviolento.
7. La liberazione di Leonard Peltier e' stata chiesta dal Parlamento Europeo, dall'Onu (una cui commissione ad hoc ha ricostruito l'intera vicenda giudiziaria concludendo che debba essere liberato), e da innumerevoli altre istituzioni democratiche di tutto il mondo.
8. La liberazione di Leonard Peltier e' stata chiesta da innumerevoli istituzioni, associazioni e movimenti rappresentativi dei popoli nativi, dediti alla protezione dei diritti umani, impegnati in difesa della Madre Terra.
9. La liberazione di Leonard Peltier e' stata chiesta da milioni di persone di tutto il mondo.
10. Last, but not least, la liberazione di Leonard Peltier e' stata chiesta all'unanimita' anche dal Comitato Nazionale del Partito Democratico degli Stati Uniti d'America, il partito di cui anche lei fa parte, ed anzi e' il piu' autorevole rappresentante.
Egregio Presidente,
siamo consapevoli che lei non puo' leggere tutta la corrispondenza che le perviene, e tuttavia sentiamo il dovere di scriverle per sollecitare la sua attenzione, il suo giudizio, la sua umanita'.
Restituisca la liberta' a Leonard Peltier.
*
Alleghiamo in calce:
- Allegato primo. Per scrivere al Presidente Biden;
- Allegato secondo. Per saperne un po' di piu' su Leonard Peltier, da 48 anni prigioniero innocente;
- Allegato terzo. Alcuni ulteriori contatti utili per informazioni dirette sulle iniziative attualmente in corso in Italia e in Europa per Leonard Peltier.
Il "Centro di ricerca per la pace, i diritti umani e la difesa della biosfera" di Viterbo
Viterbo, 24 novembre 2024
Mittente: "Centro di ricerca per la pace, i diritti umani e la difesa della biosfera" di Viterbo, strada S. Barbara 9/E, 01100 Viterbo, e-mail: centropacevt at gmail.com
Il "Centro di ricerca per la pace, i diritti umani e la difesa della biosfera" di Viterbo e' una struttura nonviolenta attiva dagli anni '70 del secolo scorso che ha sostenuto, promosso e coordinato varie campagne per il bene comune, locali, nazionali ed internazionali. E' la struttura nonviolenta che negli anni Ottanta ha coordinato per l'Italia la piu' ampia campagna di solidarieta' con Nelson Mandela, allora detenuto nelle prigioni del regime razzista sudafricano. Nel 1987 ha promosso il primo convegno nazionale di studi dedicato a Primo Levi. Dal 2000 pubblica il notiziario telematico quotidiano "La nonviolenza e' in cammino". Dal 2021 e' particolarmente impegnato nella campagna per la liberazione di Leonard Peltier, l'illustre attivista nativo americano difensore dei diritti umani di tutti gli esseri umani e dell'intero mondo vivente, da 48 anni prigioniero innocente.
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Allegato primo. Per scrivere al Presidente Biden
Per scrivere al Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America e' sufficiente collegarsi al sito della Casa Bianca alla pagina web: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
Compilare quindi gli item successivi:
- alla voce MESSAGE TYPE: scegliere Contact the President
- alla voce PREFIX: scegliere il titolo corrispondente alla propria identita'
- alla voce FIRST NAME: scrivere il proprio nome
- alla voce SECOND NAME: si puo' omettere la compilazione
- alla voce LAST NAME: scrivere il proprio cognome
- alla voce SUFFIX, PRONOUNS: si puo' omettere la compilazione
- alla voce E-MAIL: scrivere il proprio indirizzo e-mail
- alla voce PHONE: scrivere il proprio numero di telefono seguendo lo schema 39xxxxxxxxxx
- alla voce COUNTRY/STATE/REGION: scegliere Italy
- alla voce STREET: scrivere il proprio indirizzo nella sequenza numero civico, via/piazza
- alla voce CITY: scrivere il nome della propria citta' e il relativo codice di avviamento postale
- alla voce WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO SAY? [Cosa vorresti dire?]: scrivere un breve testo (di seguito una traccia utilizzabile):
"Egregio Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America,
le scriviamo per chiederle di concedere la grazia presidenziale a Leonard Peltier.
Come lei sa, Leonard Peltier ha gia' subito 48 anni di carcere per un delitto che non ha commesso.
E' vecchio, e' gravemente malato, le sue patologie non possono essere adeguatamente curate in carcere.
La sua liberazione e' stata chiesta da Nelson Mandela, da madre Teresa di Calcutta, dal Dalai Lama, da papa Francesco, da Amnesty International, dal Parlamento Europeo, dall'Onu, da milioni di persone di tutto il mondo.
Egregio Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America,
conceda la grazia a Leonard Peltier.
Restituisca la liberta' a Leonard Peltier.
Distinti saluti".
* * *
Allegato secondo. Per saperne un po' di piu' su Leonard Peltier, da 48 anni prigioniero innocente
Leonard Peltier e' un illustre attivista nativo americano difensore dei diritti umani di tutti gli esseri umani e dell'intero mondo vivente, da 48 anni prigioniero innocente.
Segnaliamo alcuni materiali di documentazione in lingua italiana disponibili nella rete telematica:
https://sites.google.com/view/viterboperleonardpeltier/home-page
https://sites.google.com/view/vetralla-per-peltier-2021/home-page
https://sites.google.com/view/vetrallaperpeltier2022/home-page
https://sites.google.com/view/vetrallaperleonardpeltier2023/home-page
https://sites.google.com/view/vetralla-per-peltier-2024/home-page
Segnaliamo anche alcune pubblicazioni a stampa in italiano e in inglese particolarmente utili:
- Edda Scozza, Il coraggio d'essere indiano. Leonard Peltier prigioniero degli Stati Uniti, Erre Emme, Pomezia (Roma) 1996 (ora Roberto Massari Editore, Bolsena Vt).
- Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 1980, Penguin Books, New York 1992 e successive ristampe; in edizione italiana: Peter Matthiessen, Nello spirito di Cavallo Pazzo, Frassinelli, Milano 1994.
- Leonard Peltier (con la collaborazione di Harvey Arden), Prison writings. My life is my sun dance, St. Martin's Griffin, New York 1999; in edizione italiana: Leonard Peltier, La mia danza del sole. Scritti dalla prigione, Fazi, Roma 2005.
- Jim Messerschmidt, The Trial of Leonard Peltier, South End Press, Cambridge, MA, 1983, 1989, 2002.
- Bruce E. Johansen, Encyclopedia of the American Indian Movement, Greenwood, Santa Barbara - Denver - Oxford, 2013 e piu' volte ristampata.
Segnaliamo inoltre che nella rete telematica e' disponibile una notizia sintetica in italiano dal titolo "Alcune parole per Leonard Peltier":
https://lists.peacelink.it/nonviolenza/2022/03/msg00001.html
Sempre nella rete telematica e' disponibile anche una piu' ampia ed approfondita bibliografia ragionata dal titolo "Dieci libri piu' uno che sarebbe bene aver letto per conoscere la vicenda di Leonard Peltier (e qualche altro minimo suggerimento bibliografico)":
https://lists.peacelink.it/nonviolenza/2022/09/msg00064.html
Ancora nella rete telematica segnaliamo una lettera "ad adiuvandum" alla "United States Parole Commission" del 22 giugno 2024:
https://lists.peacelink.it/nonviolenza/2024/06/msg00055.html
Segnaliamo anche che in queste settimane il "Centro di ricerca per la pace, i diritti umani e la difesa della biosfera" di Viterbo pubblica un notiziario telematico quotidiano con la testata "Non muoia in carcere Leonard Peltier" che propone iniziative e materiali.
Segnaliamo infine l'attuale sito ufficiale del Comitato di solidarieta' con Leonard Peltier, il "Free Leonard Peltier Ad Hoc Committee": www.freeleonardpeltiernow.org
* * *
Allegato terzo. Alcuni ulteriori contatti utili per informazioni dirette sulle iniziative attualmente in corso in Italia e in Europa per Leonard Peltier
Per informazioni sulle principali iniziative italiane contattare Andrea De Lotto, tel. 3490931155, e-mail: bigoni.gastone at gmail.com
Vi e' anche un gruppo su facebook: Free Leonard Peltier Italy: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1051622359691101
Un sito che fornisce preziose informazioni aggiornate sulle iniziative in Europa (in tedesco e in inglese) e' www.leonardpeltier.de
Un riferimento fondamentale in Italia e' anche l'ottima rivista "Tepee" e la storica associazione Soconas-Incomindios: per contatti scrivere o telefonare alla professoressa Naila Clerici: cell. 3478207381, e-mail: naila.clerici at soconasincomindios.it, facebook: facebook.com/pages/Soconas-Incomindios/, youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1jno1fq2G_HnMd50IG0hww
Ricordiamo infine ancora una volta che il sito ufficiale (in inglese) del Comitato di solidarieta' con Leonard Peltier, il "Free Leonard Peltier Ad Hoc Committee", e' www.freeleonardpeltiernow.org
2. REPETITA IUVANT. CHE FARE ADESSO PER LA LIBERAZIONE DI LEONARD PELTIER
Come e' noto, la "United States Parole Commission" ha negato la "liberta' sulla parola" a Leonard Peltier, ed ha fissato la prossima udienza al 2026. Gli avvocati di Leonard Peltier hanno gia' annunciato che ovviamente interporranno appello avverso questa decisione.
Come e' noto Leonard Peltier, l'illustre attivista nativo americano difensore dei diritti umani di tutti gli esseri umani e dell'intero mondo vivente, e' detenuto da 48 anni in un carcere di massima sicurezza per un delitto che non ha commesso; la sua condanna si baso' su "testimonianze" false e su "prove" altrettanto false. E' anziano (ha quasi 80 anni) e gravemente malato, e le sue plurime patologie non possono essere curate adeguatamente in regime carcerario. Numerosissime personalita' benemerite dell'umanita', associazioni benefiche come Amnesty International, istituzioni democratiche di tutto il mondo - in primis l'Onu e il Parlamento Europeo - chiedono la sua liberazione.
*
Che fare?
Occorre perseverare lungo tutte e tre le vie che possono portare alla liberazione di Leonard Peltier:
1. la richiesta al Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America di concedere la "grazia presidenziale";
2. la richiesta al Procuratore Generale degli Stati Uniti d'America di concedere il "rilascio compassionevole";
3. la richiesta alla "United States Parole Commission" di concedere la "liberta' sulla parola".
*
Alcune indicazioni pratiche
a) Per scrivere al Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America:
aprire la pagina ad hoc nel sito: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ e seguire le indicazioni li' contenute.
Proposta di testo:
Egregio Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America,
e' consuetudine che avvicinandosi il termine del mandato quadriennale il Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America conceda la grazia ad alcuni detenuti.
La preghiamo di voler concedere la grazia al signor Leonard Peltier, detenuto da quasi mezzo secolo, ormai quasi ottantenne, affetto da gravissime patologie che non possono essere curate in regime carcerario, la cui liberazione e' stata richiesta da personalita' illustri come Nelson Mandela, madre Teresa di Calcutta, il Dalai Lama, papa Francesco e da istituzioni come l'Onu e il Parlamento Europeo.
Voglia gradire distinti saluti.
b) Per scrivere al Procuratore Generale degli Stati Uniti d'America:
aprire la pagina ad hoc nel sito: https://www.justice.gov/doj/webform/your-message-department-justice e seguire le indicazioni li' contenute.
Proposta di testo:
Egregio Procuratore Generale degli Stati Uniti d'America,
la preghiamo di voler concedere il "rilascio compassionevole" ("compassionate release") al signor Leonard Peltier, detenuto da quasi mezzo secolo, ormai quasi ottantenne, affetto da gravissime patologie che non possono essere curate in regime carcerario, la cui liberazione e' stata richiesta da personalita' illustri come Nelson Mandela, madre Teresa di Calcutta, il Dalai Lama, papa Francesco e da istituzioni come l'Onu e il Parlamento Europeo.
Voglia gradire distinti saluti.
c) Per scrivere alla "United States Parole Commission":
usare l'indirizzo e-mail: USParole.questions at usdoj.gov
Proposta di testo:
Egregie signore ed egregi signori della "United States Parole Commission",
pur consapevoli della vostra recente decisione, ci permettiamo di sollecitare ulteriormente una tempestiva riconsiderazione della situazione del signor Leonard Peltier, detenuto da quasi mezzo secolo, ormai quasi ottantenne, affetto da gravissime patologie che non possono essere curate in regime carcerario, la cui liberazione e' stata richiesta da personalita' illustri come Nelson Mandela, madre Teresa di Calcutta, il Dalai Lama, papa Francesco e da istituzioni come l'Onu e il Parlamento Europeo.
Vogliate gradire distinti saluti.
*
d) Per informare gli avvocati che assistono Leonard Peltier:
usare gli indirizzi e-mail: ksharp at sanfordheisler.com, jenipherj at forthepeoplelegal.com
Proposta di testo:
Egregia avvocata, egregio avvocato,
vi informiamo che abbiamo scritto al Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America, al Procuratore Generale degli Stati Uniti d'America, alla "United States Parole Commission", le lettere il cui testo alleghiamo.
Vogliate gradire distinti saluti.
*
Tre consigli a chi vuole esprimere e promuovere la solidarieta'
I. La prima forma di solidarieta' e' la conoscenza
- occorre studiare adeguatamente tanto i fatti quanto il contesto;
- occorre far circolare l'informazione, avendo cura che sia un'informazione precisa ed incontrovertibile;
- occorre promuovere altre adesioni all'impegno, avendo cura che ci si attenga scrupolosamente al fine della liberazione di Leonard Peltier e che la metodologia sia rigorosamente nonviolenta;
- soprattutto: occorre far sentire la propria voce direttamente alle istanze istituzionali concretamente preposte alla decisione sulla liberazione di Leonard Peltier; e farla sentire in modo adeguato: ovvero comprensibile e persuasivo. Non serve, ed e' anzi dannosa, la retorica d'accatto, ignorante e stereotipata, che ovviamente non convince nessuno.
E' semplicemente indispensabile la lettura di tutti i seguenti testi:
- Ward Churchill e Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, South End Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1988, 2002, Black Classic Press, Baltimore 2022.
- Ward Churchill e Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States, South End Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1990, 2002, Black Classic Press, Baltimore 2022.
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Beacon Press, Boston 2014.
- Steve Hendricks, The Unquiet Grave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country, Thunder's Mouth Press, New York 2006.
- Bruce E. Johansen, Encyclopedia of the American Indian Movement, Greenwood, Santa Barbara - Denver - Oxford, 2013 e piu' volte ristampata.
- Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 1980, Penguin Books, New York 1992 e successive ristampe.
- Jim Messerschmidt, The Trial of Leonard Peltier, South End Press, Cambridge, MA, 1983, 1989, 2002.
- Leonard Peltier (con la collaborazione di Harvey Arden), Prison Writings: My Life is my Sun Dance, St. Martin's Griffin, New York 1999.
- Michael E. Tigar, Wade H. McCree, Leonard Peltier, Petitioner, v. United States. U.S. Supreme Court transcript of record with supporting pleading, Gale MOML U.S. Supreme Court Records, 1978 e successive ristampe.
- Joseph H. Trimbach e John M. Trimbach, American Indian Mafia: An FBI Agent's True Story About Wounded Knee, Leonard Peltier, and the American Indian Movement (AIM), Outskirts Press, Denver 2009.
II. La prima forma di azione nonviolenta e' la parresia
- occorre prendere la parola e dire la verita' contrastando la violenza del potere;
- occorre prendere la parola e dire la verita' alle istituzioni per ottenere il rispetto del diritto e della morale;
- occorre prendere la parola e dire la verita' come atto politico che invera l'esercizio della democrazia.
Leonard Peltier e' innocente. Leonard Peltier e' in pericolo di morte. Leonard Peltier deve essere liberato.
Nella vicenda di Leonard Peltier si compendia e si testimonia la condizione imposta dalla violenza etnocida, genocida ed ecocida del potere colonialista, imperialista e razzista a tutti i popoli oppressi, all'umanita' intera e all'intero mondo vivente.
La liberazione di Leonard Peltier significa quindi riconoscere il diritto alla vita non solo di ogni persona innocente e di ogni popolo oppresso, ma di tutti gli esseri umani in quanto tali, dell'umanita' intera, di tutti gli esseri viventi e dell'intero mondo vivente.
III. Il tempo e' poco, agire ora
La vecchiaia e le patologie di Leonard Peltier rendono urgente l'impegno per la sua liberazione.
Occorre scrivere ora ai soggetti istituzionali che hanno il potere di restituirgli la liberta'.
Occorre promuovere ora ogni iniziativa nonviolenta adeguata a far crescere l'impegno per la sua liberazione.
Occorre attivare i mezzi d'informazione per ottenere ora la massima attenzione possibile dell'opinione pubblica.
*
Free Leonard Peltier.
Non muoia in prigione un uomo innocente.
Mitakuye Oyasin.
Il "Centro di ricerca per la pace, i diritti umani e la difesa della biosfera" di Viterbo
Viterbo, 7 luglio 2024
3. DOCUMENTAZIONE. MICHELE BOLLINGER: LEONARD PELTER AND THE INDIAN STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM (2009) (PARTE PRIMA)
[Dal sito della "International Socialist Review" riprendiamo il seguente articolo basato su una relazione tenuta il 20 giugno 2009]
This article is based on a presentation delivered Saturday, June 20, at Socialism 2009 in Chicago.
*
I AM here today to talk about federal prisoner number 89637-132 - man named Leonard Peltier, an innocent man who has spent more than thirty-three years in prison for a crime he did not commit. In 1977, he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms for the deaths of two FBI agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, who were killed in a gunfight on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in June 1975. Peltier's case is one of the greatest travesties of justice of modern U.S. judicial history -alongside Sacco and Vanzetti, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Leonard Peltier is one of American society's longest serving political prisoners. His prosecution and conviction were driven solely by his participation in the American Indian Movement, also known as AIM. Leonard Peltier has been a victim - time and time again - of the racism that is embedded in the U.S. criminal justice system.
But Leonard Peltier is not simply a victim. He is a fighter, writer, activist, grandfather, Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and was the presidential candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party in 2004. Leonard, his friends, family, and comrades have fought for real justice to be done. In the years since his conviction, millions upon millions of people around the world have come to learn of his case, agree that he is innocent, and demand his freedom. This is in part due to the famous documentary, Incident at Oglala, directed by Michael Apted and narrated by Robert Redford, and the national bestselling book that everyone from the FBI to former South Dakota governor Bill Janklow tried to block from publication - Peter Matthiessen's In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.
This struggle has had its ups and downs. Former President Bill Clinton - a Democrat who expanded the prison system and the death penalty - refused to grant clemency to Peltier after hundreds of FBI agents marched against it in front of the White House, saving all his pardons for his wealthy benefactors like Mark Rich. This was a painful blow to many who built momentum around Peltier's case in the 1990s—but it was a clear reflection of the Clinton presidency, which expanded the death penalty, ushered in an era of mandatory minimum sentences and zero-tolerance policies, and ended with over 2 million people incarcerated.
Following Clinton, the eight long, painful years of attacks on civil liberties by the Bush administration through the Patriot Act has rightfully led to the emergence of new cases, like the case of Dr. Sami Al-Arian, coming to the forefront. It also meant that cases like Peltier's were pushed to the margins of political consciousness, to some degree even among activists.
But it is critical now to rebuild momentum in the case of Leonard Peltier, to put his name back at the center of the fight for justice in this country, and to radicalize new activists around his case. It is necessary to make the case to the huge numbers of people who have pursued justice for years that the last chapter of this struggle is far from having been written. Leonard Peltier is now sixty-four years old; he has diabetes and other health problems. He was attacked and brutally beaten earlier this year. He must be freed. This struggle is not over; in fact a renewed and re-energized fight can be waged and won.
Leonard had his first full parole hearing this summer, on July 28. Hundreds of supporters of Leonard Peltier demonstrated outside as the hearing was taking place. [As the ISR goes to press, the outcome of the hearing is still undecided.] With the new Obama administration appointments to the U.S. Parole Commission, the Leonard Peltier Defense-Offense Committee (LPDOC), which includes his sister, Betty Peltier-Solano, remains optimistic about the possibility of winning Leonard's freedom. But given the history and the dynamics of this case, one thing is clear - victory is not going to be handed to us. The U.S. government went to extreme lengths to convict Peltier and to keep him in prison all these years. His conviction and incarceration are not just revenge for the deaths of two FBI agents, but a warning issued by the U.S. government to all who were part of and looked to the struggles of the 1960s for inspiration, especially the militant American Indian Movement and the antiwar, national liberation, and Black Power struggles that inspired and shaped it. To free Peltier is to vindicate what radicals have argued for years—that the real criminal of this era was the U.S. government, through its murderous FBI counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO.
Going forward, it's key to understand why Leonard Peltier was wrongfully imprisoned and why AIM was met with such brutal repression. Our goal should be to use the lessons of this tragic incident to galvanize the fight to free Leonard Peltier and all political prisoners as part of a greater offensive against the criminal justice system.
*
The Incident at Oglala
On June 26, 1975, what became known as the "Incident at Oglala" occurred when two unmarked cars chased a red truck onto the Jumping Bull property on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Across the field from the road where the chase occurred was the compound where the Jumping Bull family lived and where AIM members and families had set up camp. When the agents - who hadn't identified themselves - then began firing on the ranch, Peltier and others, who were defending the compound, fired back, not knowing who the men were or what they wanted.
Within minutes, more than 150 FBI SWAT team members, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) police, and the Oglala Sioux tribal government's armed squads known as GOONs had surrounded the ranch. The quick response has led many to believe that the incident was a deliberate provocation by the FBI. Both FBI agents and one Lakota man, Joe Killsright Stuntz, were killed. No one has ever been convicted of Joe Stuntz's death. In fact, only one major newspaper at the time of the incident even mentioned it. The largest FBI manhunt in history followed.
Leonard Peltier had two co-defendants, Bob Robideau1 and Dino Butler, who were tried and found not guilty after a vigorous defense effort by the radical lawyer William Kunstler. Their trial was a huge embarrassment to the federal prosecutor, not to mention the FBI. They decided to go after Peltier, who had escaped to Canada, with a vengeance. The U.S. Constitution guarantees a right to a fair trial. But this is far from what Leonard Peltier got. In this trial, the defense was not allowed to present most of the evidence that prompted the jury in the first trial to acquit Butler and Robideau, and the prosecution presented fabricated evidence and coerced testimony against Peltier.
The litany of offenses committed by the government against Peltier is lengthy. The government lied, cheated, and threw the Constitution out the window to ensure a conviction. The U.S. government used three perjured affidavits to force Peltier's extradition from Canada. To secure these, federal officials shamelessly threatened and intimidated Myrtle Poor Bear, the source of these affidavits. Poor Bear later recanted their contents entirely. The jury at Peltier's February 1976 trial in Fargo, North Dakota, was all-white; the government used racism and fear-mongering to deliberately make the jury feel vulnerable to attack - sequestering them unnecessarily, for example. The judge, who actually had meetings with the FBI during the trial, constantly and aggressively ruled against the defense's objections, and refused to allow Peltier's attorneys to argue "self-defense" as his defense.
During the trial, the Assistant U.S. Attorney, Lynn Crooks, did not produce any witnesses who could identify Peltier as the one who killed the agents. The prosecution presented false evidence regarding the murder weapon; they held that there was only one AR-15 and it belonged to Peltier. Yet there were many AR-15 rifles found at the site. The government also withheld evidence—critical ballistic reports that showed the gun they said Peltier had been using could not be matched to the bullet casing they found near the agents who had been killed.
None of this is disputed by the U.S. government. At the appellate hearing in the 1980s, the government attorney conceded, "We had a murder, we had numerous shooters, we do not know who specifically fired what killing shots... [W]e do not know, quote unquote, who shot the agents." Though the Eighth Circuit Court at this time found that the jury in Peltier's trial might have acquitted him had the FBI not withheld certain evidence, they refused to grant him a new trial.
This is just a barebones overview of the main injustices that colored Leonard's trial. The United States of America did not fail Leonard Peltier beginning with his unfair trial in 1976. His entire life story was shaped by the treacherous treatment of indigenous people in this country at the hands of the U.S. government. He was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 1944, the child of Anishinabe and Lakota parents, with roots in the powerful Sioux nation that once dominated the Great Plains.
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Historical background
The Civil War and the defeat of slavery in the South opened up a period of rapid industrial capitalist expansion in the United States, which was accompanied by a wave of railroad construction and the consolidation of U.S. control over the western territories it had acquired through war and conquest. The defeat by the U.S. government of the Plains Indians, and especially the Sioux, was absolutely decisive in this process.
Yet it certainly was no easy fight. As professor Ward Churchill says, Vietnam isn't the first war the U.S. lost; instead, it was the famous Oglala Sioux Chief Red Cloud's war in the late 1860s. As Dee Brown, the author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, writes: "For the first time in its history the U.S. Government had negotiated a peace which conceded everything demanded by the enemy and which extracted nothing in return." The Ft. Laramie Treaty established the Great Sioux Reservation as the "the Lakota homeland - centering on the sacred Black Hills - was reserved for their exclusive use and occupancy in perpetuity." The Ft. Laramie Treaty was an established part of U.S. law—ratified by Congress on February 16, 1869. The reservation covered the entire area of present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri River.
But the Black Hills were rich in minerals, gold, and timber, and the white robber barons wanted it. Prospectors began violating the treaty almost right away. General George Armstrong Custer's Black Hills Expedition in 1874 opened the region to a massive gold rush. Custer's adjutant and brother-in-law, Lieutenant James Calhoun, wrote in his diary that Custer "has expressed a desire on many occasions to explore the Black Hills, believing that it would open a rich vein of wealth calculated to increase the commercial prosperity of this country."
There was money to be made - quickly. According to Matthiessen, in 1877 "George Hearst's Homestake Gold mine was established at Lead, in the northern hills; within two years, Homestake appeared on the NYSE [New York Stock Exchange], and within ten, an investment of $10,000 was worth $6 million - a million dollars more, that is, than had been offered by the commissioners [to the Lakota people] for all of the Black Hills."
The Lakota were not interested in making any deals and did not conceive of these sacred hills as something that could be bought or sold. Colonel John E. Smith noted that this was "the only portion [of their reservation] worth anything to them" and concluded that, "nothing short of their annihilation will get it from them."
This so-called "thriftless race of savages" (as the Lakota were referred to during one congressional session), under the leadership of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, managed to kill George Armstrong Custer and defeat the Seventh Cavalry in the famous Battle of the Little Bighorn in July 1876. But they were unable to stop the advance of American capitalism. Both Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were eventually murdered. By the late 1800s, the U.S. had thoroughly broken the Ft. Laramie Treaty and the entire area was flooded by missionaries and mining companies. According to Indian historian Vine Deloria, "Indian landholdings were reduced from 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million in 1934. Of this 48 million acres, nearly 20 million were useless for farming."
The official policy became to "civilize" Indian peoples and end their existence as separate entities by "assimilating" them into white society. The American ruling class was honest about their aims, as the Report of the Commissioner on Indian Affairs, 1889, makes clear: "The Indian must conform to the white man's ways, peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must. This civilization might not be the best possible, but it is the best the Indians can get. They cannot escape and must either conform to it or be crushed by it."
The Dawes Act of 1887 legally destroyed communal ownership of land, allowing the U.S. government to break up tribal lands into private parcels, and criminalized Indian culture and religion. Indian children were herded into brutal quasi-military boarding schools that cut their hair and strictly forbade the use of their own languages. Teddy Roosevelt - whose face was blasted into a stolen mountain now known as Mount Rushmore - celebrated the Dawes Act as "a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass." The act set aside a limited amount of land to be divided up among individual tribal members as private plots, freeing up the rest to be declared as "surplus." In the first thirteen years of the Dawes Act, the United States took more than 28 million more acres of "surplus" Native land.
The final blow to the Lakota Sioux was the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, where 300 Lakota, mostly women and children, were slaughtered by the Seventh Cavalry and unceremoniously buried in a mass grave. By then the various bands of the Lakota were left with five small reservations as we know them today, including Pine Ridge, administered by the much-hated Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). These reservations became pockets of deep despair and poverty.
The 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, known as the "Indian New Deal," overturned the land privatization provisions of the Dawes Act, establishing some degree of tribal self-governance and religious freedom, and providing some meager federal funds for Indian nations to try and rebuild their land base. However, the act did nothing to restore the millions of acres of lost Indian lands, and it made Native American men eligible for the military draft. Thereafter the U.S. government did business with the tribal councils; the representatives on these councils, and their policies, were based on majority vote, even if turnout was only 15 percent, as it was in one Hopi election. Moreover, all tribal decisions were subject to the approval of the secretary of the interior.
The post-Second World War period opened up a renewed era of Indian land theft. Following Washington's emergence from the war as the world's most powerful industrial empire, U.S. corporations eyed greedily the remaining tribal lands under which lay rich deposits of coal, oil, and uranium. By the 1960s companies like Peabody Coal, Union Carbide, Chevron, Philips Uranium, and countless others had made their way onto reservations. Some were invited on by tribal councils—using bribery and pressure - to the resentment of many. But many more got there via the "termination" and "relocation" policies developed and carried out in the mid-to late-1950s.
The trend was set by Dillon S. Myer, the man who had been in charge of the Japanese internment camps during the Second World War. As head of the BIA from 1950 to 1952, Myer interfered in tribal council elections, sold Indian land without tribal consent, and supported efforts by whites to appropriate more Indian land.
Termination was a process by which the Eisenhower administration, reverting back to the policy of assimilation, terminated its relationships (including its treaty obligations) with the tribes and handed them over to local states. Between 1954 and 1960, fifteen tribes were terminated, affecting more than 40,000 Indians, who lost their tribal status. These Indians became victims of trickery, bribery, and coercion that deprived them further of what little land they had left.
The key to making termination successful (from the government's point of view) was "de-settling" the reservations - relocating Indians. Beginning in 1952, the government, preying on people's desperation on reservations, lied and pressured people to move to urban areas where they were promised jobs and housing. In order to promote these relocation programs, the U.S. government refused building permits for hospitals and schools in tribal areas, and slashed food and commodity aid to the tribes. The relocation policy created a concentration of Indians in impoverished urban neighborhoods subject to the miseries of police brutality and poverty. Many were forced by poverty to sell the allotments they had received under the Dawes Act.
But by the mid-1960s, relocation had other unintended consequences. It brought people together from different tribes, which led to a renewed interest in culture and encouraged pan-Indian consciousness. And it placed young Native Americans in the very cities, communities, and in some cases, campuses in the midst of the radical upsurge that was the 1960s.
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Leonard Peltier
Each of these factors shaped Leonard Peltier's life. As a child he lived with grandparents on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota in a tiny house without water and electricity. They had barely enough to eat, working the potato fields for low pay.
In 1953, like tens of thousands of other Native American children, a big black government car came and took Leonard and other children off to the BIA boarding school in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where he was tormented, disciplined, had his hair shorn, and was sprayed with DDT.
"I consider my years at Wahpeton my first imprisonment," writes Leonard,
and it was for the same crime as all the others: being an Indian. We had to speak English. We were beaten if we were caught speaking our own language. Still, we did. We'd sneak behind the buildings, the way kids today sneak out to smoke behind the school, and we'd talk Indian to each other. I guess that's where I first became a "hardened criminal" as the FBI calls me. And you could say that my first infraction in my criminal career was speaking my own language. There's an act of violence for you!
After surviving the BIA boarding school, Leonard was not even fifteen when he was arrested by BIA police as he and his friends were leaving the grounds of a Sun Dance, and then again a few months later for siphoning some diesel fuel from an army truck to heat his grandmother's freezing house.
It was no surprise, then, that in 1959 Leonard "relocated" to Portland to join his mother, where he worked in construction and other jobs. He even co-owned an auto body shop in Seattle, which failed as they began doing jobs for friends for free. As he recalled, "before long we got so deep into debt that we had to close the shop. My one attempt at capitalism was over, scuttled by that old Indian weakness: sharing with others. It's a practice that means we're rich as a people, but poor as individuals."
Leonard increasingly became tuned into struggles emerging around him, such as the fishing rights struggles in Washington State. "Even though I was young, I felt I could no longer ignore the Native struggle so long as one Indian was being mistreated. Like so many others who were shaken out of their submission and lethargy and indifference during the 1960s, I joined the fight for civil and human and Indian rights."
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Roots of AIM
The civil rights and Black Power movements provided the backdrop to a rise of Indian militancy that grew out of and developed parallel to them.
The conditions were ripe for this kind of struggle. The movements for independence and decolonization in Africa and Asia, as well as the national liberation struggle in Vietnam, set the stage for Native Americans to challenge the policies of the U.S. government. In his book Custer Died for Your Sins, the celebrated Sioux author Vine Deloria noted that "President Lyndon Johnson talked about America's 'commitments' and President Nixon talked about Russia's failure to respect treaties. Indian people laugh themselves sick when they hear these statements." After all, to quote Howard Zinn, "The U.S. government had signed more than 400 treaties with Indians and violated every single one."
Native American political organizing in the very early 1960s consisted of moderate organizations like the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) that grew less accommodating throughout the sixties - not unlike the NAACP. In 1961, a group of radicalizing students, led by Clyde Warrior, who had worked on a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) voter education project in the summer, split from NCAI and formed the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC). NIYC condemned the BIA as a white colonialist institution and began discussing "Red power" in the pages of its newspaper, ABC (Americans Before Columbus.)
Throughout the 1960s a wave of smaller struggles unfolded mostly in Indian areas of major cities, and on campuses such as San Francisco State. LaNada Boyer, the first American Indian student at Berkeley, led a fight for an American Indian studies department. There were other key battles as well, namely the "fish-ins" that occurred in Washington State by local tribes demanding their traditional rights to fish for salmon and steelhead as guaranteed by treaties signed in the 1850s. Clearly there was an opening for actions on a much larger scale and that could take up bigger questions of Indian sovereignty and dignity.
The immediate spark that created the American Indian Movement began with the occupation of Alcatraz Island. In November 1969, seventy-eight people, most of them members of the group Indians of All Tribes (IAT), occupied Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay. The IAT demanded title to Alcatraz and, in the interests of being fair, offered to "purchase Alcatraz for 24 dollars in glass beads and cloth…our offer of $1.24 per acre is greater than the 47 per acre the white men are now paying the California Indians for their land [through the ICC]." The Alcatraz occupation lasted for nineteen months and more than 5,600 American Indians joined the occupation - some for all eighteen months and some for just part of a day. The action was received with an outpouring of support, both political and material, and made headline news for months, though eventually the occupants were removed from the Island. A number of Indian activists, some who were later to become well known in the movement, led and participated in the occupation - for example, Richard Oakes, LaNada Boyer, Grace Thorpe, and John Trudell, and Russell Means.
The occupation, though it did not achieve its goals to establish an Indian museum and cultural center on the island, was important in that it brought the issues and concerns of American Indians to national attention. But the IAT was not able to project itself onto the national stage that its own actions had prepared.
The American Indian Movement (AIM) stepped into that role. It was founded in Minneapolis in 1968 by a group of urban Anishinabes, including Clyde Bellecourt, Mary Jane Wilson, Eddie Benton, and Dennis Banks. Clyde and Eddie actually met at the Minnesota Federal Penitentiary and organized Native Americans living in Minneapolis and St. Paul. At first, AIM organized around jobs, housing, and against police harassment. In the late 1960s, the annual household income of an American Indian family was $1,500—one-fourth the national average. Native American life expectancy was forty-four—twenty-one years below the national average. AIM took off quickly, with chapters sprouting up across the country as they organized a series of critical, bold, and polarizing actions - until it was met with vicious government repression that culminated in Peltier's conviction and imprisonment.
Leonard Peltier first became an activist while living in Seattle, participating in the 1970 takeover of Fort Lawton, an abandoned military installation. The action was directly inspired by the Alcatraz events. Some months later Peltier joined the AIM chapter in Denver.
AIM itself drew inspiration, ideas, and tactics from the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense - this was very conscious in the minds of its leading members like Dennis Banks and Russell Means - and was comprised of Native Americans in urban areas (Minneapolis, Seattle, Cleveland, and the Bay Area) but with very strong ties to reservations. AIM had a working class core to it, though often people on the margins of the working class, such as unemployed workers, and many Vietnam War veterans. They were often armed. They had to be. South Dakota was known as the "Mississippi of the North" in part because of the extreme poverty - on the Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation the life expectancy was just forty-six years. (To this day, there is 60–80 percent unemployment and 69 percent live below the official poverty line on Pine Ridge.) But it was also called the "Mississippi of the North" because of the racist violence they faced.
Just like the victims of the Jim Crow South such as Emmitt Till, Pine Ridge had its victims of racist violence, especially in the deeply bigoted border towns that preyed on the Indian communities. One such incident - the racist murder of a Sioux in a white town near Pine Ridge - prompted AIM's first involvement in activism in the area.
In January 1972, fifty-one-year-old Raymond Yellow Thunder was brutally beaten by four white racists, taunted and humiliated, stripped down and shoved in the trunk of a car while being driven around for hours, pushed naked into an American Legion Dance Hall in Gordon, Nebraska, and then thrown out into the cold night. Afterward he went missing, only to be found dead in his car a week later.
Yellow Thunder's distraught family searched for him for a week, and at first weren't allowed to see his body. They sought assistance everywhere they could, including from police, BIA, and the tribal government, in hopes that there would be an investigation into Yellow Thunder's death, but they found none. Severt Young Bear, a nephew of Raymond's, contacted AIM.
This was AIM's first major action on a reservation. They mobilized 1,400 people, mostly Lakota of the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations - with eighty tribes represented overall - and occupied Gordon, Nebraska, shutting it down for three days. One million dollars in Oglala Sioux tribal money was transferred out of Gordon's banks. In response, the state of Nebraska, the Department of Justice, and the Department of the Interior all agreed to investigate Yellow Thunder's death.
In January 1973, a white service station attendant known locally as "Mad Dog" stabbed and killed Wesley Bad Heart Bull. After the perpetrator was charged with involuntary manslaughter, Wesley's mother, Sarah Bad Heart Bull, turned to AIM for help. Two hundred AIM supporters showed up at a courthouse in Custer, South Dakota, for a meeting with officials. Protestors found the place swarming with police. When officials cancelled the meeting, all hell broke loose. "As Bad Heart Bull attempted to get past the crowd and into the courthouse," explains Russell Means, "police officers pushed her down the steps, using a nightstick on her throat." The incident was the signal for police to start swinging. In the melee two police cars were overturned and burned.
Dennis Banks and Russell Means were brought up on riot charges. Sarah Bad Heart Bull got a three-to-five-year sentence for rioting and served five months. Her son's murderer, in ironic contrast, received a mere two months' probation and served no time. After the riot, the U.S. attorney general assigned sixty-five federal marshals to Pine Ridge. Why such a heavy federal presence? According to Peter Matthiessen, "state and government authorities were concerned less with law and order than with the obstacle to Black Hills mining leases that AIM insistence on Indian sovereignty might represent."
However, these battles deepened AIM's connections to reservations, essentially building themselves a base of active members. Additionally, they clearly demonstrated that there was power through struggle and that people could win. They also set the stage for AIM's higher profile actions that put them in direct confrontation with the federal government.
These were followed by other spectacular AIM actions. In what was known as the Trail of Broken Treaties, a caravan of hundreds of Native Americans came to Washington to protest grievances. After being provoked and threatened by government officials and police, they occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs building. Later there came the historic Occupation of Wounded Knee.
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Trail of Broken Treaties
AIM organized the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan in November 1972. Participants traveled from all over the country. The caravan stopped in cities and reservations along the way, and held political meetings and rallies. In St. Paul, the caravan converged and participants drafted a twenty-point proposal of social, economic, and political demands to present at the White House. But the portents were not good. An interior department memo - which the caravan's participants had gotten wind of before they arrived - instructed BIA officials to offer no assistance to the caravan.
By end of the first day in Washington, 400 Native Americans had arrived, including Leonard Peltier. They had been in touch with Vice President Agnew's office and had been assured they would be met seriously and respectfully. But the caravaners faced problems immediately. The Park Service refused to allow the Indians to perform a religious ceremony at the grave of Iwo Jima veteran Ira Hayes in Arlington Cemetery. The BIA had just spent $50,000 hosting tribal chairmen, yet refused to offer any financial support, even when the Trail's housing fell through. Angered and without adequate accommodations, the Trail participants decided to descend on the BIA building. Participants were told that they could stay in the BIA auditorium until proper accommodations could be found for them. Before arrangements were finalized, however, police in riot gear arrived and ordered the Indians to leave. After a fierce five-minute battle, the police found themselves outside the building, the entrance barricaded by the Indians, who by then numbered 1,000. According to historians Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, "The Indians unfurled a banner reading NATIVE AMERICAN EMBASSY across the BIA building. A tepee rose on the front lawn of the liberated territory."
"If Alcatraz seemed fraught with potential disaster," writes Smith and Warrior, "this sudden rebellion in Washington, D.C. had catastrophic possibilities that bordered on the surreal. Five days before the presidential election, Indian revolutionaries held a government building six blocks from the White House, vowing to die rather than surrender. The casualties, if it came to that, would likely include the Trail's scores of children and old people."
Outside the building, there was much solidarity. Many stopped by to leave food and supplies. Some Indian BIA employees showed up to participate. Celebrities like Dr. Spock and Black leaders like Stokely Carmichael came to offer their support. "A circle of black, white and Chicano supporters had linked arms, forming a human barricade." But the more conservative National Tribal Chairman's Organization denounced the occupation.
The occupation began with great unity and energy. Toward the end, however, the hungry, frustrated, and exhausted occupiers exploded in a final rage of destruction against the BIA and its building, causing more than $2 million in damages. Agent provocateurs fanned the flames of destruction.
Finally, instead of attacking, as they had repeatedly threatened to do, the government was forced to negotiate. AIM leaders including Clyde Bellecourt, Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and Hank Adams and some elders met with Nixon administration officials. The agreement to end the occupation included three main points that would all soon be broken: no legal action against the occupiers; reform the U.S. government's relationship with Indian people to be more responsive to Indian needs; and analyze and respond to the twenty-point proposal within thirty days.
The negotiations secured compensation for travel ($66,000) and a police escort out of town. But they also took with them a little more - namely, a couple tons of BIA files that verified everything from cases of government misconduct, conflict of interest within the BIA - like the assistant secretary of the interior who went to work for Peabody Coal a few years later - the identity FBI informants, including agents involved in the caravan, and documents verifying the forced sterilization of Native American women. It was described as the biggest document heist in history.
A House subcommittee said that the AIM action was "the most severe damage inflicted upon Washington, D.C. since the British burned the city in the War of 1812." But the federal government had a substantial number of agents among the protesters who had encouraged the destruction. It thus became apparent why the government was so willing to agree not to prosecute the Indians, in the words of Vine Deloria, it would have been "extremely difficult for the government to have proven an intent by the real Indian activists to destroy the building."
Out of this struggle the FBI and BIA escalated their war on AIM and Native Americans, turning its notorious counterintelligence program, or COINTELPRO, on AIM, and as well, in the 1972 Oglala Sioux tribal elections, throwing its weight behind strongman Dick Wilson for tribal president, hoping that a "strong Indian retaliation" against AIM and its supporters could quell the growing Indian militancy.
(segue)
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NON MUOIA IN CARCERE LEONARD PELTIER
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Foglio a sostegno dell'appello a scrivere al Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America affinche' conceda la grazia che restituisca la liberta' a Leonard Peltier
A cura del "Centro di ricerca per la pace, i diritti umani e la difesa della biosfera" di Viterbo
Supplemento a "La nonviolenza e' in cammino" (anno XXV)
Direttore responsabile: Peppe Sini. Redazione: strada S. Barbara 9/E, 01100 Viterbo, e-mail: centropacevt at gmail.com
Numero 113 del 3 dicembre 2024
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L'unico indirizzo di posta elettronica utilizzabile per contattare la redazione e' centropacevt at gmail.com
NON MUOIA IN CARCERE LEONARD PELTIER
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Foglio a sostegno dell'appello a scrivere al Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America affinche' conceda la grazia che restituisca la liberta' a Leonard Peltier
A cura del "Centro di ricerca per la pace, i diritti umani e la difesa della biosfera" di Viterbo
Supplemento a "La nonviolenza e' in cammino" (anno XXV)
Direttore responsabile: Peppe Sini. Redazione: strada S. Barbara 9/E, 01100 Viterbo, e-mail: centropacevt at gmail.com
Numero 113 del 3 dicembre 2024
Sommario di questo numero:
1. Una lettera ai mezzi d'informazione: dieci buone ragioni per concedere la grazia a Leonard Peltier
2. Che fare adesso per la liberazione di Leonard Peltier
3. Michele Bollinger: Leonard Peltier and the Indian struggle for Freedom (2009) (parte prima)
1. INIZIATIVE. UNA LETTERA AI MEZZI D'INFORMAZIONE: DIECI BUONE RAGIONI PER CONCEDERE LA GRAZIA A LEONARD PELTIER
Vi inviamo la seguente lettera che alcune persone amiche della nonviolenza hanno inviato dall'Italia al Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America Joe Biden.
Vi saremmo assai grati se voleste dare ad essa ulteriore diffusione.
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Egregio Presidente,
mancano meno di due mesi al termine del suo mandato presidenziale.
In queste settimane lei decidera', come e' consuetudine, di concedere la grazia ad alcuni detenuti.
Le scriviamo per chiederle di concedere la grazia a Leonard Peltier e ci permetta di elencarle alcune buone ragioni a sostegno di questo suo atto non solo di umanita', ma di verita' e di giustizia.
1. Leonard Peltier ha ottanta anni ed e' in prigione da 48 anni per un delitto che non ha commesso: non ha mai ucciso nessuno, ed anzi si e' sempre adoperato in difesa della vita delle persone, dei popoli, della natura.
2. Leonard Peltier ha subito un processo viziato da "testimonianze" dimostratesi false e da "prove" dimostratesi anch'esse false; autorevoli magistrati e numerose personalita' delle istituzioni del suo paese hanno riconosciuto che la sua condanna e' stata ingiusta, frutto di una persecuzione, palesemente contraria al diritto.
3. Leonard Peltier e' un uomo anziano gravemente malato: che possa tornare alla sua famiglia in questo poco tempo che gli resta da vivere.
4. La liberazione di Leonard Peltier e' stata chiesta da personalita' benemerite dell'umanita' come Nelson Mandela e madre Teresa di Calcutta.
5. La liberazione di Leonard Peltier e' stata chiesta da alcune delle maggiori autorita' morali e religiose mondiali: come il Dalai Lama e papa Francesco.
6. La liberazione di Leonard Peltier e' stata chiesta da prestigiose associazioni umanitarie, come Amnesty International e il Movimento Nonviolento.
7. La liberazione di Leonard Peltier e' stata chiesta dal Parlamento Europeo, dall'Onu (una cui commissione ad hoc ha ricostruito l'intera vicenda giudiziaria concludendo che debba essere liberato), e da innumerevoli altre istituzioni democratiche di tutto il mondo.
8. La liberazione di Leonard Peltier e' stata chiesta da innumerevoli istituzioni, associazioni e movimenti rappresentativi dei popoli nativi, dediti alla protezione dei diritti umani, impegnati in difesa della Madre Terra.
9. La liberazione di Leonard Peltier e' stata chiesta da milioni di persone di tutto il mondo.
10. Last, but not least, la liberazione di Leonard Peltier e' stata chiesta all'unanimita' anche dal Comitato Nazionale del Partito Democratico degli Stati Uniti d'America, il partito di cui anche lei fa parte, ed anzi e' il piu' autorevole rappresentante.
Egregio Presidente,
siamo consapevoli che lei non puo' leggere tutta la corrispondenza che le perviene, e tuttavia sentiamo il dovere di scriverle per sollecitare la sua attenzione, il suo giudizio, la sua umanita'.
Restituisca la liberta' a Leonard Peltier.
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Alleghiamo in calce:
- Allegato primo. Per scrivere al Presidente Biden;
- Allegato secondo. Per saperne un po' di piu' su Leonard Peltier, da 48 anni prigioniero innocente;
- Allegato terzo. Alcuni ulteriori contatti utili per informazioni dirette sulle iniziative attualmente in corso in Italia e in Europa per Leonard Peltier.
Il "Centro di ricerca per la pace, i diritti umani e la difesa della biosfera" di Viterbo
Viterbo, 24 novembre 2024
Mittente: "Centro di ricerca per la pace, i diritti umani e la difesa della biosfera" di Viterbo, strada S. Barbara 9/E, 01100 Viterbo, e-mail: centropacevt at gmail.com
Il "Centro di ricerca per la pace, i diritti umani e la difesa della biosfera" di Viterbo e' una struttura nonviolenta attiva dagli anni '70 del secolo scorso che ha sostenuto, promosso e coordinato varie campagne per il bene comune, locali, nazionali ed internazionali. E' la struttura nonviolenta che negli anni Ottanta ha coordinato per l'Italia la piu' ampia campagna di solidarieta' con Nelson Mandela, allora detenuto nelle prigioni del regime razzista sudafricano. Nel 1987 ha promosso il primo convegno nazionale di studi dedicato a Primo Levi. Dal 2000 pubblica il notiziario telematico quotidiano "La nonviolenza e' in cammino". Dal 2021 e' particolarmente impegnato nella campagna per la liberazione di Leonard Peltier, l'illustre attivista nativo americano difensore dei diritti umani di tutti gli esseri umani e dell'intero mondo vivente, da 48 anni prigioniero innocente.
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Allegato primo. Per scrivere al Presidente Biden
Per scrivere al Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America e' sufficiente collegarsi al sito della Casa Bianca alla pagina web: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
Compilare quindi gli item successivi:
- alla voce MESSAGE TYPE: scegliere Contact the President
- alla voce PREFIX: scegliere il titolo corrispondente alla propria identita'
- alla voce FIRST NAME: scrivere il proprio nome
- alla voce SECOND NAME: si puo' omettere la compilazione
- alla voce LAST NAME: scrivere il proprio cognome
- alla voce SUFFIX, PRONOUNS: si puo' omettere la compilazione
- alla voce E-MAIL: scrivere il proprio indirizzo e-mail
- alla voce PHONE: scrivere il proprio numero di telefono seguendo lo schema 39xxxxxxxxxx
- alla voce COUNTRY/STATE/REGION: scegliere Italy
- alla voce STREET: scrivere il proprio indirizzo nella sequenza numero civico, via/piazza
- alla voce CITY: scrivere il nome della propria citta' e il relativo codice di avviamento postale
- alla voce WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO SAY? [Cosa vorresti dire?]: scrivere un breve testo (di seguito una traccia utilizzabile):
"Egregio Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America,
le scriviamo per chiederle di concedere la grazia presidenziale a Leonard Peltier.
Come lei sa, Leonard Peltier ha gia' subito 48 anni di carcere per un delitto che non ha commesso.
E' vecchio, e' gravemente malato, le sue patologie non possono essere adeguatamente curate in carcere.
La sua liberazione e' stata chiesta da Nelson Mandela, da madre Teresa di Calcutta, dal Dalai Lama, da papa Francesco, da Amnesty International, dal Parlamento Europeo, dall'Onu, da milioni di persone di tutto il mondo.
Egregio Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America,
conceda la grazia a Leonard Peltier.
Restituisca la liberta' a Leonard Peltier.
Distinti saluti".
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Allegato secondo. Per saperne un po' di piu' su Leonard Peltier, da 48 anni prigioniero innocente
Leonard Peltier e' un illustre attivista nativo americano difensore dei diritti umani di tutti gli esseri umani e dell'intero mondo vivente, da 48 anni prigioniero innocente.
Segnaliamo alcuni materiali di documentazione in lingua italiana disponibili nella rete telematica:
https://sites.google.com/view/viterboperleonardpeltier/home-page
https://sites.google.com/view/vetralla-per-peltier-2021/home-page
https://sites.google.com/view/vetrallaperpeltier2022/home-page
https://sites.google.com/view/vetrallaperleonardpeltier2023/home-page
https://sites.google.com/view/vetralla-per-peltier-2024/home-page
Segnaliamo anche alcune pubblicazioni a stampa in italiano e in inglese particolarmente utili:
- Edda Scozza, Il coraggio d'essere indiano. Leonard Peltier prigioniero degli Stati Uniti, Erre Emme, Pomezia (Roma) 1996 (ora Roberto Massari Editore, Bolsena Vt).
- Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 1980, Penguin Books, New York 1992 e successive ristampe; in edizione italiana: Peter Matthiessen, Nello spirito di Cavallo Pazzo, Frassinelli, Milano 1994.
- Leonard Peltier (con la collaborazione di Harvey Arden), Prison writings. My life is my sun dance, St. Martin's Griffin, New York 1999; in edizione italiana: Leonard Peltier, La mia danza del sole. Scritti dalla prigione, Fazi, Roma 2005.
- Jim Messerschmidt, The Trial of Leonard Peltier, South End Press, Cambridge, MA, 1983, 1989, 2002.
- Bruce E. Johansen, Encyclopedia of the American Indian Movement, Greenwood, Santa Barbara - Denver - Oxford, 2013 e piu' volte ristampata.
Segnaliamo inoltre che nella rete telematica e' disponibile una notizia sintetica in italiano dal titolo "Alcune parole per Leonard Peltier":
https://lists.peacelink.it/nonviolenza/2022/03/msg00001.html
Sempre nella rete telematica e' disponibile anche una piu' ampia ed approfondita bibliografia ragionata dal titolo "Dieci libri piu' uno che sarebbe bene aver letto per conoscere la vicenda di Leonard Peltier (e qualche altro minimo suggerimento bibliografico)":
https://lists.peacelink.it/nonviolenza/2022/09/msg00064.html
Ancora nella rete telematica segnaliamo una lettera "ad adiuvandum" alla "United States Parole Commission" del 22 giugno 2024:
https://lists.peacelink.it/nonviolenza/2024/06/msg00055.html
Segnaliamo anche che in queste settimane il "Centro di ricerca per la pace, i diritti umani e la difesa della biosfera" di Viterbo pubblica un notiziario telematico quotidiano con la testata "Non muoia in carcere Leonard Peltier" che propone iniziative e materiali.
Segnaliamo infine l'attuale sito ufficiale del Comitato di solidarieta' con Leonard Peltier, il "Free Leonard Peltier Ad Hoc Committee": www.freeleonardpeltiernow.org
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Allegato terzo. Alcuni ulteriori contatti utili per informazioni dirette sulle iniziative attualmente in corso in Italia e in Europa per Leonard Peltier
Per informazioni sulle principali iniziative italiane contattare Andrea De Lotto, tel. 3490931155, e-mail: bigoni.gastone at gmail.com
Vi e' anche un gruppo su facebook: Free Leonard Peltier Italy: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1051622359691101
Un sito che fornisce preziose informazioni aggiornate sulle iniziative in Europa (in tedesco e in inglese) e' www.leonardpeltier.de
Un riferimento fondamentale in Italia e' anche l'ottima rivista "Tepee" e la storica associazione Soconas-Incomindios: per contatti scrivere o telefonare alla professoressa Naila Clerici: cell. 3478207381, e-mail: naila.clerici at soconasincomindios.it, facebook: facebook.com/pages/Soconas-Incomindios/, youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1jno1fq2G_HnMd50IG0hww
Ricordiamo infine ancora una volta che il sito ufficiale (in inglese) del Comitato di solidarieta' con Leonard Peltier, il "Free Leonard Peltier Ad Hoc Committee", e' www.freeleonardpeltiernow.org
2. REPETITA IUVANT. CHE FARE ADESSO PER LA LIBERAZIONE DI LEONARD PELTIER
Come e' noto, la "United States Parole Commission" ha negato la "liberta' sulla parola" a Leonard Peltier, ed ha fissato la prossima udienza al 2026. Gli avvocati di Leonard Peltier hanno gia' annunciato che ovviamente interporranno appello avverso questa decisione.
Come e' noto Leonard Peltier, l'illustre attivista nativo americano difensore dei diritti umani di tutti gli esseri umani e dell'intero mondo vivente, e' detenuto da 48 anni in un carcere di massima sicurezza per un delitto che non ha commesso; la sua condanna si baso' su "testimonianze" false e su "prove" altrettanto false. E' anziano (ha quasi 80 anni) e gravemente malato, e le sue plurime patologie non possono essere curate adeguatamente in regime carcerario. Numerosissime personalita' benemerite dell'umanita', associazioni benefiche come Amnesty International, istituzioni democratiche di tutto il mondo - in primis l'Onu e il Parlamento Europeo - chiedono la sua liberazione.
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Che fare?
Occorre perseverare lungo tutte e tre le vie che possono portare alla liberazione di Leonard Peltier:
1. la richiesta al Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America di concedere la "grazia presidenziale";
2. la richiesta al Procuratore Generale degli Stati Uniti d'America di concedere il "rilascio compassionevole";
3. la richiesta alla "United States Parole Commission" di concedere la "liberta' sulla parola".
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Alcune indicazioni pratiche
a) Per scrivere al Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America:
aprire la pagina ad hoc nel sito: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ e seguire le indicazioni li' contenute.
Proposta di testo:
Egregio Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America,
e' consuetudine che avvicinandosi il termine del mandato quadriennale il Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America conceda la grazia ad alcuni detenuti.
La preghiamo di voler concedere la grazia al signor Leonard Peltier, detenuto da quasi mezzo secolo, ormai quasi ottantenne, affetto da gravissime patologie che non possono essere curate in regime carcerario, la cui liberazione e' stata richiesta da personalita' illustri come Nelson Mandela, madre Teresa di Calcutta, il Dalai Lama, papa Francesco e da istituzioni come l'Onu e il Parlamento Europeo.
Voglia gradire distinti saluti.
b) Per scrivere al Procuratore Generale degli Stati Uniti d'America:
aprire la pagina ad hoc nel sito: https://www.justice.gov/doj/webform/your-message-department-justice e seguire le indicazioni li' contenute.
Proposta di testo:
Egregio Procuratore Generale degli Stati Uniti d'America,
la preghiamo di voler concedere il "rilascio compassionevole" ("compassionate release") al signor Leonard Peltier, detenuto da quasi mezzo secolo, ormai quasi ottantenne, affetto da gravissime patologie che non possono essere curate in regime carcerario, la cui liberazione e' stata richiesta da personalita' illustri come Nelson Mandela, madre Teresa di Calcutta, il Dalai Lama, papa Francesco e da istituzioni come l'Onu e il Parlamento Europeo.
Voglia gradire distinti saluti.
c) Per scrivere alla "United States Parole Commission":
usare l'indirizzo e-mail: USParole.questions at usdoj.gov
Proposta di testo:
Egregie signore ed egregi signori della "United States Parole Commission",
pur consapevoli della vostra recente decisione, ci permettiamo di sollecitare ulteriormente una tempestiva riconsiderazione della situazione del signor Leonard Peltier, detenuto da quasi mezzo secolo, ormai quasi ottantenne, affetto da gravissime patologie che non possono essere curate in regime carcerario, la cui liberazione e' stata richiesta da personalita' illustri come Nelson Mandela, madre Teresa di Calcutta, il Dalai Lama, papa Francesco e da istituzioni come l'Onu e il Parlamento Europeo.
Vogliate gradire distinti saluti.
*
d) Per informare gli avvocati che assistono Leonard Peltier:
usare gli indirizzi e-mail: ksharp at sanfordheisler.com, jenipherj at forthepeoplelegal.com
Proposta di testo:
Egregia avvocata, egregio avvocato,
vi informiamo che abbiamo scritto al Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America, al Procuratore Generale degli Stati Uniti d'America, alla "United States Parole Commission", le lettere il cui testo alleghiamo.
Vogliate gradire distinti saluti.
*
Tre consigli a chi vuole esprimere e promuovere la solidarieta'
I. La prima forma di solidarieta' e' la conoscenza
- occorre studiare adeguatamente tanto i fatti quanto il contesto;
- occorre far circolare l'informazione, avendo cura che sia un'informazione precisa ed incontrovertibile;
- occorre promuovere altre adesioni all'impegno, avendo cura che ci si attenga scrupolosamente al fine della liberazione di Leonard Peltier e che la metodologia sia rigorosamente nonviolenta;
- soprattutto: occorre far sentire la propria voce direttamente alle istanze istituzionali concretamente preposte alla decisione sulla liberazione di Leonard Peltier; e farla sentire in modo adeguato: ovvero comprensibile e persuasivo. Non serve, ed e' anzi dannosa, la retorica d'accatto, ignorante e stereotipata, che ovviamente non convince nessuno.
E' semplicemente indispensabile la lettura di tutti i seguenti testi:
- Ward Churchill e Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, South End Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1988, 2002, Black Classic Press, Baltimore 2022.
- Ward Churchill e Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States, South End Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1990, 2002, Black Classic Press, Baltimore 2022.
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Beacon Press, Boston 2014.
- Steve Hendricks, The Unquiet Grave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country, Thunder's Mouth Press, New York 2006.
- Bruce E. Johansen, Encyclopedia of the American Indian Movement, Greenwood, Santa Barbara - Denver - Oxford, 2013 e piu' volte ristampata.
- Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 1980, Penguin Books, New York 1992 e successive ristampe.
- Jim Messerschmidt, The Trial of Leonard Peltier, South End Press, Cambridge, MA, 1983, 1989, 2002.
- Leonard Peltier (con la collaborazione di Harvey Arden), Prison Writings: My Life is my Sun Dance, St. Martin's Griffin, New York 1999.
- Michael E. Tigar, Wade H. McCree, Leonard Peltier, Petitioner, v. United States. U.S. Supreme Court transcript of record with supporting pleading, Gale MOML U.S. Supreme Court Records, 1978 e successive ristampe.
- Joseph H. Trimbach e John M. Trimbach, American Indian Mafia: An FBI Agent's True Story About Wounded Knee, Leonard Peltier, and the American Indian Movement (AIM), Outskirts Press, Denver 2009.
II. La prima forma di azione nonviolenta e' la parresia
- occorre prendere la parola e dire la verita' contrastando la violenza del potere;
- occorre prendere la parola e dire la verita' alle istituzioni per ottenere il rispetto del diritto e della morale;
- occorre prendere la parola e dire la verita' come atto politico che invera l'esercizio della democrazia.
Leonard Peltier e' innocente. Leonard Peltier e' in pericolo di morte. Leonard Peltier deve essere liberato.
Nella vicenda di Leonard Peltier si compendia e si testimonia la condizione imposta dalla violenza etnocida, genocida ed ecocida del potere colonialista, imperialista e razzista a tutti i popoli oppressi, all'umanita' intera e all'intero mondo vivente.
La liberazione di Leonard Peltier significa quindi riconoscere il diritto alla vita non solo di ogni persona innocente e di ogni popolo oppresso, ma di tutti gli esseri umani in quanto tali, dell'umanita' intera, di tutti gli esseri viventi e dell'intero mondo vivente.
III. Il tempo e' poco, agire ora
La vecchiaia e le patologie di Leonard Peltier rendono urgente l'impegno per la sua liberazione.
Occorre scrivere ora ai soggetti istituzionali che hanno il potere di restituirgli la liberta'.
Occorre promuovere ora ogni iniziativa nonviolenta adeguata a far crescere l'impegno per la sua liberazione.
Occorre attivare i mezzi d'informazione per ottenere ora la massima attenzione possibile dell'opinione pubblica.
*
Free Leonard Peltier.
Non muoia in prigione un uomo innocente.
Mitakuye Oyasin.
Il "Centro di ricerca per la pace, i diritti umani e la difesa della biosfera" di Viterbo
Viterbo, 7 luglio 2024
3. DOCUMENTAZIONE. MICHELE BOLLINGER: LEONARD PELTER AND THE INDIAN STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM (2009) (PARTE PRIMA)
[Dal sito della "International Socialist Review" riprendiamo il seguente articolo basato su una relazione tenuta il 20 giugno 2009]
This article is based on a presentation delivered Saturday, June 20, at Socialism 2009 in Chicago.
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I AM here today to talk about federal prisoner number 89637-132 - man named Leonard Peltier, an innocent man who has spent more than thirty-three years in prison for a crime he did not commit. In 1977, he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms for the deaths of two FBI agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, who were killed in a gunfight on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in June 1975. Peltier's case is one of the greatest travesties of justice of modern U.S. judicial history -alongside Sacco and Vanzetti, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Leonard Peltier is one of American society's longest serving political prisoners. His prosecution and conviction were driven solely by his participation in the American Indian Movement, also known as AIM. Leonard Peltier has been a victim - time and time again - of the racism that is embedded in the U.S. criminal justice system.
But Leonard Peltier is not simply a victim. He is a fighter, writer, activist, grandfather, Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and was the presidential candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party in 2004. Leonard, his friends, family, and comrades have fought for real justice to be done. In the years since his conviction, millions upon millions of people around the world have come to learn of his case, agree that he is innocent, and demand his freedom. This is in part due to the famous documentary, Incident at Oglala, directed by Michael Apted and narrated by Robert Redford, and the national bestselling book that everyone from the FBI to former South Dakota governor Bill Janklow tried to block from publication - Peter Matthiessen's In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.
This struggle has had its ups and downs. Former President Bill Clinton - a Democrat who expanded the prison system and the death penalty - refused to grant clemency to Peltier after hundreds of FBI agents marched against it in front of the White House, saving all his pardons for his wealthy benefactors like Mark Rich. This was a painful blow to many who built momentum around Peltier's case in the 1990s—but it was a clear reflection of the Clinton presidency, which expanded the death penalty, ushered in an era of mandatory minimum sentences and zero-tolerance policies, and ended with over 2 million people incarcerated.
Following Clinton, the eight long, painful years of attacks on civil liberties by the Bush administration through the Patriot Act has rightfully led to the emergence of new cases, like the case of Dr. Sami Al-Arian, coming to the forefront. It also meant that cases like Peltier's were pushed to the margins of political consciousness, to some degree even among activists.
But it is critical now to rebuild momentum in the case of Leonard Peltier, to put his name back at the center of the fight for justice in this country, and to radicalize new activists around his case. It is necessary to make the case to the huge numbers of people who have pursued justice for years that the last chapter of this struggle is far from having been written. Leonard Peltier is now sixty-four years old; he has diabetes and other health problems. He was attacked and brutally beaten earlier this year. He must be freed. This struggle is not over; in fact a renewed and re-energized fight can be waged and won.
Leonard had his first full parole hearing this summer, on July 28. Hundreds of supporters of Leonard Peltier demonstrated outside as the hearing was taking place. [As the ISR goes to press, the outcome of the hearing is still undecided.] With the new Obama administration appointments to the U.S. Parole Commission, the Leonard Peltier Defense-Offense Committee (LPDOC), which includes his sister, Betty Peltier-Solano, remains optimistic about the possibility of winning Leonard's freedom. But given the history and the dynamics of this case, one thing is clear - victory is not going to be handed to us. The U.S. government went to extreme lengths to convict Peltier and to keep him in prison all these years. His conviction and incarceration are not just revenge for the deaths of two FBI agents, but a warning issued by the U.S. government to all who were part of and looked to the struggles of the 1960s for inspiration, especially the militant American Indian Movement and the antiwar, national liberation, and Black Power struggles that inspired and shaped it. To free Peltier is to vindicate what radicals have argued for years—that the real criminal of this era was the U.S. government, through its murderous FBI counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO.
Going forward, it's key to understand why Leonard Peltier was wrongfully imprisoned and why AIM was met with such brutal repression. Our goal should be to use the lessons of this tragic incident to galvanize the fight to free Leonard Peltier and all political prisoners as part of a greater offensive against the criminal justice system.
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The Incident at Oglala
On June 26, 1975, what became known as the "Incident at Oglala" occurred when two unmarked cars chased a red truck onto the Jumping Bull property on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Across the field from the road where the chase occurred was the compound where the Jumping Bull family lived and where AIM members and families had set up camp. When the agents - who hadn't identified themselves - then began firing on the ranch, Peltier and others, who were defending the compound, fired back, not knowing who the men were or what they wanted.
Within minutes, more than 150 FBI SWAT team members, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) police, and the Oglala Sioux tribal government's armed squads known as GOONs had surrounded the ranch. The quick response has led many to believe that the incident was a deliberate provocation by the FBI. Both FBI agents and one Lakota man, Joe Killsright Stuntz, were killed. No one has ever been convicted of Joe Stuntz's death. In fact, only one major newspaper at the time of the incident even mentioned it. The largest FBI manhunt in history followed.
Leonard Peltier had two co-defendants, Bob Robideau1 and Dino Butler, who were tried and found not guilty after a vigorous defense effort by the radical lawyer William Kunstler. Their trial was a huge embarrassment to the federal prosecutor, not to mention the FBI. They decided to go after Peltier, who had escaped to Canada, with a vengeance. The U.S. Constitution guarantees a right to a fair trial. But this is far from what Leonard Peltier got. In this trial, the defense was not allowed to present most of the evidence that prompted the jury in the first trial to acquit Butler and Robideau, and the prosecution presented fabricated evidence and coerced testimony against Peltier.
The litany of offenses committed by the government against Peltier is lengthy. The government lied, cheated, and threw the Constitution out the window to ensure a conviction. The U.S. government used three perjured affidavits to force Peltier's extradition from Canada. To secure these, federal officials shamelessly threatened and intimidated Myrtle Poor Bear, the source of these affidavits. Poor Bear later recanted their contents entirely. The jury at Peltier's February 1976 trial in Fargo, North Dakota, was all-white; the government used racism and fear-mongering to deliberately make the jury feel vulnerable to attack - sequestering them unnecessarily, for example. The judge, who actually had meetings with the FBI during the trial, constantly and aggressively ruled against the defense's objections, and refused to allow Peltier's attorneys to argue "self-defense" as his defense.
During the trial, the Assistant U.S. Attorney, Lynn Crooks, did not produce any witnesses who could identify Peltier as the one who killed the agents. The prosecution presented false evidence regarding the murder weapon; they held that there was only one AR-15 and it belonged to Peltier. Yet there were many AR-15 rifles found at the site. The government also withheld evidence—critical ballistic reports that showed the gun they said Peltier had been using could not be matched to the bullet casing they found near the agents who had been killed.
None of this is disputed by the U.S. government. At the appellate hearing in the 1980s, the government attorney conceded, "We had a murder, we had numerous shooters, we do not know who specifically fired what killing shots... [W]e do not know, quote unquote, who shot the agents." Though the Eighth Circuit Court at this time found that the jury in Peltier's trial might have acquitted him had the FBI not withheld certain evidence, they refused to grant him a new trial.
This is just a barebones overview of the main injustices that colored Leonard's trial. The United States of America did not fail Leonard Peltier beginning with his unfair trial in 1976. His entire life story was shaped by the treacherous treatment of indigenous people in this country at the hands of the U.S. government. He was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 1944, the child of Anishinabe and Lakota parents, with roots in the powerful Sioux nation that once dominated the Great Plains.
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Historical background
The Civil War and the defeat of slavery in the South opened up a period of rapid industrial capitalist expansion in the United States, which was accompanied by a wave of railroad construction and the consolidation of U.S. control over the western territories it had acquired through war and conquest. The defeat by the U.S. government of the Plains Indians, and especially the Sioux, was absolutely decisive in this process.
Yet it certainly was no easy fight. As professor Ward Churchill says, Vietnam isn't the first war the U.S. lost; instead, it was the famous Oglala Sioux Chief Red Cloud's war in the late 1860s. As Dee Brown, the author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, writes: "For the first time in its history the U.S. Government had negotiated a peace which conceded everything demanded by the enemy and which extracted nothing in return." The Ft. Laramie Treaty established the Great Sioux Reservation as the "the Lakota homeland - centering on the sacred Black Hills - was reserved for their exclusive use and occupancy in perpetuity." The Ft. Laramie Treaty was an established part of U.S. law—ratified by Congress on February 16, 1869. The reservation covered the entire area of present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri River.
But the Black Hills were rich in minerals, gold, and timber, and the white robber barons wanted it. Prospectors began violating the treaty almost right away. General George Armstrong Custer's Black Hills Expedition in 1874 opened the region to a massive gold rush. Custer's adjutant and brother-in-law, Lieutenant James Calhoun, wrote in his diary that Custer "has expressed a desire on many occasions to explore the Black Hills, believing that it would open a rich vein of wealth calculated to increase the commercial prosperity of this country."
There was money to be made - quickly. According to Matthiessen, in 1877 "George Hearst's Homestake Gold mine was established at Lead, in the northern hills; within two years, Homestake appeared on the NYSE [New York Stock Exchange], and within ten, an investment of $10,000 was worth $6 million - a million dollars more, that is, than had been offered by the commissioners [to the Lakota people] for all of the Black Hills."
The Lakota were not interested in making any deals and did not conceive of these sacred hills as something that could be bought or sold. Colonel John E. Smith noted that this was "the only portion [of their reservation] worth anything to them" and concluded that, "nothing short of their annihilation will get it from them."
This so-called "thriftless race of savages" (as the Lakota were referred to during one congressional session), under the leadership of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, managed to kill George Armstrong Custer and defeat the Seventh Cavalry in the famous Battle of the Little Bighorn in July 1876. But they were unable to stop the advance of American capitalism. Both Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were eventually murdered. By the late 1800s, the U.S. had thoroughly broken the Ft. Laramie Treaty and the entire area was flooded by missionaries and mining companies. According to Indian historian Vine Deloria, "Indian landholdings were reduced from 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million in 1934. Of this 48 million acres, nearly 20 million were useless for farming."
The official policy became to "civilize" Indian peoples and end their existence as separate entities by "assimilating" them into white society. The American ruling class was honest about their aims, as the Report of the Commissioner on Indian Affairs, 1889, makes clear: "The Indian must conform to the white man's ways, peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must. This civilization might not be the best possible, but it is the best the Indians can get. They cannot escape and must either conform to it or be crushed by it."
The Dawes Act of 1887 legally destroyed communal ownership of land, allowing the U.S. government to break up tribal lands into private parcels, and criminalized Indian culture and religion. Indian children were herded into brutal quasi-military boarding schools that cut their hair and strictly forbade the use of their own languages. Teddy Roosevelt - whose face was blasted into a stolen mountain now known as Mount Rushmore - celebrated the Dawes Act as "a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass." The act set aside a limited amount of land to be divided up among individual tribal members as private plots, freeing up the rest to be declared as "surplus." In the first thirteen years of the Dawes Act, the United States took more than 28 million more acres of "surplus" Native land.
The final blow to the Lakota Sioux was the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, where 300 Lakota, mostly women and children, were slaughtered by the Seventh Cavalry and unceremoniously buried in a mass grave. By then the various bands of the Lakota were left with five small reservations as we know them today, including Pine Ridge, administered by the much-hated Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). These reservations became pockets of deep despair and poverty.
The 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, known as the "Indian New Deal," overturned the land privatization provisions of the Dawes Act, establishing some degree of tribal self-governance and religious freedom, and providing some meager federal funds for Indian nations to try and rebuild their land base. However, the act did nothing to restore the millions of acres of lost Indian lands, and it made Native American men eligible for the military draft. Thereafter the U.S. government did business with the tribal councils; the representatives on these councils, and their policies, were based on majority vote, even if turnout was only 15 percent, as it was in one Hopi election. Moreover, all tribal decisions were subject to the approval of the secretary of the interior.
The post-Second World War period opened up a renewed era of Indian land theft. Following Washington's emergence from the war as the world's most powerful industrial empire, U.S. corporations eyed greedily the remaining tribal lands under which lay rich deposits of coal, oil, and uranium. By the 1960s companies like Peabody Coal, Union Carbide, Chevron, Philips Uranium, and countless others had made their way onto reservations. Some were invited on by tribal councils—using bribery and pressure - to the resentment of many. But many more got there via the "termination" and "relocation" policies developed and carried out in the mid-to late-1950s.
The trend was set by Dillon S. Myer, the man who had been in charge of the Japanese internment camps during the Second World War. As head of the BIA from 1950 to 1952, Myer interfered in tribal council elections, sold Indian land without tribal consent, and supported efforts by whites to appropriate more Indian land.
Termination was a process by which the Eisenhower administration, reverting back to the policy of assimilation, terminated its relationships (including its treaty obligations) with the tribes and handed them over to local states. Between 1954 and 1960, fifteen tribes were terminated, affecting more than 40,000 Indians, who lost their tribal status. These Indians became victims of trickery, bribery, and coercion that deprived them further of what little land they had left.
The key to making termination successful (from the government's point of view) was "de-settling" the reservations - relocating Indians. Beginning in 1952, the government, preying on people's desperation on reservations, lied and pressured people to move to urban areas where they were promised jobs and housing. In order to promote these relocation programs, the U.S. government refused building permits for hospitals and schools in tribal areas, and slashed food and commodity aid to the tribes. The relocation policy created a concentration of Indians in impoverished urban neighborhoods subject to the miseries of police brutality and poverty. Many were forced by poverty to sell the allotments they had received under the Dawes Act.
But by the mid-1960s, relocation had other unintended consequences. It brought people together from different tribes, which led to a renewed interest in culture and encouraged pan-Indian consciousness. And it placed young Native Americans in the very cities, communities, and in some cases, campuses in the midst of the radical upsurge that was the 1960s.
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Leonard Peltier
Each of these factors shaped Leonard Peltier's life. As a child he lived with grandparents on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota in a tiny house without water and electricity. They had barely enough to eat, working the potato fields for low pay.
In 1953, like tens of thousands of other Native American children, a big black government car came and took Leonard and other children off to the BIA boarding school in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where he was tormented, disciplined, had his hair shorn, and was sprayed with DDT.
"I consider my years at Wahpeton my first imprisonment," writes Leonard,
and it was for the same crime as all the others: being an Indian. We had to speak English. We were beaten if we were caught speaking our own language. Still, we did. We'd sneak behind the buildings, the way kids today sneak out to smoke behind the school, and we'd talk Indian to each other. I guess that's where I first became a "hardened criminal" as the FBI calls me. And you could say that my first infraction in my criminal career was speaking my own language. There's an act of violence for you!
After surviving the BIA boarding school, Leonard was not even fifteen when he was arrested by BIA police as he and his friends were leaving the grounds of a Sun Dance, and then again a few months later for siphoning some diesel fuel from an army truck to heat his grandmother's freezing house.
It was no surprise, then, that in 1959 Leonard "relocated" to Portland to join his mother, where he worked in construction and other jobs. He even co-owned an auto body shop in Seattle, which failed as they began doing jobs for friends for free. As he recalled, "before long we got so deep into debt that we had to close the shop. My one attempt at capitalism was over, scuttled by that old Indian weakness: sharing with others. It's a practice that means we're rich as a people, but poor as individuals."
Leonard increasingly became tuned into struggles emerging around him, such as the fishing rights struggles in Washington State. "Even though I was young, I felt I could no longer ignore the Native struggle so long as one Indian was being mistreated. Like so many others who were shaken out of their submission and lethargy and indifference during the 1960s, I joined the fight for civil and human and Indian rights."
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Roots of AIM
The civil rights and Black Power movements provided the backdrop to a rise of Indian militancy that grew out of and developed parallel to them.
The conditions were ripe for this kind of struggle. The movements for independence and decolonization in Africa and Asia, as well as the national liberation struggle in Vietnam, set the stage for Native Americans to challenge the policies of the U.S. government. In his book Custer Died for Your Sins, the celebrated Sioux author Vine Deloria noted that "President Lyndon Johnson talked about America's 'commitments' and President Nixon talked about Russia's failure to respect treaties. Indian people laugh themselves sick when they hear these statements." After all, to quote Howard Zinn, "The U.S. government had signed more than 400 treaties with Indians and violated every single one."
Native American political organizing in the very early 1960s consisted of moderate organizations like the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) that grew less accommodating throughout the sixties - not unlike the NAACP. In 1961, a group of radicalizing students, led by Clyde Warrior, who had worked on a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) voter education project in the summer, split from NCAI and formed the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC). NIYC condemned the BIA as a white colonialist institution and began discussing "Red power" in the pages of its newspaper, ABC (Americans Before Columbus.)
Throughout the 1960s a wave of smaller struggles unfolded mostly in Indian areas of major cities, and on campuses such as San Francisco State. LaNada Boyer, the first American Indian student at Berkeley, led a fight for an American Indian studies department. There were other key battles as well, namely the "fish-ins" that occurred in Washington State by local tribes demanding their traditional rights to fish for salmon and steelhead as guaranteed by treaties signed in the 1850s. Clearly there was an opening for actions on a much larger scale and that could take up bigger questions of Indian sovereignty and dignity.
The immediate spark that created the American Indian Movement began with the occupation of Alcatraz Island. In November 1969, seventy-eight people, most of them members of the group Indians of All Tribes (IAT), occupied Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay. The IAT demanded title to Alcatraz and, in the interests of being fair, offered to "purchase Alcatraz for 24 dollars in glass beads and cloth…our offer of $1.24 per acre is greater than the 47 per acre the white men are now paying the California Indians for their land [through the ICC]." The Alcatraz occupation lasted for nineteen months and more than 5,600 American Indians joined the occupation - some for all eighteen months and some for just part of a day. The action was received with an outpouring of support, both political and material, and made headline news for months, though eventually the occupants were removed from the Island. A number of Indian activists, some who were later to become well known in the movement, led and participated in the occupation - for example, Richard Oakes, LaNada Boyer, Grace Thorpe, and John Trudell, and Russell Means.
The occupation, though it did not achieve its goals to establish an Indian museum and cultural center on the island, was important in that it brought the issues and concerns of American Indians to national attention. But the IAT was not able to project itself onto the national stage that its own actions had prepared.
The American Indian Movement (AIM) stepped into that role. It was founded in Minneapolis in 1968 by a group of urban Anishinabes, including Clyde Bellecourt, Mary Jane Wilson, Eddie Benton, and Dennis Banks. Clyde and Eddie actually met at the Minnesota Federal Penitentiary and organized Native Americans living in Minneapolis and St. Paul. At first, AIM organized around jobs, housing, and against police harassment. In the late 1960s, the annual household income of an American Indian family was $1,500—one-fourth the national average. Native American life expectancy was forty-four—twenty-one years below the national average. AIM took off quickly, with chapters sprouting up across the country as they organized a series of critical, bold, and polarizing actions - until it was met with vicious government repression that culminated in Peltier's conviction and imprisonment.
Leonard Peltier first became an activist while living in Seattle, participating in the 1970 takeover of Fort Lawton, an abandoned military installation. The action was directly inspired by the Alcatraz events. Some months later Peltier joined the AIM chapter in Denver.
AIM itself drew inspiration, ideas, and tactics from the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense - this was very conscious in the minds of its leading members like Dennis Banks and Russell Means - and was comprised of Native Americans in urban areas (Minneapolis, Seattle, Cleveland, and the Bay Area) but with very strong ties to reservations. AIM had a working class core to it, though often people on the margins of the working class, such as unemployed workers, and many Vietnam War veterans. They were often armed. They had to be. South Dakota was known as the "Mississippi of the North" in part because of the extreme poverty - on the Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation the life expectancy was just forty-six years. (To this day, there is 60–80 percent unemployment and 69 percent live below the official poverty line on Pine Ridge.) But it was also called the "Mississippi of the North" because of the racist violence they faced.
Just like the victims of the Jim Crow South such as Emmitt Till, Pine Ridge had its victims of racist violence, especially in the deeply bigoted border towns that preyed on the Indian communities. One such incident - the racist murder of a Sioux in a white town near Pine Ridge - prompted AIM's first involvement in activism in the area.
In January 1972, fifty-one-year-old Raymond Yellow Thunder was brutally beaten by four white racists, taunted and humiliated, stripped down and shoved in the trunk of a car while being driven around for hours, pushed naked into an American Legion Dance Hall in Gordon, Nebraska, and then thrown out into the cold night. Afterward he went missing, only to be found dead in his car a week later.
Yellow Thunder's distraught family searched for him for a week, and at first weren't allowed to see his body. They sought assistance everywhere they could, including from police, BIA, and the tribal government, in hopes that there would be an investigation into Yellow Thunder's death, but they found none. Severt Young Bear, a nephew of Raymond's, contacted AIM.
This was AIM's first major action on a reservation. They mobilized 1,400 people, mostly Lakota of the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations - with eighty tribes represented overall - and occupied Gordon, Nebraska, shutting it down for three days. One million dollars in Oglala Sioux tribal money was transferred out of Gordon's banks. In response, the state of Nebraska, the Department of Justice, and the Department of the Interior all agreed to investigate Yellow Thunder's death.
In January 1973, a white service station attendant known locally as "Mad Dog" stabbed and killed Wesley Bad Heart Bull. After the perpetrator was charged with involuntary manslaughter, Wesley's mother, Sarah Bad Heart Bull, turned to AIM for help. Two hundred AIM supporters showed up at a courthouse in Custer, South Dakota, for a meeting with officials. Protestors found the place swarming with police. When officials cancelled the meeting, all hell broke loose. "As Bad Heart Bull attempted to get past the crowd and into the courthouse," explains Russell Means, "police officers pushed her down the steps, using a nightstick on her throat." The incident was the signal for police to start swinging. In the melee two police cars were overturned and burned.
Dennis Banks and Russell Means were brought up on riot charges. Sarah Bad Heart Bull got a three-to-five-year sentence for rioting and served five months. Her son's murderer, in ironic contrast, received a mere two months' probation and served no time. After the riot, the U.S. attorney general assigned sixty-five federal marshals to Pine Ridge. Why such a heavy federal presence? According to Peter Matthiessen, "state and government authorities were concerned less with law and order than with the obstacle to Black Hills mining leases that AIM insistence on Indian sovereignty might represent."
However, these battles deepened AIM's connections to reservations, essentially building themselves a base of active members. Additionally, they clearly demonstrated that there was power through struggle and that people could win. They also set the stage for AIM's higher profile actions that put them in direct confrontation with the federal government.
These were followed by other spectacular AIM actions. In what was known as the Trail of Broken Treaties, a caravan of hundreds of Native Americans came to Washington to protest grievances. After being provoked and threatened by government officials and police, they occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs building. Later there came the historic Occupation of Wounded Knee.
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Trail of Broken Treaties
AIM organized the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan in November 1972. Participants traveled from all over the country. The caravan stopped in cities and reservations along the way, and held political meetings and rallies. In St. Paul, the caravan converged and participants drafted a twenty-point proposal of social, economic, and political demands to present at the White House. But the portents were not good. An interior department memo - which the caravan's participants had gotten wind of before they arrived - instructed BIA officials to offer no assistance to the caravan.
By end of the first day in Washington, 400 Native Americans had arrived, including Leonard Peltier. They had been in touch with Vice President Agnew's office and had been assured they would be met seriously and respectfully. But the caravaners faced problems immediately. The Park Service refused to allow the Indians to perform a religious ceremony at the grave of Iwo Jima veteran Ira Hayes in Arlington Cemetery. The BIA had just spent $50,000 hosting tribal chairmen, yet refused to offer any financial support, even when the Trail's housing fell through. Angered and without adequate accommodations, the Trail participants decided to descend on the BIA building. Participants were told that they could stay in the BIA auditorium until proper accommodations could be found for them. Before arrangements were finalized, however, police in riot gear arrived and ordered the Indians to leave. After a fierce five-minute battle, the police found themselves outside the building, the entrance barricaded by the Indians, who by then numbered 1,000. According to historians Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, "The Indians unfurled a banner reading NATIVE AMERICAN EMBASSY across the BIA building. A tepee rose on the front lawn of the liberated territory."
"If Alcatraz seemed fraught with potential disaster," writes Smith and Warrior, "this sudden rebellion in Washington, D.C. had catastrophic possibilities that bordered on the surreal. Five days before the presidential election, Indian revolutionaries held a government building six blocks from the White House, vowing to die rather than surrender. The casualties, if it came to that, would likely include the Trail's scores of children and old people."
Outside the building, there was much solidarity. Many stopped by to leave food and supplies. Some Indian BIA employees showed up to participate. Celebrities like Dr. Spock and Black leaders like Stokely Carmichael came to offer their support. "A circle of black, white and Chicano supporters had linked arms, forming a human barricade." But the more conservative National Tribal Chairman's Organization denounced the occupation.
The occupation began with great unity and energy. Toward the end, however, the hungry, frustrated, and exhausted occupiers exploded in a final rage of destruction against the BIA and its building, causing more than $2 million in damages. Agent provocateurs fanned the flames of destruction.
Finally, instead of attacking, as they had repeatedly threatened to do, the government was forced to negotiate. AIM leaders including Clyde Bellecourt, Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and Hank Adams and some elders met with Nixon administration officials. The agreement to end the occupation included three main points that would all soon be broken: no legal action against the occupiers; reform the U.S. government's relationship with Indian people to be more responsive to Indian needs; and analyze and respond to the twenty-point proposal within thirty days.
The negotiations secured compensation for travel ($66,000) and a police escort out of town. But they also took with them a little more - namely, a couple tons of BIA files that verified everything from cases of government misconduct, conflict of interest within the BIA - like the assistant secretary of the interior who went to work for Peabody Coal a few years later - the identity FBI informants, including agents involved in the caravan, and documents verifying the forced sterilization of Native American women. It was described as the biggest document heist in history.
A House subcommittee said that the AIM action was "the most severe damage inflicted upon Washington, D.C. since the British burned the city in the War of 1812." But the federal government had a substantial number of agents among the protesters who had encouraged the destruction. It thus became apparent why the government was so willing to agree not to prosecute the Indians, in the words of Vine Deloria, it would have been "extremely difficult for the government to have proven an intent by the real Indian activists to destroy the building."
Out of this struggle the FBI and BIA escalated their war on AIM and Native Americans, turning its notorious counterintelligence program, or COINTELPRO, on AIM, and as well, in the 1972 Oglala Sioux tribal elections, throwing its weight behind strongman Dick Wilson for tribal president, hoping that a "strong Indian retaliation" against AIM and its supporters could quell the growing Indian militancy.
(segue)
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NON MUOIA IN CARCERE LEONARD PELTIER
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Foglio a sostegno dell'appello a scrivere al Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America affinche' conceda la grazia che restituisca la liberta' a Leonard Peltier
A cura del "Centro di ricerca per la pace, i diritti umani e la difesa della biosfera" di Viterbo
Supplemento a "La nonviolenza e' in cammino" (anno XXV)
Direttore responsabile: Peppe Sini. Redazione: strada S. Barbara 9/E, 01100 Viterbo, e-mail: centropacevt at gmail.com
Numero 113 del 3 dicembre 2024
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