The Long Struggle Of Leonard Peltier

Leonard Peltier, a citizen of the Lakota and Anishinabe nations, was an active member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the early 1970s in the upper Midwest, where he was born, and on the West Coast, where he lived and worked off-and-on for several years. AIM was a product of the militant struggles of the 1960s against racism and the Vietnam War (many of its members were Vietnam Veterans). Its most important leaders during the seventies-Dennis Banks and Russell Means-were inspired by the civil rights movement and, more importantly, the Black Panthers. Formed in 1968 by Anishinabe Indian activists in Minneapolis, AIM quickly sprouted chapters across the country, and moved from civil rights to issues of Indian sovereignty and pride. Two events put AIM on the map. In 1972, on the eve of Richard Nixon's landslide reelection to the presidency, AIM led a nationwide caravan, called the "Trail of Broken Treaties," that culminated in the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) headquarters in Washington, D.C. The BIA had long been a source of hatred for its flagrant embezzlement of funds that were supposed to go to impoverished Native Americans and for its legalizing of the theft of reservation land. The following year, at the request of its residents, AIM led the armed occupation of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation, the site of the historic massacre of Sioux men, women, and children in 1890. The event marked the coming together of urban Indian radicals with reservation traditionals who resented the corruption and abuse of the BIA-sponsored tribal administration, as well as its denigration of native traditions. During the ensuing seventy-one-day standoff, BIA police, FBI, and U.S. military fired 500,000 rounds of ammunition at the entrenched Indian encampment, killing two AIM members. While the siege provided little in tangible concessions from the federal government, it succeeded in publicizing AIM and generated a surge of popular interest in Native American issues and history. It also resulted in AIM becoming a greater target of ferocious government repression. The FBI led the attack on AIM as part of its Counter Intelligence Program (COINTEPRO), begun in the mid-1960s under its director J. Edgar Hoover, and used with terrifying effectiveness against the Black Panther Party. COINTELPRO employed many dirty tricks against its targets including wiretapping, assassination, and the use of agents provocateurs-all in coordination with state and local police forces. The goal, according to FBI documents, was to "neutralize" the leadership. AIM members across the country faced constant harassment and frame-ups that drained the organization's resources and, eventually, broke its leadership. One of the AIM members caught up in this dragnet was Leonard Peltier. During Wounded Knee II, Pine Ridge Tribal Chair Dickie Wilson formed the Guardians of the Oglala Nation (literally and boastfully GOON), paid for with a $62,000 BIA stipend, and launched a reign of terror on AIM and its supporters at Pine Ridge. Not by coincidence, at this time the BIA was interested in using Wilson to sign over a portion of the reservation known to be rich in uranium and molybdenum to the U.S. Forest Service. >From 1973 to 1976, more than sixty AIM members and supporters, many of them traditionals, were murdered without a finger lifted by the state government or the FBI to investigate their deaths. A new generation of rabidly racist and self-proclaimed "Indian fighters" emerged in South Dakota led by William Janklow, who declared: "The only way to deal with the Indian problem in South Dakota is to put a gun to the AIM leaders' heads and pull the trigger." He would eventually become South Dakota's attorney general, governor, and, later, the state's only congressman. (Last year, Janklow finally stepped down from his House seat after he was convicted and sentenced to 100 days in jail for slamming his speeding car into, and killing, a motorcyclist. In addition to his history of racism, Janklow apparently has a long history of reckless driving-thirteen traffic citations since 1990-and the judge in the case could have given Janklow ten years. But witnesses convinced him of Janklow's good character and solid contributions to the community.) To find out more about Leonard Peltiers case, go to http://www.freepeltier.org/. The best books to read on Leonard Peltier's case are Peter Matthiessens "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse", and "The Trial of Leonard Peltier" by Jim Messerschmidt. Peltier's own book, "Prison Writings: My Life is My Sun Dance", is also excellent. Joe Allen is a member of Teamsters Local 705 in Chicago. Paul D'Amato is associate editor of the ISR. http://www.counterpunch.org/allen11302005.html

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