Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
Letter from
Leonard Peltier
Leonard Peltier
Sunday, June 26, 2016
American Indians and Friends
Sisters,
brothers, friends and supporters:
June 26th
marks 41 years since the long summer day when three young men were killed at
the home of the Jumping Bull family, near Oglala, during a firefight in which I
and dozens of others participated. While I did not shoot (and therefore did not
kill) FBI agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, I nevertheless have great
remorse for the loss of their young lives, the loss of my friend Joe Stuntz,
and for the grieving of their loved ones. I would guess that, like me, many of
my brothers and sisters who were there that day wish that somehow they could
have done something to change what happened and avoid the tragic outcome of the
shootout.
This is not
something I have thought about casually and then moved on. It’s something I
think about every day. As I look back, I remember the expressions of both fear
and courage on the faces of my brothers and sisters as we were being attacked.
We thought we were going to be killed! We defended our elders and children as
they scattered for protection and to escape. Native people have experienced
such assaults for centuries, and the historical trauma of the generations was
carried by the people that day -- and in the communities that suffered further
trauma in the days that followed the shootout, as the authorities searched for
those of us who had escaped the Jumping Bull property.
As the
First Peoples of Turtle Island, we live with daily reminders of the centuries
of efforts to terminate our nations, eliminate our cultures, and destroy our
relatives and families. To this day, everywhere we go there are reminders --
souvenirs and monuments of the near extermination of a glorious population of
Indigenous Peoples. Native Peoples as mascots, the disproportionately high
incarceration of our relatives, the appropriation of our culture, the
never-ending efforts to take even more of Native Peoples’ land, and the
poisoning of that land all serve as reminders of our history as survivors of a
massive genocide. We live with this trauma every day. We breathe, eat and drink
it. We pass it on to our children. And we struggle to overcome it.
Like so
many Native children, I was ripped away from my family at the age of 9 or so
and taken away to get the “Indian” out of me at a boarding school. At that
time, Native Peoples were not able to speak our own languages for fear of being
beaten or worse. Our men’s long hair, which is an important part of our
spiritual life, was forcibly cut off in an effort to shame us. Our traditional
names were replaced by new European-American names. These efforts to force our
assimilation continue today. Not long ago, I remember, a Menominee girl was
punished and banned from playing on the school's basketball team because she
taught a classmate how to say "hello" and "I love you" in
her Native language. We hear stories all the time about athletes and graduates
who face opposition to wearing their hair long or having a feather in their
cap.
With this
little bit of my personal history in mind, I think it is understandable that I
would then, as a young person in the 1960’s and 70’s, be active in the
Indigenous struggle to affirm our human, civil, and treaty rights. Our movement
was a spiritual one to regain our ceremonies and traditions and to exercise our
sovereignty as native or tribal nations. For over 100 years some of our most
important ceremonies could not be held. We could not sing our songs or dance to
our drum. When my contemporaries and I were activists, there were no known sun
dances.
Any ceremony that took place had to be hidden for fear of reprisals.
One of our roles as activists for the welfare of our Peoples was to create
space and protection for Native peoples who were trying to reconnect to our
ancient cultures and spiritual life. This was dangerous and deadly. It meant
putting our lives on the line because people who participated in these
ceremonies, and people who stood up for our elders and our traditional way of
life, were brutally beaten, killed or disappeared. Paramilitary groups and
death squads ruled some reservations and each day was a battle. If an
uninvited, unknown or unrecognized vehicle pulled up to your house, the first
reaction was that you were being visited by someone who meant to do you harm in
some way. This was learned behavior on the reservations. This was
excruciatingly true in the 1970’s.
Hey, I
don’t want to be all doom and gloom here. I see over the decades that in some
important ways, life has improved for our Peoples. President Obama’s
extraordinary efforts to forge a strong relationship with our Tribal Nations is
good cause for a new sense of optimism that our sovereignty is more secure. By
exercising our sovereignty, life for our people might improve. We might begin
to heal and start the long journey to move past the trauma of the last 500
years. But what will we do if the next Administration rolls back those gains
made over the past 8 years?
I often
receive questions in letters from supporters about my health. Yes, this last
year has been particularly stressful for me and my family. My health issues
still have not been thoroughly addressed, and I still have not gotten the
results of the MRI done over a month ago for the abdominal aortic aneurysm.
As the last
remaining months of President Obama’s term pass by, my anxiety increases. I
believe that this President is my last hope for freedom, and I will surely die
here if I am not released by January 20, 2017. So I ask you all again, as this
is the most crucial time in the campaign to gain my freedom, please continue to
organize public support for my release, and always follow the lead of the
International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee.
Thank you
for all you have done and continue to do on my behalf.
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse…
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse…
Doksha,
Leonard
Peltier
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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