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News :: Miscellaneous |
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A saga of genocide over the span of two centuries |
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by Pete Vale (Special for Granma International)
(No verified email address) |
11 Jul 2001
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July 6, 2001
A saga of genocide over the span of two centuries
• Red man’s burden |
\"I’m in with [the general prison] population. The doors are open at 6:30 a.m. and then we have to go in the cell from 4:00 to 4:30 p.m. It reopens again and we are able to make ten-minute movements on the hour and then we’re locked up for the night again at 10:00 p.m.\" This brief narration of a typical day at Leavenworth Penitentiary by Leonard Peltier, American Indian activist and political prisoner, sums up the last 26 years of his life.
Framed by the FBI for the murders of Special Agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams in a shootout with American Indian Movement (AIM) members in South Dakota, Peltier continues to fight a prolonged court battle for his freedom. From his prison cell, he commented that the \"two [FBI] agents got killed in a fire fight in 1975 at the Pine Ridge Oglala reservation and because they claim I was the leader, I was responsible, they feel that I am a very serious threat, a danger to them.\"
The only \"crime\" this Native American revolutionary is guilty of, however, is defending his people against a federal assault during the FBI occupation of indigenous territory from 1973 to 1976, known as the \"the reign of terror.\" With tribal consent, AIM organized an armed defense of the Pine Ridge Reservation which was to be transferred to the National Forest Service, a move that would have left tens of thousands of Indian families homeless. In response, the government deployed forces in a military-style occupation in which 70 AIM members and sympathizers were killed and 350 seriously wounded.
Peltier underscored the Pine Ridge incident as part of the ongoing conflict between the U.S. government and the Native American population: \"We were trying to get the U.S. government to honor the treaties... There are billions of dollars involved in this whole thing. Plus there’s the fact that we would be declaring ourselves a sovereign nation, which by the way, although there has been no reporting on it, ten tribes have already done... They would lose an enormous amount of minerals and land, and that’s worth billions, and it’s money that is behind so much of what’s happened here and accounts for so many reasons why the Indians have been targeted.\"
WAR AND PILLAGE AGAINST THE INDIANS
Policy-making concerning the Pine Ridge Reservation was not an anomaly, but rather part of a long chain of legal machinations by the U.S. government designed to strip the native inhabitants of their territory. In the first half of the 19th century, 371 nation-to-nation agreements were declared null and void due to a Supreme Court decision which declared U.S. sovereignty inherently \"higher\" than that of the indigenous nations to which it had made treaties. Consequently, the Indians were forced to sell their land to the U.S. government and white citizens at absurdly low prices enforced by the courts. Indian resistance was systematically met with military and private action resulting in wholesale slaughter.
A report by the Smithsonian Institute states that the U.S. government initiated over 40 separate wars against the indigenous population throughout the 1800s. In the state of California alone, native inhabitants were reduced from 300,000 to 20,000 by the end of the 19th century. In Texas, military interventions resulted in their virtual extermination. Indeed, as a result of war and disease, over the last 500 years a population of what initially amounted to 15 million Indians in North America has been reduced to approximately 10% of its original composition.
According to an Oxford University study, by the 1930s American Indians were concentrated in approximately 2.5% of their original land holding while the best 100 million acres were stripped away and opened up to non-Indian homesteading, corporate acquisition, or conversion into national parks and forests.
During the mid-1950s the federal government enacted a variety of \"termination statutes\" which dissolved over a hundred indigenous nations and their reservation areas. A U.S. Bureau of the Census report affirms that by 1990 federal relocation programs had displaced more than half of the remaining Native American populace into urban ghettoes.
The more recent resettlement efforts were inspired by the discovery of numerous uranium deposits on Indian territory. Consistent with the historical legacy of U.S. policy, rather than negotiate the excavation and purchase of the uranium with the respective tribal governments, Native Americans were once again moved like cattle to peripheral areas.
U.S. Indian policy fueled a new wave of resistance during the 1960s and ’70s. Revolutionary actions by AIM, among other indigenous groups, such as the 1969 takeover of Alcatraz and the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, were initiated to bring the American Indian plight to the national spotlight. Among other nationwide actions, both were crushed by the FBI with military force.
It was within this context of federal aggression that the Peltier case was catapulted into the mass media. During the FBI’s \"reign of terror,\" AIM and other groups of the indigenous organized left were systematically targeted for neutralization. Standard operating procedure counterintelligence tactics such as infiltration, imprisonment, and selective assassination of its leaders proved to be very effective. AIM was destabilized. After the Pine Ridge shootout, Peltier fled to Canada in search of political asylum.
The Canadian government, with an abysmal human rights record towards its own indigenous population, denied him sanctuary and capitulated to the U.S. extradition order, turning him over to U.S. authorities.
The extradition order was based on the affidavits of one Myrtle Poor Bear, who supposedly knew and saw Peltier shoot the FBI agents at point blank range. Both the \"eyewitness\" testimony and an FBI ballistics report, attributing the murder weapon to Peltier, contributed to what appeared to be an open and shut case.
HOW EVIDENCE IS FABRICATED
As the court drama unraveled, however, the government was forced to admit publicly that the affidavits were fabricated for the purpose of the extradition. The federal appellate court characterized this behavior as \"a clear abuse of the investigative process.\" But the FBI still had one more trick up its sleeve: the ballistics document.
Peltier was ultimately convicted on the strength of a ballistics report matching a shell casing found in the trunk of Agent Coler’s car with an AR-15 rifle belonging to the defendant. Years later, through the Freedom of Information Act, Peltier’s attorneys obtained the original FBI ballistics report which stated that \"the shell casing could not possibly have been fired from the weapon in question.\" Thus, the second piece of evidence manufactured by the FBI had been brought to light.
Under any other circumstances, this case would have been thrown out of court, and the defendant released and entitled to just compensation. But not in cases as politically charged as Peltier’s which run the risk of further discrediting the FBI and exposing illegal covert operations. In cases such as these, the supposedly \"autonomous\" U.S. court system is interceded by state security which conveniently uses the \"national security\" argument in order to prevent the incrimination of one of its organs at any cost.
Even in the wake of critical new information and subsequent eyewitness testimony before the press, years later, alluding to the identity of the real shooter, Peltier has been denied a new court hearing on numerous occasions. In spite of pleas from over 10% of the U.S. Congress and many of the world’s human rights and religious leaders, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Peltier continues to watch the remaining years of his life waste away behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit.
Unfortunately, this case is anything but an aberration. Peltier is one of the many political prisoners of ethnic origin in the UNITED STATESHe is simply one more casualty in the 500-year-old ethnic cleansing campaign against America’s original inhabitants.
Indeed, one Indian is as good as the next for the FBI. The issue for the U.S. government is not whether Peltier is guilty or innocent, but rather, to set an example for all present and would-be revolutionaries struggling for human and civil rights. The dominant culture has never been interested in sharing power and resources with its minority counterparts. For the white power establishment, Indians, blacks, and Hispanics have proven to be good cannon fodder for America’s imperialistic wars in countries like Viet Nam, and cheap labor for the domestic economy. Native Americans currently rank as the poorest of the three ethnic groups which compose the Third World of the United States.
Leonard Peltier persists as a symbol of national liberation for all besieged ethnic communities in the United States, and throughout the international community, dominated by repressive political structures. |
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