Historical background to Peltier's case

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Guilt or innocence is a legal finding reaching by judges or juries. Leonard Peltier was found guilty of several crimes in U.S. after his extradition from Canada in 1973.

It is not the mandate of Windspeaker to re-try the legal cases.

However, in this analytical story, freelance writer Guiou Taylor portrays Peltier as one in a long line of warriors who, over 500 years, have attempted to defend Indian lands and culture against the European intrusion power.

This is part of Taylor's Windspeaker series "On the Borderline".

Objibwa-Sioux Leonard Peltier's current address is Leavenworth, Kansas, a maximum security prison. Serving a term after conviction for crimes against the United States, the killing of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Sioux Reservation, Peltier is now claiming international attention.

Whatever Peltier's personal situation, the Peltier Defence Committee feels Peltier's treatment by the legal system is an example of the legal lynching of Native people, one of thousands of cases since the settlement of Europeans in the new world.

Behind the criminal charges against Peltier and others lies a long history of land grabs and treaty violations covered in the last two issues of Windspeaker.

Peltier's mother is a member of the Pembina Ojibwa tribe, with relatives in both the United States and Canada. From a U.S. Treaty in 1864 which awarded 1,150 square miles for a new reservation, that land base had dwindled to less than 70 square miles in 1970.

On his father's side, Peltier is Sioux. That nations land loss has been reported in the stories on Sitting Bull, the Little Big Horn and Gen. Custer, and the Massacre at Wounded Knee.

The great plains of the Missouri River valley had been "purchased" from the French Emporer Napoleon Bonapart in 1805 by the United States government, in order to finance his campaign to conquer Europe for the French.

Yet settlement of the plains, which includes the states of Oklahoma, Louisiana, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, north to the Canadian border, and west to the Rocky Mountains, had remained slow ? until the end of the Civil War.

Suddenly, immigration from Europe thrust millions of new people into America, and land for establishing farms, towns and railroad lines to the west was vital.

Indian rights were lost in the confusion.

New town sprung up all over the west. By 1876, only eight years after the Laramie Treaty and the granting of Black Hills "in perpetuity", Red Cloud of the Oglala was forced to sign a new document relinquishing those hills to the United States. This was the year of the Custer defeat on the Little Big Horn.

The Sioux signed away the Black Hills and 22 million acres of their Great Reservation at gun point. The Sioux were rounded up, restricted to the nine traditional reservations and forbidden under military threat to trespass on the 40 million acres of land they had not ceded to the government.

Over the years leading up to the birth of Leonard Peltier, this great land base was gradually eroded from the Sioux nation through government controlled leases, outright sales, and manipulation of Indian families under the Land Allotment Act.

By the next 60 years, 10,000 Indians had lost their lives fighting for the rights of United States citizens in the First World War. Citizenship was granted in 1924.

Unfortunately, this did not guarantee the right to survive. Reserve Indians found their "rights" did not include adequate food, education, or health care. Programs of the federal government acknowledged that the plight of the Indian was terrible.

With the end of the World War II in 1945, a new generation of young Indians, often in the cities where their parents had fled from the inhumanity and poverty of the reservations, began a new struggle for Indian rights.

By the late '60s a generation of young urban Indian warriors had been in "whiteman's jails," served in the United States military, and seen some of the world outside the reservatn. Leonard Peltier was one of them.

In November 1972, a large group of Indians and sympathizers set out on "The Trail of Broken Treaties," a trek to Washington, D.C. to confront U.S. President Richard Nixon, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in their own turf.

The trail ended with the occupation of the BIA building and the refusal of the administration to entertain the 20 demands of the delegation.

In 1973, America was facing what it considered a more demanding challenge than unhappy Indians ? the Arab/OPEC Oil Crisis. Americans were panicking over the lack of oil and gasoline.

The previous decade had seen hippies and passivists in the streets of every American city. The Black Civil Rights movement and and Anti-war movement had prompted other movements including the Feminists to proclaim that something had to change.

Indians were not idle in these struggles and on the Pine Ridge Reservation, the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, the struggle for change was not unnoticed.

By 1968, the American Indian Movement (AIM) had been formed. It united young Indian men and women, determined to use their urban skills to push for Indian rights and ensure that historic treaties by the United States government were honoured.

In the fall of 1970 AIM established a base camp in the public eye at Mount Rushmore, a symbol of American arrogance which imposes the faces of four American Presidents on the heart of Indian country. AIM was gaining a national reputation for being "A New Kind of Indian".

In the early '70s, a series of killings of Indian men around the Pine Ridge area and in South Dakota, led to a confrontation between traditionals on the reservation and the current BIA-approved regime of Charles Wilson.

Acting in a symbolic protest, AIM moved with a small group of the historic village at Wounded Knee.

In an unprecedented move, the State of South Dakota, fearing a second Wounded Knee, called out the state police who were later joined by the National Guard, theBI and other military personnel. The United States clearly was not about to let itself suffer another defeat, like Vietnam, at the hands of untrained guerrilla troops, the AIM civilians.

For several months, AIM and its supporters held Wounded Knee in the face of the organized federal forces. Finally, under the glare of the world press and the support of numerous church groups, movie stars and other celebrities, the government backed down. One Indian was killed.

But the government, embarrassed, had not forgotten. Nor had Charlie Wilson, whose para-military troops had not been capable of keeping the peace against its own members.

On June 26, 1975, late in the morning and unannounced, two FBI agents with no jurisdiction or authority on the reservation approached a small house looking for a man about "stealing a pair of boots". In the action which followed, the two FBI agents were killed.

There followed in the next year a chase that crossed America and into Canada where Peltier was captured at Chief Smallboy's camp in Alberta. After several Canadian hearings he was extradited to the United States where he was tried and convicted.

In recent years, a wide network of international voices has arisen to protest Leonard Peltier's violent capture by foreign agents on an Indian reserve in Canada, and the much challenged evidence leading to his conviction.

Whatever its outcome, other Leonard Peltiers are now raising the call for Indian rights as the land, its minerals and animals loom more and more important in the life of North America.