10
saddlebag dispatches
L
EONARD PELTIER HAS BEEN called a modern-day warrior and a martyr for the indigenous cause by Native American special interest groups. He’s been called a political radical, a liar, and a murderer by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He’s been the subject of a best-selling biography, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, and an awardwinning documentary, Incident at Oglala. He’s been convicted of two murders and has spent more than forty years in federal penitentiaries. Petitions have been circulated all over the world demanding his release and every president since Jimmy Carter has considered and rejected his plea for clemency. There hasn’t been a Native American surrounded by this much controversy since the end of the Indian Wars and resettlement of the indigenous peoples on reservations, but if you’re a mainstream EuroAmerican you probably have very little idea what all the fuss is about. WHO IS LEONARD PELTIER? On September 12, 1944, Leonard Peltier was born into a family of thirteen children on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation near Belcourt, North Dakota. He is a citizen of the Anishinabe and Dakota/ Lakota Nations. His parents divorced when he was four years old and he was raised by his paternal grandparents until he reached the age of nine. That’s when a government car came and took him
to a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school at Wahpeton, North Dakota. “I consider my years at Wahpeton my first imprisonment,” Leonard Peltier wrote in his book, Prison Writings—My Life is my Sun Dance. “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.” That was his first brush with government authority, but it was not his last. A fairly large minority of the world population thinks he shouldn’t be there. His supporters include names that won’t surprise anyone—Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, Willie Nelson— as well as a number of individuals and organizations that aren’t quite so predictable—Oliver Stone, Amnesty International, The National Congress of American Indians, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and Coretta Scott King. Leonard Peltier also has a number of supporters who don’t typically take positions on political matters within the United States: Robin Williams, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., William Stryon, E.L. Doctorow, the European Parliament, the Belgian Parliament, the Italian Parliament, The Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, Tenzin Gyatso (the 14th Dalai Lama), Ramsey Clark (former U.S. Attorney General), and Daniel K. Inouye (the late Democratic Senator of Hawaii). Numerous petitions have been circulated
