How #LeonardPeltier has unjustly spent forty years in prison — and why it’s time to change that

Mike Baughman July 20, 2016

"So much time has passed that many Americans have forgotten, if they ever knew, what happened to an American Indian named Leonard Peltier, who has spent more than 40 years confined in various federal penitentiaries. This summer, a group of his family members and friends are traveling the country in an attempt to salvage what remains of his life, and to remind us all that no statute of limitations pertains to the application of justice.

"Peltier’s ordeal began when two FBI agents, Ron Williams and Jack Coler, were shot to death on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975. No one familiar with the details of the case believes that Leonard committed the murders, and Peter Matthiessen explored this miscarriage of justice in his 1983 book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, called Matthiessen’s book 'the first solidly documented account of the U.S. government’s renewed assault upon American Indians that began in the 1970s.'

"The plain truth is that with two FBI agents shot dead on an Indian reservation, the government needed a conviction. At Peltier’s trial before an all-white jury, prosecutors used false testimony against him, some of it obtained through torture. One particularly repugnant example: The FBI produced affidavits by a woman named Mabel Poor Bear, who said she was Leonard’s girlfriend and claimed to have seen him shoot Williams and Coler at close range. But Poor Bear had never met Leonard, didn’t even know what he looked like, and was proved to have been nowhere near the scene of the murders. When she tried to recant her testimony, claiming that the FBI had threatened to take her child away if she didn’t sign the affidavit, the judge refused to hear her testimony.

"Amnesty International classifies Leonard as a political prisoner. Some of his other defenders include Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Robert Cantuar, a former archbishop of Canterbury. Michael Apted produced an acclaimed documentary film exploring the case, Incident at Oglala, which was narrated by Robert Redford.

"Despite the FBI’s fraudulent evidence and perjured testimony, Peltier remains in federal prison. He went in as a 31-year-old and is now 71. He’s been transferred often, from Leavenworth, Kansas, to Terre Haute, Indiana, to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, to Canaan, Pennsylvania, back to Lewisburg, and finally to Florida. Everywhere he’s been, inmates have jumped and beaten him, likely with the collusion of guards. Now he is going blind from diabetes, suffers from kidney failure and is susceptible to strokes. Ed Little Crow, a Lakota living in Oregon, says that all Peltier wants 'is a chance to see his family and work on old cars. If that dignified black man who’s president doesn’t pardon him, he’ll die in prison. This is his last chance.'

"When Peltier was sentenced, the applicable law stated that an inmate with a good record should, after 30 years, be released. His record was good, but, instead of freedom, his parole board gave him another 15-year sentence. His next hearing is scheduled for 2024.

"Before his second term ended, President Bill Clinton, under pressure from Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye and billionaire philanthropist David Geffen, among others, was expected to grant executive clemency. But after several hundred FBI agents, along with the dead agents’ family members, demonstrated outside the White House, Clinton on his last day in office pardoned a financier named Marc Rich instead. Rich had been indicted for tax evasion and illegal oil deals, including a purchase of $200 million worth of oil from Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran while 53 Americans were being held hostage there, and selling oil to the apartheid regime in South Africa despite a U.N. embargo. Geffen called Rich’s pardon 'a sign of corrupted values.'

"On my last trip to South Dakota, I visited the Pine Ridge Reservation. In the town of Pine Ridge, I talked to the man I’d come to see and then drove north to Wounded Knee, where I spent the long afternoon alone. There was a pleasantly cool north wind and a clear blue sky. I walked and thought. This quiet place was where, in 1890, the U.S. 7th Cavalry surrounded an encampment of Lakotas, and for no justifiable reason opened fire. By some estimates, as many as 300 Indian men, women and children were slaughtered by the time the firing finally stopped. To make a foul deed even worse, at least 20 of the soldiers who participated in this senseless massacre were awarded the Medal of Honor.

"There’s nothing anyone can ever do about what happened at Wounded Knee. But, though very belatedly, something can still be done about Leonard Peltier. I hope President Obama sets this man free. "

Original article:
https://www.hcn.org/issues/48-12/how-leonard-peltier-has-unjustly-spent-forty-years-in-prison-and-why-its-time-to-change-that/

Archived version:
https://archive.ph/NPKLS

2020: How #NativeAmericans’ #RightToVote has been systematically violated for generations

In the new book Voting in Indian Country, Jean Reith Schroedel weaves together historical and contemporary voting rights conflicts as the election nears

by Nina Lakhani in New York
Fri 16 Oct 2020

"#VoterSuppression has taken centre stage in the race to elect potentially the 46th president of the United States. But we’ve heard little about the 5.2 million #Native Americans whose ancestors have called this land home before there was a US president.

"The rights of indigenous communities – including the right to vote – have been systematically violated for generations with devastating consequences for access to #CleaAir and #water, #health, #education, economic opportunities, #housing and #sovereignty. Voter turnout for Native Americans and Alaskan Natives is the lowest in the country, and about one in three eligible voters (1.2 million people) are not registered to vote, according to the National Congress of American Indians.

"In a new book, Voting in Indian County: The View from the Trenches, Jean Reith Schroedel, professor emerita of political science at Claremont Graduate University, weaves together historical and contemporary voting rights conflicts.

"Is the right to vote struggle for Native Americans distinct from the wider struggle faced by marginalized groups in the US?

"One thing few Americans understand is that American Indians and #NativeAlaskans were the last group in the #UnitedStates to get #citizenship and to get the #vote. Even after the civil war and the Reconstruction (13th, 14th and 15th) amendments there was a supreme court decision that said #IndigenousPeople could never become US citizens, and some laws used to disenfranchise them were still in place in 1975. In fact first-generation violations used to deny – not just dilute voting rights – were in place for much longer for Native Americans than any other group. It’s impossible to understand contemporary voter suppression in Indian Country without understanding this historical context.

"Why didn’t the #AmericanIndianCitizenshipAct 1924 nor the #VotingRightsAct (#VRA) 1965 guarantee Native Americans equal access to the ballot box?

"The motivation for the VRA was the egregious treatment of #black people in the south, and for the first 10 years there was a question over whether it even applied to #AmericanIndian and Native Alaskan populations. It wasn’t really discussed until a #CivilRights commission report in 1975 which included cases from #SouthDakota and #Arizona that showed equally egregious #discrimination and absolute denial of right to vote towards Native Americans – and also #Latinos.

"When voter suppression is discussed by politicians, advocates and journalists, it’s mostly about African American voters, and to a lesser degree Latinos. Why are Native Americans still excluded from the conversation?

"Firstly they are a small population and secondly most of the most egregious abuses routinely occur in rural isolated parts of #IndianCountry where there is little media focus. But it’s happening – take Jackson county in South Dakota, a state where the governor has done little to protect people from #Covid. The county council has just decided to close the legally mandated early voting centre on the #PineRidgeReservation, citing concerns about Covid, but not in the voting site in #Kadoka, where the white people go. Regardless of the intent, this will absolutely have a detrimental effect on Native people’s ability to vote. And South Dakota, like many other states, is also a very hard place for Native people to vote by mail. In the primary, the number of people who registered to #VoteByMail increased by 1,000% overall but there was no increase among reservation communities. In #Oglala county, which includes the eastern part of Pine Ridge, turnout was about 10%.

"The right to vote by mail is a hot political and civil rights issue in the 2020 election – could it help increase turnout in Indian Country?

"No, voting by mail is very challenging for Native Americans for multiple reasons. First and foremost, most reservations do not have home mail delivery. Instead, people need to travel to post offices or postal provide sites – little places that offer minimal mail services and are located in places like gas stations and mini-marts. Take the Navajo Nation that encompasses 27,425 square miles – it’s larger than West Virginia, yet there are only 40 places where people can send and receive mail. In West Virginia, there are 725. Not a single PO box on the Navajo Nation has 24-hour access."

Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/16/native-americans-voting-rights-mail-in-ballots-us-elections