Weekend Update – Forced Relocation

Russell Means discusses the forced relocation of the Indians from the reservations to the cities through means of coercion as well as bureaucratic and economic despair. At a time when Indian culture, religion and language were outlawed, the Indian people became further disenfranchised and dispirited. Russell Means tells the story of his journeys through this time, as well as his observations on the present day.

Police State Won’t Help

In response to the opinion of Senator John Thune (R-Senator SD) dated 10/12/09,  http://www.indianz.com/News/2009/016956.asp …

I applaud his recognition of what the governments’ call Native American day and what he believes to truly honor the legacy of the Lakota,  Dakota, and Nakota traditions.  The Senator’s opinion to solving the crisis  the Dakota, et .al. face on our respective reservations and communities is to introduce more force on my People.

It seems that is the only way Demo-Publicans can respond to social ills in any community.  I disagree that we need a police state to help solve our problems on Pine Ridge.  What is needed is what the United States Constitution Article 6 states; Treaties are the law of the land.  In one of those agreements we are promised the Arts of Civilization, in return for the richest parts of our land and rivers.

The interpretation of the Arts of Civilization include the following:
Our own energy companies, banks, control over our own lands including water and minerals, the right to a meaningful education that is certified by our culture not by the state or any government, true healthy comprehensive health care.  All of the above would enable us to be self sufficient and contributing to the wealth by a vastly greater degree than we do now.  It would certainly lessen the need for police power.  Senator Thune and all government officials, including police take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America.  There are not any ‘Buts’ in those oaths.

Without the duly constitutional rights enumerated above, we will always need an increase in police power.  What is a population with over 80% unemployed  going to do without our rights to participate in the economics of the world. I understand the reservation police are overworked and understaffed, however, that is actually the last of our problems that needs to be addressed by Senator Thune or anyone else.

Everyone in SD and the world should understand there are 9 Sioux Indian Reservations and their Peoples from which constitutes over 25% of the tax base of the state of SD.  Also, the wealth of those reservation lands and the water are traded on wall street by the attorney general of SD.  Look it up on Dunn and Bradstreet, and other financial indexes that monitor wall street. Therefore, it is understandable why SD and the Federal Government needs to keep us impoverished and dependent in order for the surrounding white communities to exist.  That includes NE towns and counties along the SD border.

Russell Means, Chief Facilitator
Provisional Government
Republic of Lakotah

“I am Obama’s prisoner now” – Leonard Peltier Speaks out After Parole Denial

I am Obama’s prisoner now
September 14, 2009

On August 21, Native American activist Leonard Peltier, one of America’s longest-serving political prisoners, was denied parole by the U.S. Parole Commission.

In 1977, Leonard was sentenced to two consecutive life terms for the deaths of two FBI agents who were killed in a gunfight on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota on June 26, 1975. His co-defendants Bob Robideau and Dino Butler were acquitted on the basis of self-defense, but the government managed to secure a conviction against Leonard, despite never producing any witness who could identify him as the person who killed the agents.

Leonard wrote the following after his parole was denied.

THE UNITED States Department of Justice has once again made a mockery of its lofty and pretentious title.

After releasing an original and continuing disciple of death cult leader Charles Manson who attempted to shoot President Gerald Ford, an admitted Croatian terrorist, and another attempted assassin of President Ford under the mandatory 30-year parole law, the U.S. Parole Commission deemed that my release would “promote disrespect for the law.”

If only the federal government would have respected its own laws, not to mention the treaties that are, under the U.S. Constitution, the supreme law of the land, I would never have been convicted nor forced to spend more than half my life in captivity. Not to mention the fact that every law in this country was created without the consent of Native peoples, and is applied unequally at our expense. If nothing else, my experience should raise serious questions about the FBI’s supposed jurisdiction in Indian Country.

The parole commission’s phrase was lifted from soon-to-be former U.S. Attorney Drew Wrigley, who apparently hopes to ride with the FBI cavalry into the office of North Dakota governor. In this, Wrigley is following in the footsteps of William Janklow, who built his political career on his reputation as an Indian fighter, moving on up from tribal attorney (and alleged rapist of a Native minor) to state attorney general, South Dakota governor, and U.S. congressman.

Some might recall that Janklow claimed responsibility for dissuading President Clinton from pardoning me before he was convicted of manslaughter. Janklow’s historical predecessor, George Armstrong Custer, similarly hoped that a glorious massacre of the Sioux would propel him to the White House, and we all know what happened to him.

Unlike the barbarians that bay for my blood in the corridors of power, however, Native people are true humanitarians who pray for our enemies. Yet we must be realistic enough to organize for our own freedom and equality as nations. We constitute 5 percent of the population of North Dakota and 10 percent of South Dakota and we could utilize that influence to promote our own power on the reservations, where our focus should be.

If we organized as a voting bloc, we could defeat the entire premise of the competition between the Dakotas as to which is the most racist. In the 1970s we were forced to take up arms to affirm our right to survival and self-defense, but today the war is one of ideas. We must now stand up to armed oppression and colonization with our bodies and our minds. International law is on our side.

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GIVEN THE complexion of the three recent federal parolees, it might seem that my greatest crime was being Indian. But the truth is that my gravest offense is my innocence.

In Iran, political prisoners are occasionally released if they confess to the ridiculous charges on which they are dragged into court, in order to discredit and intimidate them and other like-minded citizens. The FBI and its mouthpieces have suggested the same, as did the parole commission in 1993, when it ruled that my refusal to confess was grounds for denial of parole.

To claim innocence is to suggest that the government is wrong, if not guilty itself. The American judicial system is set up so that the defendant is not punished for the crime itself, but for refusing to accept whatever plea arrangement is offered and for daring to compel the judicial system to grant the accused the right to right to rebut the charges leveled by the state in an actual trial. Such insolence is punished invariably with prosecution requests for the steepest possible sentence, if not an upward departure from sentencing guidelines that are being gradually discarded, along with the possibility of parole.

As much as non-Natives might hate Indians, we are all in the same boat. To attempt to emulate this system in tribal government is pitiful, to say the least.

It was only this year, in the Troy Davis case, that the U.S. Supreme Court recognized innocence as a legitimate legal defense. Like the witnesses who were coerced into testifying against me, those who testified against Davis renounced their statements, yet Davis was very nearly put to death. I might have been executed myself by now, had not the government of Canada required a waiver of the death penalty as a condition of extradition.

The old order is aptly represented by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who stated in his dissenting opinion in the Davis case:

This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged “actual innocence” is constitutionally cognizable.

The esteemed senator from North Dakota, Byron Dorgan, who is now the chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, used much the same reasoning in writing that “our legal system has found Leonard Peltier guilty of the crime for which he was charged. I have reviewed the material from the trial, and I believe the verdict was fair and just.”

It is a bizarre and incomprehensible statement to Natives, as well it should be, that innocence and guilt is a mere legal status, not necessarily rooted in material fact. It is a truism that all political prisoners were convicted of the crimes for which they were charged.

The truth is the government wants me to falsely confess in order to validate a rather sloppy frame-up operation, one whose exposure would open the door to an investigation of the United States’ role in training and equipping goon squads to suppress a grassroots movement on Pine Ridge against a puppet dictatorship.

In America, there can by definition be no political prisoners, only those duly judged guilty in a court of law. It is deemed too controversial to even publicly contemplate that the federal government might fabricate and suppress evidence to defeat those deemed political enemies. But it is a demonstrable fact at every stage of my case.

I am Barack Obama’s political prisoner now, and I hope and pray that he will adhere to the ideals that impelled him to run for president. But as Obama himself would acknowledge, if we are expecting him to solve our problems, we missed the point of his campaign.

Only by organizing in our own communities and pressuring our supposed leaders can we bring about the changes that we all so desperately need. Please support the Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee in our effort to hold the United States government to its own words.

I thank you all who have stood by me all these years, but to name anyone would be to exclude many more. We must never lose hope in our struggle for freedom.

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,
Leonard Peltier

–the preceding article first appeared in socialistworker.org:

http://socialistworker.org/2009/09/14/obamas-prisoner-now