And now:[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1999 17:01:06 -0500
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Lynne Moss-Sharman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Leonard Peltier
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No Surrender
Defiant after 23 years in prison, Leonard Peltier says
Canada put a 'nail in my coffin'
By Veronique Mandal Windsor Star Nov. 22, 1999
Leonard Peltier rubs a hand across his mangled jaw and gazes through a
window lined in prison bars -- past miles of razor wire and acres of grassy
fields -- to the distant road he dreams one day to travel.
The road to freedom. Twenty-three years behind bars have exacted a
horrible toll on the man Amnesty International calls America's
only political prisoner, a native activist at the centre of
Canada's most controversial extradition, the convicted killer of two FBI
agents on what is widely acknowledged as a trumped-up case.
Three botched surgeries to correct lockjaw have left Peltier unable to open
and close his mouth. To recover from the operations he was
put in isolation -- "the hole" -- where his cell-mates were
cockroaches and other vermin. Today, his lips move, but not his jaw and he
puts food in his mouth through two missing teeth, then "chews" with his
tongue. He suffers "screaming" jaw pain and terrible headaches almost
daily. He lost 80 per cent of the vision in his left eye from a retinal
hemorrhage, tested positive for hepatitis B, suffers from angina and high
blood pressure.
Yet while his body has been beaten, his spirit endures. A resigned Peltier
says he will never submit to the will of the U.S. parole board and admit to
killing the agents, although to do so might hasten his release. "I can't
say I'm sorry I killed those guys because it's not true, I did not kill
them, I did not see the agents
die," Peltier tells The Windsor Star in an exclusive interview. "But I am
sorry they died and would have tried to stop it if I knew what was going to
happen. I want to be free, but if to be free means having to admit to a
lie, I can't do that. So maybe I will have to die in prison." Peltier gets
upset when he talks about the shootout at Pine Ridge, S.D., following a
botched FBI raid in June 1975. At the time of the incident, he was lying in
a cot in a "spiritual camp" on the reserve. He talks of the callous way the
FBI concentrated only on the death of its own agents, while another
casualty, native Joe Killsright Stuntz, was not investigated.
Living death
He's been beaten down by Canadian and U.S. governments who refuse to
deal with the fraudulent evidence used by the FBI to convince Canada to
extradite him and a U.S. court to sentence him to a living death -- life at
hard labour in Leavenworth federal prison. The latest blow was dealt by
Canada's Justice Minister Anne McLellan, who
on Oct. 16 refused to ask her U.S. counterpart Janet Reno to release
Peltier. It was Peltier's "great hope" that McLellan would seek to reverse
the 1976 extradition and her refusal left him heartbroken.
"I truly believed she would be just and fair, but all she did was put
another nail in my coffin," says a saddened Peltier. "When I heard she
waited until the U.S. gave her permission to release her report and it was
taking so long, I had a feeling something was going terribly wrong."
And so Leavenworth, the storied keeper of "Scarface" Al Capone and
"Machine Gun" Kelly, is where Peltier will stay to his last breath.
Once called a "mad dog murderer" by the FBI, Peltier, 55, is gentle and
soft-spoken. He is five-foot-three and his long, flowing black hair,
streaked with grey, is pulled back from his high forehead. His
self-laundered, prison issue khaki shirt is tucked into matching, crisply
pressed trousers. "I like being neat and clean," he offers by way of
explanation. Peltier admits to days of despair, but not bitterness,
something he calls a "wasteful emotion." He wages a daily fight against the
ravages of loneliness. For years, prison authorities refused to let
reporters interview Peltier. It took
this reporter eight years to see him.
The day before The Star visit on Nov. 10, Peltier heard that his close
friend and stepmother, Ethel Pearson, had died in Vancouver.
"It makes me so sad to hear of her death," says Peltier. "She was so good
to me and never lost faith in my innocence. I will always have her spirit
near me." In 1997, Pearson, in tears, told The Star about her son: "He is a
good and kind man. It breaks my heart to know that he is rotting in that
terrible place. I pray that people around the world will help set him
free." Grieving from behind bars has been a constant of Peltier's prison
stay, with Pearson's passing following on the heels of Peltier's father
Leo, mother Alvina, a brother, a sister and many other relatives and
friends. Peltier's ties to Canada have always been strong and he treasures
the support he's received from Anne and Frank Dreaver of Toronto, founders
in 1979 of
the Leonard Peltier Defence Committee. "To me they are so important, not
only in a political way but to know I have such good, loving friends keeps
my spirits up and helps me survive this," he says.
Surviving "this" also means dealing with the fact that he's in prison for a
crime the evidence suggests he did not commit. "For a lot of years it was
unbelievable to me. I kept having those hopeful
thoughts in my head, these fantasies that eventually they'd say 'OK we made
a mistake, you're going home,' " says Peltier. "I didn't have much faith in
the U.S. government and have even less now for the Canadian government.
They're just as responsible. When does it end when you're innocent?" Cast
in the role of spiritual leader by his people, Peltier sees his struggle
for freedom as the struggle of all natives. "This is a case of native
people, of ethnic cleansing happening to them."
He turns away from the bars and sits in a chair at a small table facing the
window. His eyes dart around the room, as familiar to him as the
five-by-nine, windowless cell he's called home for most of his
incarceration. The family visiting room at Leavenworth has light brown
panelled walls, startling bright light and four windows, all with thick
metal bars. It's furnished with several vending machines -- off-limits to
the cons -- and a bright coloured floor rug etched with numbers and letters
intended to amuse inmates' children. Peltier smiles and points out several
toys and children's books. "This is where I raised my children," he says
sadly. "This is where I read them bedtime stories, talked to them, listened
to their troubles and encouraged them to finish school and keep their
culture. It was a hard life for seven little ones learning to grow up with
a father in prison."
'Painful'
Daughter Marquetta Shields agrees. "It was hard because I love my father
and other kids would yell at me 'Your father's a murderer.' But I knew he
wasn't," says Shields. "Now it's painful to take my son Jacob to see him
still in prison. It's also hard to deal with the blow Canada has just
struck him with (McLellan's) decision."
While she desperately wants to free her father, Shields would not want him
to admit to a lie. "No, I wouldn't want him to do that, because his fight
for Indian people would be for nothing and I know he couldn't do that,"
says Shields. "My greatest concern now is getting him medical attention."
Specialists from the Mayo Clinic have offered to perform corrective surgery
on his ruined jaw, but prison officials refuse to allow it. The three
surgeries were conducted using inadequate facililities in a prison
infirmary.
The nights are bad for Peltier. That's when the dreams come and with them
the memories of his childhood and the last day he tasted freedom. Peltier
was born in Grand Forks, N.D. on Sept. 12, 1944. His father was part
Chippewa (Ojibway) and French. His mother was part Dakota and Chippewa.
When he was four his parents divorced and sent Peltier and his sister Betty
Ann to live with their grandparents, Alex and May Dubois-Peltier. Home was
a tiny house in the woods at Turtle Mountain in North Dakota, close to the
Canadian border. Peltier loved "Gramps" and "Gamma" and from
them learned old songs and stories, a little medicine and hunting. He
became fluent in Metis and English and spoke passable French, Sioux and
Ojibway and was brought up with both the Indian traditional religion and
Catholicism. He made his own toys, using old car hoods to fashion
toboggans. A '41 Ford made the fastest, he says. He was happy, he says
with a tear in his eye, until Gramps died in 1953. "He was a good man, my
mentor, a kind and gentle person who was very
well-respected," Peltier says. "After that white people said Gamma couldn't
look after us and sent us to a residential school for three years. It was
terrible I can tell you."
He suffered the stigma of being Indian -- jeered at and ridiculed, being
told by fellow six-year-olds, "Go on home, you dirty Indian."
"Those things hurt when you're a boy," Peltier says softly. "But they hurt
just as much when you're a grown man." He remembers being told to "spread
'em, Tonto" by RCMP officers who arrested him in Vancouver and having
venomous prison guards whisper,"You'll never leave here alive, you dirty
Indian." In his book, Prison Writings -- My Name is My Sun Dance, Peltier
writes about life on the reservations, where white people excitedly point
and tell their
children, "There's an Indian." They don't wave, or stop and say hello,
Peltier said. "They treat us like we're in a zoo."
June 1975
When Peltier's dreams turn to freedom, they take him back to that fateful
June morning in 1975. He describes waking to the the sweet morning air that
follows a night-time thunderstorm and the smell of pancakes cooking on an
open fire. The sounds of women laughing, when one drops a pancake on the
ground and suggests they just wipe if off because the men won't know the
difference. Lying in the sultry heat inside his tent, Peltier's reverie is
shattered by gunfire and then screams. "It was chaos. Bullets were flying
everywhere and I heard children crying in fright," says Peltier. "I went to
check on an elderly couple in the camp and then to protect the children. I
couldn't tell where the bullets were coming from but eventually realized
they were coming from two cars parked about 150 yards away. I fired a few
warning shots into the air and I knew some of the
other men were firing as well. After awhile the firing stopped and the word
went round that the two men from the cars were dead. We were shocked and
knew that every man, woman and child were also as good as dead. I was
terrified and knew we had to get out of there, but suddenly what seemed
like hundreds of FBI agents, members of the goon squad, who were natives
paid by the FBI and local lawmen were all over the place." Peltier has not
known freedom since that day.
He pauses, seemingly exhausted. He says documents his defence team
obtained under freedom of information laws showed the FBI raid was
planned. The agency was lying when it said agents were chasing an Indian
who had stolen a pair of boots, he says. "They were planning to attack and
kill us." Three and half hours into the interview, Peltier is flagging.
"It's a lonely life," he says. "I fantasize about the outside world but
sometimes it frightens me because I know the world has changed and will be
kind of a shock." Younger inmates try to look after him, often mashing up a
snack and bringing it to his cell. Some prison guards treat him well,
others "hate me with a
passion," Peltier says. He stands. Suddenly a smile spreads across his
swollen face. "I'll soon have a seventh grandchild," he says with pride.
"I'm very proud of my children and grandchildren. Some day I'd like to have
some land, maybe in Canada, build a home, continue my painting and have
them around me."
What's the first thing you would do if they set you free? "Have my jaw
fixed." Do you think about dying? "Yes, I think about it a lot these
days. It's one of my fears. I feel that time is closing in on me and it
does sadden me to think I will never see home again. I
wish this was over. But I would rather die with my family rather than lay
in some old cell dying."
Locked away
Smiling again, he follows an armed guard out of the room. Somewhere,
another guard releases an electronic mechanism to unlock the metal door out
of the visitors' room. A reporter and photographer step inside. It closes,
trapping them in cage-like steel between two doors. Another loud click and
they're released. Outside the massive doors of Leavenworth there's a steep
staircase leading away from the cold, lifeless prison. Some day, for
Leonard Peltier, it could
mean 44 steps to freedom. But U.S. President Bill Clinton has less than
two years left in office. If the tough-on-crime Republicans win, Peltier,
his supporters fear, will never walk those 44 steps.
"Let Us Consider The Human Brain As
A Very Complex Photographic Plate"
1957 G.H. Estabrooks
www.angelfire.com/mn/mcap/bc.html
FOR K A R E N #01182
who died fighting 4/23/99
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.aches-mc.org
807-622-5407
For people like me, violence is the minotaur; we spend our lives
wandering its maze, looking for the exit. (Richard Rhodes)
Never befriend the oppressed
unless you are prepared to
take on the oppressor.
(Author unknown)
