from Nightlife, early 1990s
Nightlife Interviews Native American Political Prisoner Leonard Peltier
by Margaret A. Howard
Micheal Apted's long-awaited film, Incident at Oglala unwinds and clarifies the incredibly sordid history of the FBI's railroading of American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier, a member of the Oglala Lakota (Siuox) Nation. Apted's cool, uncluttered style is said to make this film an elegant, exciting, and infuriating look at wrongs in the United States judicial system.
There cases in the chronicles of American political target-making as blatently obvious in invention of evidence and indictment of an innocent person as the case of Leonard Peltier; certainly no other case has come to such world-wide attention, although as Peltier says, "there are many more like me in the prisons." But Peltier is to his people both a symbol of the injustice typical in their lives, and as an American Indian Movement (AIM) leader, a symbol of hope.
In 1973, two years before the shoot out on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation that ended in Peltier's imprisonment, tension between AIM and the FBI was already high. In February of that year 300 AIM members peacefully occupied the village and government offices of Wounded Knee, South Dakota (the sight of the final U.S. Cavalry massacre of women, children, and elders barely 100 years ago that nearly achieved the government's goal of breaking the spirit of the Lakota Nation) as part of AIM's effort to call attention to the genocidal land grabbing policies of the U.S. Government toward Native Americans. A military response by the U.S., including Phantom jets and armored personnel carriers, forced an AIM agreement to walk peacefully from the encampment. Nonetheless, three AIM leaders, including Russell Means (seen in Last of the Mocchians), were arrested and taken to trial.
Next thing anyone knew the presiding judge in the case, Fred Nicholl, was tossing out the entire prosecution, refusing to get involved in this "gross misconduct on the part of the FBI."
In a November 2 telephone interview with Nightlife, superstar civil rights attorney William Kunstler, who argued for Peltier in two appeals and was at Wounded Knee during the occupation in 1975 said, "A lot of the FBI venum [toward AIM] came from the Wounded Knee decision. Their tactics were really exposed there, and they didn't like that."
The environment on Pine Ridge in 1975 was volatile. AIM leaders had been working for years to get the United States Government to honor treaty agreements it had made with Indian Nations. But following its historical bent, the United States chose to continue to violate treaties and use Indian land, and Indians, in whatever way it pleased. When the land was "given" to Native Americans, it was thought to be worthless. But underneath the wasteland was a kingdom of uranium, drawing military action just as gold in the Black Hills of the Dakotas attracted the United States Cavalry less than 100 years before AIM occupation of Wounded Knee. At the time of the shoot out, the little reservation settlement of Oglala was hot with tension between broken promises and money.
On June 26, 1975, in the midst of what many have called an outright war on the people of the Pine Ridge Reservation two FBI agents drove onto this Indian land ostensibly looking to investigate the theft of a pair of cowboy boots. A short time later a shoot out ensued resulting in the deaths of one Native American man and two FBI agents. After the Pine Ridge shoot out the Bureau wanted an example of what happens to those who interfere with the United States Government. According to William Kunstler, Peltier was their man.
Leonard Peltier is now serving two consecutive life sentences for the murder of the FBI agents; the murder of the Native American man has never been investigated. The complete fabrication of all evidence that convicted Peltier was proven in subsequent appeals, yet the U.S. Judicial system refused to grant him a new trail. But an appeal November 9 at the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Paul, Minnesota could, with publicity from the Apted film, turn this around.
"That's what the film is for," Peltier told Nightlife in a telephone interview October 30 from Ft. Leavenworth Prison in Kansas, "to educate the public. They didn't have a script, the people tell the story in their own words. They tell the truth. At least," he said, "the people on our side tell the truth."
Now here's the clincher. According to Kunstler, Peltier was convicted on ballistics evidence. The prosecution tied a gun connected with Peltier to a shell casing found by FBI agents. Prosecutors told the jury that Peltier killed these two men in cold blood, at point blank range. Their case rested on this portrayal of Peltier as a ruthless executioner. In documents concealed by the FBI, the ballistics expert who examined the gun and the shell casing stated the casing could not have come from Peltier's gun. The mark from the firing pin did not match the firing pin of the rifle; this is considered conclusive evidence. However, this ballistics information was suppressed until attorneys for Peltier forced its release through the Freedom of Information Act over strong protests from the FBI.
At Peltier's second appeal in 1985 the ballistics evidence was presented, but prosecutors then argued that even if he didn't kill the agents he was there, wasn't he, so couldn't they keep him in for aiding and abetting? Their argument stuck, and Peltier was denied a new trial.
Further Government suppression in the Peltier case is evidenced by the removal some years ago of Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Peter Matthiessen's chronology of the Peltier case, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (The Viking Press, 1980), from bookshelves for the duration of two protracted libel suits brought by former Governor of South Dakota Janklow and one of the FBI agents present at the Pine Ridge shoot out, David Price. Price's spurious dealings included whitewashing the brutal rape of a teenage girl committed in Palo Alto, California by the prosecution's key witness in the aborted Wounded Knee trial, on the very day the witness claimed to have been at Wounded Knee, watching the defendants murder and pillage. (That same witness, by the way, is on video tape speaking to a live television audience at Palo Alto about AIM, again, on that very day he claimed to have been at Wounded Knee.)
But Price and Janklow lost their libel suits, and Mattiessen's book is back on the shelves, with a new epilogue.
Peltier told Nightlife "[The suppression of the book] was a totalitarian act on the part of the United States Government. It was to keep information away from the public. After spending $2.5 million to defend the law suits, it's good it's all done. But I don't think the judges [who presided in the libel trials] were on our side; they did everything they could to prolong the suits. This kept the book off the shelf, and all the money it could have been making was kept out of [Indian] hands. But the judges had their careers to think about, and the evidence is overwhelming. What else could they do?"
Viking Press, the publisher, backed the legal costs of this battle. A smaller press couldn't have handled the expense. "They believed in my case and supported me from the beginning," Peltier stated.
This time, however, the defense is ready to argue that Peltier is being kept in prison on a charge for which he was never tried. Again, according to Kunstler, this is the argument that Ramsey Clark will present to the appellate court on November 9.
Southern Illinois was the focus of world-wide scrutiny during the eight years Peltier spent at Marion Federal Penitentiary, and Carbondale was then headquarters for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. Marion Penitentary is presently the highest security prison in the country, condemned by Amnesty International for its human rights violations.
Peltier, along with a few other prisoners, was transferred out of Marion to the Federal Medical Facility in Springfield after a prolonged fast protesting the violation of their right to practice religion in the penitentiary after Marion officials refused to allow them access to a medicine man and other essentials of Lakota traditional spiritual practice. "Marion Prison is a hell," Peltier said on October 30, "I don't wish that on anybody, that they spend time in Marion."
A recent West 57th spot exposed the U.S. Government's suppression of information in the Peltier case. During the piece people were stopped on the street in Red Square and asked if they had heard of Leonard Peltier; nearly everyone had. Around the world Peltier is a hero, spoken of along side Andrei Sakkorav and Nelson Mandella; in the United States most of us have never heard the name. Withholding of information in the Peltier case has been rampant from court room to the ten o'clock news.
But exposure has been increasing in recent years with the West 57th spot and others on West 57th Street and Good Morning America. Little Stephan has made a music video of his song Leonard Peltier, and on November 6, NBC's Tom Brokaw will run a segment on Peltier.
The recent Hollywood attraction to things native may end up paying off for Peltier and his people. The sentimental Dances With Wolves stirred interest and convinced Hollywood of the market; Michael Apted's fictional Thunderheart brought together elements of Peltier's and other's cases; and word has it that Oliver Stone will be making a feature film with Peltier as focus.
Robert Redford, narrator of Incident at Oglala, has long been interested in the Peltier case and has been instrumental in making the Apted film.Because funding was hard to get, Redford backed it himself. Peltier, speaking the hope the film brings to his people, told Nightlife, "It enormously exposes then truth of just how vicious the U.S. judicial system can be with those they call rebels, renegades. In the '70s they called us savages."
About the film Kunstler said, "Redford has sunk a lot of money into this, a lot of time. He's been very dedicated. And the film is very well done, very exciting. It's the only documentary film that has run four weeks in New York City. It was held over that long. The reviews have been incredible." By the way, you can see William Kunstler as the judge in the upcoming Spike Lee film Malcolm X, as the lawyer in The Doors. As Nightlife spoke to him, Kunstler had a script for an upcoming Robert DeNiro film in which he will play a similar part. "I guess at 74 I'm becoming an ingenue," he said.
Linda Stromberg of Friends for Native Americans in Carbondale and a member of the Cherokee Nation, said "Most people think atrocities to Native Americans happened 100 years ago, but that's not true. It's happening right now. I'm glad the film has come here."
Incident at Oglala will be in Carbondale tonight only, at the Student Center Auditorium for two shows, 7 and 9:30 PM. Admission is $1.