Open Letter From Leonard Peltier to Barack Obama
From Leonard Peltier
I have watched with keen interest and renewed hope as your campaign has
mobilized millions of Americans behind your message of changing a
political system that serves a small economic elite at the expense of the
peoples of the United States and the world. Your election as president of
the United States, where slaves and Indians were long considered less than
human under the law, will undoubtedly constitute a historic moment in race
relations in the United States.
Yet symbolism alone will not bring about change. Our young people, black
and Native alike, suffer from police brutality and racial profiling,
underfunded schools, and discrimination in employment and housing. I
sincerely hope your campaign will inspire some hope among our youth to
struggle for a better future. I am, however, concerned that your recent
statement on the Sean Bell verdict, in which the New York police officers
who fired 50 shots at a young man on the eve of his wedding were acquitted
of criminal charges, displays a rather myopic view of the law. Until the
law is harnessed to protect the victims of state violence and racism, it
will serve as an instrument of repression, just as the slave codes
functioned to sustain and legitimize an inhuman institution.
As I can testify from experience, the legal institutions of this nation
are far from racial and political neutrality. When judges align with the
repressive actions and policies of the executive branch, injustice is
rationalized and cloaked in judicial platitudes. As you may know, I have
now served more than three decades of my life as a political prisoner of
the federal government for a crime I did not commit. I have served more
time than the maximum sentence under the guidelines under which I was
sentenced, yet my parole is continually denied (on the rare occasions when
I am afforded a hearing) because I refuse to falsely confess. Amnesty
International, South African Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama of Tibet,
my Guatemalan sister Rigoberta Menchu, and many of your friends and
supporters have recognized me as a political prisoner and called for my
immediate release. Millions of people around the world view me as a symbol
of injustice against the indigenous peoples of this land, and I have no
doubt that I will go down in history as one of a long line of victims of
U.S. government repression, along with Sacco and Vanzetti, the Haymarket
Square martyrs, Eugene Debs, Bill Haywood, and others targeted by for
their political beliefs. But neither I nor my people can afford to wait
for history to rectify the crimes of the past.
As a member of the American Indian Movement, I came to the Pine Ridge
Oglala reservation to defend the traditional people there from human
rights violations carried out by tribal police and goon squads backed by
the FBI and the highest offices of the federal government. Our symbolic
occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 inspired Indians across the Americas to
struggle for their freedom and treaty rights, but it was also met by a
fierce federal siege and a wave of violent repression on Pine Ridge. In
1974, AIM leader Russell Means campaigned for tribal chairman while being
tried by the federal government for his role at Wounded Knee. Although
Means was barred from the reservation by decree of the U.S.-client regime
of Richard Wilson, he won the popular vote, only to be denied office by
extensive vote fraud and control of the electoral mechanisms. Wilson’s
goons proceeded to shoot up pro-Means villages such as Wanblee and
terrorize traditional supporters throughout the reservation, killing at
least 60 people between 1973 and 1975.
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