Repression on Pine Ridge – Amherst Native American Solidarity Committee (1976)

From ‘Nummo News’, (A Black Student Weekly), November 29, 1976, Amherst, Massachusetts

Leonard Peltier is a 32 year-old Lakota (Sioux) man who is wanted by the FBI for his alleged participation in a gun-battle on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota that left two FBI agents and one Indian man dead on June 26, 1975. Peltier is seeking political asylum in Canada, where is presently held in prison, because he and his supporters are convinced that the US authorities simply want to stop Leonard Peltier, whether that be by putting him in a US jail or by other means. At the moment, Peltier’s case is before Ron Basford, the Canadian Minister of Justice. Progressive peoples throughout Canada and the US are pressuring Basford not to extradite Peltier, but the chances of Basford’s recognizing the political nature of Peltier’s case, and hence granting him asylum, are slim.

The question of why the FBI wants Leonard Peltier and why, on the other side, many people do not want Peltier extradited, is at once simple and complex. The answer involves two issues. First, US government repression of the Native American movement. Secondly, it highlights Indian peoples’ struggles for recognition of their sovereign and self-determining status as nations.

Leonard Peltier is a active and militant member of the American Indian Movement. He was, until he was forced to flee, working on the Pine Ridge Reservation with his people, the Oglala Lakota. Pine Ridge has been the scene of massive repression of progressive and traditional Indian people by the FBI since the liberation of Wounded Knee in 1973. Many of these people have been killed and many more have gone to prison for their commitment to the struggle on Pine Ridge. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, through its puppet Tribal Government in concert with the FBI, has functioned as an illegal and alien colonial government on Pine Ridge and on all Indian territories.

When on June 26, 1975 the FBI invaded the community of Oglala on Pine Ridge, clad in battle fatigues and carrying M-16’s, they were acting as a foreign army on Lakota territory. As might be expected to follow from any such intrusion, a gun battle ensued, which killed Joe Stuntz, an Indian man and the two FBI agents. Later four people were indicted for responsibility for the deaths. All were Indians and they were charged with murdering the agents. No one investigated the death of Joe Stuntz and no one was charged with his murder.

Two of the four, Robert Robideau and Darrelle Butler, were acquitted in July of this year by an all-white jury in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Lacking hard evidence on which to try the two the government built a circumstantial case which included at least one witness who was offered money, 24-hour security and leniency on charges pending against him in return for his testimony.

The jury simply refused to buy the government’s story. However, the government has had the benefit of this first try and will have its story tight if it brings Peltier and (if his charges are not dropped) the fourth defendant, James Eagle, to trial. Peltier’s fight for asylum becomes all the more necessary when some other facts surrounding the case become clear.

Anna Mae Aquash, a Mic-Mac woman from Nova Scotia, was also an AIM activist on Pine Ridge. In March of last year, her body was found in a culvert on a lonely road in one of the outlying districts on the reservation. The FBI maintained that Aquash died of exposure and quickly buried the body, before notifying next of kin. In an act of typical FBI brutality, they severed Aquash’s hands and sent them to the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. for identification. While the FBI, who keep close tabs on all Pine Ridge activists, did not need to find out who Anna Mae was, they were for some reason attempting to cover up the nature of her death.

When a federal judge demanded a new autopsy from an independent pathologist, it was quickly discovered that Aquash died not from exposure but from a 38 caliber bullet (a caliber weapon used almost exclusively by police) in the back of the head.

If the FBI is willing to comply in assassination at least to point of covering for some persons or organizations hostile to AIM, it is clear that Leonard Peltier’s life is indeed in danger should he be forced to return to the U.S.

Political assassination is not new to the FBI. Anyone who witnessed the murders of Black leaders like Fred Hampton in 1968 [correction: 1969] under the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations knows the lengths to which they are willing to go to crush progressive movements.

Now, in 1976, AIM is being subjected to similar harassment by federal-FBI programs like Operations Bicent and CHAOS.

The only “crime” of which Leonard Peltier is surely guilty is that of devoting his life to the liberation of his Indian people. The real crime is that the US government wants to take his liberty and perhaps his life, in retribution.

– Amherst Native American Solidarity Committee

Excerpt from ‘The Indian Voice’, Vancouver, BC, June 1976

1976 — Supporters drum and sing with fists in the air during Leonard Peltier’s extradition hearing at the Vancouver, BC, courthouse. According to an eyewitness account from inside the courtroom, as the judge began to read his decision to extradite, “everyone in the gallery, with arms raised in the AIM salute, rose in solidarity with Peltier…” The judge adjourned the court, but because it was so crowded people had to exit slowly. “The Sheriff’s officers started to push… pushing turned to punches… I saw one woman being strangled by a police officer while another held her by the feet. Another woman was dragged along by the hair. In another corner a pregnant woman was being pushed into the wall and kicked… Blood was spilling onto the floor.”