Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance

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Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

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Doing time creates a

demented darkness of my

own imagination.…

Doing time does this thing

to you. But, of course, you

don’t do time.

You do without it. Or

rather, time does you.

Time is a cannibal that

devours the flesh of your

years

day by day, bite by bite.

introduction

by Chief Arvol Looking Horse

Hua Kola—

Let it be known that Leonard Peltier is a son of our great grandfathers, a spiritual warrior of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Nations. He shares the spirit of our ancestors who fought for the rights of our people, such as Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. He is a man who has borne witness to the pain and suffering of our grandmothers, women, and children. As a Sun Dancer, he sacrificed his life to the People seeking justice for all our relatives. He offered himself to Wakan Tanka so that the People might have peace and happiness once again.

I, Chief Arvol Looking Horse, 19th Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe, ask that Leonard Peltier receive the blessings of the Great Spirit, for his words to become etched in the minds and hearts of all people. I ask for his prayers to be answered so that he might enjoy the freedom he sought for the People and that the wounds on his soul heal. And I ask those who continue to inflict such pain and suffering on him to see the error of their ways. Let us all work together to restore justice so that the Hoop of Our Nation mends and so our children see better days.

On behalf of all O’yate, I ask Tunkashila for Leonard Peltier to be set free, for him to enjoy his freedom once again. I call on each of you individually and personally, with every breath you take, to never cease in your efforts to free Leonard Peltier. Return him to us!

I, Horse Man, speak these words from my heart, from Paha Sapa, the heart of everything that is—praying for the return of our sacred lands, which have also suffered at the hands of our oppressors.

May peace be with you all.

Mitakuye Oyasin—All My Relations.

Chief Arvol Looking Horse

19th Generation Keeper of the

Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe

a prayer

Grandfather,

Mysterious One,

We search for you along

this Great Red Road you have set us on.

Sky Father,

Tunkashila,

We thank you for this world.

We thank you for our own existence.

We ask only for your blessing

and for your instruction.

Grandfather,

Sacred One,

Put our feet on the holy path

that leads to you,

and give us the strength and the will

to lead ourselves and our children

past the darkness we have entered.

Teach us to heal ourselves,

to heal each other

and to heal the world.

Let us begin this very day,

this very hour,

the Great Healing to come.

preface

by Ramsey Clark, counsel to Leonard Peltier and former Attorney General of the United States

I want to tell you why the freedom of Leonard Peltier is so important.

There are well over two hundred million indigenous people on the planet, maybe as many as three hundred million. They live on six continents and on countless numbers of islands. And everywhere they are the most endangered of the human species. Yet the survival of humanity depends upon their salvation.

Leonard Peltier is the symbol of that struggle. I am distressed, saddened, and outraged that so many Americans have forgotten, or perhaps never known, who he is and what he represents. If we forget him, we forget the struggle itself. Strangely, he is much better known outside of this country than here—in Europe, in Canada, in South America, in Asia, and Africa. Enlightened people around the world see in him the struggle of all indigenous people for their lives, their dignity, for their sovereignty, their future. And they wonder: how is it that this man has been held so long when his innocence is known by those who hold him? Here in the United States, his voice, and the urgent message of indigenous peoples everywhere, has been muffled if not silenced. Those who put him behind bars—and insist on keeping him there after nearly a quarter century—believe he has been consigned to the dustbin of history, along with the cause of native peoples everywhere. We must not allow that to continue.

I think I can explain beyond serious doubt that Leonard Peltier has committed no crime whatsoever. Even if he had been guilty of firing the gun that killed two FBI agents—and it is certain that he did not—it would still have been in self-defense and in the defense not just of his people but of the right of all individuals and peoples to be free from domination and exploitation. Not a single credible witness said they saw Leonard take aim at anybody that tragic day at Oglala in June 1975 on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. There was absolutely no evidence that he killed anyone—except fabricated and utterly misleading circumstantial evidence. Among the many, many things withheld in his alarmingly unfair trial—a trial that disgraced, and continues to disgrace, the American judicial system—was the staggering violence on the Pine Ridge Reservation that led directly to the events of that day. That violence, directed against traditional people on the reservation, had earlier caused the related and better-known tragedy revolving around the occupation and siege at nearby Wounded Knee in 1973. And that violence accelerated enormously in the two years between 1973 and 1975.

At the time of Wounded Knee in 1973, there were only a few FBI agents in the whole state of South Dakota, and frequently just one. But by 1975, there were sixty. They were deployed overwhelmingly against a small Indian population. During those two years more than sixty Indians on the Pine Ridge reservation—some say as many as three hundred—died violent and unexplained deaths, overwhelmingly from activity instigated by our own federal government. And there is little doubt about it.

With government complicity, a rogue paramilitary group that proudly called itself the GOONs—Guardians of the Oglala Nation—were provided with weapons, training, and motivation to create a wave of violence, still remembered as the reign of terror, against traditional Indian people and their supporters, including the American Indian Movement (AIM). In March of 1975 alone seven Indians were killed, their deaths going virtually uninvestigated despite the presence of that army of FBI agents and other federal, state, and tribal lawmen. And that’s why the traditional people, the Elders of the Lakota (Sioux) people, asked AIM, as they had two years before at Wounded Knee, to send some people to help protect them. And I say, thank God AIM did.

A small group of brave, dedicated AIM members—fewer than seventeen people, only six men, Leonard Peltier among them—came to protect the traditional Indians from violence secretly and illegally condoned and initiated by our government. Those AIM defenders, joined by local traditionals, set up a tent city, a spiritual camp they called it, on the remote Pine Ridge property of Harry and Celia Jumping Bull—two Elders who feared desperately for their loved ones’ lives after constant threats from the GOONs.

This was a time, we must remember, of government paranoia against all dissident groups that remained as the Vietnam War era was drawing to a close. These things were all interrelated. We should never forget Martin Luther King, Jr.’s heartbreaking words in 1967, when he came out against the war in Vietnam and announced, The greatest purveyor of violence on earth is my own government.

There’s no question but that our own government was generating violence against traditional Indians of Pine Ridge at that time as a means of control and domination, some believe acting on behalf of energy interests planning to purloin the reservation’s vast untapped mineral wealth, especially uranium.

We now know, from documents recently released in the 1990s under the Freedom of Information Act, that the FBI had people in place at least twenty minutes before the two cars that precipitated the incident at Oglala drove down into the Jumping Bull compound. The government had been preparing for a major act.

During the trial of Leonard Peltier in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1977, much essential background evidence in the case was excluded. The greatest exclusion was all of this government-instigated violence, which had caused the whole tragedy and led to the deaths of their own agents.

Why were these men of AIM there? Why was Leonard Peltier there? He was there to protect people, his own people, who were being killed! If that’s a crime, where are we?

But the government’s own crimes didn’t end there. They suborned our whole system of justice when they intimidated a witness, a poor and unknowing Indian woman, into testifying that she was Leonard Peltier’s girlfriend and that she had actually seen Leonard kill the agents—then used that testimony to extradite Leonard from Canada, where he had fled fearing precisely the kind of kangaroo justice he was about to receive in U.S. courts.

As the FBI well knew, that woman wasn’t even there, had never met or even seen Leonard Peltier, and the government knew it! It’s amazing to me still, how they talk about that woman and blame her for not telling the truth. Because, long after it was all over, they freely admitted there’s not a scintilla of evidence, not a spark of evidence—those are their own words—that this woman was a witness to anything. They admitted she wasn’t even there. Now, do you think she just came forward and volunteered three affidavits? What did that poor woman go through at the hands of her interrogators? What type of abuse? It was the same sort of abuse and manipulation being perpetrated on the whole traditional population of Pine Ridge—and by our own government agents. Think of how they treated her to force her to give utterly false testimony, and took advantage of her in order to get Leonard Peltier and bring him back here. What a shameful, criminal act! So long as it goes unchallenged and unpunished we are all of us, every citizen in this great nation of ours, subject to the same kind of naked and arrogant injustice.

The other concealments that the government went through to imprison Peltier are unbelievable. The FBI laboratory, as you no doubt have heard, is the subject of a whole series of recent reports that condemn it for fabricating evidence, for falsifying evidence, for incompetence in evaluation of evidence. Yet the extenuated nature of the only evidence against Leonard Peltier is so absurd that, if the FBI laboratory were either competent or honest, that so-called evidence wouldn’t be worth anything. The government, in prosecuting its fraudulent case against Leonard, covered up lab reports that said they could not connect the one bullet (it wasn’t even a bullet but a casing, an expended casing) with what was called the Wichita AR-15, the so-called murder weapon. And yet the FBI claimed to connect the AR-15 bullet casing (itself suspected of being fabricated evidence) with that particular AR-15, even though their own lab said they did not match, and they then illegally concealed this evidence to the contrary throughout Leonard’s Fargo trial. Nor, even if they did connect the two, could they place that weapon in Leonard Peltier’s hands, much less even prove it to be the murder weapon. Leonard wasn’t within fifteen hundred miles of where it was found near Wichita, Kansas, weeks after the shootout at Oglala. So how does that get to be his rifle in the first place? Well, they had a plan for that. The government argued that there was only one AR-15 rifle possessed by Indians on the reservation. But that was absolutely false, as they well knew. And the courts have since confirmed, without question, that there were a number of AR-15s there, and M-16s as well, which fire the .223 cartridge, which is the same kind of high-velocity cartridge that allegedly killed these FBI agents.

At Leonard’s trial, government prosecutors reenacted a scene for which they had no evidence whatsoever—an imaginary scene in which one agent, supposedly suffering from already having been hit at a distance, put his hand in front of his face and begged not to be shot and was shot through the hand and killed by Leonard Peltier, who then whirled and shot the other agent and killed him, both at point-blank range. The only problem was that there was absolutely no evidence of that; no witness testified to anything like that. And yet the jury was intimidated into believing this totally false story.

Then, in 1985, after Leonard had already served a decade in prison, one of the government prosecutors candidly admitted, We did not know who shot the agents. That’s what he said: We did not know who shot the agents. Now more than another decade has passed and still Leonard Peltier is in prison! He’s there, convicted on two counts of murder, and he’s serving two life sentences—all for a crime the government knows it did not prove he committed! By imprisoning Leonard Peltier, those who keep him locked away from his people continue the government’s dishonorable, centuries-old policy of domination over, and oppression of, Indian peoples. Leonard Peltier is the very symbol of that domination and continuing oppression. Is it any wonder he’s called a political prisoner?

So even after the government admitted that they did not prove who killed the agents, rather than see Leonard freed and thus open the door to an investigation into their own misdeeds, they switched after the fact to a new, equally fraudulent argument for continuing his imprisonment—charging him with aiding and abetting whoever it was who supposedly killed the agents. Yet the jury had given him a double life sentence because they believed the prosecutor’s fabricated story that Leonard had murdered those injured agents in cold blood at point-blank range, not for a charge of aiding and abetting, which could apply equally to scores of Indians that day. They would never have given