Despite now spending 47 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit, Leonard Peltier continues to be denied parole by the federal government of the United States. Why has the US so obstinately refused to free Peltier, despite decades of international outcry? The answer lies in the threat posed by what Peltier represents—the demands of the Indigenous liberation movement for sovereignty and justice after centuries of US settler colonialism. Historian Ward Churchill joins Rattling the Bars for a discussion on Leonard Peltier, the American Indian Movement, COINTELPRO, and more.
Additional links/info below…
- Eddie Conway, The Real News Network, “Free Indigenous prisoner Leonard Peltier“
- Wes Enzinna, Mother Jones, “‘I Never Claimed I Was F***ing Sitting Bull’“
- Casey R. Kelley, Scholarship and Professional Work – Communication, 123, “Blood-Speak: Ward Churchill and the Racialization of American Indian Identity” (2011)
Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
Mansa Musa: When we hear a conversation around American Indians, Indigenous people, reservations, tribal councils, or the Bureau of Indian Affairs, we filter these conversations through a lens that is perpetuating misinformation, but more importantly, a distortion of history. What is behind the history of Leonard Peltier? Why is he still being held captive when there’s overwhelming evidence that he is innocent? Joining me to talk about the Indigenous nation’s struggle for self-determination is Ward Churchill. Much of Ward Churchill’s work focuses on the historical treatment of political dissenters and Native Americans by the US government. Welcome, Ward.
Ward Churchill: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here, an honor to be here.
Mansa Musa: Yeah, my man. Like I said, I appreciate it. Like I said as I was talking to you off-camera, it’s important that people get an understanding of why Leonard Peltier has been held in captivity all these years and what is the genesis of him being placed in captivity. We recognize in this country that Native Americans, as they’re called, are the original people of this country; We recognize that. So whatever claim they make, unlike other people who make claims, whatever claim they make, they’re not claiming reparation. They’re not claiming you interned us as Japanese internment camps because, in your imperialist mentality, you went out, waged a war, and then when it came back on you now you’re going to lock up citizens of this country. They’re not claiming that.
Their claim is that they have a right to an autonomous situation where they govern themselves. And this claim is not based on the fact that they say they were here. This claim is based on the fact that they have 100 pieces of paper saying this and treaties that have been broken. So when they make this claim, they make this claim under the knowledge and under the facts that we have a right to be independent, we have a right to self-sufficiency, and we have a right to our own time. Ward, peel back some of the layers they organized. Start with, if you can, giving our audience an overview of AIM and if you want, work your way up to AIM. That’d be a good starting point for how we can get into Peltier.
Ward Churchill: Well, you nailed it. It’s not a matter of Indigenous people in North America; US or Canada, either one. But we’re in the US and the issues with the US at the moment, we don’t have claims for land against that. We have the right to land. We’re the Aboriginal – As they put it – Population; the original population. The US may have claims for land that it would like to press thus but they’ve got that completely stood on its head in a colonial arrangement. But internal colonies are not subparts of the US: They are other nations recognized as such by the US by way of treaties.
And treaties – According to Article 1, Section 10 of the US Constitution – Can be entered into only between sovereign peers, so the US government cannot enter into a treaty with a subpart of itself. And those treaties still exist because, nominally, according to the US narrative, they are the real estate documents, the basis upon which the US can lawfully assert title, and consequently entitled to and jurisdiction over all the areas within its domain. Well, that’s false. You know there’s not a country that’s not ceded by treaty – Even nominally, even by pretense. It was simply taken.
Then there’s a question of the validity of treaties, whether the US has complied, and whether the treaty might be binding. We understood that. Indigenous people understood that all along. The Sioux Nation – Where most of the events pertaining to Peltier transpired – Pressed for separation, complete self-governance, and territorial land base under the Treaty of 1868. They began that in the 1920s, early on, okay? So these struggles have been ongoing; they never stopped. But in the 1960s you had a generation that was fed up because things didn’t get better, there wasn’t progress being made. In fact, they were terminating declaring whole peoples to be no longer existent. In terms of relation with the feds, more of the population which began in the 1950s and was ongoing in the ’60s, had essentially a national liberation movement. Although there are a number of nations that are involved, it has been called pan-Indian. Not a term that I especially like, but, Indigenous –
Mansa Musa: – Right, it’s problematic in and of itself, the term.
Ward Churchill: Yeah.
Mansa Musa: When it comes to this phenomenon, it doesn’t have anything to do with that.
Ward Churchill: No.
Mansa Musa: Right, right, right.
Ward Churchill: The American Indian Movement was founded in 1968 and there’s this period of organizing and it grows. Chapters are formed in various locations around the country. The membership is growing and in 1972, you have the organization of what’s called the Trail of Broken Treaties. People converge on Washington, D.C., representative delegations from Indigenous nations from California all the way over to D.C. So you’ve got several thousand Indigenous people converged on Washington, D.C. shortly before the ’72 election. And the feds, who had initially encouraged them to show up so that you could have this dog-and-pony show meeting that Nixon could use, there were too many people that would show up the 20 points that they wanted to negotiate with the Nixon administration.
At that point, the Bureau of Indian Affairs in D.C. said, enough; They didn’t give their support to it. So all of a sudden you’ve got these people who have been promised accommodations – Housing and so forth for the duration of the meetings of the Nixon administration – With no place to go. And there’s active hostility. They declined to allow trail participants even to conduct ceremonies at the grave of Ira Hayes in Arlington Cemetery. They balked Indians from going into the cemetery, this grave site.
So they weren’t reckoning with who the American Indian Movement was. The response to the Indians at that point, AIM in particular, was that they went to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and they took that building; They took the Bureau of Indian Affairs building away from the federal government to accommodate people. They were living in it and proclaimed it to be the Native American Embassy.
Mansa Musa: You know what? It’s important that our listeners and our viewers understand that you used the term Indigenous nations. And it’s important that our listeners understand that when we’re talking about Indigenous people and their claim, we have to always put their claim in the context of we are being colonized, we want our autonomy, and we want our independence as a nation because this is what we agreed to, these are the things that y’all signed off on. We are only asking for you to make the whole be held accountable for everything that you have done.
So when they took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and when you look at it historically, they’re saying that this was an insidious act on the part of rowdy savages. When you put it into context that this started back in the ’50s, the nations are mobilizing to hold the US accountable. In time, Indigenous people got to the point where they said, listen, we’re tired of begging. We’re tired of asking. We’re tired of trying to get you to recognize and accept that you signed this, and that we agreed to this. Now we’re demanding that we get what we’re entitled to. And it was right at that point I want you to pick up on because I read that once AIM got in the picture and the nations became more organized in their direction, Hoover and COINTELPRO recognized them as a threat to national security. Pick up on that.
Ward Churchill: Well, they did. At that point in November of 1972, the FBI, which was already paying attention to them, really locked in because asserting treaty rights – National rights that are clearly defined constitutionally and in international law straight down the line – Pushing those issues in itself is an issue. Plus, you’ve got the fact that the reservations in which Indians were shunted in the 19th century, which were thought to be the most useless land in the country, turn out to be some of the most mineral-rich. Yeah.
Mansa Musa: Yeah, you made a mistake.
Ward Churchill: You name it, a mineral, and it’s there. The US was in the process of assimilation. Coming into the 20th century, they were trying to dissolve Indian Nations altogether, dissolve the reservations, and absorb Indians into this overburden of settler society. Indians are reduced in number, recognized by the federal government, to about a quarter million at that point. And you’ve got millions of settlers. So they’re going to absorb it and they suddenly realize in the resource profile, if we dissolve the Nations, that throws this all up for grabs. Far better that we maintain these entities, the reservations which are solely under federal control, then the federal government could utilize resources under whatever terms and conditions and whatever rates it wanted: Preferred corporations, preferred rates of central planning pretending to be a free market economy.
Okay. It all gets complicated but basically, the reservations continued to exist because the resource extraction policies that could pertain were very useful to both the governmental and corporate interests of the US and its position in the world. Okay. So when you start challenging that and you have a clear-cut case to do so in an international arena to play in if you’re not getting satisfaction here, this is a security threat of the first order in the minds of those in charge. So AIM is taken as a very high-profile target for neutralization right then and there.
Mansa Musa: Right. I want to pick up on that point because this is when we find the reservations, and occupation of the reservations in the form of the repression where the Bureau prison, the CIA, FBI, and the military are killing people on reservations. They’re being organized to understand that you can demand certain things, you have a right to certain things, and we are not asking anymore; we’re demanding. And we are positioning ourselves to get our demands met and we’re also positioning ourselves in the fighting formation to protect ourselves because we’re being killed off and we have a right to self-defense.
As you evolve into your analysis, pick up on how these reservations… Because this opened the door up for why I would find a federal agent knocking on my doggone door in the middle of the night. Or why I would find a federal agent having a roadblock for me to come… Like I’m in South Africa, I have documents to leave and documents to come back. This will go into that space. Once they recognize AIM as the threat like they recognize the party is a threat, the free breakfast program is a threat. Feeding kids is a threat. Giving out newspapers is a threat. Testing for sickle cell anemia – Because anything that is related to the party and organizing people is a threat. Go ahead, Ward.
Ward Churchill: Well, all of those things are relevant. AIM, particularly in Minneapolis – It was founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota – In 1968, following the model of the Black Panther Party in the urban context, policing the police, the observation of the police, to curtail police violence against the community that had been relocated largely from reservations into the urban context, they established survival schools, they established clinics, and so on. All of that pertains but then there’s the issue of the treaties.
Mansa Musa: That’s right. Come on.
Ward Churchill: All of the reservations were bound up by… We had a particular issue in South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation at that time. If you think back, you’re starting with the OPEC oil crisis; Stuff is beginning to emerge – So fossil fuels – And that’s getting to be a little shaky. They’re worried about the Arabs closing off supply.
Mansa Musa: Hey, come on, come on.
Ward Churchill: All right. Nixon, during that period, hatched a plan and articulated it. His goal was, by the end of the decade of the 1970s, to build about 100 more nuclear reactors, switch over to nukes, and engage in a nuclear weapons program that is fairly well known. But when you start talking about building another 100 nuclear reactors and converting the whole country, the power grid, into increasingly large proportion, nukes and uranium becomes a premium.
In Pine Ridge, you have the northwestern eighth of the reservation which was borrowed during World War II by the feds to use as an aerial gunnery practice range. Flying around B-17s, practicing the 50-caliber machine guns with a lethal range of three miles, and so forth, you’ve got to have someplace that has no population or no population you considered –
Mansa Musa: – Human.
Ward Churchill: – Basically, yeah, of consequence if they’re killed. But they did remove most of the people from that area. It was lightly populated. But the arrangement was that the area was to be restored to the Pine Ridge Reservation and to the people there once the war ended. My understanding is that World War II ended in 1945 and we’re coming into the 1970s now. They’ve never gotten the land back and you had a special satellite mapping that was going on, like infrared film. But this stuff about radiation that’s being emitted from the land, so they’re mapping out uranium deposits, is what it amounts to.
The feds discovered that there’s what appears to be a significant uranium deposit on the gunnery or in the gunnery range if you will. So I did some on-ground follow-up on that and said, yeah, there is uranium here. And it’s intermixed with molybdenum, which happens to be another strategically valuable material. So they hash a really complicated plan to install a bootlegger who had worked for the tribal government before, by the name of Dick Wilson. He’d fled South Dakota and was living in Arizona at the time in order that he would not be arrested for prosecution on embezzlement of funds and various other things.
Mansa Musa: Yeah, and various other things, yeah.
Ward Churchill: They brought him back and basically contrived with some local business interests in exchange for monopolies on construction on other projects on the reservation, put him in office, and quid pro quo was that he would sign the papers transferring the gunnery range and all the uranium and molybdenum, which was still secret, to the federal government – Badlands National Monument – At a certain point when it was convenient. They didn’t have a date when that was going to happen but the term of office in Pine Ridge is two years then and now, so presumably within two years.
Then there was a lot of resistance to Wilson because he was a known entity. They were bringing him back and true to form, he was hiring his entire family: his brothers, his son, his wife, and all of that, to populate the tribal government. You’ve got the formation of what was called the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights. The Oglala Lakotas are the resident population there, seven bands of Lakota. Each has its own reservation. And that’s a little simplistic, but yeah –
Mansa Musa: – No, I got you, I got you. Yeah.
Ward Churchill: – The Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization began to organize opposition to him, which led to an attempt to impeach him under the federal laws that pertain to tribal governance after 1934 in the Indian Reorganization Act, as they called it, which the feds couldn’t stop them from doing because it was their own law.
Mansa Musa: Yeah. So they do what they do.
Ward Churchill: The way they resolved that was in triplicate, really. They provided what they called “highway improvement funds.” And if you’ve ever been on an American Indian reservation – Still today in a large part but especially back in the ’70s – You knew when you arrived because the bottom went out from under you driving in the car; The roads were –
Mansa Musa: –Yeah, right. Treacherous.
Ward Churchill: – Yeah. Perfect rationale, highway improvement funds. We need to improve the roads there. But the money was utilized under the authority of Wilson, so he used it to form what he called the Tribal Rangers Group.
Mansa Musa: Right, there we go.
Ward Churchill: The Tribal Rangers Group was better known and called themselves the Guardians of the Oglala Nation. If you look at it, G-O-O-N spells something really similar to goon. So it’s his private police force. Interestingly enough, more than half of them, estimates run up to three-quarters of the people who were GOONs, employed as tribal rangers, were also Bureau of Indian Affairs police. So yeah, this is their moonlighting activity. So if you’re a BIA cop and you want [inaudible], you’re maybe not doubling your salary but you’re increasing it by becoming a part of this, and they began to physically repress the opposition.
Mansa Musa: There we go. That’s where I want to be, right there. And you know why right there? Because this is where this contradiction… Because now we recognize that when we’re talking about Peltier, we’re talking about any Indigenous person that’s been locked up, any Indigenous person that’s been killed, assassinated, we’re talking about the genesis of it is imperialism, capitalism, and the control over the minerals of the Indigenous people’s nation. The bootleggers and the auxiliary force, the paramilitary in this case took Indigenous people which they do in every case – United Slaves, Ron Karenga, Cotton Smith, how they killed Fred Hampton – They always find somebody that they can pay off or scare off, or scare into submission to do their bidding.
But as we close out, Ward, the reason why I wanted to bring this to a head and run up to this point is because I’m going to be talking to somebody later on about Peltier but I wanted to get our audience in a space where they understand the historical content. When we say Peltier, we’re saying you have no right to do anything to him under your laws. But more importantly, even if we were to say you can bring him into the process of this corrupt judicial system, you still didn’t have the information and the evidence to put him in the position that you found him. You still had to coerce witnesses, you still had to go bribe people, you still had to go fabricate evidence, and manufacture evidence to get them in the space.
More importantly, other people who were charged with him were able to exercise their right to self-defense. You positioned him so he couldn’t do that and then you brought the whole fabricated case against him. As you close out, Ward, speak to our audience about why it’s important that they understand the significance of this history and how when we talk about Indigenous people, no matter what their situation is, Indigenous people have the right; We don’t have the right, they have the right.
Ward Churchill: Right. Well, they were pressing the right but in a form that didn’t take into account the degree of repression that would be visited upon them. Now, I’ve talked about the feds funding this Tribal Rangers Group, the GOONs, and they were heavy on physical repression. But that second part of how the feds responded was to send in a special operations group, 60-strong, of US marshals. So they’re running around in baby blue jumpsuits with all kinds of weaponry, including sandbag machine gun positions in Pine Ridge, at the tribal office buildings, and so forth. They had machine gun people if they tried to storm the building.
The third part of the impeachment process, in effect, placed Wilson in charge of his own impeachment hearing. So all the people on the council – The tribal council who might’ve voted against him – He knew who they were. They were all arrested and run into jail the night before so they weren’t even present to vote on impeachment at the time. So he is not impeached, sufficient to say, and he immediately declared a ban on all meetings on the reservation of more than three people.
Well, the opposition went to Calico Hall, a town outside the town of Oglala, which is where the firefight that Peltier goes to prison as a result of, happens a couple of years later. And now you’ve got the traditional leadership of the Oglalas meeting and they’re trying to figure out what’s the response, and that’s when they put out a call for AIM to become involved. They asked for the intervention of the American Indian Movement, which was largely assembled in Rapid City for other reasons, another clash, was with South Dakota state authorities.
The upshot of that is they decided to go up to the site of an 1890 massacre, a famous one, Wounded Knee, and to convene a press conference there. Because it was the American Indian Movement because it was Wounded Knee and so forth, they figured the press would show up and they’d be able to get the information out as to what was happening on the reservation to the body politic. They thought people didn’t know, which to a certain extent was true, but the GOONs and the marshals were setting up roadblocks around Wounded Knee by the time they woke up in the morning and you had this 71-day siege that resulted.
Okay. And now the Army comes in by way of Boney Warner and a guy by the name of Potter; both field grade officers, both of them dispatched by the White House. Alexander Haig at the White House sent them to act as consultants. So the Army is now providing equipment, munitions, and so forth to this array of GOONs, marshals, and white vigilante organizations from around the area. And what you have that’s been put into effect, and this is what’s crucially important for people to understand because this still very much exists, COINTELPRO is an FBI operation. It interfaces with local police, it interfaces with various government agencies, and so forth. But the overarching formula for this is something that has existed in various forms since World War I, and it’s called Plan White. Well, it should be Plans – Plural – White, because it evolves over time. And what that involves is using military and civil authorities, intelligence authorities and police, and what are described as patriotic organizations, in combination, coordinated centrally, to put down insurrection or to quell disturbances or to maintain the status quo in terms of –
Mansa Musa: – Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. That’s right.
Ward Churchill: – Okay. By the time you get to 1973, which is when Wounded Knee happens, you have various scenarios that have been spun off the latest Plan White. One is called Garden Plot and the other is called Cable Splicer. Garden Plot, in particular, seems to have been field-tested for rural application – Not against Indians per se, but for rural applications. Well, you get rural, remote even in common vernacular, when you get to western South Dakota. It’s just not on anybody’s radar. So they figured they could field test this operation on that reservation to see what the effectiveness is, see what the problems are with the implementation. They can make corrections, they can change plans accordingly; Same thing they were doing, to a certain extent, in Vietnam during that.
Mansa Musa: Right. Hey Ward, look, we’re going to have to wrap up.
Ward Churchill: Okay.
Mansa Musa: But why don’t you try to summarize as we close out?
Ward Churchill: That’s the model that remains in place. It was installed in FEMA when Reagan was elected because the guy who formulated Garden Plot in particular was Louis Giuffrida who was appointed the first director of FEMA. So they’ve run that out. They’ve got current scenarios that they implement as necessary against whoever. So yeah, we have this particular Indian focus and the rights of Indigenous nations and the decolonial struggle and all that needs to be clearly borne in mind, but it doesn’t end there. Indians are the miners’ canary, as Felix Cohen once put it. What they will do to Indians, they will do to anyone.
Mansa Musa: As they are.
Ward Churchill: Yeah. Whether it’s the Black Liberation Movement or it’s the Chicano Movement, they don’t care who. If you become a tangible threat in their estimation to the business as usual of the US internal empire, this is what they’ll come at you with: A combination of forces and dirty tricks that we can’t go into much further at this point. But it is big time and it is continuously available and to one or another extent, is applied as necessary.
Mansa Musa: Yeah. Ultimately, they use the death of a thousand cuts which they are doing with Peltier. Once you got him locked in, he’s going to die a death of a thousand cuts if and when he gets out.
Ward Churchill: For three years after Wounded Knee, you got a counterinsurgency war that is waged, fought out on and around Pine Ridge, and that’s Peltier. Ultimately, the American Indian Movement and the traditional old laws were not supposed to be able to hold up under this; They did. And that makes what happened to Peltier symbolic for the US, for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in particular, because they were falsely convicted of killing two agents. That’s why you have this vestiture of interest in maintaining him in a state of – Well, you’re going to get to it a little later, you say – Degradation at this point.
Mansa Musa: Thanks, Ward.
Ward Churchill: Yes, sir.
Mansa Musa: We really appreciate this, Ward, for not only this insightful information, but more importantly to contextualize when we talk about Peltier or anybody who’s an Indigenous person that’s being occupied by this country. When we talk about it now we get a context where we can say, yeah, this is about corporate America. This is about capitalism. This is about fascism. This is not about Indigenous people; It’s about them not owning up to the treaties they signed. This is about them speaking with a forked tongue, as they say.
Thank you, Ward. There you have it; The Real News, Rattling the Bars. We appreciate you, Ward. We ask that you continue to support The Real News and Rattling the Bars. Because guess what? We are actually the real news.
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