Wednesday, June 16, 1999
The University Daily Kansan
Section B·Page 3
Kansas prisoner symbolizes injustice
By Katie Burford
Kansan campus editor
The government is right. Leonard Peltier is dangerous.
He is dangerous because he is the symbol, the very embodiment, of every unjust act that has ever been committed against indigenous people — and because he possesses the fervency of a warrior with the voice of a poet.
Now in his 24th year of imprisonment for the murder of two FBI agents, Pelitier resolutely maintains his innocence in his recently released memoir, "Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance."
The events that led to Peltier's conviction are documented in Incident at Oglala, a 1991 film produced and narrated by Robert Redford. Chronicled are the events that occurred June 26, 1975, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. There, a shootout between members of the American Indian Movement and a host of law enforcement agencies resulted in the deaths of the two FBI agents and one Native American.
Two other men were acquitted of the agents' murders before Peltier was captured and tried. Many believe that the government learned from its mistakes in the first trial and, therefore, fabricated the evidence needed to get a conviction in Peltier's trial. He received two consecutive life sentences for the crimes.
Despite the legions of foreign and domestic dignitaries that have campaigned for Peltier's release, his legal appeals have been denied, and his only remaining hope for clemency is an order from the president. President Clinton has not commented publicly on the case.
Reasserting his innocence is a secondary tenet of "Prison Writings." Primarily, Peltier uses its pages to demonstrate that being chewed up and spit time and again by the legal system has not broken his soul or shaken his belief that there is a higher purpose for his suffering.
On his imprisonment, Peltier observes, "You don't do time. You do without it. Or rather, time does you. Time is a cannibal."
Peltier touches on a number of other subjects as well.
On hypocrisy: "America, when will you live up to your own principles?"
On the future: "When at last I'm a free man again, the real work will begin. Our most important work, before all else, is our survival as a people."
On hope: "My body may be locked in here, but my spirit flies with the eagle."
Commentary
IN THE SHADOWED
NIGHT
Sometimes
in the shadowed night
become spirit.
The walls, the bars, the gratings dissolve into light
and I unloose my soul
and fly through the inner darkness of my being.
I become transparent a bright shadow
a bird of dreams singing from the tree of life.
— from "Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance," by Leonard Pellier, United States prisoner #89637-132. Edited by Harvey Arden. St. Martin's Press, $23.95.
One of the most poignant passages of the book is powerful because of its matter-of-fact delivery.
Peltier writes, "I've learned the best way to be beaten is to relax as best as you can while clenching your stomach muscles, protect your head and genitals, and think of Sun Dance."
Peltier's acceptance of beating as a fact of life is jarring. The necessity for developing such a method must be something that only a people who have spent a lifetime being oppressed could conceive.
"When you grow up Indian, you don't have to become a criminal," Peltier said. "You already are a criminal. You never know innocence."
The Peltier who existed prior to that fateful day in 1975 has been a mystery for all but those who knew
Woven throughout his tale is Pellier's unlikely but unwavering belief in a better tomorrow, both for himself and for his people.
him then. This book changes that. It provides a context, both personal and political, for Pettier's role in the incident at Oglala.
"Like Nelson Mandela, you never know when you will suddenly and unexpectedly be called upon. He, too, knows what's like to sit here in prison, year after year, decade after decade. I try to keep myself ready if ever I'm needed." Peltier writes.
The analogy is startling. In America we cast stones at apartheid, but we live in a glass house.
Peltier spent two years recording his recollections on a legal pad with a pencil stub in the penumbra of his prison cell while the disembodied voices of other prisoners echoed in the cavernous interior of Leavenworth Penitentiary. From the pages of his diary, his clarion call is delivered: "I am undestroved."
sarveyed.
Facts that have emerged and documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act have not been kind to the government's case. While our great nation is preoccupied with a war against ethnic cleansing overseas, Peltier languishes in prison, America's emblem of its own dirty little secret.
The questions remain. Can blows beget poetry? Can injustice beget insight? Can suffering beget reconciliation? Read the book.
For more on Leonard Peltier, see A Struggle with Conviction by Pallavi Agarwal, April 30, 1999, Kansan archives (www.kansan.com), or call the Lawrence-based Leonard Peltier Defense Committee at 842-5774.
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