Swallow, who is Teton Lakota, band of Crazy Horse, was one of a panel of speakers to address the meeting, which drew 40 people to the Zumix arts and cultural center in East Boston. The event occurred the same day as the conviction in South Dakota of Arlo Looking Cloud for the 1976 murder of fellow AIM member Anna Mae Pictou Aquash. AIM spokesman Vernon Bellecourt told the New York Times that the way the prosecution conducted its case against Looking Cloud, “you would think the American Indian Movement was on trial.”

Speaking at the Boston meeting, Peltier’s attorney Barry Bachrach observed that Looking Cloud’s trial “isn’t about who murdered Anna, it is about smearing Leonard Peltier and other AIM leaders.”

Andrea Hornbein, a coordinator of the Boston Area Leonard Peltier Support Group, which sponsored the meeting along with the Militant Labor Forum, said that the event was part of an international day of solidarity with Peltier’s fight for freedom. Last year, she said, the defense committee forced the FBI to release additional pages of formerly secret files on its investigation of the Pine Ridge killings. Some 100,000 pages remain under FBI lock and key, she added.

In the course of Peltier’s attempts to gain justice, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that his trial and previous appeals had been riddled with FBI misconduct and judicial impropriety. It cited coercion of witnesses, perjury, and fabrication and suppression of evidence. Nevertheless, the court confirmed Peltier’s conviction and double life sentence.

Peltier had gone to Pine Ridge after becoming active in the fight for American Indian rights in the early 1970s. There he worked to assist local people under attack by goons organized by the Pine Ridge Tribal Council headed by Dick Wilson, who enjoyed covert FBI backing. During this time the reservation had a higher ratio of FBI agents to citizens than any other area in the country. Despite this, not one of the murders or beatings carried out in the course of Wilson’s campaign of violence was ever investigated.

On June 26, 1975, shooting broke out between two FBI agents in unmarked cars and local residents, some of them AIM members. The two agents and one Native man were killed. Leonard Peltier was one of three people put on trial in the deaths of the agents. No investigation of the Native man’s death took place. Two of those who went to trial were found not guilty on grounds of self-defense.

Fearing that he had no possibility of a fair trial, Peltier fled to Canada, from where he was later extradited in response to FBI affidavits that the government now concedes were fabricated. Tried in a different district from the first trial, and by a judge handpicked by the FBI, he was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.

Swallow, who grew up at Pine Ridge and was nine years old at the time of the frame-up, described conditions today on the reservation. “There is a massive health problem—black mold is in the houses—our babies die before they are one year old, our old people are dying. There is no other housing available and the Bureau of Indian Affairs tells us we have to pay the rent.” Cutbacks in government programs for the reservations squeeze their residents even tighter, he said.

The other panelists were Danielle Shenandoah Patterson, Oneida of the Six Nation Iroquois Confederacy and representative to the United Nations Indigenous Forum, and Margaret Trowe of the Socialist Workers Party.  
 
Murder trial of AIM member
The prosecution had opened its case against Arlo Looking Cloud three days earlier, charging that he had carried out the killing on Peltier’s orders. They leveled the same charge at John Graham, who is fighting extradition from Canada.

Prosecutors claimed that AIM leaders targeted Aquash, a veteran of the 1973 occupation at Wounded Knee and other protests, because they feared she was a government spy. Ka-Mook Nichols, who had been a friend of Aquash and a member of AIM, testified along these lines.

“The prosecutors have accomplished what they wanted. They’re trying to smear Leonard, and they’re trying to smear AIM. They’re trying to change history,” said Bachrach in response to Looking Cloud’s conviction, according to the New York Times. The report in the big-business paper itself indicated that AIM was at the center of the proceedings. The trial, it said, “offered a glimpse inside the politics and distrust within the militant Indian civil rights group at the height of its clashes with federal authorities in the 1970s.”

In a February 8 press release, Bachrach observed that “the majority of the testimony presented had nothing whatsoever to do with Arlo Looking Cloud, but prominent members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and my client, Leonard Peltier, in particular.”

Bachrach noted that in spite of this, the AIM leaders have not been charged “simply because there is no evidence against them…. And for every witness presented, there are any number of other individuals who could be called to appear and who would tell very different stories—that Annie Mae wasn’t afraid of AIM, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation; she had stated this to various individuals on numerous occasions; and she had actually put such fears in writing.”

To obtain information on Peltier’s case and upcoming activities related to his fight for freedom, contact the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee at Box 583, Lawrence, KS 66044, call (785) 842-5774, or visit www.freepeltier.org.

Joe Swanson in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this article.  
 
 
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