I want to thank my Special Friend for making this picture of Leonard Peltier for me and I have given it to all the other faster/strikers who are supporting Leonard and all other political prisoners.

Thank You Dear Friend



I want to thank Darrin Wood for doing this interview with Leonard. I also want to thank my Friends Susana Saravia who is the Coordinator for Nuevo Amanecer Press-N.A.P. for all of her help in setting it up to have the interview translated from Spanish into English as it had never been released before in English. I also want to thank Leslie and Arturo Lopez for doing the translation. I thank you all from the bottom of my Heart and send to you all of my Love. We all thank you!!

In Solidarity
White Feather Siouxsun



ACROSS THE WORLD, MANY PEOPLE ARE FASTING RIGHT NOW, DEMANDING THAT THE US GOVERNMENT ALLOW INDIAN LEADER LEONARD PELTIER, UNJUSTLY IMPRISONED, TO RECEIVE THE MEDICAL ATTENTION HE NEEDS SO THAT HE WON'T HAVE TO SUFFER CONSTANT PAIN. NUEVO AMANECER PRESS-USA-MEXICO-EUROPE JOINS WITH THE VOICES SAYING: NO MORE TORTURE OF LEONARD PELTIER, POLITICAL PRISONER OF THE USA.



INTERVIEW WITH LEONARD PELTIER

United States Penitentiary
Leavenworth, Kansas, July 19, 1991

(DW= Darrin Wood)

(LP= Leonard Peltier)

DW: What led you to join the American Indian Movement(AIM)?

LP: Well, in the 70's, in the late 60's, I started to look for an organization that was really rooted in organization itself. One of the reasons was that I was getting frustrated with other organizations I was involved in, because of the splits among the leaders, and I was starting to feel frustrated. Also, there were a lot of weekend meetings, and things like that. So, basically I started to look for an organization that I thought was safer and more effective. At the same time, I was starting to witness more discrimination against Native Americans in different parts of the country, and I felt that we needed an organization that united all the tribes, because we all shared the same problems. When I joined the American Indian Movement in Denver, Colorado, it was around 1970, 1971. I spoke with Vernon Bellecourt and I asked him what kind of organization it was. He took me out to eat and told me all about AIM and its objectives. Which consisted of regaining pride in our heritage, religion and working on our treaties--something I'd been involved in since I was very young... I was raised with the thinking that we had to try to get the government to respect our treaties. We were a sovereign nation. These were basically the same objectives that AIM had.

DW: Did this happen at the same time as Alcatraz?
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LP: After. After talking to Vernon Bellecourt I decided that this was the organization that I wanted to commit to. I instantly became a member.

DW: When you joined with them, were you part of the Northwest Group?

LP: No, of course I had been living in the Northwest. When I joined AIM and met with Vernon Bellecourt, but when I met the other leaders, Dennis Banks, Russell Means, Herbs Powless, Carter Camp, and they got to know me, they all wanted me to start traveling with them. I decided to travel with Dennis Banks, and I really became part of the national office, the national leadership, immediately. I was a security person--an organizer in that area. It wasn't long before I was totally broke. I didn't have any transportation. I was well-known in the Northwest and the Seattle area. I had a lot of friends in that region, business people. People that I'd been in contact with for some years. I headed there. When I got there, there were already people that knew about the American Indian Movement, but they weren't members. I started to organize that region. I had already started up a group. My cousin, Jimmy Robideau, had become involved, and we were all committed. We started to become known as the strongest group.

DW: Because of discipline?

LP: Discipline, sincerity and commitment. The majority of us, even though at that moment we were living in cities, were from reservations. We had just relocated after a period of four or five years. But the majority of us had been reservation Indians. We considered ourselves to be very committed. Naturally, we were known as the strongest warrior group of the American Indian Movement.

DW: Did it help that some of you were related?

LP: Well, only two or three of us were related. Some of us, even though we were related, didn't get along very well. We still looked out for one another. Well...I guess it helped in some way. Me, Jimmy and Steve Robideau were really active. I helped Jimmy and Steve get out of jail when I had a repair shop there. I already felt committed and they started learning about these things afterward.

DW: When did Bob join up with you?

LP: Bob didn't join up until later. Not until after Wounded Knee.

DW: Did you participate in the "Trail of Broken Treaties"?
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LP: Yes, that was in 1972. At that moment I was living with my wife in Wisconsin. I met with a group from New Mexico, in Milwaukee. They liked me and they offered me a job and a rank in the organization as an alcoholism counselor, but I really became a job director, because I had some experience in that. I moved back to Milwaukee, Wisconsin before beginning the "Trail of Broken Treaties."

DW: In the "Trail of Broken Treaties", after taking a position in the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, did they ask you to direct security?

LP: Yes, in Washington, DC, Carter Camp and some other national leaders asked me to do that. I really didn't want the job, because it was a lot of responsibility. You really have to be the "bad guy." You have to control everyone and sometimes you have to be, verbally, really harsh. There was another man named Stanley Moore, a Chippewa from Wisconsin. Carter looked at me and said, "Look, Leonard, you're going to have to get a higher position, a more visible leadership role, because it seems like everyone's waiting to follow your directions." I said, "I don't want the responsibility. I don't feel ready yet, and I really don't want to either."

DW: Do you think that accepting that kind of responsibility obligated you to become more of a leader than just another AIM member?

LP: Well, yeah. Look, in the first place the American Indian Movement is just a group of people. The organization is just an group of people who took on the name, but the American Indian Movement has existed since the invasion.(3) In all the places I've lived, I've always seemed to have followers. All the groups I was with (and a lot of people were in them), so I thought of myself as a leader. Although officially we weren't an organization or anything, they always said, "So, what should we do tonight, Leonard? or "What should we do this weekend?" That kind of thing. So I guess I thought I was there naturally. Those guys, Dennis and all those people, they really didn't know me. Nobody knew me yet. For me, they asked me to be part of the leadership, you know, join the leaders. Stay with us. Instead of going back to another coordinator or different factions. Russell Means wanted me to travel with him. The Bellecourts did it--I felt that Dennis was more sincere, more committed, not so full of himself, so I went with him. Even though I liked Carter Camp. Carter was a very, very good person.

DW: Was Carter one of the original founders?

LP: No, he was part of the national leadership, but he was from Oklahoma. I think he was Potawatomi.

DW: After the "Trail of Broken Treaties," did you return to Wisconsin?

LP: Yes, I returned to Milwaukee and a continued with the program I had established, which was a job service outside of the offices of the American Indian Movement. One time we were in a place called the "Texas" restaurant, where they served Mexican food, after a pool tournament. A couple of guys started to harass us. I thought there was going to be a fistfight, but it all ended up with me being accused of attempted murder of a police officer--but it was all about a fistfight. After that, I decided...

DW: Did they beat you up really badly?

LP: Yeah. They hit me a lot. In fact, Officer Hlavinka was whipping me so badly that the other officer got scared somehow and told him to stop. He said: "Stop it! You're going to kill him." He was involved at first but then he started backing off. Thank God. These beatings with sticks and that kind of treatment has been part of American justice since the beginning. There's nothing new about it. There's a big controversy around Rodney King in California, but it's nothing new. We have changed a some, and now we're doing it more--not "us," as in including me--the American government is heading towards a police state. The police have an unlimited power. Especially the courts. The district attorney can charge you as guilty with made-up information, but there's nothing you can do about it. There is complete autonomy for a district attorney, who is just a lawyer, but one which is representing the United States government. Federal judges, same thing--there's nobody to control them. They can do, literally, whatever they want. We have a system in Congress, where Congress can doing something about it. The only ones, let's say now the Republicans are in power. The only judges that will do something would be, maybe, the Democrats. Really there aren't as many corrupt Democrat judges as there are Republicans, who when it comes down to it, interpret the Constitution the way they want it to be. Things like COINTELPRO, the FBI program that persecutes political organizations here, in the United States, was working very well. During my trial for attempted murder in Milwaukee, Hlavinka, testified for the defense, in our favor, bragging that he had nabbed a big leader of the American Indian Movement for the FBI.

DW: So, the police officers knew who you were before you even entered the restaurant.

LP: There's a lot of evidence that points to that (which we believe, of course). I'm sure they knew me before...I was involved in the taking of Forth Lawton in 1971.(4) We were all affiliated with the Alcatraz people. I was involved in demonstrations against the Vietnam war. I was very politically active, so they had to know who I was. They deny it, but we've found documents that say that they knew, that they were interested and watching me. I firmly believe, and all the evidence we have shows, that I was one of the people chosen to be a target, and as a result, here I am.

DW: After the Milwaukee arrest, what did you do?

LP: I went back to South Dakota for the Sun Dance. I'm a Sun Dancer. It's one of the most important religious ceremonies in Indian religion. I had prayed a lot for four days and four nights. I made a decision, since I wasn't guilty of the attempted murder, and I was faced with thirty years in jail--and that judge definitely would have given me the thirty years. As a person of a sovereign nation, the United States didn't have the authority to accuse me of anything, especially with the history of criminal treatment against my people...I wouldn't participate in any of their trials, and so I went underground. I became a fugitive. I didn't change my name or anything like that. I didn't wear a disguise. I didn't do any of those things. I kept on doing what I had always done, I just didn't show up at court. I got involved in other political actions after that. Including, I went back to Wisconsin and I got involved in a lot of the political activities that were taking place at that time. I really wasn't in hiding, if I had been I would have changed my name, my appearance. I would really have gotten wrapped up in being underground.

DW: Like dyeing your hair blond?

LP: (Laughing) Right, like dyeing my hair blond.

DW: How did the call from the elders at Oglala arrive?

LP: Well, we were holding our American Indian Movement convention in Farmington, New Mexico. Around 1971, I went to work in Page, Arizona. They were building an electrical plant, a damn electrical plant on the Navajo reservation. I went to work there as a carpenter. Basically, at that moment I was broke, I didn't have a car, clothes--I was part of the movement. I decided I should find a job. I got something so that I could feed myself. I was starting a new family again. I've dedicated myself to all my professions; I was a carpenter, also an auto mechanic. I went to work there as a carpenter. I was there about a month, and I started witnessing serious and brutal discrimination against Indians. So when I got involved in the American Indian Movement, I started mentioning some of these things to the leadership. In fact, Vernon went there, later on Vernon Bellecourt went there. He was a witness to the same discrimination against Native Americans. He started to speak out clearly about it, and he was arrested and accused of causing a disturbance, and had to pay a fine of $25,000. During that time, he was witness to really brutal treatment of Indians. We decided to go back. Another reason we decided to go was to hold our convention in Farmington, New Mexico, there were a dozen people there--someone was going around brutally killing Indians--smashing their heads with big rocks, really brutal and sad. Nobody was arrested because they were Indians. We're talking about a dozen human beings. Doing horrible things to them. Beating their stomachs. Really horrible, so that's why we decided to hold our convention there. I took our group there. We got there, like other warriors from all over the country. Dennis, he did the negotiating and spoke for us. We decided the evidence was so overwhelming, so decisive--we were only there during one convention and we found out who the murderer was and we weren't investigators. We haven't been trained to do that. We confronted the chief of police, the mayor, and everybody regarding the matter, and they told us, "Well, we really don't have any proof yet about those people. We suspect them, but we have to be sure that we make a really good case against them." We said: "What the hell! You have witnesses, what other damn proof do you need? You have witnesses!"   They were--some of them were rich people from the city, some of the kids of the richest people--their kids were implicated, 15- and 16-year-old kids. Naturally, we put big pressure on the city and we told them that we would create a disturbance and whatever else was necessary if they didn't do something, and they promised us they would do something. We called everyone, the FBI, all of them, trying to get them involved--even though we didn't really want their commitment--what we wanted is for them to arrest someone for those horrible crimes against Indians. While we were there, the Orlala delegation came from the Oglala Nation and pleaded with the American Indian Movement to go back with them and support them, because of the reign of terror going on, committed against them by the Goon Squads--a terror being waged against Pine Ridge and the Oglala Nation. I myself, and our group, decided to go support them. We thought it was-- the Farmington case was very well known and the state prosecutor was really sincere. He gave us his word. Of course, they lied. They said they would take it upon themselves to make sure that the people responsible would spend the rest of their lives in jail. I think finally they did six months to two years at the most.

DW: For murder and mutilation?

LP: For murder and mutilation of twelve people. But we weren't there for that. All this took two years to happen, before they went to trial. But we got a group together at Pine Ridge and met with the community. First we let them know that we weren't there as a paramilitary group. Nor were we there to get revenge for the brutalities committed against them by the Goon Squads. Basically we were there as security to try avoid crimes in the community, discourage alcoholism and all terrorist acts. And we made ourselves very, very visible. We were also there to build an economy to get people to start taking care of themselves again, which was one of the main goals of the American Indian Movement. Really, concentrate on nation-building. That's what we did.

DW: Did you talk about sovereignty at that time with Chief Fools Crow?(5)

LP: Oh yeah, about everything. All of that was part of it. The treaties,sovereignty, we discussed all of that, and the strategy we came up with was to get world attention.You have to influence public opinion. Public opinion was against us on the issue of sovereignty and treaties, because of the propaganda spread around by the United States government against us. A common belief among United States citizens was "Well, all that happened so long ago, and those treaties are so old, it's better just to forget them." This was another tactic to abrogate our treaties, our peoples and our selves as a race of people. "Forget it, it's just too old. All these things happened a hundred years ago." Well, these things happened a hundred years ago, but they're still valid. So we started to build a community to get to be more self-sufficient. We helped build a grocery warehouse, a gas station. We started organizing ourselves to start planting, to make more community gardens--really big gardens. We started to try to discourage juvenile delinquency. Really make a good community to live in. People were happy with us there.

DW: At that time, wasn't Pine Ridge the worst place in the country as far as life expectancy, suicides, alcoholism, unemployment? Wasn't life expectancy something like 45 years?

LP: Right, yes. All that. It's still true. It hasn't changed much. At that time we didn't know it, but the government was becoming very displeased with our activities at Pine Ridge and everything we were doing there. They started to gather information about our group. They were planning to assault us, they were planning to come and kill us. Well, supposedly this is America--the place where these things don't happen--especially when you're trying to do something good. The people, in different communities around the reservation, seeing some of the things we were doing, asked us to go to their communities. But we couldn't leave at that moment. But they invited us to other communities to do the same there, but we couldn't leave, so we had to say no. We known that June first of that year (1975) the chiefs of the Oglala Nation wrote a letter to the State Department telling them that, since they hadn't received any response from police agents and officers to investigate the murders and terrorist acts committed against them, as of that first of June they no longer recognized the Bureau of Indian Affairs and would begin to organize a traditional government that at one time existed in the Oglala-Lakota Nation. Apparently, after that, around the 10th of June, the people at Oglala had seen in different areas, troop transport vehicles (APC's) moving around different parts of the reservation. They had seen non-Indian people running on the reservation in military uniforms. They were really worried. We all suspected that something was going to happen, but of course we didn't know. Then, on June 26, 1975, it happened.

DW: That day, did two agents stop by early in the morning, before the shootout?

LP: I don't think it was that day. I think it was the day before. They told them that the person, the person they were supposedly looking for, wasn't there, that he wasn't welcome there and that they didn't want him there.

DW: Jimmy Eagle?

LP: Right, because he drank a lot. When he got drunk, he caused a lot of problems. So, we told him he had to respect the rights of property-owners. That they were very worried because they didn't want him there. They told them that Jimmy Eagle wasn't wanted around there, that he doesn't come by here. We didn't want him there.

DW: Jimmy Eagle told a lot of stories about the shootout. Are you saying that he wasn't there?

LP: No, he wasn't there.(6)

DW: On that morning, did agents follow the truck into the area?

LP: That's what they say, that's what the government's theory rests on. Based on that they made their declarations, but they weren't following any particular truck, or any truck at all within the area, as far as I know. I don't know. They weren't there. They say they were following the truck. I don't know.

DW: When you heard the first shots, were you in the campground?

LP: Yes.

DW: What did you think at that time? Did you think they were Goons?

LP: Yes, of course, at the beginning. What I thought was, a couple of days before, one of the Goons was using an automatic weapon at a dam that's about a half mile above the Jumping Bull property, shooting fish. That's what he said. He had been doing that, so finally I went up there and approached him. I told him that the elders were worried and afraid because they all knew what that was about. They knew he was a Goon. He was shooting off his weapon and bothering some of the elders. Actually, they told me to go up there and try to discourage him. There was nothing we could do, you know, he wasn't breaking any laws. And I wasn't a police officer and would never act like one of them, but like someone protecting the people there--they had invited me. It was my responsibility to ask him to stop. That's what I thought it was, because the shots sounded just the same. So, when I got there, or up above, this big-scale shootout was taking place. The shooting had begun at 10 or 11 that morning and ended that afternoon, and we were still fighting at 8 or 9 o'clock that night.

DW: In Bob's account and also "Mr. X's"...

LP: I can't say anything about that, Darrin. I haven't said anything about it for almost sixteen years. I can't do it. My struggle is legitimate. I am a legal person. I didn't get to jail and then try to turn my case into a political case. In other words, I really am who I am and for me to start pointing fingers, to start squealing, is treason. I would die before doing that.

DW: Are you angry that "Mr. X" has done that? That he has offered to say what really happened?

LP: No, because I know his intentions are to give credibility to my claims of innocence, and my defenders are committed to showing that I am not guilty. For me, it's something very heroic that he's done. He's putting himself at risk, seriously at risk. I will say this: that this brother is a very strong brother. He is not a cold-blooded murderer. He is not a bad person, he's very kind, generous and sincere. The incident that occurred was just a matter of circumstances, of how the cards were dealt that day. That's all I can say about it. I can't say any more. I won't do it. It's not about you, because all the media have asked me about this, and it's the same answer, I can't say anything about it. I appreciate what he's done. I don't know if it will help, except that it makes my declarations of innocence more believable.

DW: When the shootout ended, you first went to go see Noah Wounded in the Badlands. Did you spend the night there and then the following day, and then you set out on the road the following night?

LP: Yes.

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