A Black Friday Message
By Carolina Soto
I hope that your holiday was full of meaning and delicious food. It is a great thing to celebrate giving thanks to nature, the bounty of the season, our families, our loves, and friendships.
Today, aka Black Friday, I would love to point you in the direction of a favorite performance group, Reverend Billy and The Church of Stop Shopping, just back from Glasgow and COP26. Here is one of their hits Bad Weather. I like to remember to think of this when I buy things - as she types on a new computer, ugh! Also, the Reverend has some hilarious YouTube videos of performances slamming Walmart and inside the NYC Disney store to the complete dismay of local law enforcement. The Church of Stop Shopping opposes the mono-culture in the broadest terms: consumerism, militarism, and capitalism's attack on nature.
If you are in the mood to buy, I would like to direct you to the website that supports Leonard Pelletier's freedom. They make excellent Christmas gifts!
Currently one of the world's longest-held political prisoners, many people don't remember Leonard Peltier, an Anishinabe-Lakota, who was wrongfully convicted of killing two FBI agents in a shootout on the Pine Ridge, SD, Indian reservation on June 26, 1975. He and other members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) were there at the request of traditional Lakota people on that reservation who opposed the exploitation of their mineral resources and oppression by the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) police. AIM supported their efforts and sent a contingent of its members, led by Peltier, to protect the people. Robert Redford and Michael Apted made an excellent movie, Incident at Oglala, which is available on Amazon Prime or to rent for $1.99 and on Netflix in the New York area.
Our own U.S. Civil Rights Commission documented 67 murders and over 300 beatings of Indian people on Pine Ridge in the three-year period surrounding the shootout, most of which were attributed to the Bureau of Indian Affairs police and tribal chairman Dick Wilson's "GOON Squad," the Guardians Of the Oglala Nation was a private paramilitary group that operated on the reservation during the early 1970s. In 1976, a new chairman was elected and disbanded the GOON squad.
A curious fact is that many corporations, including Union Carbide, were subsidized by our taxpayer money to the tune of $2.3 billion to find uranium on the Pine Ridge Reservation. There were 5000 speculative mining leases in the area. One-eighth of the reservation was signed over to the federal government on the day of the shootout by Dick Wilson.
If you dig long enough, you will understand why two FBI agents moved against the traditional people and the AIM supporters with gunfire while looking for Jimmy Eagle, who was accused of stealing a pair of boots by the tribal chairman, Wilson.
Peltier stood trial in 1977 in Fargo, ND, in the court of Judge Paul Benson. Judge Benson would not allow any evidence not directly pertaining to the exact day and time of the shootout, so the "climate of fear" argument was not available to him or the jury. As a result, about four-fifths of the defense's testimony was disallowed.
Since then his prosecutors have admitted to fabricating and withholding evidence and coercing witnesses, and every shred of evidence that links him to any crime has been discredited. At a hearing before the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1978, the U.S. attorney at the time admitted that, "We don't really know who shot the agents." In his 1992 appeal the government again admitted that they did not know who shot the agents.
The Innocence Project, a group that tries to expose wrongful convictions, organized a one-day inquiry into the Pelletier case in Toronto. There, Poor Bear recanted her testimony of two decades ago, admitting she lied when she told police she saw Peltier kill the FBI agents. Her testimony was used for the extradition of Leonard from Canada.
Although everyone from a FBI agent who knew the two agents killed at Pine Ridge, the Dali Lama, Desmond Tutu, and an amazing list of world and civil rights leaders support the release of Leonard Peltier, the FBI is a major obstacle to his freedom. The Obama Administration refused his clemency petition.
In a letter, dated April 24, 2020, the then U.S. Representative, Deb Haaland (D- NM, 1st District) and Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ, 3rd District) asked for Peltier's release. Deb Haaland is now the Secretary of the US Department of the Interior.
Peltier is currently being held in the maximum security wing of the Coleman Federal Penitentiary in Florida. His health is weak. He suffers from diabetes and has had prostate trouble. A few years ago, he was beaten badly in prison. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, Peltier applied for a compassionate release and was denied on May 1, 2020 with the only explanation given “not at this time.”
You can sign his clemency appeal here!
I found this Thanksgiving message from Leonard dated 2019 very moving and worth sharing.
If you never have, you should read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown. or the wonderful collection of Native Histories By Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz.
Start reading now:
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People
"All the Real Indians Died Off": And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans
As a member of Re/Creation I feel the need to express, and the need to push the political landscape towards healing, connection, and liberation; we must acknowledge and reckon with the long and painful histories (and current realities) of white supremacy and colonization. It is important to celebrate holidays but it is important to recognize the myths and that their creation was part of settler colonialism. The singular aim of the settler state is the elimination of native peoples to acquire their land. (Check out the map!) A work still in progress.
One of “the real women of Orange Is the New Black,” Carolina Soto is one of the founding members of the Re/Creation writing workshop at Restoration Plaza. Unlike the fictionalized Yoga Jones, Carolina has a long history of work in social justice and advocacy, and is a seasoned painter and visual artist. Since beginning her work in the Re/Creation writing workshop at Restoration Plaza in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, Carolina has increased her confidence and aptitude with both the written and spoken word, composing speeches and essays for her advocacy work and as well as written memoir. In particular, her essays and memoirs illustrate her vast capacity for empathy in her descriptions of people with whom she shared time inside. She now splits her time between living in New York City and the Dominican Republic.