Cool Zone Media that.
Wait, no, welcome to cool People who did cool stuff.
The podcast where Margaret turns into a bat.
That's right, and then I had to unturn into a bat just to bring you this here introduction about the podcast. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is the same guest as last week because it's a continuation of last week, and that means my guest is Miriam. Hi. How was your week so far?
So good? Haven't heard any extensive histories of genocide in at least a couple of days, So here I am.
This one's far more a history of resistance to genocide.
Oh thank god, Hell yeah, here for it.
We got through. It's not going to be without bad stuff, but there's a lot of I think this is one of the most important stories that I've told on the show. I wanted to like really get get going with the show before I talked about some of these things, and I've been looking forward to talking about this one for a long time, and I think this one is really good. Well, lots of bad stuff happens, but it's really important, really interesting. There's lots of cool people, they do really cool stuff.
I'm really excited to hear about it.
Yeah. Our producer is Sophie Hi, Sophie.
Hi, Margaret Hi, Miriam Hi Sophie.
Our audio engineer is Ian and must say Hi Ian, Hi, Ian Hi Ian. Our music was made for us by Unwoman. I went to Unwoman and said, give me something that sounds sort of ironic compared to what we'll be talking about, and Unwoman was like, here you go, and now we have a theme song. So this is part three of a four parter about Lakota resistance to the American Empire.
And one of the main reason, the main reason that we want to talk about it is that I want to talk about a political prisoner who's still in prison named Lenard Peltier, and I felt like this amount of context is necessary and useful when talking about his case. So here we're going to do it. The roots of the American Indian Movement or AIM started in ways that I'll be familiar to regular listeners of the podcast, which is to say it started when some folks were like,
how come we never learn about our own history? And much like many resistance movements, it started in jail. The organization itself didn't start in jail, but a lot of its founders met and kind of toppled the first domino that led to the American Indian Movement in jail in nineteen sixty two, in Stillwater State Prison in Minnesota, two ajibwemn Clyde Bellicourt and Eddie Benton BENII got together and started what they called the first real Indian studies program
in the country. They organized forty six Indigenous prisoners in that jail, and Miriam, you will be shocked to know that the Indigenous people were and are vastly disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system in the US, because.
I used up all my being shocked a while ago.
This group that they started was called the American Indian Folklore Group, and Clyde Bellicourt had a kind of typical or maybe even almost archetypical upbringing as a young Ajiboy boy at the time he was born on the res was forced into a Catholic school when then his family fell victim to yet another kill the Indian save the Man style thing, the Indian Relocation Act of nineteen fifty six, which forced a ton of folks off of reservations and
into cities and terminated their tribal status as part of the larger You know, there was a policy that lasted for decades in the twentieth century called the Indian Termination Policy.
It's a nice and upfront for a policy.
Yeah, it's about as evil as it sounds. This was a decades long policy of forced assimilation and ending travel sovereignty what little you know was remaining or whatever. Right.
I also, I like how right wing Americans are always like, uh, cities, that's where the bad progressives live. Real Americans live out in the country, you know, unless you're dealing with indigenous people, in which case all of a sudden they're like, you know, where you need to go to be a real American to assimilate properly is those cities we hate so much. As long as you can fuck people over, really.
And as long as you can ranch on their fucking land, as long as you can do resource extraction on their fucking land, as long as white people get to do it, that's going to be a huge part of all of
this stuff that's coming up. And also, the Indian Termination Policy is sort of the big bad evil that we're talking about this week, the thing that people are fighting back against and actually successful in terms of the cultural thing that was the Indian Termination Policy, and that said, Indigenous people in North America have resisted genocide after genocide and are still here and fuck yeah, fuck yeah they're still here.
Fuck yeah.
So young Clyde, he's poor, miseducated, systemic, systemically oppressed. This didn't help him with job prospects, and pretty soon he's in prison for burglary and robbery. Another member of this first group in jail was a man named Dennis Banks, who's a little bit more remembered as a name leader.
Later.
He had been sent to a residential school and stripped of his language at five years old. This is one of the infamous Indian boarding schools, which from which he regularly ran away. He would just like get the fuck out of there and go home, right, and then they
would come and get him again. When he was seventeen, he joined the Air Force and he went to Japan and he was like on the bases there when he was ordered to shoot, shoot to kill Japanese protesters because there was this whole protest movement happening where locals and leftists in Japan were mad as hell that the air force base was expanding and displacing local villagers and shit, right, because it's always the same fucking thing. It's always land grabs. Well, shit,
I'm just like learning about new atrocities. Did US Air Force people shoot to kill Japanese protesters during these events? A ton were injured?
I not.
In my research of that, I did not find them actually killing people. But and so this is kind of a thing.
I like, like, go a day without discovering like another like historic murder by recent historic murder by the US government like that.
That would be cool. That will be about a thousand years in the future where we only have the cliff notes of what's left of America.
Have it.
We're not running out of atrocities yet. Yeah, And basically, there was this huge non violence civil disobedience campaign that actually won. A thousand people were injured non violently resisting and this led to the US dropping its number of troops in Japan by forty percent, and I believe stopped that particular air force expansion, air Force base expansion. We're like very much still there though. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's it's a dropped thing. It's yeah, it's the starting of
the scaling back. Yeah. So Dennis Banks is like, fuck that shit fuck being told to go do this, and the courage of Japanese peasants against US imperialism was a major influence on him later too, So he went a wall. He was dishonorably discharged back in the States, and he gets caught for burglary. And it's actually it's mostly his statement that we have about that they were told to shoot to kill. I have no reason to disbelieve this, but there isn't a there isn't evidence that that specifically
happened in a large number or anything like that. But I'm I'm certain he got told to do that. So all these folklore folks, they've started this Indian studies group in jail, They get out of jail and they keep organizing. Bellicourt and some others tried starting like a classic civil rights campaign because it's the mid sixties and it's like the thing to do, right, and they were focused on the rights of indigenous people who had been displaced into
the cities. This didn't really work, according to Bellacourt. He said later quote, I tried to work within the system for four years, demanding a fair share of it for my people, but all the money was controlled by the churches and bureaucracies, and they weren't interested in any programs that might have led towards real economic independence for the Indians. Meanwhile, in nineteen sixty eight, a bunch of folks sat down
and they formed the CIA. The Concerned Indian Americans. Yay, what you got me?
You faked me out?
Yeah, yeah, I went, I went for it. Yeah.
No.
One of their elders, a woman, was like, how about we call it the American Indian Movement instead?
Okay, but sorry. Fun fact, the Culinary Institute of America, which is a like cooking school, a cooking school that I have driven by like many times. It's a slightly upstate New York, has existed for longer than the actual like CIA.
And so they're like, fuck that, this is our name.
I think it would be so cool if they sued the CIA, if just like a bunch of cooking nerds were like, excuse me, we are the Culinary Institute of America. Do you know how to make a goddamn soufle.
No, you don't see on it. You are disparaging our good name exactly.
I don't know shit about the Culinary Institute of America. Maybe they suck. I don't know they turned any like any democratically elected governments though.
Well see I was thinking that's probably what they actually did do. And the CIA that we all talk about is actually pretty much just been twiddling their thumbs.
So they want you to think.
In nineteen sixty eight, AIM was formed and the lesson here has listened to your elders, and this group wasn't the rebirth of Indigenous resistance to the American Empire as far as I can tell, that has been going on every year since fourteen ninety two.
Right, it can't be a rebirth if it never died.
Yeah, exactly like it ebbs and flows, absolutely, and there is a new energy that AIM and the Red Power movement that we're going to talk about kind of brought into it. AIM originally was focused on the urban indigenous population, but it was inspired by the work of some other folks that I hope I'll be covering at some point also, such as the Pulleyupni Squally fishing rights battles and Oregon
and Washington that were happening. There are these huge like fish ins right where people were like, you can't take away our salmon fishing rights just because you put up a bunch of fucking dams that are killing the salmon. Like that's a you problem. Get rid of your fucking dams. We were here first anyway, not that I'm bitter about. I spent a while on the Pacific Northwest as a environmentalists,
and so I'm very aware of that fight. AIM was also influenced by land protests by the Hodnashone in the northeast and the growing Red Power movement that was picking up on the on the West coast, inspired by.
The Black.
And they started. Aims started doing work very similar to what panthers were doing. They set up street patrols to protect people from cops into film arrests. And it's I want to know how they were filming arrests because this is nineteen sixty eight. The portable Lincoln, Like the size of the cameras, Yeah, Like are they shooting on fucking sixteen millimeter film that they're hand cranking in a bulex because the portable video recorder was only invented one year
earlier in nineteen sixty seven. And so they would go and they would film are and they would inform people of their rights and told them that they could stay silent, and of course the police were like, well, that's perfectly legal. We're going to totally let you get away with doing.
That, or yeah, that's what cops do.
Bellicourt was beaten by cops at least thirty times for jesustrol work.
Yeah, that is so many times.
Holy couldn't fucking stop him?
Good, Oh my god, I love him.
Yeah. The Indian termination policy was starting to go away by the end of the sixties. We're just starting to see a downturn. So some nonprofits and churches and government agencies were actually supportive of AIM in the beginning in nineteen seventy they set up survival schools. This is survival schools like the Black Panther survival programs like the Survival of the People, not like throw you in the forest with a knife. And these were alternatives for young indigenous offenders.
Instead of going to reform school, you would be sent to an AIM survival school. And this was approved of by the judiciary of most of talking about the Midwest at the time point. And so they taught kids how to handle white society without forgetting who they were and where they came from and all that shit, and it was like, so it's like survival almost, Like it's a like how to survive the white man's world without like assimilating.
You know, Wow, I can't believe they got that approved. That they were like yeah, allowed to do that.
For a little while. We'll talk about why the government was like wait, we changed our mind.
I mean, the judiciary is sort of amazingly has kind of an amazing history of lack of oversight about like what programs they will approve, sending true to so like true and that they do approve programs that are basically like yeah, you can like take children and like throw them into a torture camp in the woods. I would fucking hope they would also be like, yes, you can teach children about resistance and identity and white supremacy.
Yeah. Yeah, it's like they they managed to leverage a weird kind of shitty loophole that was going on in the legal system.
Got to get something good through that loophole for once.
Yeah. As as we like established.
In the previous episodes, I am not a lawyer.
I am it's dad, right, Yes, absolutely, but getting.
Good things through shitty loopholes is exactly what we should do with the law.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and there's gonna be you will be shocked to know that indigenous resistors have had some really cool lawyers and we're going to talk a little bit about some of the stuff that they did later.
Awesome.
Yeah, and then at the end there's going to be a big reveal as to why you're big reveal. Now you already know the reveals. It's for the audience. Yeah, but everyone else has to wait because that's at the end, all right, But don't skip to the end. No, yeah, don't do that, you would.
Be I mean, it's not that good a reveal.
No, better stuff is coming along the way. Yeah, much better. They're going to take over so much shit, just so much.
Shit, amazing, Like, can't wait.
They are absolutely the reigning champs of taking over shit in a good way. Anyway. While they're willing to work with the system here and there, they are not quiet liberals. They open carry it protests and soon enough they adopted a symbol. They picked a flag. The flag they picked was the American flag upside down, And Dennis Banks says about that quote, some ex Navy guy suggested it. White people protested, of course, and a lot of our Indian
people protested too. A lot of the guys had been there, had been in the military, and in some way they were still Americans, and it made them uneasy to see the flag flown upside down. We had to explain that this was the international distress signal for people in trouble, and no one could deny that Indians were in bad trouble and needed help. So that's the American Indian movements
getting its start. But then some other shit starts happening over in the bay, the the West Coast Bay, the San Francisco Bay, specifically, a different group of people had something else going on that's important to the story, which is to say, there's more cool people doing cool things. There's an island in San Francisco Bay. It's called Alcatraz. You ever heard of Alcatraz?
Heard of that one?
Yeah, it was a prison for a while, perhaps most famously, but I sure don't mind that. What's going to happen next is just about as famous, or should be. The
prison closed in nineteen sixty three. Some Indigenous folks got together and were like, you know, I've been reading through this treaty that's still technically on the books, the eighteen sixty eight Fort Laramie Treaty that Margaret spent last week talking about, and this is salvage land and we should be able to buy it for forty seven cents an acre.
So a bunch of generous offer. Honestly, I know, I think they even actually adjusted it to like to inflation, and it was like, you know, still like we'll give you a thousand bucks for the island or whatever. You know, fucking nonsense. So in nineteen sixty four, a bunch of street theater activists folks tried to do just that, and they went out there and tried to claim it. And there are these.
Indigenous street theater activists folks, okay, yeah, and then they fled when they were threatened with felonies.
Five years later, the San Francisco Indian Center burned down on October tenth. Fleeing when you're about to be subject to felonies is a great strategy. Oh yeah, doing actions. A lot of people feel like, I think you got to get arrested for an action account It fucking rules when you go right up to the point where they're about to arrescue and then you're like, haha, bye. Yeah, totally.
Another thing that you should flee from is not taking advantage of the sweet sweet deals offered by whoever chose to give this podcast network money. Here's the mats and we're beca So five years later, the San Francisco Indian Center burns down October tenth, nineteen sixty nine. And this was a place that helped hook people up with jobs and healthcare and legal aid and all that shit. So people were like, Oh, we need a new one, don't we.
And there's that there's that island over there isn't there. So some student activists with the Native American Student Organization were like, fuck it, let's go. They got a three masted yacht. This isn't why I had you on, but there is a tall ship in this story. I do love a mast. Yeah yeah, and there's three on here. Yeah, fantastic. It's called the Monte Cristo and they bank it out, very fucking cool name.
Yeah.
They basically pay the captain, and the captain's not going to land on Alcatraz. They're just like, we'll pay you to go buy it. So he goes by it and four folks, including people representing the Cherokee, the Inuit and the ho Chunk Nation jump overboard, swim out and claim the right claimed the island by right of discovery.
The coast has been well established, I know in American history. You're allowed.
Yeah. The coast Guard dragged them off, so.
They were.
They gave up, and nothing never happened. No, fourteen people hired a fishing boat and then they went out to the island. The coast guard got them again this time I think because someone in the movement made a deal or whatever the fuck where they were like, oh, we're going to negotiate or whatever, you know. Then November twentieth, nineteen sixty nine, eighty nine Indigenous people and not just students this time, but also some families and some other
folks were in school. They set out. The coast Guard blocked some of them, but they couldn't get all of them. Fourteen people got passed and started an occupation of the island. Hell yeah, third times the charm. The occupation lasted nineteen months and peaked at four hundred people.
There was.
Yeah, I didn't know it was that big. That's so cool.
It's really fucking cool. That's like a town that is a small town. Well, they had daycare and healthcare set up awesome, and the Coast Guard blockaded it, but allies of all sorts snug past them in canoes to bring food to the occupiers.
Hell yeah, and.
They're Their demand was an American Indian Cultural Center on Thanksgiving, an almost an almost absurdly reasonable demand.
I know.
I think that one of the things I keep running across on the show is people who are like actually revolutionaries and down to take things really far often come in up with like they're like, look, just like, make it so we don't have to sleep in bunk beds and we can go to the doctor. And people are like no, and they're like, all right, fine, revolution what do you want?
I mean, that's the thing, right, If the people you're up against are going to deny you, like the fucking basics, then it sort of seems like you have no choice but to be like, fuck it, we're not dealing with you anymore.
Yeah. And then almost everything that people successfully win is when they uh, you know, shoot for the stars and get the moon or whatever. You know, whereas you shoot for the moon, you don't get anything. There's a cliche in here that I'm not fully first in so on Thanksgiving Day, hundreds of supporters show up for the day to celebrate a future AIM member, John Trudell starts a pirate radio station called Radio Free Alcatraz. The the actors
Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando visit. Of course they're gonna visit all this.
They're going to put in an appearance. Yeah.
I actually I think that they do more than an appearance. I think they're not like anyway, well, we'll talk about it.
No, I think they're I think that I think that in that in that era, there were them and a couple other actors were actually like do materially supporting. Yeah, that's why the FBI had Gene Sieberg because she was buying guns for the Black Panthers.
Oh Jesus, no, I didn't know about this. No future episode, Okay. Creden's Clearwater Revival bought and donated a boat. Unexpected cameo. So the main transportation by the end was the boat the clearwater.
Oh, like the boat the Clearwater, like Pete Seeger's boat.
I will take your word for it. I'm now out of my element. I'm not a boat knower.
There is a tall ship called a schooner called the Clearwater that was started by I don't know if like it was initially bought or set up, but Pete Seeger was like involved in the beginning and operating of this boat. It still sails the Hudson. It does education programs and
like science programs and music programs. It has more banjo's per capita on that boat than any other tall ship I've ever been on, and like, you usually find a banjo or two on tall ships, and it's the only tall ship I've ever been on where they brew kombucha in the engine room because they're a bunch of fucking hippies.
It's great. Is the banjo thing why everyone moved away from tall ships? Eh, it's fun to make fun of banjo's. As an accordionist, I gotta take I gotta get my shots in when I can.
You know, it can't be the same clear water though, because we're talking west coast, east coast, and it is difficult to get out.
There's no way to get from one boat from one side of the other. No, I have no idea.
It's a pain in the ass. You can do it.
Yeah, I don't think this was a tall shop either. I think this was like a oh, a boat with a motor. But I don't know.
You just accidentally made room for me to talk about tall ships.
Yeah, exactly, No, it's okay. The Black Panthers and the Brown Berets handled security to get food to the island, and I got to read you the occupier's proclamation because it goes so hard.
Love a good proclamation. Let's hear it to.
The Great White Father and all his We the Native Americans, reclaim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery. We feel that this so called Alcatraz Island is more than suitable for an Indian reservation as determined by the white man's own standard. By this, we mean that the place resembles most Indian reservations in that one it is isolated from modern facilities and without adequate means of transportation. Two it
has no fresh running water. Three it has inadequate sanitation supplies. Four there are no oil or mineral rights. Five there is no industry, so unemployment is very great. Six there are no healthcare facilities. Seven the soil is rocky and unproductive, and the land does not support game. Eight there are no educational facilities. Nine, the population has always exceeded the land base. Ten the population has always been held as
prisoners and kept dependent upon others. Further, it would be fitting and symbolic that ships from all over the world entering the Golden Gate would first see Indian Land and thus be reminded of the true history of this nation. This tiny island would be a symbol of the great lands once ruled by free and noble Indians. Fuck that goes so hard, Yeah, so good. They had a couple problems. The biggest one was the coast Guard. Another problem was
white people, specifically white allies, specifically hippies. For a while, white allies were allowed to join the occupation and spend the night, but pretty soon all the a political hippies were out there like doing drugs and shit and fucking everything up, and so they decided that only Indigenous folks could sleep there, which seems fucking reasonable.
So so so reasonable, and such a good policy. Yeah, I was at Occupy Wall Street.
I Yeah. In the end, internal conflict and repression worked together, and eventually their numbers dropped low enough that the government just came in and arrested the people who remained. But this is more. This is a year and a fucking and a half.
You know, I didn't know as it went on that long either.
In nineteen months. Wow, the occupation said a precedent and really got shit going, and it shifted public opinion and eventually was part of shifting government policy away from termination and towards indigenous autonomy. It shifted so much that after this Nixon had to come out and say that the policy had shifted towards offering self determination, which is pretty impressive when you get fucking Nixon to say something progressive.
You know, his pretend favorable opinion was going to revert later, of course, and a ton of folks from the occupation wound up AIM members later after, you know, as things really are getting going, a ton of spiritual leaders in the various nations supported AIM and the Red Power movement more broadly, even though it had started in the cities. So these kids who'd been stolen from their culture enforced into cities were folding back together with the traditional folks
still on the reservations. Basically, one of the first spiritual leaders to endorse the American Indian Movement was Leonard crow Dog, the Great grandson of crow Dog, the guy who'd killed Spotted Tail for being a sellout in last week's episodes, And there's going to be a lot of like direct like, hey, this is the grand kid of the person that we talked about last time, you know.
Yeah, and this goes to what you were saying before about this not being a rebirth, yeah, but a continuity.
Yeah. The middle ground position, the middle of the road position, were people who supported the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and this was disappearing as people. More and more people are joining AIM and they're also joining the Indians of All Tribes, which is the group that started with the Alcatraz occupation.
They started as that student group and then eventually they were like, we're the Indians of All Tribes as well as a There's another group that was picking up around this time as well, called the United Native Americans, which is a nonprofit that's still around today. And soon into all of this stuff that's happening comes this week's main hero, Leonard Peltier. Leonard Peltier was born on September twelfth, nineteen
forty four, in North Dakota. His family was migrant workers who picked potatoes basically it was like indigenous folks picked the potatoes and folks were indigenous to Mexico picked the beats in the area that lived in Peltier describes his lineage as sue Ajibwe and one to eighth French. He grew up speaking English in a Jibwe. His father and uncle fought the Nazis in World War Two. His uncle died fighting fascism and his dad had his legs machine gunned.
When his parents separated, he was raised by his grandparents, which was a fairly traditional way to be raised. He spent a few years as a kid on a ranch in the res. Then he was off to Butte, Montana, where his family worked in a copper mine. He was there for a little bit, but then white kids were bullying him for being indigenous. There's a couple indigenous kids and families at the copper mine, right, White kids were like throwing rocks and shit at him and yelling racial slurs.
And finally, after being pelted with rocks, he threw one back and hit a kid in the head. And this is going to be a really good symbolism moment. It's almost too on the nose, but you know that where he hit the kid. Yeah, So the bully's mom, whose name was probably Karen, drove over, Yeah, drove over and was like, your son tried to kill my kid, and then started yelling racist shit. But the women of Leonard's
family drove her away. They were like, yeah, we're gonna beat the shit out of you if you don't get the fuck out of here.
Nothing nothing like showing up to complain and immediately justifying, you know, like, yeah, totally where I see where your shitty kid gets it from him? I wonder, right, no, wonder our kids threw a rock.
Yeah, the violence started when the protesters threw the tear gas canisters back at the police, you know exactly. And so Karen, whose name was definitely Karen, was gonna go to the authorities and get young Leonard arrested. So the whole family up and moved that night to a tiny ran.
Holy shit.
Yeah, the women and the kids left first. The men stuck around to like pick up paychecks the next day and then got on the road. Because that's the that's what you got to do when your kid fights back against racism, you know.
Yeah, and like that's the like threat level you're dealing with, especially like if you're trying to keep your family together.
Yeah, you know. And so they go to their grandfather's ranch, where, especially once the grandfather dies, Leonard is out hunting rabbits with a sling shot or the family is no meat, you know, it's like, oh, no, you better go kill a rabbit, which is really hard to do with a sling shot. He writes about this a bit. Yeah, you're like, I wish I had a twenty two, but I didn't have a fucking twenty two, you know. Then and he's
like eight or nine. Right when he's eight or nine, the government came and fucking stole them off to an Indian school, wapetan Indian school. The kids heads were shaved long hair as a cultural indicator of indigeneity and like a very important like part of the traditional stuff that we'll be talking about. It's gonna come up a bunch. And they were powdered with DDT too, you know, because
they're terrible, dirty kids or whatever, you know. And he's stuck there for a year before his mother gets the money together to come get him out. And he's like eleven at this point or so, him and him and some other kids steal some gas from an army reserve so the houses don't run out of fuel. They're like a storm's coming and they're like, oh, we don't have any fucking gas. We're gonna run out of fuel. We're gonna be screwed. And so the eleven year old goes
and steals some gas from the like army. Right, he's caught. He spends two weeks in jail, and then he sent off again, this time to live with his father on Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, where everyone is fucking starving. He used to go to community meetings just because there was sometimes food, where like everyone would like pot luck and you know, bring together what they had, you know. And when he was fourteen or so, he had this
moment that changed his life. He saw an elder, a Gway woman basically say why are there no more warriors among our men? If there was, why did they not stand up and fight for their starving children? And he made a vow that he would help his people for the rest of his life, and he has he's never
broken that vow. It's been a long time since. Then in nineteen fifty eight, he's a young teen, he goes to witness an a legal son dance which was held secretly at night in a teepee, and the cops were afraid to bust it up because there's a lot of people and they were like adults, you know. So they arrested the kids outside because they're cowards, because they're because cops are brave. Yeah, exactly, as they are constantly telling us. Yeah, and so they arrest Leonard for being drunk, even though
he wasn't drunk. And this is still during the policy the period of termination that we're talking about, right, it isnteen late nineteen fifties, the BIA would announce literal policies like no food for those who are resisting termination. Like it's like fuck, Like it's not fucking subtle, like like these days it is. It is considered fashionable to at least pretend to not be evil.
Yeah, Like you're not supposed to just be like, oh, this is the Department of starving children.
Yeah totally. Yeah. And then people are like as an adjective or a verb, and you're like, it's a verb, we will starve them the Department to starve children. Yeah, yeah, don't worry. We have like a we have a whole budget set aside for implements to hit them with, Like, why are you like, like you come on, guys, you gotta at least pretend to be not evil. Yeah, although I.
Don't know, it's kind of great. You know, it's kind of preferable, I guess, to be openly evil than sneaky.
Yeah.
I mean, like, you know, it's half a dozen of one, you know. So he's fourteen years old and he moves out west after his mother, who's out there doing migrant labor, to get out of where he is. At seventeen, he tries to join the Marines to go fight in Vietnam, but he's rejected for medical reasons because his jaw was all fucked up from a bunch of fights he'd been in and hadn't been able to get medical care for.
At twenty, he's living in Seattle, and he's not political at this point, right, but he's trying to do his best by people. He actually is political, it just calls himself not whatever anyway.
By people can be pretty political.
Oh he's he fucking good at it. So he owns an autobody shop in Seattle, and he uses the second floor as a halfway house for Indigenous folks recovering from alcoholism or needed a place to go after getting out of jail. He is twenty years old and he is running this by himself. I mean there's other people work at the auto shop and shit right, but like everyone
loves him. He's a hard worker. He's kind and generous, and he's at this point always looking to de escalate fights and he's always about reminding people of who they are, you know. In nineteen seventy he gets involved in his
first sort of like protest thing. Leonard joins the American Indian Fort Lawton Occupation Forces, which is a fucking go and hard name for an activist group because they well, you'll be shocked to know that the American Indian Fort Lawton Occupation Forces were a group of American Indians who occupied Fort Lawton Awesome in an Alcatraz style takeover of abandoned sir plus land around an abandoned fort called Fort Lawton.
Veterans of the Alcatraz Occupation came up to help them, and after three weeks of occupation, the Indigenous folks won the Daybreak Star Cultural Center.
Hell yeah, because this time they didn't let the white hippies come along.
Yeah, totally just got it and fucking got it done. They did let Jane Fonda come. Okay, well again she was gonna she was required at most yost things. No, there's at the time, and there's some quotes they didn't make it into the script, but there's some quotes from folks who were part of that occupation who were like, we kind of it kind of worked. Jane Fondo is a big part of it working, you know, like the star power being used to draw attention. Like, yeah, Jane
Fonda didn't do it. The indigenous people did it. But like she she she opened some doors. And this was not a nonviolent occupation. This was months of breaking into the fort, arrests, fighting riot cops, and just doing it all over again, all alongside court maneuvers to claim the land. When Leonard was arrested alongside thirteen others, all of them were beaten in custody and then they like were letting him go and he was like, I'm not fucking leaving
until everyone leaves. And then like it was his idea he spread that they did jail solidarity. Basically they were like, well, we are not leaving until everyone leaves and they were all released.
Yeah. I mean, when people are getting beaten in custody, it's not a good idea to like let people just disappear.
Yeah, anyone who's listening, you should look into jail solidarity. It is sometimes effective. I have used it successfully twice where you I only recommend doing this if you plan it, But it involves refusing to cooperate once you are arrested in a mass arrest type situation in order to prevent people from being singled out and like given escalated charges and things like that. Don't do it based on that one sentence description to your own reasons. Talk to your lawyer, yeah, Miriam, your lawyer.
Yeah, no dad.
Oh right, don't talk to your dad about it. Well, you can talk to me. No, don't actually no, don't talk about crime with anyone that you're planning that. Don't talk about No. None of you have ever done crime and never will. No, don't do crime. It's bad, immoral, except all the crimes that I'm talking about that are cool.
Yeah.
All right. So, after this particular fight was one only through peaceful law abidingness, despite what I just said, he wound up in Denver and he joined AIM, all the while continuing to do migrant labor right, because he's still got to eat, you know, he quits drinking. At this point, there's a growing sense of seriousness in the movement and
a growing sense of discipline. There's actually already some divisions within AIM between people who wanted national leadership and those who wanted regional autonomy and people who are like more into not drinking and people are into drinking and discipline in it. I'm I'll talk about a little bit about that, but we'll get to that later, but it's not gonna
be the main focus. And for a while at least, they refuse to let that split them, and people who would like lose votes would just stick it out with the main group. And they managed to do all of their most amazing shit after they already had had these fairly large disagreements. And I think that's fucking.
Co Yeah, being able to still work with people with whom you have significant disagreement is like pretty crucial.
Yeahs, the only way I've even gets done. Yeah, literally, Like yeah, white vigilanti groups are op being anti indigenous violence everywhere as folks start organizing more and more. One of the leaders of the Alcatraz occupation was a peaceful mohawk activist named Richard Oaks who had helped set up indigenous education everywhere he went. When he was thirty, he was murdered by a white guy named my Michael Morgan, who shot the unarmed man, claimed self defense and got
away with it. And of course there's just generic racist violence that they're all dealing with too. But before they can deal with that, do you know what else they have to deal with? Miriam?
Is this a fucking ad plug?
They have to deal with pressing the skip button like three four times until they hear the bumper music come back on. Wow.
Yeah, that's a lot to deal with. I think all your listeners can deal with that, though, I hope so, except sometimes you're like listening if you're driving or something.
Yeah, Like they think you have to controls aren't really. Yeah, Like like for me, it's like when I'm like doing like woodworking or something, and I'm like, ah, might or like there's a chainsaw in my hands, I can't. I'm just trying to out my butch points here. I'm exaggerating.
You understand suffering?
Yeah, exactly? God. Anyway, here's some ads and we're back. In nineteen seventy two, the American Indian Movement won the respect of the traditionalists who lived on the reservations and in particular on Pine Ridge. There was already some folks who were starting to respect them. But there's one thing that they did that really cemented this. A man named Raymond Yellow Thunder was treated badly enough that I won't
go into details. He was beaten and stripped and paraded around in front of a white crowd in Nebraska, just across the border from Pine Ridge in South Dakota, and he died from his wounds the next morning.
Yeah, so that like, like he was lynched, like that's it were less I mean categorizing it that way.
Well, okay, I mean if you're taking lynches like taken from custody, then no, right, no, But he suffered that way. He suffered racial abuse. It's unclear whether they were like he was public in a racist attempt, in a racist attack. Yeah, I think that is a fair thing to say. Yeah, he died from his wounds the next morning. The two white dudes, the brothers, Uh brothers are the last named hair.
They were like the people who did this, right, they were arrested but released without bail, and everything was in place for them to just get off unpunished. Yellow Thunder's family tried to go to like the cops and shit, and then they tried to go to BIA the Bureau of Indian Affairs. No one was helping them, so they went to AIM. AIM brought in a two hundred car caravan and forced the FEDS to file actual charges against the Hairs and for the chief of police to be fired.
Like everyone listening has like probably been around some like how hard it is to get police to be held accountable for anything.
You know.
Yeah, Aim got the chief of police fired for this. One of the main organizers for this protest was another AIM leader, Russell Means, who's also famous for voice acting in Pocahontas and playing a role in Natural Born Killers. Also he did a ton of other activism and there's like lots of complicated political debate with Indiandigenous right movements about blah blah blah blah blah, but he helped get
justice for Raymond Yellow Thunder. Car caravans were clearly an effective strategy, so they got themselves together to a really fucking big one. Also in nineteen seventy two, various indigenous rights groups united and set off on the Trail of Broken Treaties. And this was a cross country caravan of cars that when it gathered and departed from Minneapolis. And this is only about three quarters. There's like four, there's four caravans from across the country. Right, Three of them
gathered in Minneapolis and set out together. And one of them did a symbolic thing from Oklahoma reverse of the trailer tears. And the one that departed from Minneapolis was over four miles long, this caravan wow, and they drove to DC. In this caravan, there were seven hundred folks from two hundred different tribes and nations. Eight movements organized this only AIM is remembered partly because they were spicy, partly because of branding, and partly because of some lawsuits
and crimes that we're going to talk about later. That is why AIM is remembered. So I just want to like shout all the eight groups out there was the American Indian Movement, the National Indian Brotherhood came down from Canada, the Native Americans Right Rights Fund, the National Indian Youth Council, the National American Indian Council, the National Council, Council on Indian Work, National Indian Leadership Training, and the American Indian
Committee on Alcohol Drug Abuse. These eight groups got together to do this. Along the way, they stopped on reservations to hold demonstrations and workshops and listening sessions to be like, hey, when we go talk to the lawmakers, because they they promised they'd meet with us, what should we say? Like, what's going on? You know, which is an important thing that activists need to stay good at. Listening sessions. Oh,
listening to people. Yeah, yeah, they ti I'm this caravan to reach DC the week before the nineteen seventy two election. Their goal was to show up and present Nixon with a twenty point list of demands that they had put together. And these demands are shit, like give us back the right to negotiate with the US's nations, that's the big one. Put together a committee to investigate all the broken treaties, replace the BIA with an Office of Federal Indian Relations
and Community Reconstruction, and the termination acts. Give us some of the land back. They wanted a one hundred and ten million acres out of the two point four to three billion that is the US. This is roughly twice the acreage of all current reservations. This is the kind of stuff they were asking for later.
And like almost absurdly reasonable.
Yeah.
Later, this document formed the basis of the two thousand and seven UN Declaration of Rights of Indigenous People. Nixon didn't bother to meet with them. And this is going to shock you again. Get ready to get ready to get shocked.
Embracing myself.
Yeah, the government went back on all its promises if meetings was Various officials way, the Department of the Interior, Labor and Commerce all canceled on them at the last minute without reason.
Wait are you, margaret? Are you telling me that the US government broke promises to Indigenous people?
I know, I know, that's clearly only happened a thousand
years ago. The National Park Service denied them the right to gather at Arlington Ridge Park, and the government forbade the BIA from helping them out with housing and shit, even though usually when delegations of tribes and nations would come to DC, the BIA was in charge of like finding everyone housing and shit like that, and they like did they were like, Oh, there's like this church that's literally full of rats where I guess your elders could sleep.
I don't know. And it's interesting because the I think the head of the BIA didn't put this in the script that I think the head of the BIA was actually like was an indigenous person and was like wanted to be supportive and was just like not allowed, you know. So the organizers were like, all right, fuck it, We're going to a sit in in the BIA until our elders have a place to sleep. Right, that's their fucking demand again, right, They're like, yeah.
Don't put our elders in a rat church.
Yeah, exactly, like rat churches for rats and rat friends. That's it.
Yeah, you know, the rats, the rat priests, the whole rat congregation, rat nuns, yeah, all of those guys.
Yeah, they can hang out a rat. But this was not any of the people who were there. So right, So they decided to sit in at the BIA building. More than a thousand people participated. The cops tried to evict them violently, so people rioted, drove off, the police, barricaded the doors. They put up a banner that said Native American Embassy and took over the Beerhouve Indian Affairs. Hell yeah, They are the fucking raining champs of taking shit over in good ways.
They're really good at it.
Yeah yeah, they al So they spent a week in the building, and they spent that week coming through records that proved just how shitty that they'd been treated.
Right, oh shit, because they're locked in there with all the records.
Yeah, oh my god. All the while they're defending the place with molotovs and the press ate it up, but they ate it up in the bad way where they were like, yeah, they were like, oh no, these like bad people. They like broke some furniture and they spray painted, and this action is what cements AIM's reputation as the bad kids. They are the vandals. Never mind that the cops actually did most of the damage to the building during all their various attacks and stuff.
You know, also, like most government buildings could use a little spray paint and a little broken stuff, Like oh yeah, this is what I hate, like when people acted like the bad thing about the January sixth riders was that they like broke things in the Capitol. It's like that's fine, you know, it was the fascist stuff in the Capitol needs to be broken. The bad thing is it was fascists doing it to promote fascism. Fascists could hold a fucking bake sale to promote fascism and it would be
like fuck you and your goddamn brownies. Like the issue is is promoting fascism, not breaking Pelosi's desk.
Fuck Pelosi's desk. Yeah, oh absolutely, And so the news runs with all these like look, how ungrateful these people are type stories and lots of things that are wearing more racist people only.
Say ungrateful when they have done absolutely fucking nothing for the people they're calling ungrateful.
Yeah, totally. And so at this point the FBI decides they were all communists and enemy of the state's enemies of the state, which is like not true, but I mean it's not the furthest but it's like whatever, it's fun.
Like also, the state was the enemy of them, I know, exactly, showing up being like, hi, we have a very reasonable list of demands and the state is like getting the rat church.
Yeah, It's like what the fuck you? Yeah, And at this Leonard Peltier is one of the two heads of security for AIM. He hadn't really volunteered, never trust the kind of person who wants to volunteer to be.
I was just gonna say I was just gonna say, oh, wait, he was head of security. That's that's good. But if he didn't volunteer, then I trust him. I trust anybody who doesn't volunteer to be head of security.
Yeah. No, he he was volunteered. Basically, there was like him and someone else where. People were like, look, you all keep a you keep a calm head in crisis. You're in charge of security.
Those are the two traits you want for a person in charge of security, keeps a calm head in crisis. Doesn't want that job.
Yeah, totally. And so after this he gets called on for security all the time, and that's kind of one of his main roles within aim going forward. That and fugitive and political prisoner. But you know, we're not there yet. Yeah. In the end, the government gives in a little bit and offers them immunity from prosecution, as well as sixty six five hundred dollars as travel expenses for folks to get home. They also promised that they would set up
a task force to consider the twenty points. And everyone points this as like, oh, they like really fucked up by taking over that building. No one was even going to give them that much as setting up a task force to consider it until fucking building takeovers and molotovs got involved.
Yeah, it sounds like the first offer was nothing yeah, and then the post occupation offer was something yeah yeah.
Shockingly, get ready to get shocked. The task force rejected the twenty points No one sick thing that happened as a result of the trail of broken treaties is the Piscataway people, one of the longest colonized indigenous peoples in North America. The folks who lived around what's now DC put together the Piscataway Resurrection to bring back cultural culture and history and memory as a result of this basically and finally receive state recognition as like existing in twenty twelve.
But so the government withdraws its financial support of AIM survival schools at this point, right because of the bad kids. I promised that would happen, and it puts them on extremist lists and it starts fucking with them. The panthers are like winding down owing to the repression that they've faced. So the eye is sore on kind of turns towards aim. Shortly after returning to Milwaukee from the takeover, Leonard Peltier
is framed up on attempted murder. Basically, he's hanging out this diner and these two undercovers are like trying to pick a fight with him, and he's like, what the fuck, and then they like pull a gun on him, arrest him. He didn't know there were cops. They search him, they find an old shitty bretta that like literally was proven in court like couldn't fire, and then they put him in jail for five months for attempted murder. Before he gets out on.
Bail, attempted murder being near undercover cops.
That's pretty much, Yeah, same thing gun rates for everyone except indigenous people and all other marginalized people. He spends most of what's coming next in a jail cell. But we are going to talk about the most hardcore of their occupations, all the shit that comes next on Wednesday instead of today, you're gonna have to wait, well, not Mariam. Miriam must wait like five minutes while I go pee haha. But everyone else has to wait till Wednesday because you're
not Miriam. That's actually the one advantage of the name Miriam. You thought that Ian was the only one with a special thing related to the name.
It's true. The advantage of the name Miriam is you get to hear things today instead of Wednesday and this week, like yeah, one in ten people you meet will be like, oh I knew an old lady named Miriam once.
It's like when I used to play accordion and people will just stop me on the street to be like my grandfather and I'm like, uh huh yep, and me will you give me money? I need to eat food anyway. Uh. This is the end of the episode until except for the plugs, which is Miriam. What do you want to plug?
What did I plug last time?
Medical, land Back Aid.
For Palestinians and land back Yeah, replug those. Replug those landback dot org.
Do that.
I'm not online. You can't find me.
Ha ha, And I'm gonna plug an essay that people who if people are if white people in particular are thinking about how they want to be allies of indigenous people in all the direct action struggle that's happening for the environment. That's cool, and I would recommend that you read an essay that you can find online called accomplices, not allies, and it talks about the problems with the ally industrial complex and the ways in which people what
it actually takes to be in solidarity with people. And I would recommend reading it if that's the thing you want to do.
I like that you give your listeners homework.
Oh yeah, no, that's why everyone likes me, is the homework giver. That's a classically popular physician to be in that rules.
Give them homework, yeah, make them work for it.
Yeah. So if you got anything you want to plug.
Oh, listen to Hood Politics with prop He's had some really awesome episodes lately.
Elli. Yeah, that's been my cooking listening lately.
That's a good show to listen to.
You cook, I know, all right, see you on Wednesday.
Bye.
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