User:Ricamelikat/Rica's Sandbox

User:Ricamelikat Leonard Peltier went to assist the Oglala Lakota people in the summer of 1976. He was a member of the American Indian Movement or AIM and his mission was to protect Indians from harm and further the causes of all Indian peoples. The elders, women and children he had just re-located to Pone Ridge had suffered beatings, abuses and murder. The bullies that had tormented them were expected to retaliate, so the situation was very tense and everyone was watchful. On 26 June 1975, a terrible shoot-out occurred, leaving one Indian boy and two Federal Officers, dead. The sunlit day ran with blood as two agents exploded onto the reservation in an unmarked car and began shooting. The AIM volunteers were scrambling around, trying to get to positions where they could be most useful, like a surrounding dragnet. It was crazy, bullets were pinging everywhere, women were screaming and grabbing children, men were yelling and shouting and grabbing children to safety too, it was pandemonium. No one really knew what was coming next, it seemed that the rash act of two FBI agents had created a maelstrom that got everyone’s attention. But the day turned horrifically tragic. The aftermath of this infamy left Indians holding the bag, which was the intent of the FBI all along, but they hadn’t counted on their agents hot dogging it with their egregious action of storming Rosebud, a powder keg of edgy folk expecting retaliatory action. Leonard Peltier fled to Canada, knowing he would never get a fair trial in the United States. He did not. The Canadians allowed Leonard to be extradited based on false documents the FBI presented to them. When the Canadians realized they had been duped, they tried to get Leonard back, to no avail; he was already lost in the U.S. prison system.

Anna Mae Aquash was murdered, her body was left in a ditch, a farmer found her only because there was an early spring thaw. The FBI knew who she was at her autopsy, but they did not identify her body. Instead they had her hands cut off and sent to a lab for fingerprinting. This was an especially deplorable desecration because they knew Indians held the body as sacrosanct. It was a final insult to a young Indian woman, because to mutilate her body was akin to mutilating her spirit. Leonard Peltier has been considered as her murderer, but one cannot be sure in a world where the FBI uses hate, fear tactics and lies to break up organizations that fight for justice and equality. They did the same thing with the Black Panther party in the sixties, they even went so far as to hook party members on drugs, help them recover and then give them drugs again, right after brow beating sessions wherein they convinced them that their fellows were betraying them. This intense degradation had a dire effect upon the morale, but also on the psyche, breaking down the body-mind-soul connection that enables us to recover from harrowing incidents. “Annie” Aquash will always be in the hearts of freedom fighters everywhere, she is a heroine.