Leonard Peltier Quotes
If you look at the statistics regarding Native Americans, you will see that most of the tribes since the 70s have improved their economic situation in some form. And this has been brought about by their aggressive assertion of their sovereign treaty rights.
Peltier, Leonard. Interview. International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, 2008.
This law allowed the President to forcibly move entire tribes from their native lands to sparsely settled land in the West. Oklahoma became knows as Indian Territory as so many Indians were relocated there. The act, and this clause in particular, gave the President the authority over all Indian tribes in the nation and established the difficult if not impossible relationship between the Indian nations and the Federal government. The act—the last sentence of the quote—also ratified all treaties with the Indians and pronounced them inviolate. That was not to be.
Marshall was in general very sympathetic with the Indians and their rights, but even for him the notion of treating the Indians as sovereign masters of all their lands was unthinkable.
Abramoff was taking millions from the Choctaw Indians Tribe for his ‘services’ to get federal legislation so that they would not have to pay state taxes on their gambling profits. He also had other Indian tribes as clients. Privately he had no respect for the Indians and cheated them while they were trying to get unfair special treatment from the Republican controlled Congress and administration. Abramoff went to jail along with others in one of the biggest political scandals in modern America.
The intentions of the Founding Fathers towards the Indians was decent, respectful, and well intentioned. However, there was not enough of a system of enforcement or the will to enforce when the greed of the average whites grew too great. Many settlers saw these vast lands and could not see any harm in using a few acres for their farm. And if there had been only a few, there would have been little trouble. However, the settlers kept coming and coming and soon the Indians began to push back. In a sense, it was a class problem. The members of the Continental Congress who wrote the Northwest Ordinance were educated, affluent men who had plenty of land. Most of the men who contested for the Indian lands had little land or were newly affluent and saw few limits to America.
Jackson refused to obey this decision, He was the only American President who disobeyed a Supreme Court Decision. In doing this, he killed tens of thousands of Indians, allowed the Southern Whites to steal most of the Cherokee land. His Indian Removal, contrary to this Supreme Court decision, was the worst case of ethnic cleansing in the history of the United States.
Leonard Peltier is an American activist, convicted of murder. An activist for Native American civil rights and an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa, he joined the American Indian Movement in 1972. Since 1977, he has been imprisoned for the 1975 murders of two FBI agents at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. He is of Lakota, Dakota and French descent.
