Video: Leonard Peltier “Sun-Dancer”

The much-loved political prisoner Leonard Peltier shares this poem-song from behind bars.

Lyrics by Leonard Peltier

Note: The transition of presidents is the time when the leaving president often grant release to political prisioners.  The arrival of a new president is a time when an old injustice should be made right. We demand freedom at long last for Leonard Peltier.

The following is the text that accompanied his poem online:

Leonard Peltier also known as Tate Wikuwa is a human rights and ecological activist, member of the American Indian Movement. In a trial, which was called a disgrace for the American legal system by the former general attorney Ramsey Clark, he was falsely accused of murdering two FBI agents and sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment in 1976. Leonard Peltier is innocent! 
But the government wanted to brand him as a criminal and through him the Native American civil rights organisation AIM. Their ‘crime’; to protest against the ongoing land-robbery and constant human rights violations committed by the US-government, the FBI and the mining-companies in the reservations of South-Dakota. At that time those companies tried by all means to lay their hands on the mineral resources (mainly uranium) of the Native American Territory. As a consequence of the uranium mining activities the drinking water was poisoned and the death rate among the Native Americans rose dramatically. 

Leonard Peltier, a Lakota-Ojibway native American, is a symbol for the justified struggle of his people and it’s suffering. The vision of this man, unbroken to this day, is justice, a considerate relation towards Mother Earth and a peaceful co-existence of ‘the white man and the red man’ through a revival of Native American culture and traditions. This song carries his message into the world and hopefully help Leonard Peltier to finally obtain the right to spend the remainder of his life in freedom, instead of suffering the unspeakable injustice, he has endured until now up to the year 2041! 

Under US law he can be freed only by presendential pardon. Countless people have already stood up for his release, amongst them well known personalities as Mother Theresa, H.H. Dalai Lama, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Robert Redford, Harry Belafonte, Richard v. Weizsäcker, Rev. Jesse Jackson and many others.

For more information on Leonard Peltier’s case; www.freepeltier.org