Full Circle in the Americas: Indigenous Resistance and Resurgence in the 21st Century
Full Circle in the Americas: Indigenous Resistance and Resurgence in the 21st Century
October 14, 2016
by Kent Paterson
For the second year in a row, Albuquerque, New Mexico, celebrated Indigenous People’s Day instead of Columbus Day. And like last year, marchers organized by the Red Nation and allies took to the streets to demand justice and uphold Indigenous liberation.
On Monday, October 10, about 200 people marched through downtown Albuquerque chanting and carrying signs and banners that variously proclaimed “We stand with Standing Rock! #No DAPL,” Standing Rock: Today’s Wounded Knee“, “The Revolution will be Indigenized” and “Abolish the Entrada. The Reconquista was not bloodless!,” a reference to the annual Santa Fe Fiesta’s annual celebration of Spanish conquistador Juan de Onate’s reoccupation of Santa Fe in 1692 after the Pueblo Revolt of twelve years earlier.
As the crowd surged into the crispness of an early evening under a beautiful autumn sky, a chorus of voices rang out with the demand “Free Peltier!” An American Indian Movement (AIM) activist imprisoned for decades, Leonard Peltier was found guilty of the 1975 murder of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, a conviction supporters contend is a frame-up. But in a growing movement sweeping Indian Country and beyond, supporters are calling on President Obama to grant Peltier executive clemency before his presidency ends next January. To get their message across, some of the Albuquerque demonstrators wore black t-shirts imprinted with the words and numbers:
“Clemency Now
Call the White House
202-456-1111”
A counter-campaign waged by the FBI Agents Association and other supporters of slain FBI agents Jack Coler and Ron Williams is urging President Obama not to grant Peltier clemency. The Duke City marchers paused at the steps of the Albuquerque Police Department, currently under scrutiny by a court-ordered, independent monitor after a 2014 Department of Justice investigation found a pattern of excessive deadly force. Sporting a red banana across her face, a woman attired in a camouflage shirt over a black dress asked the crowd why she was masked.
“It’s because the Indian wars in the U.S. never ended,” she answered her own question, condemning “the police state” for attacking water protectors at North Dakota’s Lakota Standing Rock Reservation attempting to stop the nearly 1,200 mile-long Dakota Access Pipeline that’s slated to transport fracked oil upstream from Lakota land and down a Midwestern corridor.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/14/full-circle-in-the-americas-indigenous-resistance-and-resurgence-in-the-21st-century/
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