Leonard Peltier
February 2nd, 2010 | 
Author: n the Beginning
Leonard Peltier (of the Anishinabe, Dakota, and Lakota Nations) traces the roots of his political activism to the rank racism and brutal poverty he experienced every day as an Indian child growing up on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa and Fort Totten Sioux reservations in North Dakota.
Termination and Its Aftermath
During the last years of the Eisenhower administration a resolution was passed by Congress to “terminate” all Indian reservations and “relocate” Indians off their lands and into the cities. Indians were given two choices: either relocate or starve. Later, court decisions would declare this policy illegal. In the late 1950s, however, to implement their inhuman policy, the United States government cut off the reservations’ already meager supply of food and commodities—the pitiful little “payment” they had promised the Indians in their treaties to recompense Indians for all the vast and holy continent they’d stolen. Now, Indian people were offered money to get off their land and move to cities like Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Chicago—where they were faced with joblessness, poverty, and hopeless despair on the mean streets of America’s inner-city slums.
Leonard was about 14 years old at the time. With his father, he attended meetings on the reservation to discuss the government’s decision to terminate Turtle Mountain. He recalls one Ojibwa lady, a cousin, who stood up angrily and asked in a loud, emotional, tear-filled voice, “Where are our warriors? Why don’t they stand up and fight for their starving people?”
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