Still Fighting for Native American Rights

DB: The FBI agent apologized, just doing my job.

Banks: Yeah. ["] But AIM has learned a lot from Standing Rock. And I think when this is over I think the pipeline will back away, and I think that they will realize that this is not going to go away, and these guys are here for the long run, and we are. And, you know, we'll outlast these pipeline people. We'll outlast the pipelines that are under our ground already, in our water. And we'll be here. We're in this for the long haul.

DB: I guess you've been here a long time. I keep hearing these words from the elders at Standing Rock: We are the land, we are the water. I didn't move, here I am here.

Banks: Dennis, when I say that I am part mountain, they might not understand that. And when I say I'm part buffalo, and I'm part eagle, and I'm part rose, the flower, I'm part maple tree, oak tree maybe then they'll begin to understand that we are part of Mother Earth, all of us. Whatever the ingredients are that make up Mother Earth, that's us. We also have, even the little bit partials of gold, that is running through our system. And we are part sun, we are part moon, we are part Mother Earth, Grandmother Moon. And when people began to understand that kind of thinking then they will understand who we are, as Native People.

And, you know, we didn't choose to be protectors of the water. We didn't choose to be protectors of the Earth, protectors of water, protectors of the ground, protectors of the buffalo, and the species that have been endangered, the species that have been obliterated from this Earth, but we are. And we still carry on that responsibility.

Yes, some of us are lawyers, some of us are doctors, some of us are activists, some of us are ditch diggers. But when we go to bed at night we are still that person with those responsibilities and duties. And that's what makes us who we are. And I am, as I was in Wounded Knee, I was proud, I was not afraid of the FBI or the bullets, or the marshals and their guns, and APCs. It only made me kind of stronger. Because I said "Wow, if Dennis Banks or if the American Indian Movement is that big [that] they've gotta quash us with all this hardware, military hardware, then we must be rubbing someone the wrong way." And maybe they will finally see it in the end. But not our end. Maybe they'll see it on their end.

DB: When they are threatened with their end.

Banks: Yep, so that's why I tell my children, even today, "Stay away from the wood ticks, lunatics and politics."

A PLEA TO FREE LEONARD PELTIER

DB: Obama could still do something extraordinary. He could free Leonard Peltier. [Peltier is a Native American activist who was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences in prison for allegedly shooting two FBI agents during a 1975 conflict on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.]

Banks: Oh, yes, absolutely.

DB: If he has the courage and the belief. He certainly has the legal background to understand exactly what the situation is.

Banks: I had some hope that he would do that. And I still have hope that as he leaves office that he could do this. The parole board said they don't want to release him because he hasn't shown remorse. How can you show remorse for something you didn't do?

The real culprit in this is the manufacturing of evidence against Peltier that put him in prison. And even the federal judge, on the bench of the 8th Circuit Court wrote to the president, wrote to President Bush, the first, H.W. Bush, and said "Release Peltier, after all it was the government that started that fight." And in the first, the jury, the first trial against the other two that were charged, they were charged with aiding and abetting. And they used the self-defense theory. And the judge allowed them to use it. And they proved that the government came in there shooting and the jury found them not guilty.

But the judge in the next case, against Peltier, ruled that they could not use "the self-defense theory["]. And Peltier was charged with aiding and abetting. But yet he was prosecuted as if he was the shooter. And even at the end he says, "And so Peltier shoots, takes his rifle and shoots [FBI agent Jack R.] Coler, and he aims it at [FBI agent Ronald A.] Williams, and he kills them both." He was charged as the shooter. And he was convicted of a double murder. And he sits in prison today for something that he did not do.

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