With a little help from Rio Arriba County sheriff's deputies, the first-ever prayer run for imprisoned American Indian Movement (AIM) activist Leonard Peltier got underway around 9:30 a.m. last Saturday (April 16) in Velarde. The event, which sought to raise awareness about Peltier, was held in partnership with Global Peace Walk and the Rio Grande Water Walk.
About 35 people participated in the event, which blocked northbound traffic in the narrow, canyon-enclosed section of Highway 68 for hours, but served to capture the attention of people in vehicles traveling both directions of the road. Many southbound vehicles slowed down to get a better look at the caravan of trucks, a drum group, several protest signs and raised fists, and a rotating set of runners on the blacktop.
Bobby Valdez, member of Laguna Pueblo and president of AIM Albuquerque GrassRoots, and Albuquerque chapter vice-president Deborah Jirón, an Isleta Pueblo member who also sits on the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, were among the American Indian Movement members who gathered in Velarde to lead the event.
"It's very urgent right now for Leonard, we need his immediate release," Jirón told the Taos News, adding that Peltier contracted COVID-19 in late January. "He's got a lot of health issues, he's diabetic, he had an aneurysm, he's got a heart condition. After he got COVID, all they did was put him in isolation for four days with no water, no cup."
Peltier was convicted in 1977 of murdering two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1975, crimes he has steadfastly maintained he did not commit. In the 1970s, the American Indian Movement, like other anti-establishment groups of the period that posed a perceived threat to the prevailing American culture, was in turmoil, in part thanks to constant government surveillance and the infiltration of informants into activists' ranks.
For AIM members, 1975 was a paranoid time. The FBI's notorious COINTELPRO domestic surveillance and anti-subversive program was still in full swing and targeting AIM.
Valdez noted that the shooting in which Peltier was accused of participating — more than 100 bullet holes riddled the cars belonging to agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler — occurred about two years after the 1973 Wounded Knee incident, when federal authorities laid a months-long siege to members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe who, in an act of protest, had taken over the town in South Dakota where the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre took place.
"They called it 'the reign of terror' during that time when everybody was getting stopped, pulled over, beaten up," Jirón said. "I remember," said the elder Valdez, who said he was harassed by law enforcement in the 1970s because of his involvement with the American Indian Movement.
Peltier's murder trial, in which he was ultimately convicted and sentenced to two life sentences in federal prison (he's currently housed in a Florida penitentiary) was widely regarded as flawed, and several of the prosecution's star witnesses later recanted their statements incriminating Peltier, saying they had been coerced.
"He went to prison for nothing," Valdez said. "Nothing."
"The prosecuting attorney, he's retired now, but because of what he knew the government did he wrote a letter to [President Joe] Biden saying, 'Hey, this man needs to be free," Jirón said, referring to former-U.S. Attorney James Reynolds.
Biden, like presidents before him, has not acted on requests to commute the now-77-year-old prisoner's sentence.
"He's an elder now, so we're asking for his compassionate release," Jirón said.
Organizers didn't know if there would be a repeat of the prayer run for Peltier next year.
"Everything went smoothly, we had an escort from the Sheriff the entire way," said organizer, Mike Davis. "The drum group was phenomenal, and the American Indian Movement and the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee led the entire event."
Davis said runners who hail from Taos Pueblo and Ohkay Owingeh were among those who took turns pounding the pavement in the narrow canyon stretch of the highway from Velarde to the Taos Horseshoe Curve Overlook.
Rev. Yusen Yamato, the Taos-based buddhist monk who founded the Santa Fe-to-Taos Global Peace Walk 28 years ago, led a prayer ahead of the run, followed by a prayer by Valdez and words from Jirón.
"We have to find harmony with nature, that's why we're walking," Yamato told the Taos News, noting that he's crisscrossed the United States, Japan and other regions of the world in the name of global peace.
"The fighting never ends," he said. "This paradise, only humans would destroy."
(1) comment
Could the photographer please explain the photo caption ‘Kai-Sa Sandy’? This was the name of a Zuni/Taos artist who passed many years ago. I am wondering if there is some connection.
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