N E W S 

Havana. August 29, 2003

 The eagle’s feather

BY ORLANDO ORAMAS LEON, —Granma daily staff writer—

THE North American Indigenous Movement had already been founded in the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota when Daniel Yang was born. He’s currently in Cuba as an ambassador for U.S. native peoples and is the godson of Leonard Peltier, that indefatigable warrior unjustly imprisoned for defending the ancestral hopes and rights of his people.

With him are a drum and legendary pipe to help his prayers reach the Great Spirit. His clear voice intones the hymn of the Movement, accompanied by the drum whose beat is the heartbeat of Mother Earth. And although his words might be hard to understand, the message remains strong in the evocation of an ancestral struggle that still has many battles ahead.

The color red predominates in his traditional dress and an aura of mystery envelopes him when he offers us a "purifying" toke on the pipe or when he lights a bowl of dry salvia — the sacred plant of his people, the Anichanabi.

Those traditions stretch back much further than the five centuries that saw the beginning of the North American Native Indians’ struggle against those who are still oppressing and discriminating against them and confining them to reservations.

And these traditions confer the most valuable decoration that a warrior can receive — the eagles’ feather. For the first time ever, he explained, the North American Indigenous Movement has given one to a head of state and someone outside of the United States. It is an exceptional decoration that signifies success, honor and bravery.

Daniel affirmed that the Movement had authorized him to award it to the undefeated fighter President Fidel Castro because together with his people he has maintained aloft the resistance of the Cuban Revolution and an unswerving solidarity with the Movement’s cause. Whilst speaking those words he drew on his pipe in order to impart more force to the message entrusted in him.

This is the number given to Leonard Peltier who has spent the last 28 years in U.S. jails. His major crime has been continuing to defend the stolen and pillaged rights of U.S. native peoples.

For the thirty years now he and activists from the Pine Bridge Reservation, South Dakota have been mobilizing in defense of other indigenous peoples; hundreds of native people have been killed there. The police and FBI have very rarely concentrated so many of their agents — not to clear up those deaths but to suppress the native people’s protests.

He was charged with homicide but this was never proved. What is certain is that his rigged trial brought him to the notice of indigenous peoples and gave international importance to the silent and shameful situation of U.S. Native Indians.

Leonard chose Daniel to be his godson, who confirmed how U.S. justice has been reducing his appeal options. Peltier is serving double life in a maximum-security cell in Lavenworth jail, Kansas.

The former U.S. administration had promised him a pardon. President Bill Clinton himself confirmed this during an electoral tour of a reservation. In the last days of his mandate, Leonard’s family was informed of the decision and he gathered up his belongings in prison. But in the end, Justice Department pressure reconfirmed the injustice.

He has lost the sight in one eye in prison, suffers from diabetes, arthritis and high blood pressure, but he was still able to paint a picture for Fidel and Cuba. It is the vision of an unbeaten warrior, as he sees us from his incarceration.

So it’s not by chance that he is embracing the cause of the five Cuban anti-terrorist fighters and entrusting his godson to carry his support to their families in Cuba. Yang underlined that the five Cubans and Peltier have been condemned for fighting terrorism against the Cuban people and the indigenous nations of North America.

Almost 30 years after Leonard Peltier was locked up, 90% of Pine Bridge’s workforce is unemployed. U.S. native peoples have the highest suicide rate in the country. Discrimination and exploitation are currently acquiring new forms but for the same ends: to marginalize indigenous peoples.

Daniel Yang explained that the North American Indigenous Movement is continuing to fight for Washington to acknowledge the hundreds of treaties that have been ignored throughout 500 years.

Their rights, including those to land, water and self-determination, have been and continue to be denied by the colonizers. Daniel stressed that they were a society of warriors who want to live in peace, but peace has still to be won because the reservations where they are confined are the poorest places of the world’s richest power.

He puffed on the pipe, the smoke of the salvia invoking the spirits. Afterwards, the drumbeats announced that a notable warrior was about to receive the eagle’s feather.