The Nov. 16 story “Agency to remove prisoner’s art from lobby” reported of plans to remove “paintings done in prison by Leonard Peltier, 71, a Native American activist who is serving two consecutive life sentences in the deaths of two FBI agents during a 1975 standoff on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.”
I suggest that self-appointed art monitor Ray Lauer, a retired FBI agent, and anyone else not familiar with the case of Peltier, read Peter Matthiessen’s book “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.” Unlike Lauer’s unsubstantiated condemnation of Peltier, Matthiessen’s exhaustively researched history of the 1975 Pine Ridge encounter and its aftermath demonstrates the countless abuses of “justice” the federal government and the state of South Dakota engaged in to destroy the American Indian Movement and railroad Peltier to prison. It is one of the most significant failures of American “justice” in the 20th century.
