The Total Femme

Write to Biden. FREE LEONARD PELTIER!

Every year at the National Day of Mourning in Plymouth, Mass., Leonard Peltier’s annual letter is read out. It is written from his jail cell.

May next year be the year that it comes to us from the house his friends and relatives have prepared for him in North Dakota. May this be the year that he is finally released from prison.

freeleonardpeltiernow.org, you get one pingy-dingy! Thank you for your dedicated and heart-directed work on behalf of this revered elder. Let this be the year!

https://www.freeleonardpeltiernow.org/

From Leonard:

February 6th 2024©

My life was taken 48 years ago, at 11:00 am. The sweater that my adoptive

mother Ethel and her daughter Donna placed on my shoulders as I was

taken in the bitter cold of Canada was a kindness that I still remember.

I could not foresee that 48 years later I would be entombed in a

lockdown nightmare. I live in lockdown, for no reason other than that

they can get away with it.

If I had been tried with the others, I would be a free man. They were

rightly found not guilty by reason of self-defense. We were under attack.

We were facing the extermination of our people.

Justice never came for those they killed. I was chosen to be the sacrifice

to cover up the crimes committed on that reservation. I am not here

because I committed a crime. I am here because I stood in the way of

their greed and corruption.

James Reynolds, the State Attorney who supervised my prosecution, has

admitted that they could not prove I committed any crime. He stated,

“We were not able to prove that Mr. Peltier himself committed any

offense on the Pine Ridge Reservation.”

Time has become so twisted with these lockdowns that night blurs into

day, a miasma of time that has no sense to it. All hours are the small

hours of the night. Life itself is suspended. We wait for a brief glimpse

of what life looks like. We exist in cold, filthy cells, and we wait. The

voices of those murdered on Pine Ridge Reservation are a constant echo

in my mind.

Time has become a weapon they use to try and annihilate the essence of

who I am. They have done their best to break me. They started by

holding me in a lightless cell block in Canada, telling me that I was

awaiting my execution, to try and force a confession.

But no one can break the spirit of a Sundancer.

I have fought for my freedom every single day of these past 48 years.

You, my people, my supporters, my family in a very real way, lift my

spirit and enable me to hold fast to the beliefs they want me to

denounce. You get me through these hours that last for days or years.

Keep fighting. Fight the parasitical influence of colonialism. Fight the

lies, the greed, the corruption of the oppressor. Fight for the survival of

our people.

The greed and corruption of the colonizers is infectious. My own

Committee, which has stood behind me and been a training ground for

activists for over four decades, was lost to the parasite of greed and

corruption the colonizers infected us with.

The very greed and corruption that imprisons me will be the undoing of

those who take too much. Power arises from truth, from the willingness

to give voice to that truth, from lifting the voices of your brothers and

sisters when they speak their truth. Truth is power. That is why they try

to silence us, you know. You also know they are losing their ability to

silence us.

Take care, my relations. Ask the Creator to set your path before you. Live

in ceremony. When I choose my actions, I watch carefully to make sure

those actions come from spirit, not ego. Sometimes the greatest enemy

we will face comes from within. At times I want to lose myself to rage.

The rage of being unlawfully imprisoned, the rage that drifts through

the air here, a haze you can almost see, that arises from men caged in

conditions that would be illegal for dogs.

If I allow that rage to take me, I may never come back. That is not who I

am. I know who I am. That is why I am still here – I will not lie, I will

not grovel, I will not beg. I will not denounce my beliefs. I will not

betray myself.

I know you are out there, my relations, my friends, my supporters. You

know the meaning of Mitakuye Oyasin. You give me the courage to stay

strong and face these eternal twilight hours of lockdown. I know you are

fighting for me, fighting with me, fighting for an end to the oppression

and tyranny that take so many of us, in so many ways.

I have heard of a new cry going out. NOT ONE MORE YEAR. It has been

said that I am a common man who stood up to an uncommon enemy.

People think of me as a symbol. I suppose I am, but I am a man. A man

who wants to go home to his family.

Let this be the year that common sense prevails. Let this be the year that

“liberty and justice for all” are not words that ring hollow. Let this be the

year that America learns to live up to its own principles.

We will prevail. Our children will know who they are and know they are

cherished. All of them, not just a privileged few, while the rest go

hungry and lose their connection to Mother Earth. That connection is

everything. Never, ever forget who you are. Mother Earth births us. She

fires the blood that runs through our veins. She takes us back to her

womb when our journey ends.

We will prevail. I can see a world that is not powered by lies,

manipulation, greed. This will not happen by magic. We must come

together, my brothers and sisters in solidarity, and let our truth

illuminate the dark recesses of society.

It is time.

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.

Doksha,

Leonard Peltier

I’m a typewriter whompin’, card catalogue lovin’ white girl from back in the day, and I yearn for a time before the covers of trade paperbacks were all squidgy, so you can imagine that I don’t actually understand what a pingback is. I do know that it can in some way be part of spreading the love, and since that’s what I’m all about at The Total Femme… every Wednesday, I pay homage to the laughter, love, and inspiration to be had elsewhere online. Is there someplace online that you particularly adore? Send it my way and I’ll slap it into the Pingy-Dingy lineup! thetotalfemme@gmail.com