David Hill: Statement to UN on Leonard Peltier http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2010/03/david-hill-statement-to-un-on-leonard.html

My name is David Hill. I am of the Choctaw nation and an organizer with the American Indian Movement since 1972. My reason for this letter is to bring attention to the illegal, unjust incarceration of my fellow Sun Dancer, Leonard Peltier, of the Anishinabe nation, by the US government.I will not go into all of the legalities and illegalities of his case because we probably would not have enough paper to cover them all. However there are key points of his illegal incarceration that require no legal training or expertise to understand.

Leonard Peltier and others were illegally and unjustifiably attacked June 26,1975 by a contingent of the Federal Bureau of Investigations. In the act of defending themselves, one Native American and two FBI agents were killed. The Native people were on their own land and not seeking confrontation. The Native people had been building cabins and other buildings as well as planting gardens. They were working toward developing programs to alleviate the many social ills caused by the wrongful policies in place by the US government toward Indigenous people.

Our people did not provoke this attack and historically it is consistent with this government’s policies that has at times driven Indigenous groups to the point of extinction.There are to date some 378 treaties ratified by the US Congress that are violated feloniously every day. There are millions of acres of land that are legally ours that we are denied access to. There are land leases that have expired that this US government has failed to honor and return the land to the people.