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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 March 2000 Issue No. 472 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 March 2000 Issue No. 472
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Prison Writings: My Life is my Sun Dance, Leonard Peltier, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1999. pp243
Monthly supplement
Alexandria re-inscribed
No One Sleeps in Alexandria, Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid, tr. Farouk Abdel-Wahab, The American University in Cairo Press, 1999. pp409
Southern PartThe Crusades through Muslim eyes
The Crusades -- Islamic Perspectives, Carole Hillenbrand, Edinburgh University Press, 1999. pp648Economic schizophrenia, global style
Misr wa Riyah Al-'awlama (Egypt and the Winds of Globalisation), Mahmoud Abdel-Fadil, Cairo: Dar Al-Hilal, 1999. pp264Canine ruminations
Darourat Al-Kalb fil Masrahiya (The Need for the Dog in the Play), Girgis Shukri, Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, 2000. pp101History and parallel history
Tumanbay: Al-Sultan Al-Shahid (Tumanbay: The Martyred Sultan), Emad Abu Ghazi, Cairo: Mirette, 1999. pp96Sun Dancer speaks his sorrow
Prison Writings: My Life is my Sun Dance, Leonard Peltier, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1999. pp243Novel of novels
Al-Bashmouri II, Salwa Bakr, Cairo: Supreme Council of Culture. 2000, pp151Chagall's Arabian Nights: Four Tales from The Thousand and One Nights with lithographs by Marc Chagall, Prestel Verlag, 1999. pp163 Read caption
To the editor
At a glance
A shorthand guide to the month compiled by Mahmoud El-WardaniMagazines & Periodicals
* Al-Kotob: Wughat Nazar (Books: Viewpoints), a Monthly Review of Books, issue No. 14, March, 2000, Cairo: The Egyptian Company for Arab and International Publishing
* Aafaq Ifriqiya (African Horizons), quaretrly, Cairo: State Information Service, issue no. 1
* Al-Thaqafa Al-Alamiya (World Culture), bimonthly cultural magazine, Kuwait, no.99
Books
* Al-Riwaya fi Nihayat Al-Qarn (The Novel at the End of the Century), Ali El-Ra'i, Cairo: Dar Al-Mustaqbal, 2000, pp371
* Al-Himaya wal-Iqab: Al-Gharb wal-Mas'ala Al-Diniya fil-Sharq Al-Awsat (Protection and Punishment: The West and the Religious Question in the Middle East), Samir Morqos, Cairo: Miret, 2000, pp210
* Al-Wataniya Al-Misriya fil-Asr Al-Hadith (Egyptian Nationalism in Modern Times), Amina Higazi, Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, 2000, pp555
* Khamriya, Amin El-Ayyouti, Cairo: Al-Hilal, 2000, pp121
* Awlamat Al-Faqr (The Globalisation of Poverty), Michael Chossudovsky trans. Mohamed Mostagir, Cairo: Sotour, 2000, pp328
* Hal Intahat Ostourat Ibn-Khaldoun? (Is the Myth of Ibn-Khaldoun over?), Mahmoud Ismail, Cairo: Dar Qibaa, 2000, pp333
Books is a monthly supplement of Al-Ahram Weekly appearing every second Thursday of the month. We welcome contributions and letters on subjects raised in this supplement. Material may be edited for length and clarity; and should be addressed to Mona Anis, Books Editor, Al-Ahram Weekly, Galaa St., Cairo, Arab Republic of Egypt; Faz: +202 578 6089; E-mail: m.anis@ahram.org.eg
For advertising call +202-5780233; Fax +202 394 1866To see other book supplements go to the ARCHIVES index.
Illustrations courtesy of International Commitee of the Red Cross
"Folk drawings and tales", Cairo, 1996
Sun Dancer speaks his sorrow
Reviewed by Gamal Nkrumah
Why does one person's pain speak more eloquently than another's? There is no easy answer to this question. However, when one person's pain is that of an entire people, then it is not difficult to see that it gains resonance, and takes on a deeper, more persuasive meaning.
United States Prisoner No. 89637132 is one such individual. He considers himself an Indian brave in the mould of men like Crazy Horse, but is aware that to the authorities he is just a number. Prison Writings is the story of Leonard Peltier, an activist of the American Indian Movement (AIM), now widely seen as the Nelson Mandela of Native Americans.
With a heart-rending introduction by Chief Arvol Looking Horse and preface by former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Peltier's powerful personality and defiant mood are established from the book's first pages. "Innocence", he says, "is the weakest defence... I have pleaded my innocence for so long now and in so many courts of law, in so many public statements issued through the Leonard Peltier Defence Committee, that I will not argue it here." Yet quite clearly it is the US that is guilty, and not only for Peltier's wrongful incarceration.
Many people have spoken up for Peltier. As he says, "to those of us locked away in here, there's nothing more important than being remembered." In April, South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu spoke at Kansas University in Lawrence. "I certainly support the campaign to have him [Peltier] freed very passionately," he said. "I am willing to do whatever it is that might be necessary to help. Because it is a blot on the judicial system of this country that ought to be corrected as quickly as possible." Similarly, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchu Tum, a Maya Indian from Guatemala and UNESCO Good Will Ambassador for the International Decade for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, has told Peltier that "your resistance is an example for all of us, and I want you to know that in our Central American region you are always present in our prayers, our thoughts and our hearts." Peltier's case has therefore become something of a cause célèbre. However, the pain that speaks through Peltier's Prison Writings is not Peltier's alone, it is that of a people, a people whose suffering has been made up out of a long saga of wars, negotiations, treaties, treachery, and the loss of a homeland. For me, reading his book was to be constantly reminded also of the suffering of the Palestinians.
Struggle for survival is the keynote of the narrative. For Peltier, memory is survival. And so, unsurprisingly, he argues passionately for his people's cause and for the preservation of their memory as a people. "Speaking my language was my first crime," he writes. "Practicing my religion was the second. When I was also arrested that winter for siphoning some diesel fuel from an army reserve truck to heat my grandmother's freezing house, I spent a couple of weeks in jail. That was my first stretch of hard time. So trying to keep my family from freezing was my third crime, the third strike against me. Henceforth, I would be considered incorrigible. My career as a hardened criminal was already well on its way." The narrative is often very painful. "I died to my family, to my children, to my grandchildren, to myself," writes Peltier. "I've lived out my own death for nearly a quarter of a century now... We Indians are born, live and die with inconsolable grief."
Peltier has spent almost a quarter of a century now in jail, and he decided to write his autobiography, or 'personal testament', "not because I'm planning to die, but because I'm planning to live." He was imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. In Clark's words, "Not a single credible witness said they saw Leonard take aim at anybody that tragic day at Oglala in June 1975 on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota." Among the many things withheld during Peltier's alarmingly unfair trial, which disgraced the US judicial system, was the violence of US law-enforcement agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Clark explains. These events have been widely publicised in Robert Redford's and Michael Apted's documentary film Incident at Oglala.
What matters here is that the persecution of Native Americans is not a thing of the past; on the contrary, Peltier explains that "Every day, every hour, I grieve for those who died at the Oglala firefight in 1975 and for their families, for the families of FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams and, yes, for the family of Joe Killsright Stuntz, a 21-year-old brave-hearted Indian, whose death from a bullet at Oglala that same day, like the deaths of hundreds of other Indians at Pine Ridge at that terrible time, has never been investigated."
And there was also another terrible shadow hanging over the Pine Ridge Reservation, that of Wounded Knee. On 29 December 1890, a small band of Miniconjou Sioux fled for their lives before United States troops across the very same hills, hoping to find safety among Chief Red Cloud's Oglala Sioux. The army eventually caught up with the Sioux band, and a terrible massacre, 'the battle of Wounded Knee', ensued. Defenceless men, women and children were butchered. Just as the US army in 1890 was intent on arresting the doomed Miniconjou Sioux for no other crime than the performance of their traditional Ghost Dance, so Peltier was first imprisoned as a child, and his people persecuted, simply because he had performed the sacred Sun Dance. It is truly astonishing that the United States, which nauseatingly preaches its 'democracy' to the world, should practice such barbarism towards the indigenous people on what is now US territory simply because they wish to keep their cultures alive.
Not only did America dispossess the Indians of their land and unique lifestyle, it also sought to spirit away the India's soul. Peltier explains in his book that "AIM was a trivial annoyance to the US government in that tumultuous era. America really didn't give a damn about Indians, unless we staged takeovers like Alcatraz, Fort Lawson, the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] building in Washington DC, and Wounded Knee." Yet trivial annoyance though it might have been, its activists could not be ignored forever, at least not without terrible social cost. "By the late 1960s, we were tired of the government setting the political agenda," Peltier writes. "We decided to set the agenda on our own... A new generation of spirit-warriors was being born and raised in the racial morass of America's cities, tough young men and women with brains and conscience and eloquence and guts they were willing to spill on behalf of this implacable upstart notion: the People."
Who are the People? "Contemporary Native Americans are scattered across the country and have come to know the ways of the White man well. The government for much of the latter half of the 20th century had tried to get rid of us by dumping us into the multicoloured racial refuse heaps of the inner cities, but the unintended result was that relocation created a new current of ideas between the outside world and the isolated reservations." Washington's "final solution" backfired, thanks to men and women of Peltier's calibre.
"If my imprisonment does nothing more than educate an unknowing and uncaring public about the terrible conditions Indian people continue to endure, then my suffering has had, and continues to have, a purpose. My people's struggle to survive inspires my own struggle to survive," says Peltier.
Ironically, I purchased Prison Writings from a bookstore in downtown San Francisco, California, near Fisherman's Wharf. From here, there was a full view of Alcatraz Island, site of the notorious federal prison abandoned in 1963, which, in November 1969, American Indians occupied, arguing for turning the island into a native people's cultural centre. As the first building visitors would see when coming across Golden Gate, such a centre would have symbolised from whom this vast and wonderful land had been stolen, or so Peltier argues in his Prison Writings. It is a thought that more people should ponder.
Prison Writings: My Life is my Sun Dance can be ordered from the Leonard Peltier Defence Committee (LPDC) Phone: (785) 842-5774, or write to PO BOX 583, Lawrence, KS 66044. USA. E-mail: LPDC@idir.net
