Despite now spending 47 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit, Leonard Peltier continues to be denied parole by the federal government of the United States. Why has the US so obstinately refused to free Peltier, despite decades of international outcry? The answer lies in the threat posed by what Peltier represents—the demands of the Indigenous liberation movement for sovereignty and justice after centuries of US settler colonialism. Historian Ward Churchill joins Rattling the Bars for a discussion on Leonard Peltier, the American Indian Movement, COINTELPRO, and more.
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Ward Churchill (Keetoowah Band Cherokee) is one of the most outspoken of Native American activists and scholars in North America and a leading analyst of indigenous issues. He is former tenured Professor of Ethnic Studies and Coordinator of American Indian Studies at the University of Colorado, fired in retaliation for the exercise of his First Amendment-protected speech and in violation of the doctrine of Academic Freedom.He is also co-director of the Colorado chapter of the American Indian Movement and vice chair of the American Indian Anti-Defamation Council.
Churchill\'s many books include Fantasies of the Master Race, Struggle for the Land, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, From A Native Son, Critical Issues in Native North America, The COINTELPRO Papers, Indians R Us?, Agents of Repression, Since Predator Came, and A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas.
In his lectures and numerous published works, Churchill explores the themes of genocide in the Americas, racism, historical and legal (re)interpretation of conquest and colonization, environmental destruction of Indian lands, government repression of political movements, literary and cinematic criticism, and indigenist alternatives to the status quo.
Churchill is also a past national spokesperson for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, has served as a delegate to the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations (as a Justice/Rapporteur for the for the 1993 International People\'s Tribunal on the Rights of Indigenous Hawaiians), and as an advocate/prosecutor of the First Nations International Tribunal for the Chiefs of Ontario.
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