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Dear Friend,
As we prepare and emerge from a long winter, we want to take a moment to reflect on struggle, hope, and freedom realized.
Leonard Peltier is home! This journey has been decades in the making: native sovereignty, acknowledgement, dignity and justice have been the messages carried by a generation of organizers. Thank you for everyone who carried Leonard’s freedom in their heart.
Prison Radio has stood alongside Leonard for 33 years. Our first series on KPFA Radio was a 13 part series on US political prisoners “You Can’t Jail the Spirit.” It was named after the brilliant collection of writings from the Puerto Rican community that guided us during those early years. We featured indigenous political and politicized prisoners Leonard Peltier, Yvonne Wanrow Swan (who hosted our show), Eddie Hatcher, and others.
We understand that we must listen, and act, when indigenous people are targeted. COINTELPRO might appear to be in the distant past, but it is clear that there remain robust systems of repression arrayed against liberation-loving people. We are all engaged in a collective fight for abolition; a world beyond prisons is a world beyond colonialism.
We noted in our most recent hard copy mailing:
“Our commitment to Native Sovereignty runs deep. We have worked for decades alongside native groups to support justice for Leonard Peltier. Arthur Simmons (Hualapai) is on our board of directors. John Trudell was a close advisor. In 2014 we partnered with the Water Protectors Legal Collective and hosted the Commissary and Reentry fund for No Dakota Access Pipeline prisoners. In 2019 we began working with Thalia Carroll-Cachimuel first with When We Fight, We Win the brilliant book by AgitArte and Greg Jobin Leeds, and then when Thalia joined the NDN Collective working on Leonard’s freedom. And in the last year we did research and co-wrote an Op Eds with Saleem Holbrook, Executive Director of the Abolitionist Law Center, to support Leonard’s freedom.
We want to thank Leonard for standing with The Redwood Justice Fund (Prison Radio’s non profit sponsor) us as we litigated and won our historic civil rights lawsuit against the FBI, the Oakland Police and the ATF for violating our founder, Earth First organizer Judi Bari’s 1st Amendment Rights,
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