Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 19, 1993 TAG: 9308190234
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
People ask the Roanoke County resident: Who is Leonard Peltier?
Almost two decades ago, two FBI agents were wounded and then shot to death, execution-style, during a gun battle with Native American activists on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
Peltier, a leader in the American Indian Movement, has served 17 years in federal prison for the lawmen's deaths.
Cooper believes Peltier was framed by the government. She has joined a "Free Leonard Peltier" movement that has emerged across the United States and now reaches into Virginia.
Roanoke, Charlottesville, Lynchburg, Richmond, Big Stone Gap - these places hardly sound like hotbeds of Native American activism. But in recent months, small Leonard Peltier "support groups" have sprung up in these Virginia cities.
Some members, such as Monica Poff, a 20-year-old nanny and college student in Roanoke, became interested in Peltier's case as they set out to discover their own Native American heritage.
Others, including many non-Indians such as Cooper, say they were drawn to the case because it represents a frightening injustice.
"He's just been sitting there in jail for 17 years," Poff says. "And it's just so urgent for people to understand: If they can do that to one person, what's gonna stop them from doing it to another person?"
Peltier's Virginia supporters are starting small. So far Poff, Cooper and Cooper's daughter, Diane, 18, are the only members of the Roanoke group. The groups in Big Stone Gap, Lynchburg and Richmond have about eight to 10 active members each.
They have been pushing their cause through word of mouth and information booths at Native American gatherings, such as the recent Monacan powwow in Bedford County.
The network is tied into the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee in Lawrence, Kan., which says it has 111 affiliates across the nation. Virginia, with five groups, has one of the larger networks of chapters in the United States. Much more populous California has the largest, with nine.
The human-rights group Amnesty International and the Canadian government have expressed support for Peltier. The case was profiled in a 1991 "60 Minutes" story and a 1983 book, "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse" by Peter Matthiessen.
But it is Hollywood - which spent many decades reinforcing negative stereotypes of Indians - that has sparked much of the recent grass-roots concern. Two films based on the deadly confrontation at Pine Ridge were released last year - "Thunderheart," a fictional version starring Val Kilmer and Sam Shepard, and "Incident at Oglala," a documentary produced and narrated by Robert Redford.
Robin Williams, Willie Nelson and other celebrities have loaned their star power to the cause.
That has prompted a public-relations counterattack from the FBI, which says Peltier's supporters are getting one-sided, distorted information. The agency says it is the victim of an "onslaught of Hollywood misrepresentation."
Randy Riley, a member of the Lynchburg Peltier support group, said, however, that one-on-one conversations have been his group's most effective way of spreading the word.
You don't have to prove your case to people in one conversation, Riley said, but you can "put that spark of interest in them to do the research themselves and make up their own minds."
At the Monocan powwow, Riley said, Peltier supporters collected more than two dozen pages of petition signatures.
The Lynchburg group includes a teacher, a health-care worker, a self-employed carpenter and two students. Riley said he and a couple of other members are of Native American heritage, but most are non-Indians.
Monica Poff's maternal grandparents had Blackfoot and Cherokee ancestors. But she didn't give her Indian background much thought until a couple of years ago, when some personal soul-searching led her to start reading about Native American culture and history. Then she ran across Matthiessen's book.
"For some reason, it just sort of hit me," she said. Since then, "Leonard has been very, very important to me."
In Big Stone Gap, a Peltier support group emerged this spring after Joan Boyd Short, an English teacher at Powell Valley High School, showed "Incident at Oglala" to her classes as part of their study of Native American literature.
As a writing assignment, she asked them to write letters - pro or con - about the case. Some wrote to President Clinton, some to the Justice Department, some to Peltier himself. Short guesses that about half of the 150 students actually mailed their letters.
"I was just pleased they were concerned about a social cause," she said. "It interested some kids that don't get interested in things. And that gets English teachers excited - when that spark gets turned on."
The students collected about 400 signatures on petitions. About a half-dozen visited the Big Stone Gap office of Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, to plead Peltier's case. They also made Native American bracelets and sold them to raise money for an Indian culture center in the school.
Short says she is "an old '60s person," but "we're not like a left-wing activist group. These are just a bunch of good kids who believe a cause is just. Some people get nervous about those sorts of things."
Heather Powers, then a senior, won third place in a state forensics competition with a speech she wrote about Peltier's case. Before the state finals, the Peltier Defense Committee arranged for Peltier to telephone her. They talked for several minutes.
"He was such a nice, kind man to talk to and listen to," Powers said, "you know that he couldn't have done it - that he was innocent."
The telephone number for the Peltier Defense Committee is (913) 842-5774. In Roanoke, the number is 344-9804.
by CNB