~Two Holocausts--Jewish & Native American~
har...@haveyouthought.com
>From the desk of Harvey Arden
Founder: The Wisdomkeepers Collective
"Bringing the Elders to the World & the World to the Elders"
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Author: WISDOMKEEPERS: Meetings with Native American Spiritual Elders
DREAMKEEPERS: A Spirit-Journey into Aboriginal Australia
TRAVELS IN A STONE CANOE: The Return to the Wisdomkeepers HAVE
YOU THOUGHT of LEONARD PELTIER LATELY?
Editor: PRISON WRITINGS: My Life Is My Sun Dance by Leonard Peltier
NOBLE RED MAN: Lakota Wisdomkeeper Mathew King
WHITE BUFFALO TEACHINGS by Chief Arvol Looking Horse
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Dear Friends... Here's an advance peek of few pages from the new book
~HAVE YOU THOUGHT of LEONARD PELTIER LATELY?~ which we've put together and
will shortly be printing. This extract revolves around my answer to a gal
who asks why I, a Jew, concern myself with the fate of a Native American
political prisoner in Leavenworth. I sent her these paragraphs...partly
from the book's Foreword, partly from the body of the text.
[FROM THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD]
THIS BOOK ~Have You Thought of Leonard Peltier Lately? ~ wasnt written.
It wasand continues to be lived. What you read and see in these
pagesand in our companion website www.haveyouthought.com are the
artifacts of an ongoing struggle for one mans freedom and for all of our
self-respect. The issue of Leonards freedom should be seen not simply in
regard to his own personal physical freedom, but as a key to freedom for
tens of thousands of others in our American Gulag, the innocent callously
imprisoned along with the guilty, serving time for crimes they never
committed. I personally champion Leonards cause not as a Native American
activist, which Im notthough I empathize profoundly with the cause of
indigenous peoples everywherebut as an American, as a Jew, and as a human
being, a Citizen of Planet Earth.
We are all indigenous to somewhere.
Im reminded of the words of an Aboriginal Australian Wisdomkeeper named
Lilla Watson:
If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time.
But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine,
then let us work together.
IVE OFTEN THOUGHT that my own empathy with indigenous peoples and their
sufferings relates to the still searingly recent Holocaust upon my own
people, the Jews of Europe, a calamity that haunts every fiber of my being
to this daywitness the scores of books on Auschwitz and histories and
testimonies of the Jewish Holocaust on my bookshelves, and the
dust-gathering boxes of notes and drafts for a yet-to-be-finished
Holocaust novel of my own. When the Nazi war on the Jews ended in 1945, I
was just ten years old, living carefree in Chicagotoo young to grasp even
remotely what had happened to my own People on the killing fields of
Europe, much less to do anything about it. Had my grandparents not
emigrated to America in the early 1900s, Ior any Jewish child my age in
Lithuania or the Ukraine, where my maternal and paternal families came
fromwould likely have been rounded up for the death camps in 1941-1942 or
so. Theres a famous historic photograph of a young Jewish boy of just
about my age at that time, holding his arms in the air in frozen terror as
a Nazi officer points a Luger pistol directly at his head during a
round-up of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. I often contemplate that image
with an anguished mixture of sorrow, anger, guilt and frustration.
That boymy other Self, in a waylikely died in the death
camps circa 1942. I myselfblessed to be an Americanlived
through it all, quite unknowing of my great good luck at the
time, and today I continue unabashedly to live a full,
challenging life at age 68 more than six decades later. Yes,
God Bless America.
So whenas much by accident as inclination, though both are
involvedI find myself, first as a journalist, later as an
author, witnessing a Holocaust in this same land of Americaa
Holocaust against American Indian Peoples that has taken
millions of lives over the past 500 yearsand, whats more, a
Holocaust that in many ways is still going on, all but totally
disregarded by American society at large, then my Jewish
outrage, my aboriginal outrage, my indigenous outrage, my
human outrage resonates powerfully against such injusticeand
so should all of ours. I become drawn to the victims, and,
yes, to their Causeto which I here give a capital C. That
Cause, is quite simply, To survive as a People.
The Jews of Auschwitz would have understood that.
Lakota Elder Mat King, when he was explaining to me the
concept of the Original Instructions given to Indian Peoples
by Tunkashila, the Great Spirit, emphasized: The first
Instruction is to survive as a People! Nothing is more
important than that! You understand that and you understand a
lot about us Indian People. We intend to surviveand that
means to survive as a People!
Yes, my liberation is bound up with theirsand with Leonards.
As his Lakota/Nakota/Dakota brethren of the Great Sioux Nation
say on sacred occasions: Mitakuye OyasinWe are all
relatedWe are all One Family of Humankind.
Yes, we are. If only we might all realize it.
* *
[FROM THE BODY OF THE BOOK]
EVEN WHILE the Clinton clemency decision was being awaited, I made a trip
over the Christmas 2000 holidays with wife Lorraine and my Army son Mark,
whose Apache helicopter unit was stationed in Germany (he served in the
Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts). To me this was a somber personal
pilgrimage.
We drove from Bavaria to southwest Poland to visit the haunted
site of Auschwitza central locale for the Holocaust novel I
will soon (hopefully) be finishing. Leonard was much on my
mind that appropriately bleak winters afternoon as I walked
among the well-swept remnants of this grim memorial to
humanitys inhumanity. In my mind, here in Auschwitz, I
superimposed the horrors inflicted on my own People with those
inflicted on Leonard and his People. To me personally theres
an inescapable connection between the two.
As a page torn from my own living past, heres an excerpt from
an emailwritten near the torn quick of my feelingsthat I
wrote shortly after that visit to Auschwitz to a broadcaster
who had offered to get my (ultimately unanswered) plea for an
audience with Clinton to someone close to the President.
* *
To Marc Steiner
>From Harvey Arden
On behalf of Leonard Peltier
December 23, 2000
Dear Marc,
I have just returned to Germany from a visit on Thursday to Auschwitz in
southwest Poland, where the Nazis slaughtered a million and half of my
Jewish brethren, killing each of them with a special vengeance for the
crime of being innocent--the same crime for which Leonard Peltier has been
imprisoned this past quarter century. The day was appropriately bleak, the
sky a grimy white, the air sulphurous with the fumes of Soviet-era
factories that even today make Polands air almost unbreatheable. As I
walked through the barracks where the innocents were tortured and murdered
with such malignant glee during that Holocaust of the human spirit, I felt
Leonard walking with me, and I pondered the ways of men toward their
fellow men. I wondered, What is the use of prayer? For most of those who
died here prayed with the most intense passion and profound belief every
morning, noon and evening of their lives. I pondered what is the use of
Justice, when it is so selectively dispensed by the Unjust? I asked myself
what is the use of Love, when those who love their families and friends
and country, as the Nazis did, have such hatred in their hearts as to
obliterate the very meaning of Love. As I walked through those
ghost-filled barracks, I thought not only of these hallowed ones who died,
but of my brother Leonard, languishing in his 5-1/2-by-9-foot cell at
Leavenworth, and also of President Clinton, who now holds Leonards fate
in his hands, and, yes, of the FBI agents Ron Williams and Jack Coler,
whose portraits sat above my desk for three years as I edited Leonards
book. I thought of the thousands of FBI agents who today put their lives
on the line to protect every one of us, yet wish to see an innocent man
die in prison for standing up for the rights of his People; I thought of
all the Holocaust-deniers, who would have it that no Holocaust ever
occurred, just as the FBI pretends the Reign of Terror it instigated at
Pine Ridge in the 1970 never occurred; I think of Mr. Janklow, sitting in
the Oval Office even as I was visiting Aushwitz and doing his best to
convince our President to deny clemency to Leonard Peltier, and I wonder,
what is the use of Truth, when it can be so violated as to obliterate all
Truth?
Marc, you ask me what I can say that could be passed on to convince
President Clinton to give our brother Leonard Peltier clemency. Ask him,
please, to give a half-hour audience to me and Chief Arvol Looking Horse,
19th-Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Pipe of the Great
Lakota Nation, so that we may deliver a message to him on behalf of the
tens of millions of people around the world who plead for Leonards
freedom, who see Leonards freedom as The Sign that Democracy and Justice
and Love and Prayer still have a meaning in America. I want to read to Mr.
Clinton from Leonards book PRISON WRITINGS: MY LIFE IS MY SUN DANCE. I
welcome the presence of President-elect Bush and Mr. Cheney and Mrs.
Clinton and Ms. Reno and Mr. Freeh and any others the President cares to
have on hand, even Mr. Janklow, for he, too, I know, loves his family and
his friends and his country, and his soul, too, is redeemable, as are all
of ours. Tell Mr. Clinton I also ask to have Leonard Peltier standing
beside me in the Oval Office as I read his words, words Leonard would read
himself if his locked jaw would allow him to. I ask no more than that,
make no plea beyond that. The decision is President Clintons and no one
elses.
Marc, I hope you can get this message to the President. May Spirit guide
it on its way.
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse and Leonard Peltier,
/Harvey Arden
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HAVE YOU PRE-ORDERED YOUR PERSONAL COPY YET?
PLEASE DO NOW! THANKS!
~
*^* HAVE YOU THOUGHT of LEONARD PELTIER LATELY? *^*
A LivingMemoir with Artifacts
& Companion Website ~ www.HaveYouThought.com ~
Please visit the companion website www.HaveYouThought.com
For more info contact har...@HaveYouThought.com
We WILL get Leonard out!!
To order by check, make out check for [$23 +$5 s/h=]$28 to 'Have You
Thought' and mail to:
Have You Thought
1410 Blalock Rd. #420
Houston, TX 77055
Many thanks!
If you've already ordered the book, please suggest to a few friends that
they order one too. Or buy a few gifts!
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ONCE AGAIN AVAILABLE: CLASSIC PELTIER/ARDEN CD--
Hear it FREE at
http://cdbaby.com/cd/harveyarden
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ALSO AVAILABLE FROM HYT PRESS:
ARVOL LOOKING HORSE'S WHITE BUFFALO TEACHINGS
--$12.95 www.haveyouthought.com
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