Freeing Leonard Peltier -- Jeff Armstrong

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Barack Obama plainly aspires to join the select ranks of United States presidents who led the nation through national crises with relative wisdom and resolve. Obama and his supporters often invoke Lincoln, Kennedy, and FDR as historical exemplars. But in one important respect, Obama need reach no higher than to emulate the precedent set by Republican president Warren Harding.

Rightly reviled as one of the worst presidents in American history for the corruption and mendacity of his cabinet (known, for good reason, as the Ohio Gang), Harding should nevertheless be acknowledged for freeing 24 political prisoners (excluding, of course, most IWW activists) in his first year of taking office in 1921. Among the beneficiaries of Harding's conciliatory gesture was Eugene V. Debs, the socialist party candidate for president who polled nearly one million votes in the 1920 election from behind federal prison walls. Perhaps due to his unique status, Debs was granted special dispensation to leave prison unsupervised to meet with attorney general Harry Daugherty.

Debs, to his credit, spurned the attorney general's request that he renounce his revolutionary views in return for a full pardon Yet Harding commuted Debs' sentence and released him and other political prisoners less than one year into his term and two and one-half years into Debs' 10-year sentence, which he landed for speaking out against then-President Woodrow Wilson and the military draft at a socialist party convention shortly before the conclusion of what was then known as the Great War.

At first glance, Harding's call for a return to “normalcy” and Obama's ringing but amorphous promise of change would seem to have little in common. Yet both campaign slogans signified a sharp break from the immediate past, in the case of the former from the imperious and imperial presidency of Wilson and in the latter from the reckless and lawless regime of George Bush II. Like Harding before him, Obama has sought to reach out to his ideological opponents in the spirit of reconciliation and to bring the office of the presidency back down to earth. Harding went so far as to meet personally with Debs after liberating him from captivity to the cheers of his guards and fellow inmates alike.

Instead of extending his hand to the unresponsive GOP, however, Obama should be reaching out to Leonard Peltier and apologizing for two centuries of violence, oppression, and empty promises to the indigenous peoples of the United States. If ever there was a sphere in which change, and one might even say a return to normality (in terms of normalized relations with Americans), is needed, it is in Indian Country. Reservation Natives live in something of a parallel legal universe in which they are the only racial group victimized in a majority of criminal assaults by members of other races, yet tribal police are granted no criminal jurisdiction over non-Natives.

When it comes to civil rights, tribal governments, which again with limited exceptions have jurisdiction only over Indians, are virtually beyond the reach of not only the United States constitution but even their own tribal constitutions. With rare exceptions, tribal courts are subordinate arms of tribal councils, unable or unwilling to uphold any semblance of civil rights and liberties. As if by cruel joke, that great guardian of civil liberties, the FBI, is responsible for upholding the civil rights of tribal members.