Leonard Peltier's Incident At Oglala

In the case of Leonard Peltier, his arrest and conviction were the result of the atmosphere of fear, anxiety, tension, and violence prevalent in the cultural and historical contexts associated with the murder of the two FBI agents. The video Incident at Oglala describes this atmosphere, highlighting previous events that had built up the tension between the Native Americans on the reservation and the surrounding community and pointing out that the Native Americans were fearful because of the mistreatment they had received at the hands of Wilsons local government and also because there were hundreds of unsolved murders on the reservation. As one of the speakers on the video indicates, although the federal agents appeared not to be aware of it, for strangers to come driving onto the reservation with guns was an invitation to be shot, given the fear that was felt on the reservation at that time.
Paul Berg, who had served with the FBI during the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee in which the 7th Calvary had massacred more than 200 mostly unarmed Native American old men, women, and children, simply because government agents incorrectly interpreted the Ghost Dance as an aggressive threat to non-Indians and called in the army. Berg reports that The women had thrown blankets over the children so that they would not see their executioners. This horrific and gratuitous massacre had left a haunting impression on the surviving Native Americans, and Berg recalls that when he assigned his seventh grade students to write an essay on what their lives would be like in 10 years, half of them wrote about their own