With my green 1968 Volkswagon Beetle attached to the tow bar of a recreational vehicle that we contracted to deliver, my brother, a friend Nancy and I left LA for Chicago.
Nancy and Mike would return to LA.
I would stay.
March 3rd it will be 41 years.
I was 24 years old and all that I owned I could pack into three cardboard boxes.
We loaded the boxes into the RV. The radio reported that activists from the American Indian Movement were staging an occupation of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.
It was four years after Native American activists had gained international attention when they occupied the abandoned Federal penitentiary at Alcatraz.
On March 1, 1973 Interstate 40 East would take us through Gallup, New Mexico.
Larry Casuse, a 19 year-old member of the Navajo Nation and President of a Native American student group at the University of New Mexico, was shot in the back that very day by the town’s Sheriff.
Gallup’s Sheriff was also the owner of the Navajo Inn, a local bar and liquor store. Gallup had 39 liquor stores, 32 more than allowed under a 1956 law limiting liquor establishments to one per 2,000 people. Gallup police made, on average, 800 public drunkenness arrests each month, most of them from outside liquor stores and local bars. The Navajo Inn was notorious for racial and sexual violence against Navajos.
In the days that followed there would be calls for a Federal Investigation and the following day 500 people marched through Gallup to protest the murder of Larry Casuse.
3,000 attended Larry Casuse’s funeral.
Driving through Oklahoma and Missouri we listened to the radio reporting on the events in Pine Ridge.
Then on March 3rd we drove up I-55 into Chicago. WBBM was said that demonstrators in support of the Wounded Knee occupation were sitting-in in Senator Charles Percy’s office in the Federal Building downtown.
We didn’t even need to discuss it. That was were we headed.
We parked our RV with the Beetle in the back and headed for Percy’s office where we joined the sit-in.
The sit-in lasted a few hours until there was a meeting with Percy’s administrative assistant. The occupation of Wounded Knee would last 71 days.
In 1975 AIM leader Leonard Peltier was arrested for the murder of two Federal agents at Pine Ridge.
Although evidence shows he was nowhere near the location of the shootings, and Amnesty International has identified the case as an unfair trial, Leonard Peltier remains in the United States Penitentiary, Coleman in Florida. Peltier’s next scheduled parole hearing will be in July 2024.
Barring appeals, parole or presidential pardon, his projected release date is October 11, 2040.
Fred Klonsky 
Sorry, I am all for social justice and am if fact very liberal but…..there was no injustice in this cop killers case. This case has been upheld in court time and time again. The case was prosecuted by Lynn Crooks who was a man known for fairness and playing by the rules. as a retired police administrator in Illinois, a police officer the Dakotas during this incident and a personal friend of Lynn, I can assure you Mr. Pelitier is where he belongs!
Larry Casuse shot the mayor in the back. After abducting a student in Albuquerque and forcing him at gunpoint to drive to Gallup, he took the Mayor hostage. He then broke into the sporting goods store (full of guns and ammo) and held him hostage. The mayor was shot while trying to escape by jumping through the plate glass window.