AIM Warrior Robert Robideau Passes On to the Spirit World

AIM Warrior Robert Robideau

Workers World
Published Mar 4, 2009 3:47 PM

Robert Robideau, a member of the American Indian Movement since 1973, died Feb. 17 at his home in Barcelona, Spain, where he was the founder and director of the American Indian Movement Museum. He was a member of the Turtle Mountain and White Earth Ojibwa tribes. Robideau and Darrell (Dino) Butler were acquitted in the deaths of two FBI agents in 1976 on grounds of self-defense. The charges arose from a shootout with the FBI on Pine Ridge reservation in June 1975 that left two FBI agents and an Native man dead. In the aftermath of the 1973 Wounded Knee takeover by AIM, 60 AIM members were killed and hundreds more assaulted in a government-sponsored action to destroy the organization. A third defendant, Leonard Peltier, was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences in a separate trial. Peltier, an internationally known political prisoner, has been incarcerated for 33 years for the same alleged offense of which Bob Robideau and Dino Butler were charged and acquitted. Below is Peltier’s statement on the death of Robideau.

It is with a real deep sense of loss that I write this. Robert Robideau, who we called Bob most of the time, was my brother in the struggle for Indigenous rights. He was also my blood cousin and a defendant in the Oglala shootout trials. Bob was a tireless campaigner for my freedom and Indigenous rights all over the world. I can’t express enough how greatly his leaving this level of existence will be missed.

Bob and I grew up together. We were involved in the 1970s American Indian Movement together. We were shot at together. We were on the run together. Over the 33 years of my imprisonment, Bob was a person I could count on for a lot of reasons. We laughed together, quarreled with one another, praised one another and had strong disagreements at times. Bob was the one person I could truly count on to tell me the straight of it, whether I liked it or not. ... He was sometimes my worst critic and sometimes my best support, but he was always my brother and I loved him dearly. I wouldn’t doubt that wherever he is at, he’s organizing a support group of some sort. If I thought there was anything I could say that would bring him back to us, this statement would go on for as long as it took.

I know Bob will appreciate our concerns for the loved ones he left behind and want us to go on and do the very best we can to make this a better and more free, more just world we live in and he would surely remind us that we are the guardians of the future and the keepers of today.

It is always difficult to address the loss of people you knew and cared about, but every once in a while, there is a loss that is deeper than all the rest. In this loss, there is often a loss of words. It is a time when the shock of the situation is so close that you just don’t know what to say. One thing I can say for sure is that the loss of Bob Robideau is a loss to all. And to Bob, I don’t know how long I’ll be here myself, but that doesn’t matter. I look forward to seeing you again my brother, some other time, some other place. May the Creator be with you wherever you are and wherever you go.

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Bob Robideau, Steve Robideau, Joe Stuntz, Bobby Garcia, Roque Duenas, Nilak Butler, Anna Mae Aquash and all the others who gave of themselves for our People.

Mitakuye oyasin,
Leonard Peltier
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AIM Co-founder Urges President Obama to Take Seriously the Issues Facing Indigenous Peoples

[Editor's Note: This letter was published by the Native American Times prior to Barack Obama's swearing-in ceremony, which took place on January 20, 2009 at 12:00 noon. For more information on Clyde Bellecourt, click on this Wikipedia article]

Letter to President-elect Obama from Clyde Bellecourt - AIM Grand Governing Council

President-elect Barack Obama
Transitional Team
Washington D.C. 20720


Dear Mr. President-elect,

In this year of hope and change, please accept my expression of congratulations and best wishes to you, your family and your administration, as the American Indian Movement unites with many Native people from across the hemisphere who welcome your victory. A vision of democracy is being fulfilled in our time and before the eyes of the world.

Tribal communities and governments clearly heard your commitment to reform the broken systems that manage and administer trust lands and other trust assets belonging to tribes and individual Indians. Your support of legal protections for our sacred places also encourages our governments and communities to believe that you will arduously defend the sanctity of our ancestral domains. The commitments made and in your principles statement echo the very concerns that summon representatives of indigenous governments to Washington on the eve of an historic inauguration.

It is in support of these Native American heads of state that I write to you. They bear on this journey of the burden of the future of our children, and their children's great, great, great grandchildren to be. Your administration will take office with clear understanding of conditions faced by Native American people in both the United States and Canada - conditions that defy reason to people throughout the global community. No one can understand how an eight-year old Canadian First Nations child could commit suicide in the heart of her community; or why elders can not heat their homes, while two-million [barrels] of dirty oil swiftly cross their backyards, threatening sacred world heritage sites. International media can not resolve to their audiences United States resistance to the abundantly clear need for justice in the billions of dollars under the eight-year long Indian Trust Lawsuit, while approved bailouts in the trillions for investors and lending-houses appear nearly overnight and apparently abandon all rules and accountability in favor of the most privileged.

Last year, many people heard the name that the Crow People bestowed on you when they made you a relative: "One Who Helps People Throughout the Land." Our children are falling prey to human trafficking, our young parents are losing hope with unemployment levels that exceed the national average by 1,000 percent; and the very health of our Elders is stolen from them little-by-little each day, deprived of the dignity that we have always reserved for them at this time in their lives, since time immemorial: these are the people that need your help. The chiefs calling on your office bear in mind the right to property that the United States records in the Bill of Rights and in numerous treaties on both sides of the border, which is absent in the Canadian Charter of Rights a and Freedoms. The Alberta Clipper and TransCanada Keystone Project that stands to benefit business and the general public in trillions of dollars may be built on the ruin of thousands of Native lives, if the United States fails to pressure Ottawa into compliance with their high courts in the matter of consultation and inclusion that you have emphasized as a principle.

Our hereditary leaders, Elders and the emissaries of our traditional governments who comprise the International Indigenous Treaty Council began the task three decades ago of working in the United Nations and securing international agreement on the inherent rights of our Peoples, our cultures, our children and indeed our future on Mother Earth. The unceasing work of many people finally gained passage of that agreement a little over a year ago. Article 19 speaks to one of the concerns that we bring to your attention. "States shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concern through their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free, prior and informed consent before adopting and implementing legislative or administrative measures that may affect them."

I urge you to take with serious regard the concerns of our chiefs, delegates to the Assembly of First Nations Canada, as we recall your words that "few have been ignored by Washington for as long as Native Americans - First Americans." The world will not ignore what you say, but our leaders need to know that you hear the voices they represent from throughout the land.

Most respectfully,

Clyde H. Bellecourt
Nee-Gon-Nway-Wee-Dung, "Thunder before the Storm"
Co-Founder and National Director, American Indian Movement

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copyright © 2008 Native American Times

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Posted By Alliance for Indigenous Rights to Native Rights News at 1/20/2009 09:38:00 AM