Album Notes

My Life Is My Sun Dance Prison Writings of LEONARD PELTIER Silence, they say, is the voice of complicity. But silence is impossible. Silence screams. Silence is a message, Just as doing nothing is an act. Let who you are ring out and resonate in every word and every deed. Yes, become who you are. There's no sidestepping your own being or your own responsibility. What you do is who you are. You are your own comeuppance. You become your own message. You are the message. May the Great Spirit Make Sunrise in Your Heart . . . Hoka Hey! Leonard Peltier A Bio of Harvey Arden Author/Editor of: Wisdomkeepers: Meetings with Native American Spiritual Elders Dreamkeepers: A Spirit-Journey into Aboriginal Australia Noble Red Man: Lakota Wisdomkeeper Mathew King Travels in a Stone Canoe: The Return to the Wisdomkeepers Prison Writings: My Life is My Sun Dance by Leonard Peltier Have You Thought of Leonard Peltier Lately? White Buffalo Teachings by Arvol Looking Horse Over the past few years I have given readings/lectures on the Dreamkeepers and the Wisdomkeepers at Harvard, Columbia, CalTech, USC, the University of South Dakota (Vermillion), Briarcliffe College (Sioux City, IA), etc etc etc I've given readings from Leonard Peltier s PRISON WRITINGS: MY LIFE IS MY SUN DANCE and Mathew King s book NOBLE RED MAN to audiences in schools, churches, museums, private homes, coffee shops, public auditoriums and theaters in New York, Toronto, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, New Orleans, Washington DC, Cape Cod, Western Massachusetts, New Hampshire etc.and scores of smaller towns. I've also given scores of readings at Borders and Barnes & Noble (and many, many other) bookstores across the country; I've been interviewed on NPR (national "Public Interest" show, twice), also on many many other radio stations. I was for 23 years a staff writer at National Geographic Magazine. A play of mine on Leonard Peltier, already performed at USD, is in the early stages of a professional production. My books have been translated into French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, and Japanese...with Greek and Swedish in the works. Anyway, I'm willing to put my old body on the line anytime it's needed for the Cause, but I can often be of more of use here at my basement-study PC, since I plug into lots of places in the Indian and international indigenous worlds, though I'm a white guy myself. Lot's of people know me and, hopefully, trust me. You can check me out ad nauseum with a Google search on my name. (someone told me a few weeks or so ago she found 22,000 entries on me with a few simple searches) I still spend lots of time working for and with Leonard Peltier. I ve visited Leonard half a dozen times at Leavenworth. Also I have a few novels, plays, screenplays and other nonfiction books that I'm trying to give birth to lest they be, alas, stillborn. Like Mat King used to say, "You're not too bad for a white guy, Harvey. You're lucky. Tunkashila has a job for you to do and you're going to do it!" Regarding why I, a white guy, am so involved in the indigenous world, I subscribe to the philosophy expressed in this statement by Australian Aboriginal Elder Lilla Watson: "If you've come here to help me, you're wasting your time. But if you've come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."