Biography
Chief Clinton Rickard was a Tuscarora leader and U.S. Army veteran who founded the Indian Defense League of America in 1926 to defend Haudenosaunee rights to cross the U.S.–Canada border freely under the Jay Treaty. He organized the defense of Mohawk ironworker Paul Diabo, arrested in Philadelphia in 1925 as an "illegal alien," winning a 1927 ruling that upheld Native border-crossing rights. Rickard himself was arrested and held in a Canadian jail while exercising those border-crossing rights, and he founded the annual border-crossing ceremony that continues today.
