Indigenous Political Prisoner and Elder, Leonard Peltier, is Going Home
The campaign to free Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier has achieved a significant victory. Within his final minutes as president, Joe Biden issued a public statement granting Leonard Peltier executive clemency. This commuted the remainder of his life sentence to home confinement, which the 80-year-old member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians plans to spend in Belcourt, North Dakota. The clemency takes effect on February 18.
The last-minute announcement was a long time coming. For five decades, Peltier has maintained his innocence of the crimes for which he was convicted and sentenced: two consecutive life sentences for the killing of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in June 1975. Since then, millions worldwide have expressed sympathy with Leonard Peltier’s case. For decades, the National Congress of American Indians has called for his release. Politicians, activists, celebrities, and world leaders also joined the call.
Peltier’s co-defendants and fellow members of the American Indian Movement, Bob Robideau and Dino Butler, were acquitted of the killings. The context surrounding the 1975 firefight—which a US Commission on Civil Rights investigation described as part of an FBI “reign of terror” against AIM and its supporters—convinced the jury that the defendants acted in self-defense when the two FBI agents arrived at the Jumping Bull property in unmarked vehicles, and shooting started. During the shootout, a federal agent also shot and killed Joe Stuntz, a twenty-one-year-old member of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, whose killer has never been named. Peltier was tried in a separate venue and in less favorable conditions. His conviction was the result of falsified affidavits from Myrtle Poor Bear, an Oglala woman who was threatened and coerced by the FBI. The FBI also harassed and threatened the Native children who survived the shootout to give false testimony against Peltier and his co-defendants, which some of them later recanted.
Founded in Minneapolis in 1968, the American Indian Movement adopted what its Ojibwe co-founder Clyde Bellecourt called “confrontation politics” to combat police violence and discrimination and advocate for sovereignty and cultural and political autonomy. The movement became known for its high-profile actions, such as the 1972 BIA takeover in Washington, D.C., known as the Trail of Broken Treaties, and the siege at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which aimed to topple a despotic tribal government and resulted in a 71-day armed confrontation with federal troops that took the lives of two occupiers, including the Oglala Vietnam veteran Buddy Lamont, whose killer was never named.
The violent period on the Pine Indian Reservation following the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee resulted in beatings and killings, many cases of which have gone unsolved. The Oglala Sioux Tribe’s calls for a congressional investigation into this violent period known as the “reign of terror” have gone unanswered.
For decades, the media and the FBI have depicted AIM as a violence-prone, male-led organization. Its legacy of combatting Indian child removal tells a different story of American Indian women leadership who participated in all levels of the organization but also founded and ran AIM Survival Schools, such as Ojibwe AIM co-founder Pat Bellanger and Oohenumpa Lakota Madonna Thunder Hawk. AIM Survival Schools sought to reverse the genocidal project started by the federal Indian boarding school system that ripped American Indian children from their families. The schools also sought to undo the state welfare practices that had removed more than a quarter of American Indian children from their families before the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978. And the broader activism of which AIM was a part gave rise to the creation of the Department of American Indian Studies.
Leonard Peltier himself was a survivor of Indian child removal policy, being stolen away from his family when he was nine years old and sent to the Wahpeton Boarding School in North Dakota. Peltier’s story of survival was brought up during the May 11, 2022, press conference announcing the landmark study by the Department of Interior into the history and social impacts of the federal Indian boarding school system. Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo and the first Indigenous Secretary of the Interior, led the investigation and has been a longtime supporter of Peltier’s freedom.
Leonard Peltier’s return home cuts deep for Indian Country, exposing fresh and old wounds. Every generation of American Indian families has been impacted by Indian child removal, just as every generation has been affected by high levels of police violence and incarceration — harsh realities Red Power organizations like AIM have sought to ameliorate. Peltier symbolizes the historical and ongoing injustices that American Indians have experienced. He is also a symbol of hope that things can and do change. Now, Peltier can return home and be with his family.
Resources:
Nick Estes, “Free Leonard Peltier,” Jacobin, March 4, 2023: https://jacobin.com/2023/03/leonard-peltier-american-indian-movement-political-prisoner-pine-ridge-fbi
Allison Herrera and Melissa Olson, “Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier granted clemency by President Biden,” MPR News, January 20, 2025, https://www.mprnews.org/story/2025/01/19/leonard-peltier-indigenous-activist-clemency-released-by-president-biden.
Talli Nauman, “International pressure, stateside push leads to act of clemency for AIM icon Leonard Peltier,” Buffalo Fire, January 20, 2025, https://www.buffalosfire.com/international-pressure-stateside-push-leads-to-president-bidens-act-of-clemency-for-aim-icon-leonard-peltier.
“Leonard Peltier is going home!” with Nick Estes, Jean Roach, Janene Yazzie, and Rachel Dionne-Thunder, The Red Nation Podcast, January 20, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/live/59SrgdjESmc?si=C59v4c-oNcEB9ols.
“Leonard Peltier to Be Freed After Half-Century in Prison: ‘A Day of Victory for Indigenous People’,” Democracy Now!, January 21, 2025, https://www.democracynow.org/2025/1/21/leonard_peltier.