By AVA FAHEY
On Sunday, Dec. 8, President Joe Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon for his son Hunter, sparing the younger Biden of up to 25 years in prison for six felony charges and multiple misdemeanors related to gun law violations and tax evasion. President Biden had previously stated, multiple times and in no uncertain terms, that he would not pardon his son, a controversial public figure perhaps best-known for his high-profile struggles with drug addiction. Biden’s decision was unquestionably motivated by personal prejudice. Hunter Biden has never spent a night in prison, and now, he probably never will.
The same cannot be said for the longest-serving political prisoner in U.S. history, Leonard Peltier. Despite calls for clemency from public figures as diverse as Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Mother Teresa, not to mention multiple bodies of the United Nations and the original prosecutor of his case, Peltier has served almost 50 years in federal prison for a crime he maintains he did not commit. Biden has the executive power to issue a pardon for Peltier, or at the very least to commute his sentence—and yet, he has not responded to the Peltier defense committee’s impassioned pleas.
Leonard Peltier is in dangerously poor health. Despite being eligible for age and illness-related compassionate release, Peltier’s parole was again denied in July 2024. Peltier will be eligible for a parole hearing again in 2039, when he is 94, but considering his health, age, and the disastrous outcomes faced by the elderly and incarcerated, Peltier hardly has the time to spare.
Peltier, who recently marked his 80th birthday in maximum security prison, was hospitalized in October for the second time this year due to ongoing chronic health problems. Peltier has a potentially fatal heart condition, in addition to long COVID, kidney disease, Type II diabetes, degenerative joint disease, and vision loss. Each of these health conditions requires ongoing medical care, which, according to Peltier’s lawyers, the Bureau of Prisons has not provided. Peltier uses a walker, but he needs a wheelchair, which the prison will not provide. He has not been allowed to see a dentist in over 10 years. The Bureau of Prisons offered Peltier a CPAP machine for his sleep apnea, but the machine is rendered useless by the fact that Leonard’s cell has no electrical outlet to power it on.
Peltier desperately needs to be released. His initial imprisonment for political reasons was inhumane in 1976, and it grows more inhumane every year as his health continues to fail. He is an Indigenous elder and a movement elder and his continued imprisonment has profound negative effects on both his tribal communities and on the Indigenous liberation movement as a whole. Even so, Leonard Peltier’s life story, his movement work, and his immense bravery and perseverance are a guiding light for organizers and activists worldwide.
Leonard’s youth
Peltier, who is of Lakota, Dakota, and Anishinaabe ancestry, grew up on the Turtle Mountain Reservation of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa (Mikinaakwajiw-ininiwag), of which he is an enrolled member. Six-by-12-miles in area, the Turtle Mountain Reservation is all that remains of millions of acres that the U.S. government seized and coerced from the Ojibwe people. When his grandfather died, the Bureau of Indian Affairs deemed his grandmother unfit to raise Leonard and his sisters alone and forcibly removed them to the Wahpeton Indian School, where he remained from when he was nine to when he was 12. In 2021, Peltier testified to his experience: “It was hell.”
Peltier is a survivor of the boarding school system that President Biden recently formally acknowledged and “apologized” for. Biden’s apology contained no promise of reparations for relatives of the nearly 1000 children killed by the boarding school system, nor for the Indigenous elders who survived the boarding school system, nor their descendants who continue to face the ongoing negative effects of this deliberate act of cultural genocide (see the NDN Collective’s recent press release). At Wahpeton, as at other boarding schools, white teachers buzzed off Indigenous children’s hair, physically assaulted them, sprayed them with insecticide under the flimsy pretense of disease prevention, and forced them to speak English—preventing them from speaking the languages they spoke at home. The motto of the first Native boarding schools might be applied to all that followed: “Kill the Indian, Save the man.”
And yet, like many boarding school survivors, Peltier worked hard to preserve his Indigenous identity. “We spoke our language. We sang our songs. And we prayed in our languages, all in secret. In secret, behind the gym. We called ourselves the Resisters, after the famous French Resistance.” Leonard attempted, unsuccessfully, to escape; he would not leave the school until he graduated.
When Peltier returned to Turtle Mountain, the federal government was beginning the 1956 Indian Relocation Act. It was led by Dillon S. Myer, who had recently spearheaded the U.S. policy of Japanese internment. Billed as a vocational training program, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) encouraged Indigenous people to obtain vocational training for jobs that did not exist in the rural communities where the majority of Indigenous people lived.
Concurrent with a federal campaign of termination that dissolved treaties, dismantled tribal governments, and eliminated reservations, the BIA offered seemingly generous subsidies to Indigenous people for relocation to urban areas. A former BIA commissioner called the program “a one-way ticket from rural to urban poverty.” Beyond failing to lift Indigenous people out of poverty, the program represented an undeniable attempt on the part of the federal government to assimilate Indigenous people into white U.S. culture. This was not a side effect of the program: it was the goal.
Although the policies of termination and relocation were unsuccessful in attaining its full objectives of assimilation, the policies did fundamentally change Indigenous ways of life. The BIA attempted to terminate the Turtle Mountain Chippewa by ramping up police brutality (Peltier’s cousin was beaten by a BIA officer so badly she suffered a miscarriage) and refusing food to those uninterested in relocating. At 14, Peltier left for the West Coast, where he eventually became something of a community leader among urban Indigenous people. By the age of 20, Peltier was a part owner of an auto shop, the second floor of which he used as a halfway house for recovering alcoholics and ex-convicts in his community who were struggling to find work. It was here that Peltier first became involved with the American Indian Movement (AIM).
AIM
AIM began as an urban Indigenous activist group in Minneapolis, organizing urban Anishinaabe who had been displaced there by termination and relocation. Over the next few years, AIM grew in popularity, in large part thanks to several well-executed and well-publicized protest actions. In 1969, AIM members were among the participants of a takeover of Alcatraz led by the Indians of All Tribes. Alcatraz was not then a tourist destination but rather abandoned federal property. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed between the US federal government and the Arapaho, Yanktonai, Oglala, Minniconjou, and Brule nations, stipulated that all abandoned federal land would be returned to Indigenous people. According to the terms of the 1868 treaty, AIM’s Alcatraz occupation was entirely legal.
Led by UC Berkeley student organizers Richard Oakes, who was Mohawk, and LaNada Means, who is Shoshone-Bannock, the occupiers were well organized, setting up a school on the island and voting collectively on all major decisions. Over 10,000 Indigenous people visited the Alcatraz occupation over its 19 months of existence, as well as a number of white sympathizers (who were, humorously, required to register with the “Bureau of Caucasian Affairs” the occupiers created). Despite the occupation’s legality according to the preexisting treaty, the federal government progressively shut off the island’s electricity, phone lines, and water supply, and eventually removed the final protesters by force in 1971.
In the fall of 1972, AIM organized its most ambitious event to date, the Trail of Broken Treaties and Pan American Native Quest for Justice. Caravans departed from the West Coast, headed to Washington, D.C., to deliver their 20-point list of demands, including legal recognition of treaties, new treaty-making processes, the return of millions of acres of land to Indigenous nations, the repeal of the termination act, and religious freedom. Peltier was present on the Trail of Broken Treaties, serving as a part of the caravan’s security detail. Stopping at reservations along the way, the Trail of Broken Treaties grew from three initial caravans to a line of cars four miles long. They made appointments for AIM representatives to meet with the BIA, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Commerce upon their arrival. On Nov. 2, the caravans arrived in the capital, to find that all of their appointments had been cancelled without notice, and that the churches who had agreed to feed and house the protesters had reneged on their agreement. The BIA, who normally secured accommodations for Indigenous delegations to Washington, refused to help.
Around 400 protesters from as many as 250 different Indigenous nations gathered outside the BIA headquarters to demand accommodations and a meeting. With nowhere to spend the night, the group made a spontaneous decision to occupy the BIA facilities. They occupied the BIA for six days, in the process seizing hundreds of pages of classified documents related to Indigenous affairs. They received messages of support from the Irish Republican Army and the Black Panther Party, and hundreds of non-Indigenous supporters formed a human barricade around the BIA offices. Over six days, the AIM protesters and the federal government engaged in negotiations, eventually culminating with AIM agreeing to leave the BIA offices on the condition that a task force, made up of AIM leaders and Nixon aides, to consider AIM’s 20-point list of demands.
Unfortunately, the results of the task force were less than ideal. Several months later, the task force announced they would officially reject all of the 20 points. Moreover, the occupation earned AIM increased negative attention from the federal government, and marked, if not the beginning, at least the escalation of the FBI’s protracted campaign to destroy AIM by infiltration, surveillance, and extrajudicial and at times paramilitary violence against its members.
AIM, alongside myriad left groupings and Black liberation organizations, was targeted by the FBI’s mid-20th-century Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). COINTELPRO’s stated goals were to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” people and organizations that the FBI deemed “enemies of the state.” Many tactics—mostly, if not entirely, illegal—were employed so as to “neutralize” politically active persons by making them incapable of engaging in political activity. For many, that meant incarceration; virtually every AIM leader has been incarcerated in state or federal prison at one point.
Other tactics included sending derogatory and often untrue information to people’s families and comrades, intimidating them, and sending death threats. The FBI often framed up their political targets as being police informants, which isolated important political leaders from comrades they had done no wrong against and also created an environment of fear in organizations. In 2019, a former FBI agent admitted that the FBI “wanted them to kill each other, as we were in a war against AIM.”
Wounded Knee II
On Feb. 12, 1972, a group of white settlers in a South Dakota town just off the reservation abducted, sexually assaulted, and beat an Oglala elder, Raymond Yellow Thunder, to death. The killing was random, unprovoked, premeditated, and motivated by racial hatred; eyewitnesses heard the four men who were responsible talking about “busting an Indian” earlier that night. Yellow Thunder’s killers were the first white men arrested, tried, and convicted for killing an Indigenous person in South Dakota history. Only two of the four served jail time, and neither served more than five years.
Not long after Yellow Thunder’s murder, a new president was elected to the Pine Ridge Tribal Council. Dick Wilson, a former bootlegger, was deeply corrupt and placed hundreds of his friends and relatives on the tribal payroll, awarding them salaries of $15,000 when the average annual income on Pine Ridge barely cleared $800. A Catholic of partial European descent, Wilson’s politics were assimilationist, prejudiced against full-blooded Indigenous people, and openly hostile to efforts at cultural preservation from Pine Ridge traditionalists who taught and lived by the traditional Oglala ways. With funds freely given by the BIA and FBI, Wilson formed a private police force, perhaps better described as a militia, which he proudly called the GOON Squad (Guardians Of the Oglala Nation).
Wilson made an enemy of AIM when AIM attempted to host a victory celebration after the Trail of Broken Treaties on the Pine Ridge Reservation and, in response, Wilson called a state of emergency and banned AIM from gathering on the land. He removed members of the tribal council who were known to be AIM sympathizers, even respected elders. Moreover, he called for outside support from U.S. marshals, effectively militarizing the reservation. The GOONs openly antagonized and intimidated AIM sympathizers and Oglala traditionalists by beating them, shooting at them, and burning down their homes.
Tensions rose further when on Jan. 21, 1973, Wesley Bad Heart Bull, an Oglala man, was stabbed to death by a white man named Darld Schmitz, who was charged only with involuntary manslaughter. Convincing evidence exists that the killing was deliberate, unprovoked, premeditated, and motivated by racial hatred: Schmitz was heard earlier that night stating that he was “going to kill him an Indian.”
Sarah Bad Heart Bull, Wesley’s mother, reached out to AIM to ask for their help in responding to the outrageously lenient charge. AIM organized a caravan of Indigenous activists to travel to the Custer County courthouse, where Schmitz was being tried, to demand first-degree murder charges. About 200 people showed up in the middle of a blizzard on Feb. 6, 1973.
Despite the fact that it was a public building, only five AIM representatives were allowed inside to plead their case. They failed. The AIM representatives returned to the crowd waiting outside to report that the county would not budge, whereupon Sarah Bad Heart Bull began verbally accosting a state trooper. The state trooper shoved Sarah down the stairs of the county courthouse, and the crowd erupted. Law enforcement turned smoke bombs, tear gas, and firehoses on the crowd of protesters. In response, the Indigenous protesters fought back against police brutality, throwing Molotov cocktails and attacking the infrastructure, eventually burning down the local chamber of commerce. In an absurd miscarriage of justice, 37 Oglala and Indigenous AIM activists were arrested and served sentences for charges related to the spontaneous courthouse uprising. Sarah Bad Heart Bull, Wesley’s mother, served six months on riot charges. Her son’s killer was acquitted by an all-white jury.
After the courthouse uprising, the federal government intensified its covert assault on AIM and Indigenous activists in Pine Ridge. They stationed 80 U.S. marshals, 50 BIA officials, and multiple FBI agents on Pine Ridge, working alongside Wilson’s GOONs. In response to the militarization of their reservation, and after failed efforts by the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization to impeach Dick Wilson, a number of Oglala contacted AIM for help in fighting back. Utilizing the occupation tactics that AIM had come to be known for, on Feb. 27, 1973, a group of approximately 200 Oglala and AIM activists took over Wounded Knee, the same site where, on Dec. 29,1890, the U.S. Army slaughtered nearly 300 unarmed Miniconjou and Hunkpapa Lakota.
Were it not for the disproportionate repressive tactics used by the federal government, the events at Wounded Knee may not have escalated into the 71-day occupation and standoff that occurred. Said Madonna Thunder Hawk, an Oohenumpa Lakota woman and AIM medic at Wounded Knee, “Our plan wasn’t to have a stand-off with the Feds. We were asked to come to the Pine Ridge community gathering to hear the people’s grievances. We were surrounded at Wounded Knee by the Feds.”
Surrounded they were. In less than a day, the federal government set up roadblocks preventing food and supplies from reaching the activists. Free speech was restricted as journalists were banned from entering Wounded Knee. Over the next two and a half months, federal forces fired over 130,000 rounds of ammunition.
AIM and Oglala activists entered negotiations with the White House. They demanded the abolition of the present tribal council headed by the tyrannical Wilson and the reinstitution of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and traditional Oglala Lakota government. On March 11, they declared the Oglala nation’s independence as a sovereign nation. Over the 71 days, AIM and the federal government traded fire, leading to the paralysis of U.S. Marshal Lloyd Grimm and the deaths of Frank Clearwater (Cherokee) and Lawrence “Buddy” Lamont (Oglala). Ray Robinson, a Black civil rights activist who joined the occupation, disappeared and was later declared legally dead.
After the death of Lamont, who was shot through the heart after being forced from his bunker by tear gas, tribal elders called for an end to the occupation. On May 5, 1973, the sides reached an agreement to disengage and three days later, on May 8, AIM members and Oglala evacuated Wounded Knee.
Standoff
The ensuing FBI campaign against AIM activists and sympathizers on Pine Ridge over next three years would be referred to as a “Reign of Terror.” Funded by the federal government, Wilson’s GOON squad engaged in a protracted campaign of violence against anybody thought to be an AIM supporter. At least 64 Oglala people and AIM organizers were murdered in cases that have never been formally solved, with some estimates counting the total number of dead at 300—bringing the annual murder rate on Pine Ridge to over 17 times the national average. Hundreds more were brutally beaten and harassed.
Peltier, along with about a dozen other AIM activists, returned to the reservation to offer protection to traditionalist Oglala and AIM sympathizers. They set up camp on the Jumping Bull ranch, inhabited mostly by families, children, and elders who lived by traditional Oglala ways.
On June 25, 1975, FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams arrived at Pine Ridge in search of a 19-year-old named Jimmy Eagle, whom they suspected of stealing a pair of cowboy boots. The residents told Coler and Williams they had not seen Eagle. The next day, the agents returned. In plainclothes and in an unmarked car, they drove onto the Jumping Bull ranch in pursuit of Eagle.
A woman whose children were playing outside heard what she thought were fireworks, and looked outside to see two white strangers removing gun cases from the trunk of their car. She screamed out, and a shootout ensued between the FBI agents and Jumping Bull residents defending themselves and their families. The FBI agents called for backup, and within minutes, Jumping Bull Ranch was surrounded by SWAT teams, FBI agents, BIA police, and GOONs.
With this backup, the FBI agents went from house to house, breaking down doors, ransacking personal belongings, and threatening Jumping Bull residents with automatic weapons. Some Oglala and AIM activists returned fire. When the smoke cleared, Agents Coler and Williams lay dead, shot in the head at point-blank range. Coeur d’Alene AIM activist Joseph Stuntz Killsright, too, was shot in the head at point-blank range. His death has never been investigated.
The rest of the AIM activists barely escaped with their lives, and most of them went underground. Peltier fled to Canada, recognizing he had no chance at a fair trial. With Peltier fleeing, the FBI launched one of their most extensive manhunts to date.
No fair trial
The FBI investigation into Coler’s and Williams’ deaths was unconstitutional from its outset; a U.S. Civil Rights Commission report revealed that searches were conducted without warrants and numerous individuals were detained without cause for questioning. Four AIM leaders were indicted for the deaths of the federal agents: Alongside Peltier, there was Dino Butler, Bob Robideau, and Jimmy Eagle. At Butler and Robideau’s trial, the jury found that the two were justified in returning fire, considering not only the unprovoked FBI gunfire that day on Jumping Bull but also the larger atmosphere of the Pine Ridge Reign of Terror that had targeted AIM activists for the past three years. They were found innocent.
Enraged, the FBI dropped charges against Eagle so that, according to their own memos, “the full prosecutive weight of the federal government could be directed against Leonard Peltier.” The effort expended on these two agents’ murders stands in stark comparison to the complete lack of investigation into the dozens of murders under the Reign of Terror.
Peltier fled to Canada. The FBI apprehended and extradited him with affidavits from an alleged former girlfriend, Myrtle Poor Bear, stating she had witnessed him shooting the agents. But not only was Poor Bear not present at the shootout, she had never met Peltier in her life. Poor Bear later recanted and testified that the FBI coerced her affidavits by threatening to kill her and her family. They showed her postmortem pictures of Anna Mae Aquash, a murdered Mi’kmaq AIM activist, and implied that Poor Bear might suffer a similar fate if she would not testify.
Peltier was given a different judge than Butler and Robideau, one who made rulings against Peltier’s defense team. Myrtle Poor Bear was banned from testifying about the coercion of her affidavit. Three other young Indigenous people were coerced into testifying against Peltier after being terrorized by FBI agents. Testimony about the Pine Ridge reign of terror was restricted. Ballistics reports that indicated Peltier’s guilt were included in the trial, while conflicting ballistics reports that indicated his innocence were exclude. Not one witness was able to testify that they saw Peltier kill the two agents.
In pre-trial, one juror openly admitted that she was “so prejudiced against Indians,” and yet, she was still placed on the jury by Peltier’s incompetent defense. The jury, surrounded by U.S. Marshals who had convinced them that AIM was a threat to their safety, convicted Peltier for two life sentences.
On appeal, the appellate court was forced to change its theory that Peltier had personally shot and killed the agents, due to an overwhelming lack of evidence. Instead, they theorized that Peltier had aided and abetted their killers. When asked whom Peltier aided and abetted, prosecutor Lynn Crooks stated, “Perhaps aiding and abetting himself.” One cannot aid and abet oneself in a crime, and neither could Peltier have aided and abetted Butler and Robideau, who were found not guilty. Peltier was, officially, found guilty of murder because he was an Indigenous person present with a gun on Pine Ridge on June 26, 1975.
The FBI has successfully opposed every one of Peltier’s attempts at clemency or parole. In 2000, President Bill Clinton announced he would consider pardoning Peltier before leaving office. Hundreds of federal agents marched in front of the White House to oppose Peltier’s release. The governor of South Dakota, Bill Janklow, made a private visit to the White House to beg Clinton not to pardon Peltier. (In 1983, Janklow unsuccessfully sued Peter Matthiessen, author of “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,” the definitive book on Peltier’s case, for $24 million. Janklow’s suit took issue with Matthiessen’s reporting of credible rape allegations against Janklow by Jancita Eagle Deer, a young Brulé Lakota woman who died mysteriously in 1975, not long after she had testified.)
A former FBI agent who worked on Peltier’s case has gone on public record to state that the federal agency has been motivated by personal vendetta to prevent Peltier’s release for decades now. “Retribution seems to have emerged as the primary if not sole reason for continuing … an emotion-driven ‘FBI Family’ vendetta.”
Life as a political prisoner
In his years in prison, Peltier has remained a productive organizer for Indigenous rights in the U.S. He has donated many of his paintings to human rights organizations for charitable auctions. He established a scholarship program for Indigenous students at NYU law school. He has helped to create a reservation health-care delivery system and a reservation vocational training program. In 1999, he wrote a book, titled “Prison Writings: My Life is My Sundance.” In 2004, he ran for U.S. president as the candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party, and in 2020, he ran for vice-president as the candidate of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
Peltier’s family has suffered tremendously from their relative’s incarceration. Chauncey Peltier, Leonard’s son, was only 10 when Leonard was convicted. He describes his family’s perennial struggles to pay his father’s legal bills and make up for lost income he would have been earning for their family. Peltier’s daughter, Marquetta Shields-Peltier, describes how Peltier’s imprisonment has set their family adrift. “Because of the situation, we grew apart from each other, not knowing each other,” she explained. “It just doesn’t feel like it’s a family to me. That had an impact on my mental health.”
Peltier spends most of his time in solitary confinement. He is incarcerated in USP Coleman I, located inside FCC Coleman. FCC Coleman is known as exceptionally repressive and authoritarian even within the already repressive and authoritarian federal prison system. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, FCC Coleman has been in a state of constant lockdown. During lockdown periods, prisoners are not allowed recreation and are forced to spend 24 hours a day in isolation in their cell.
Peltier told Truthout that “being in such a small space at my age is not … pleasant to have to go through. It is like torture. Your body gets to hurting from lack of exercise and movement.” He has not been allowed regular meetings with his legal counsel. Peltier is a talented painter but has not been allowed access to his painting materials for several months now. Peltier has maintained his innocence for the entire length of his conviction. He and his defense committee ask for total clemency in his case.
Said Peltier in a public statement in February 2024: “Time has become so twisted with these lockdowns that night blurs into day, a miasma of time that has no sense to it. All hours are the small hours of the night. Life itself is suspended. We wait for a brief glimpse of what life looks like. We exist in cold, filthy cells, and we wait. The voices of those murdered on Pine Ridge Reservation are a constant echo in my mind.”
Release all political prisoners!
Complete self-determination for Indigenous nations! Reparations for settler-colonial oppression!
Abolish the police!
LAND BACK!
You can write to Leonard Peltier here:
LEONARD PELTIER #89637-132
USP COLEMAN I
P.O. BOX 1033
COLEMAN, FL 33521
Sources
Click to access 2021-07-28-Clemency-Petition-FINAL.pdf
• https://www.sdhspress.com/journal/south-dakota-history-29-3/spontaneous-combustion-prelude-to-wounded-knee-1973/vol-29-no-3-spontaneous-combustion.pdf
• https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/un-body-finds-activists-detention-arbitrary-case-filed-lowenstein-clinic#:~:text=U.N.-,Body%20Finds%20Activist’s%20Detention%20%E2%80%9CArbitrary%E2%80%9D%20in%20Case%20Filed%20by%20Lowenstein,the%20U.S.%20government%20since%201977.
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• https://unlhistory.unl.edu/exhibits/show/unl-aim/unl-aim
• https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/11/20/the-occupation-of-alcatraz-was-a-victory-for-Indigenous-people
• https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/alcatraz-occupation/
• https://aadl.org/aa_sun_19721201_p015-trail_of_broken_treaties
• https://boundarystones.weta.org/2021/10/29/remembering-american-indian-movements-occupation-bureau-indian-affairs
• https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/trail-of-broken-treaties.htm
• https://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/home/background/cointelpro/
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