Earlier this year, it seemed as though the final chapter of Leonard Peltier’s story had been written. The eighty-year-old is serving two consecutive life sentences for the 1975 killing of two F.B.I. agents, Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, which he says he didn’t commit. Having exhausted legal channels for appeal, and been denied parole, it appeared that he would die in prison. But, during the final moments of Joe Biden’s Presidential Administration, Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence to home confinement. Peltier is now home, at the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, in North Dakota.
When I called him after he got there, one of the first things he said to me was, “We were at war.” That war had already begun when Peltier was a child. In 1953, when Peltier was nine, Congress passed a bill to terminate his tribe, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. The government’s actions were part of an attempt to end the trust status of tribal lands and the protections that came with it. The Red Power Movement, which advocated American Indian political and cultural autonomy, arose to reverse this agenda, and activists such as Peltier came to see themselves as engaged in a twentieth-century battle akin to the one their ancestors staged in the nineteenth century against the tide of western expansion.
In 1972, Peltier joined the American Indian Movement, among the more confrontational Red Power groups, which had been founded, a few years before, by Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, and others. That fall, AIM helped organize a cross-country caravan called the Trail of Broken Treaties, which ended in the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters, in Washington, D.C., demanding the repeal of termination legislation and renewing federal treaty relations with tribes. AIM brought together fellow-travellers from different tribes who shared similar life stories and who resolved to turn back the existential threats facing tribal life. Many had been taught to feel shame in Native culture and language at Indian boarding schools; others had been hardened by prison stints or by the harsh realities of urban poverty. All were trying to create meaning out of a life that seemed robbed from them. That meant survival by any means, and, as it had for their ancestors, that sometimes meant picking up a gun.
After the Trail of Broken Treaties, the F.B.I. also adopted tactics of war in its increased efforts against AIM. In 1973, the federal government conducted a seventy-one-day siege against hundreds of AIM members and dissident Oglalas who had holed up at Wounded Knee, the infamous massacre site on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, to protest a despotic tribal government led by a man named Dick Wilson. The government sent hundreds of F.B.I. agents, U.S. marshals, and others to the Wounded Knee trenches, armed with military equipment including armored personnel carriers and tear gas. Their opponents were armed mostly with hunting rifles. Federal forces killed two men during the siege, the first of many AIM deaths to come. Peltier, meanwhile, was sitting in a Milwaukee jail, facing a charge of attempted murder that stemmed from a different protest. He was later acquitted.
Violence only increased on the reservation in the wake of the occupation. Dick Wilson set his “GOON squad”—a private militia that he dubbed the Guardians of the Oglala Nation—to exact revenge on AIM and its supporters, and AIM retaliated. There were beatings and murders during what was dubbed the Reign of Terror. The increased presence of the F.B.I. in Pine Ridge didn’t help matters. By the spring of 1975, Peltier had set up camp on the reservation at Oglala, offering protection to elders. A confidential F.B.I. memo described the Bureau’s new function as a “paramilitary law enforcement operation in Indian Country.” The atmosphere in Pine Ridge was explosive.
On June 26, 1975, Agents Williams and Coler were at the reservation to serve warrants for robbery and assault, according to the F.B.I., when a shoot-out ensued. Peltier was arrested in Canada. His co-defendants, Bob Robideau and Dino Butler, were arrested in the U.S., tried first, and acquitted on the grounds of self-defense after their attorneys presented evidence of the volatile conditions on the reservation and the aggressive actions of the F.B.I. When Peltier was tried separately, several months later, a judge barred his defense from presenting similar evidence to a less sympathetic venue. An all-white jury convicted him of two counts of murder.
A few months after the shoot-out, another prominent member of AIM, Anna Mae Aquash, disappeared, and was later found dead. For years, rumors circulated that she had been murdered by other members of the group who suspected that she was an informant. Peltier was publicly linked to her killing, but he has denied any involvement and has never been charged. Others suspected an F.B.I. coverup. A confidential report detailed the Bureau’s likely knowledge of the murder months before the discovery of Aquash’s body.
Peltier spent the next five decades in federal prison, where he claims that jailhouse informants and would-be assassins presented new dangers. On the outside, his supporters raised his profile as a political prisoner, and the F.B.I. pushed back. In 2000, hundreds of agents marched in front of the White House, demanding that President Bill Clinton not grant Peltier clemency. In the two-thousands, two former AIM members were convicted of Anna Mae Aquash’s murder, although an alleged conspirator, Theda Nelson Clarke, was not indicted, and the trials seemed to produce more questions than answers.
Nonetheless, there continued to be overwhelming support for Peltier’s freedom in Indian Country, especially in the Pine Ridge reservation, where memories of the violence over a half century ago still feel fresh. The Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, in 2016, catalyzed a new era of Native activism, and, in recent years, young Native activists took up Peltier’s campaign. His freedom was seen as part of a broader effort to address destructive federal policies, including the Indian boarding-school system, which Peltier was subjected to. When he crossed the reservation line this February, it was as though a prisoner of the country’s longest war had finally returned home.
We spoke, via Zoom, for several hours in the spring. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you start by introducing yourself?
My father was a French Chippewa Cree from Turtle Mountain. And my mother was Lakota and Chippewa from Spirit Lake. I was raised basically here on Turtle Mountain and what was called Fort Totten, in the past, but the real name, today, is Spirit Lake. I was raised in both Nations. And we’re Nations, we’re not reservations any longer. We have opened the doors to freedom as much as we can, but we still have a ways to go.
You’ve spent five decades behind bars. Did you expect President Biden to release you?
No. I honestly believed that they were just delaying, and I was going to die in prison. Some people told him, if he didn’t do something, it would be political suicide for the Democratic Party, because the Natives are going to move away from him. But that’s not the real reason he let me go—they were looking for a way to let me go. So I told Holly [Cook Macarro, a lobbyist and activist], “Ask him for clemency and ask him for home confinement.” That’s how we got home confinement.
