After 49 years and 11 months, Leonard Peltier will finally leave prison. Peltier had his life sentence commuted by outgoing-U.S. President Joe Biden on January 20, hours before Donald Trump was sworn in. Peltier, the longest-held political prisoner in the United States is 80 years old and suffers from multiple, severe health ailments due to his nearly half-a-century of incarceration. Peltier will spend his remaining days in home confinement, though he was not pardoned for the crimes which he has insisted for over 50 years he did not commit.
The news of the commutation of his sentence was widely celebrated as a victory for those who have fought for decades for Peltier’s release.
“It’s finally over—I’m going home…I want to show the world I’m a good person with a good heart. I want to help the people, just like my grandmother taught me,” Leonard Peltier said in a statement from the NDN Collective. In recent years, the NDN Collective has been arduously lobbying and organizing to demand Peltier’s release.
The NDN Collective’s founder Nick Tilsen stated today,
Leonard Peltier’s commutation today is the result of 50 years of intergenerational resistance, organizing, and advocacy…Leonard Peltier’s liberation is our liberation—and while home confinement is not complete freedom, we will honor him by bringing him back to his homelands to live out the rest of his days surrounded by loved ones, healing, and reconnecting with his land and culture.
Tilsen added,
Let Leonard’s freedom be a reminder that the entire so-called United States is built on the stolen lands of Indigenous people—and that Indigenous people have successfully resisted every attempt to oppress, silence, and colonize us…The commutation granted to Leonard Peltier is a symbol of our collective strength—and our resistance will never stop.
“Leonard has persisted, has resisted, he has remained strong in his beliefs as a leader of Native people even in prison,” Gloria La Riva, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation told Peoples Dispatch. “Many many thousands of people have also given their support to his cause, from Nelson Mandela, to the president of Ireland, to Fidel Castro, and many others who called for a reversal of this great injustice.” La Riva, who has been part of the struggle to free Peltier for decades recounts that during the visits she had with him in prison,
each time he asks how other people are doing, how the people of Venezuela and Cuba are doing. He is so anxious to come home, to care for his great grandchildren, his grandchildren, his children.
The U.S. punishes political activists. The U.S. keeps Black, Native, Latino, and white political prisoners for decades, from 40 and 50 to beyond. We celebrate, we salute Leonard, we salute all the people who fought for him.
Who is Leonard Peltier?
Born in 1944, Leonard Peltier is an Indigenous activist from the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe and is Anishanaabe and Dakota. In the 1970s, he began organizing in the American Indian Movement (AIM) which waged militant campaigns demanding that the U.S. government respect Indigenous people’s human rights and land rights.
In 1973, AIM activists had organized an occupation of Wounded Knee in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in protest of the corrupt leadership of Oglala Lakota Sioux chairman Dick Wilson and discriminatory policies from the federal government. The occupation lasted 71 days and was followed by a three-year retaliatory “reign of terror” against AIM activists and tribal members opposed to Wilson. These violent attacks and murders, 60 according to the Free Leonard campaign, were carried out by FBI-sponsored vigilantes led by Wilson, the Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOONs).
In 1975, in the midst of the “reign of terror”, two FBI agents in unmarked cars stormed the Jumping Bull Ranch on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation allegedly looking for a suspect in a robbery. Tensions escalated and a shoot-out ensued, with allegedly 150 agents and GOONs surrounding the ranch where Peltier and other AIM members were staying. Two FBI agents were killed as well as one Native American man, Joseph Stuntz.
Peltier and several others from AIM were accused of killing the FBI agents, and in 1977, Peltier was convicted and given two consecutive life sentences for the crime, which he insists to this day he did not commit. The Indigenous movement as well as the movement for the freedom of U.S. political prisoners have maintained that Peltier’s conviction was a frame-up to repress Peltier’s leadership in the movement for Indigenous liberation.
FBI documents, released after Peltier’s sentencing, revealed the FBI’s long-term agenda against the Indigenous movement in the U.S., including by suppressing the activities of AIM. According to Kevin Sharp, a member of Peltier’s defense team, the Bureau’s strategy was to “continually harass and arrest and charge” AIM leaders so that they “can’t protest their own treatment.” An internal FBI memo also revealed a push to concentrate all resources on convicting Peltier, after his co-defendants had been acquitted. Peltier’s trial itself was rife with misconduct.
In a statement released in February 2023 to mark the 48th anniversary of his unjust incarceration, Peltier wrote,
When I speak, sometimes I think I may sound a bit too sensitive, but my love for my people and the love supporters have shown me over the years is what keeps me alive. I don’t read your letters with my intellect. I read them with my heart.
Peltier’s family and supporters, and people of conscience across the world anxiously await for Peltier’s return home.