Leonard Peltier. Photo: The Red Nation.
By The Red Nation – Jan 20, 2025
After a half-century of unjust incarceration, Leonard Peltier is finally going home!
“It’s finally over–I’m going home,” said Peltier in response to the news. “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.”
For decades, the now elder Dakota and Ojibwe member of the American Indian Movement represented a powerful symbol for millions. His imprisonment has been viewed as collective punishment against generations of Indigenous people who fought for liberation, from the Red Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the Water Protector Movement that fought against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. Indigenous peoples have paid in blood to protect their lands, waters, and livelihoods against the onslaught of genocidal settler colonialism. American Indians today face some of the highest rates of imprisonment and police violence of any group. Leonard Peltier’s five decades of unjust imprisonment is an indictment and stain on the so-called “American criminal justice system.”
Like many Native people, Leonard Peltier is also a survivor of the genocidal federal Indian boarding school system, which ripped him away from his family and homeland when he was just a child. Only in the last couple of years has the United States recognized and formally apologized for centuries of atrocities it committed against Indigenous children. Countless horrors inflicted upon Indigenous youth have yet to be fully understood and rectified as their graves continue to be discovered.
In the darkest hours, when the corporate media was silent on Leonard Peltier and the ruling parties chose to let him suffer behind bars, the humble people of the Oglala Lakota Oyate and the Indigenous grassroots movements kept the fire of liberation alive. The real seats of power in Indian Country kept the light on for Leonard Peltier, knowing they’d never truly be free until their elder and veteran warrior returned to them.
The FBI created the image of him as a ruthless killer. As with all liberation movements, the colonizers try to turn freedom fighters into criminals to justify their own criminal behavior towards Indigenous people. Today, the FBI’s dirty war against the American Indian Movement and the Oglala people has gone unpunished. The Oglala Sioux Tribe has issued multiple calls to hold the FBI accountable for its criminal acts on their reservation through congressional investigations. Like calls for Peltier’s freedom, those demands were ignored.
Instead, Leonard Peltier paid the price for the FBI’s misdeeds. His only crime was defending his people. For that, he was robbed of his freedom and dignity. He was ripped away again from his family. The torturous conditions of the U.S. prison system took his health and deprived him of his right to access his spiritual ceremonies. Despite these terrible circumstances, Leonard produced art from his cell since 1985 and donated his paintings to raise money for his defense efforts, showing how he has maintained his innocence and dedicated his time behind bars to express artistically the steadfastness of the Indigenous people’s liberation struggles.
Leonard Peltier was one of the longest-held political prisoners in the United States and was denied parole in July 2024, what some called a de facto death sentence. Executive clemency was finally granted in the last minutes of the Biden presidency. Democrats and Republicans both let Leonard languish in prison and neither of those parties deserve praise. Even now, they refuse to pardon Peltier, granting him a commutation to fulfill the remaining time of his life sentence in home confinement instead of full freedom. Letting him return home after five decades of torture is not a win that Biden or his party get to claim. If they want to take any sort of responsibility, then let them be responsible for upholding the system that put and kept him there.
All the credit for this victory goes to those warriors who voted with their feet—the ones whose spirits are not content living solely within a ballot box and took direct action through multiple administrations. This is our people’s victory!
The news of Leonard Peltier’s homecoming comes at the same time as the release of Palestinian political prisoners in the West Bank, as Gazans make their way back to northern Gaza, and on the morning after the ceasefire agreement halting a genocidal war. Across the world, Indigenous people are rejoicing as their warriors return to the people!
In the spirit of Crazy Horse, Leonard Peltier, Joe Stuntz, and all the warriors for our people!
