‘We’re In Hazard’: Leonard Peltier Has A Warning About Trump

BELCOURT, N.D. — After dwelling in a windowless, concrete field for almost 50 years, Leonard Peltier is discovering the little joys that include being in a two-bedroom home of his personal.

He can see the solar. He has a fridge, and a TV with extra channels than he can rely. He has his now-cherished recliner, the flowery sort that lays you all the way in which again and, with some navigating on a distant management, pushes you up and proper out of the seat. It’s the place Peltier, who simply turned 81, is content material to spend most of his days, nestled in with a fleece blanket as a house well being aide brings him rounds of espresso.

“Trying to look for another word, but I can’t find any, so I’ll go with the same one: awesome,” stated Peltier, a time period he used repeatedly to explain his life over the previous seven months.

Till January, Peltier was the longest-serving political prisoner in America. An activist for Indigenous rights, he was convicted in 1977 of murdering two FBI brokers, which he has at all times denied doing. In actual fact, there was by no means proof Peltier killed anybody. And as he sat in jail for all these years — his story changing into the topic of numerous books and movies and highschool assignments, the injustice of his case triggering calls for for his launch by worldwide human rights leaders, authorized specialists, politicians, Indigenous leaders and celebrities — Peltier got here to represent one thing a lot greater than himself.

Between his early years of trauma in an Indian boarding college, his years of activism with the American Indian Motion and the previous 5 a long time spent behind bars, Peltier, for a lot of, grew to become the embodiment of so lots of the injustices Native People and tribes have confronted by the hands of the U.S. authorities. And the truth that he survived all of it, with a resolute perspective of resistance, has made some hail Peltier as a hero.

However not everybody. As a lot as there had been political will to launch him, there had additionally been political requires him to remain incarcerated for the remainder of his life. Sitting in his cell early this 12 months, after a long time of U.S. presidents in each events passing him over for clemency, Peltier didn’t assume President Joe Biden would let him go residence, both.

“I had already given up,” he stated in an intensive interview with HuffPost at his residence. “So I went and laid on my bunk, and I was thinking, ‘Well? This is where I die, I guess.’ Because I wasn’t getting the medical attention I needed. And I was really feeling sick and weak, and I figured, well? This is it. Because I’m gonna die here.”

However a close-by inmate who was listening to his radio heard the information of Biden’s clemency announcement, and shouted from down the corridor, “You got it! You got it, Leonard!” A month later, he was strolling out of his Florida jail and boarding a personal airplane residence.

Peltier retains Biden’s clemency order framed and prominently on show in his front room. However he doesn’t assume the president freed him out of mercy or a way of justice. He thinks Biden caved to stress from influential Democrats and Indigenous leaders, together with his personal inside secretary, Deb Haaland, to let him go residence.

“I don’t think he did it because he loved me or anything,” Peltier stated, shrugging. “I think it was because it would have been bad politics. … I really didn’t expect anything from him.”

Quite a bit has modified since Peltier went to jail in 1976. He’s primarily been in a time capsule for 50 years, and is taking part in catch-up to all of the advances in expertise he’s missed. He’s talked to Alexa. He can’t imagine how savvy iPhones are, after years of utilizing jail pay telephones. Trendy vehicles are particularly wild to Peltier, contemplating most individuals he knew didn’t even have vehicles when he was rising up — and a few have been nonetheless utilizing horses and wagons.

“I can’t believe it,” he stated. “I mean, goddamn, some got everything in them.”

However some issues haven’t modified in any respect. His relentless deal with combating the U.S. authorities’s efforts to take civil and authorized rights away from Indigenous folks and tribes, and lifting up the well being and well-being of Native communities, is simply as agency as when he went into jail. Within the Nineteen Sixties, he co-owned an auto store in Seattle that used the higher stage as a midway home for Indigenous folks combating alcohol habit. In the present day, Peltier is keen to work with Native youth to stem drug and alcohol abuse.

His activism with the American Indian Motion within the early Nineteen Seventies was largely targeted on stopping police brutality and defending tribal sovereignty, or the inherent rights of federally acknowledged tribes to manipulate themselves, unbiased of the U.S. authorities. Tribes entered into a whole bunch of treaties with the federal government between 1778 and 1871, and so they stay the authorized framework during which tribes function at this time. Typically, these treaties concerned exchanging tribal land for guarantees of government-provided well being care and training.

However the U.S. authorities has an extended historical past of breaking its guarantees on its treaties with tribes. And looking out in the meanwhile we’re in, Peltier may be very involved.

“We’re still in danger,” he stated. “[President Donald] Trump is talking about our treaties [being] too old, and they should be abolished and everything like this. If our treaties are abolished, that means us, as a race, have been abolished completely. We don’t exist no more.”

Peltier didn’t specify what treaties he was speaking about, however Trump has taken actions this 12 months that undermine tribal sovereignty and treaty rights. In June, he withdrew the U.S. from a 2023 settlement with tribes to revive fish populations within the Columbia River. In April, his administration unsuccessfully tried to problem birthright citizenship by citing a Nineteenth-century authorized precedent that excluded some Native People from birthright citizenship. His sweeping cuts to federal spending might have violated treaty rights, too.

“Right now, this is the only thing that we have that’s keeping us recognized as a sovereign people, as a sovereign nation,” Peltier warned. “So, we’re in danger. Nothing has changed there. We’re organizing.”

Organizing has modified too, although. In contrast to his days with AIM, when Peltier and his allies have been actually within the streets combating again in opposition to police brutality and racism, at this time’s social justice motion features a huge community of native, state and nationwide teams demanding motion and combating for systemic adjustments for Native folks and tribes. The Nationwide Congress of American Indians speaks for a whole bunch of tribal governments. The Native American Rights Fund supplies authorized assist to tribes and folks. Grassroots Indigenous-led teams like NDN Collective and Native Organizers Alliance are always organizing on points like voting rights and environmental protections.

Regardless of Trump’s present efforts to wipe out variety initiatives in America, the nation has shifted through the years, culturally and politically, in help of lifting up Native communities and folks. Indigenous folks aren’t remoted of their combat for social justice; they’ve been welcomed into broader advocacy efforts by organizations throughout the nation targeted on strengthening civil rights for Black, brown and LGBTQ+ folks.

Biden centered his administration on supporting Native folks and tribes. He prioritized an intensive evaluate of the U.S. authorities’s ugly historical past of Indian boarding faculties. He took significant actions to guard sacred Indigenous websites and cultural assets, and to handle the disaster of lacking and murdered Indigenous ladies. He canceled the Keystone XL oil pipeline, a serious win for tribes and environmentalists, and stuffed his administration with high-level Indigenous employees, not the least of whom was Haaland.

Peltier stated he’s impressed with how refined social justice teams have turn out to be. The power behind them, he stated, provides him hope for the following era of activists.

“We’re more unified than we [were] when I left,” he stated. “I’m reorganizing the American Indian Movement, from ‘American Indian’ to ‘American Indigenous.’ … We’re getting a lot of good responses. People want to be part of it. All over the country.”

It was solely on his flight residence in February that Peltier, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, realized his supporters had purchased him a home on his reservation.

Leaders of NDN Collective, a few of whom joined Peltier on his journey residence, had spent months amassing cash from supporters nationwide to assist him get arrange. Some folks may solely chip in $5; others gave 1000’s of {dollars}. Additionally they purchased him a automotive, so his family and friends — Peltier has restricted imaginative and prescient — can drive him across the group.

Peltier stated he needed to cry when he realized what his supporters had carried out for him, however he “held it all back” as a result of he needed to look powerful.

“I’m supposed to be a warrior, supposed to be a sun dancer, so you can’t be crying in public,” he stated, referring to the Solar Dance spiritual ceremony practiced in Native cultures within the Nice Plains area. “Trying to be a traditionalist, you know? We believe that as warriors, sundance warriors, we don’t believe in crying like a baby.”

He’s taken journeys across the group, visiting his previous childhood residence and attending a current powwow, the place native Indigenous residents danced and celebrated his return. However Peltier appears most blissful when he’s holding courtroom from his recliner. His favourite factor to do is “just bullshitting like this,” he stated, and that’s what he’s been doing for months, internet hosting a gentle stream of holiday makers at his home, lots of whom are strangers who traveled to this distant city 20 miles south of the Canadian border to deliver him presents and effectively needs.

His home, which sits on the finish of a nondescript filth highway, feels extra like a museum than a personal residence. Each inch of wall house in his front room is roofed with vibrant, elaborate work made by Peltier during the last 50 years, earlier than his eyes went unhealthy. Rows of colourful beaded necklaces cling from the partitions, a backdrop for one apparently very efficient strip of fly tape dangling from the ceiling. Throughout the room from his recliner, a big bookshelf is overflowing with feathers, painted animal skulls, sage sticks, pale pictures of ancestors and pals, and unopened packets of Gambler pipe tobacco.

He has much more of his work on show in his bed room — he retains dozens of others locked up in safes — along with dream catchers and a poster from Haaland’s 2025 marketing campaign for New Mexico governor. A chunk of paper is taped to his bed room door with a printed message: “DO NOT ENTER.” Slightly below it, in tiny letters, it reads, “UNLESS INVITED.”

Peltier can get round his home with a cane or a bit of help from somebody, however most of what he wants is inside arm’s attain from his favourite chair. His cellphone sits on a small desk to his left, propped up for straightforward entry to take all of the calls coming in at a jarringly loud decibel stage. To his proper, a small desk holds an array of things he may want at any given second: fly swatters, the TV distant management, a bottle of hand sanitizer and three pairs of sun shades. A pile of unopened letters and postcards additionally awaits his consideration right here.

He’s by no means alone. He has two residence well being aides who alternate between 12-hour shifts at his home. Outdated pals drop by. Managing all of the guests and media requests for interviews has been so overwhelming that Peltier’s family has had a tough time getting within the door.

“My children. My grandchildren. Too many people,” he stated. “But you can’t say no to them. They helped get me out of prison. They fought for me.”

The U.S. authorities put Peltier in jail after convicting him for murdering two FBI brokers throughout a 1975 shoot-out on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. However it bought caught threatening and coercing witnesses to lie underneath oath, excluding proof essential to Peltier’s protection and hiding exculpatory proof with a purpose to do it. The truth was the FBI and U.S. Lawyer’s Workplace desperately wanted responsible somebody for the high-profile deaths of the 2 brokers, and all of Peltier’s different co-defendants had been acquitted primarily based on self-defense. There was no person left responsible — besides Peltier.

Extremely, the U.S. authorities later admitted it by no means did work out who shot these brokers. The U.S. lawyer who initially prosecuted Peltier in 1977, Lynn Crooks, instructed the eighth Circuit Court docket of Appeals in 1985, “We don’t know who killed the agents or what actual participation [Peltier] may have had.” A federal choose on that courtroom, Gerald Heaney, later stated the FBI deserved equal blame for the shoot-out that day and known as for clemency for Peltier.

One other U.S. lawyer who had beforehand helped put Peltier in jail, James Reynolds, later urged his launch and conceded, “We were not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense on the Pine Ridge Reservation.”

The million-dollar query for many years was at all times, why is that this particular person nonetheless in jail, after all of the misconduct that was revealed in his case and regardless of so many pleas for his freedom, from highly effective voices starting from Nelson Mandela to Mom Teresa to Pope Francis? As Peltier’s former lawyer Kevin Sharp as soon as put it, the reply was easy: politics, as a result of the FBI was complicit within the misconduct that led to Peltier being imprisoned within the first place.

“In order to get clemency, you have to get the FBI on board. They have an inherent conflict. You have to get the U.S. Attorney’s Office on board. They lied to get him in prison. They have an inherent conflict,” Sharp instructed HuffPost in 2021. “They’re not going to say, ‘Oops, sorry.’”

“It’s this holdover with the FBI,” he added.

Some U.S. presidents have been near releasing Peltier, notably Invoice Clinton. However he backed off his obvious plan after a whole bunch of FBI brokers protested outdoors the White Home in 2000 in an unprecedented present of public opposition by the bureau, and after being privately lobbied by his good friend and former fellow state lawyer basic, Invoice Janklow.

Biden knew he was defying FBI management by granting Peltier clemency in January. Weeks earlier, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray expressed his “vehement and steadfast opposition” to Biden’s obvious plan, and the FBI Brokers Affiliation ripped the president for his motion afterward, saying the group was “outraged.”

Nonetheless, the FBI appeared to scramble to defend its place in recent times. When contacted by HuffPost for requests for remark in tales about Peltier, it usually offered the identical boilerplate assertion that was wildly outdated and primarily based on proof that has since been disproven. The FBI nonetheless hasn’t publicly addressed the broader context of that 1975 shoot-out, both: the proof that the bureau itself was deliberately fueling intra-tribal tensions on that reservation as a part of a covert marketing campaign to suppress AIM’s actions. Peltier, an energetic AIM chief, was a chief FBI goal.

An FBI spokesperson initially didn’t reply to requests for remark. After this story printed, a spokesperson stated the bureau declined remark.

Even when Biden launched Peltier, he did so with a nod to the FBI. He put Peltier underneath residence confinement as a substitute of pardoning him, which might have meant Peltier was absolutely free and primarily forgiven by the federal government. As an alternative, Peltier is serving out the rest of his two consecutive life sentences at residence, with restrictions on his actions.

Peltier has been combating to loosen these restrictions, after all.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons, which oversees his residence confinement, initially instructed him he wasn’t allowed to have a automotive, however now he can. He wasn’t initially allowed to journey greater than 100 miles from Belcourt, however now he can with a particular move, for medical causes. The jail bureau additionally instructed him he wasn’t allowed to have a girlfriend, which can have infuriated Peltier greater than something, as he made it very clear he loves the corporate of ladies.

“I said, ‘What the hell, man?’ You know, why can’t I have a girlfriend? What’s that got to do with this shit?” Peltier stated, noting he has a girlfriend in Minnesota. “So they said, ‘OK, you can have a girlfriend. But she can’t spend all night.’ Really.”

He pushed again on the bureau some extra and now he’s allowed to have a girlfriend, and she or he’s allowed to spend the night time. She simply can’t transfer in.

Within the hours that we spoke, it was straightforward to neglect that this wasn’t only a informal dialog with somebody’s grandpa. Peltier had plenty of anecdotes to share from his lengthy life. He talked about his well being, which has significantly improved during the last a number of months. He gushed about his elementary-school-age granddaughter changing into a robust swimmer, pointing to a photograph of her pinned to the wall subsequent to his recliner.

However his 81-year-old physique is churning with rage. Peltier’s reminiscence is remarkably intact, and he has a wealth of tales he needs to inform, involving a long time of U.S. presidents and main moments in American historical past — all of which inevitably lead again to him dropping 49 years of his life to most safety prisons for a criminal offense he maintains he didn’t commit.

“I’m pissed off,” he stated sharply. Requested how usually he wakes up livid about what occurred to him, he replied with out hesitation, “I think almost every day.”

Peltier stated he may have gotten out of jail “a long time ago” if he’d been keen to lie and say he shot these FBI brokers, however he wouldn’t do it. He additionally stated he wasn’t keen to falsely accuse others of the crime to safe his personal freedom.

To throw a fellow Indigenous ally underneath the bus like that will be “treason to my people,” Peltier stated.

Requested if he’d ever thought-about saying he was responsible of murdering the 2 FBI brokers simply to get out of jail sooner, he abruptly rejected that possibility. “My dear, I took an oath to fight for my people,” he stated. “I took an oath for our lives. They were trying to terminate us.”

Peltier introduced up the U.S. authorities’s so-called Indian termination coverage, a sequence of legal guidelines put in place from the Nineteen Forties to the Nineteen Sixties aimed toward assimilating Native People into mainstream tradition by abolishing tribes and forcing Native People to relocate to city areas. The coverage was reversed in 1970, nevertheless it precipitated lasting harm to tribes and Native communities, specifically by way of the lack of land and disruptions to cultural practices.

“We’d be gone as a race of people” if these insurance policies had continued, Peltier fumed. “One of my uncles brought the newspaper home, I was probably 5 or 6 years old, they said, ‘Look at this, they’re saying we’re the vanishing Americans. They don’t know what happened to us.’ That was the cover of Look Magazine. Grandma started crying, she said, ‘What are they saying that for? We’re still here, look at us. Right? Why are they doing that?’”

“So I know that was true,” he stated of the federal government attempting to wipe out Native People. “I was standing there listening to that.”

HuffPost requested if he thinks anybody will ever know who killed these FBI brokers in 1975.

“I don’t give a shit if they ever know,” Peltier fired again. He stated the larger query is why dozens of AIM members and allies have been murdered on Pine Ridge Reservation between 1973 and 1976, throughout the years of excessive stress between tribes and the federal authorities.

“Nobody wants to say anything about Joe Stuntz,” he stated, referring to an Indigenous AIM member who was killed within the 1975 shoot-out with the FBI brokers, and whose dying prompted no authorized motion. “What about them 62 people who were killed? Who wants to know?”

“They’re not doing a goddamn thing about them,” he continued. “But those two white people?”

Peltier’s puppies broke out of the basement because the interview was wrapping up.

His daughter, who had been drifting out and in with a headache, had simply adopted two child huskies and so they ran wild as Peltier beamed and shared their names in Anishinaabe and Lakota, his Native languages. It was one of many many surreal moments of this go to, watching Peltier swap between being an iconic and controversial determine within the Indigenous rights motion, and an 81-year-old man hocking loogies right into a can and speaking about his canines.

He has plenty of massive plans forward, even in his superior years. He needs to file an audiobook about his life, as a result of writing books by hand, which he’s carried out prior to now, “was a fuckin’ killer.” He needs to rework his storage into an artwork studio and get again to portray. He’d want to repair his eyes first, so he’s been speaking to Mayo Clinic medical doctors about procedures that might assist his imaginative and prescient. He’s ready to journey to the Mayo Clinic primarily based in Minnesota in the event that they might help.

He’ll want a particular move from the Bureau of Prisons to go, although.

Peltier’s residence well being aide had been sitting quietly within the kitchen all through the day. A lady in her early 30s, she stated she’d solely been on the job for a number of weeks, and politely smiled when requested if it’s been annoying having so many individuals coming out and in of the home. She stated no, and conveyed that she, too, feels how surreal it’s being round Peltier.

“I learned about him in school,” she stated. “We had to write papers on him.”