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.
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