Leonard Peltier
Leonard Peltier (born September 12, 1944) is a Native American activist and a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) who, following a controversial trial, was convicted of two counts of aiding and abetting murder in the deaths of two Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents in a June 26, 1975, shooting on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He was sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment and has been imprisoned since 1977 (currently 46 years, 11 months).[1][2][3] Peltier became eligible for parole in 1993.[4][5] As of 2022, Peltier is incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary, Coleman, in Florida.[6]
Leonard Peltier
September 12, 1944
9
In his 1999 memoir Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance, Peltier admitted to participating in the shootout but said he did not kill the FBI agents.[7][8] Human rights watchdogs, such as Amnesty International, and political figures including Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and the 14th Dalai Lama, have campaigned for clemency for Peltier.[9][10][11] On January 18, 2017, it was announced that President Barack Obama denied Peltier's application for clemency.[12]
At the time of the shootout, Peltier was an active member of the AIM, an Indigenous rights advocacy group that worked to combat the racism and police brutality experienced by American Indians.[13] Peltier ran for president of the United States in 2004, winning the nomination of the Peace and Freedom Party, and receiving 27,607 votes, limited to the ballot in California. He ran for vice president of the United States in 2020 on the Party for Socialism and Liberation ticket with Gloria La Riva as the presidential candidate, as well as tickets for other left-wing parties and on the ballot of the Peace and Freedom Party. For health reasons, Peltier withdrew from those tickets on August 1, 2020.[14][15][16]
He is of Lakota, Dakota, and Anishinaabe descent, and was raised among the Turtle Mountain Chippewa and Fort Totten Sioux Nations of North Dakota.[12]
Early life and education[edit]
Peltier was born on September 12, 1944,[17] at the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa near Belcourt, North Dakota, in a family of 13 children.[18] Peltier's parents divorced when he was four years old.[19] Leonard and his sister Betty Ann lived with their paternal grandparents Alex and Mary Dubois-Peltier in the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation.[8] In September 1953, at the age of nine, Leonard was enrolled at the Wahpeton Indian School in Wahpeton, North Dakota, an Indian boarding school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).[19] Leonard remained 150 miles (240 km) away from his home at Wahpeton Indian School through the ninth grade; the school forced assimilation to white American culture by requiring the children to use English and forbidding the inclusion of Native American culture.[20] He graduated from Wahpeton in May 1957, and attended the Flandreau Indian School in Flandreau, South Dakota.[21] After finishing the ninth grade, he returned to the Turtle Mountain Reservation to live with his father.[21] Peltier later obtained a general equivalency degree (GED).[20]
Career and activism[edit]
In 1965, Peltier relocated to Seattle, Washington.[20] Peltier worked as a welder, a construction worker, and as the co-owner of an auto shop in Seattle in his twenties.[20] The co-owners used the upper level of the building as a stopping place, or halfway house, for American Indians who had alcohol addiction issues or had recently finished their prison sentences and were re-entering society.[20] However, the halfway house took a financial toll on the shop, so they closed it.[20]
In Seattle, Peltier became involved in a variety of causes championing Native American civil rights.[20] In the early 1970s, he learned about the factional tensions at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota between supporters of Richard Wilson, elected tribal chairman in 1972, and traditionalist members of the Lakota tribe.[20] It was Dennis Banks who first invited Leonard Peltier to join AIM.[22] Consequently, Peltier became an official member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in 1972, which was founded by urban Indians in Minneapolis in 1968, at a time of rising Indian activism for civil rights.[19]
Wilson had created a private militia, known as the Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOON), whose members were reputed to have attacked political opponents.[20] Protests over a failed impeachment hearing of Wilson contributed to the AIM and Lakota armed takeover of Wounded Knee at the reservation in February 1973. Federal forces reacted, conducting a 71-day siege, which became known as the Wounded Knee incident.[20] They demanded the resignation of Wilson.[23] Peltier, however, spent most of the occupation in a Milwaukee, Wisconsin jail charged with attempted murder related to a different protest.[23] When Peltier secured bail at the end of April, he took part in an AIM protest outside the federal building in Milwaukee and was on his way to Wounded Knee with the group to deliver supplies when the incident ended.[23]
In 1975, Peltier traveled as a member of AIM to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to help reduce violence among political opponents.[24] At the time, he was a fugitive, with an arrest warrant having been issued in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.[25] It charged him with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution for the attempted murder of an off-duty Milwaukee police officer. (He was acquitted of the attempted murder charge in February 1978.)[25]
During this period, Peltier had seven children from two marriages and adopted two children.[20]
Clemency appeals[edit]
Support for clemency[edit]
Peltier's conviction sparked great controversy and has drawn criticism from a number of prominent figures across a wide range of disciplines. In 1999, Peltier asserted on CNN that he did not commit the murders and that he has no knowledge who shot the FBI agents nor knowledge implicating others in the crime. Peltier has described himself as a political prisoner.[46] Numerous public and legal appeals have been filed on his behalf; however, due to the consistent objection of the FBI, none of the resulting rulings has been made in his favor. His appeals for clemency received support from world famous civil rights advocates including Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Rev. Jesse Jackson, Tenzin Gyatso (the 14th Dalai Lama), Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and activist Rigoberta Menchú, and Mother Teresa. International government entities such as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights, the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations, the European Parliament,[47] the Belgian Parliament,[48] and the Italian Parliament have all passed resolutions in favor of Peltier's clemency. Moreover, several human rights groups including the International Federation for Human Rights and Amnesty International have launched campaigns advocating for Peltier's clemency. In the United States, the Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, the Committee of Concerned Scientists, Inc., the National Lawyers Guild, and the American Association of Jurists are all active supporters of clemency for Peltier.
Later developments[edit]
2002 editorial about deaths of agents and Aquash[edit]
In January 2002 in the News from Indian Country, publisher Paul DeMain wrote an editorial that an "unnamed delegation" told him that Peltier had murdered the FBI agents.[63] DeMain described the delegation as "grandfathers and grandmothers, AIM activists, pipe carriers and others who have carried a heavy unhealthy burden within them that has taken its toll."[63] DeMain said he was also told that the motive for the execution-style murder of high-ranking AIM activist Anna Mae Aquash in December 1975 at Pine Ridge "allegedly was her knowledge that Leonard Peltier had shot the two agents, as he was convicted."[63]
DeMain did not accuse Peltier of participation in the Aquash murder.[63] In 2003 two Native American men were indicted and later convicted of the murder.[63]
On May 1, 2003, Peltier sued DeMain for libel for similar statements about the case published on March 10, 2003, in News from Indian Country. On May 25, 2004, Peltier withdrew the suit after he and DeMain settled the case. DeMain issued a statement saying he did not think Peltier was given a fair trial for the two murder convictions, nor did he think Peltier was connected to Aquash's death.[64] DeMain stated he did not retract his allegations that Peltier was guilty of the murders of the FBI agents and that the motive for Aquash's murder was the fear that she might inform on the activist.[64]
Indictments and trials for the murder of Aquash[edit]
In 2003, there were federal grand jury hearings on charges against Arlo Looking Cloud and John Graham for the murder of Anna Mae Aquash. Bruce Ellison, Leonard Peltier's lawyer since the 1970s, was subpoenaed and invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, refusing to testify. He also refused to testify, on the same grounds, at Looking Cloud's trial in 2004. During the trial, the federal prosecutor named Ellison as a co-conspirator in the Aquash case.[65] Witnesses said that Ellison participated in interrogating Aquash about being an FBI informant on December 11, 1975, shortly before her murder.[65]
In February 2004, Fritz Arlo Looking Cloud, an Oglala Sioux, was tried and convicted of the murder of Aquash. In Looking Cloud's trial, the prosecution argued that AIM's suspicion of Aquash stemmed from her having heard Peltier admit to the murders of the FBI agents. Darlene "Kamook" Nichols, former wife of the AIM leader Dennis Banks, testified that in late 1975, Peltier told of shooting the FBI agents. He was talking to a small group of AIM activists who were fugitives from law enforcement. They included Nichols, her sister Bernie Nichols (later Lafferty), Nichols' husband Dennis Banks, and Aquash, among several others. Nichols testified that Peltier said, "The motherfucker was begging for his life, but I shot him anyway."[66] Bernie Nichols-Lafferty gave the same account of Peltier's statement.[67] At the time, all were fleeing law enforcement after the Pine Ridge shootout.[66][61]
Earlier in 1975, AIM member Douglass Durham had been revealed to be an undercover FBI agent and dismissed from the organization. AIM leaders were fearful of infiltration. Other witnesses have testified that, when Aquash was suspected of being an informant, Peltier interrogated her while holding a gun to her head.[68][69][70][71][72][73] Peltier and David Hill were said to have Aquash participate in bomb-making so that her fingerprints would be on the bombs. Prosecutors alleged in court documents that the trio planted these bombs at two power plants on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation on Columbus Day 1975.[73]
During the trial, Nichols acknowledged receiving $42,000 from the FBI in connection with her cooperation on the case.[74] She said it was compensation for travel expenses to collect evidence and moving expenses to be farther from her ex-husband Dennis Banks, whom she feared because she had implicated him as a witness.[66] Peltier has claimed that Kamook Nichols committed perjury with her testimony.[75]
No investigation has been opened into the allegedly perjured testimony of Kamook Nichols, now married to a former FBI Chief Agent and living under the name Darlene Ecoffey. During the Looking Cloud trial, the Honorable Lawrence L. Piersol admitted the testimony with the following statement: "The requested testimony is hearsay, but I am going to admit it for a limited purpose only. This is a limiting instruction. It isn't admitted nor received for the truth of the matter stated. In other words, whether the rumor is true or not. It is simply received as to what the rumor was. So it is limited to what the rumor was, it is not admitted for the truth of the statement as to whether the rumor was true or not."
On June 26, 2007, the Supreme Court of British Columbia ordered the extradition of John Graham to the United States to stand trial for his alleged role in the murder of Aquash.[76] He was eventually tried by the state of South Dakota in 2010. During Graham's trial, Darlene "Kamook" Ecoffey said Peltier told both her and Aquash that he had killed the FBI agents in 1975. Ecoffey testified under oath, "He (Peltier) held his hand like this", she said, pointing her index finger like a gun, "and he said 'that (expletive) was begging for his life but I shot him anyway.'"[77] Graham was convicted of murdering Aquash and sentenced to life in prison.
Presidential politics[edit]
Peltier was the candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party in the 2004 election for President of the United States. While numerous states have laws that prohibit prison inmates convicted of felonies from voting (Maine and Vermont are exceptions),[78] the United States Constitution has no prohibition against felons being elected to federal offices, including President. The Peace and Freedom Party secured ballot status for Peltier only in California. His presidential candidacy received 27,607 votes,[79] approximately 0.2% of the vote in that state.
In 2020 he ran as the vice-presidential running mate of Gloria La Riva, on the ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation in the presidential campaign. He was forced to resign from the ticket for health reasons in early August 2020, and was replaced with Sunil Freeman.[14][16]
Ruling on FBI documents[edit]
In a February 27, 2006, decision, U.S. District Judge William Skretny ruled that the FBI did not have to release five of 812 documents relating to Peltier and held at their Buffalo field office. He ruled that the particular documents were exempted on the grounds of "national security and FBI agent/informant protection". In his opinion, Judge Skretny wrote, "Plaintiff has not established the existence of bad faith or provided any evidence contradicting (the FBI's) claim that the release of these documents would endanger national security or would impair this country's relationship with a foreign government." In response, Michael Kuzma, a member of Peltier's defense team, said, "We're appealing. It's incredible that it took him 254 days to render a decision." Kuzma further said, "The pages we were most intrigued about revolved around a teletype from Buffalo ... a three-page document that seems to indicate that a confidential source was being advised by the FBI not to engage in conduct that would compromise attorney-client privilege." Peltier's supporters have tried to obtain more than 100,000 pages of documents from FBI field offices, claiming that the files should have been turned over at the time of his trial or following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed soon after.[80][81]
Victim of prison violence[edit]
On January 13, 2009, Peltier was beaten by inmates at the United States Penitentiary, Canaan, where he had been transferred from USP Lewisburg.[82][83] He was sent back to Lewisburg, where he remained until the fall of 2011, when he was transferred to a federal penitentiary in Florida. As of 2016, Leonard Peltier is housed at Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Coleman, Florida.[84]