On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we feature a conversation with one of the world’s most prominent champions for Indigenous rights, Leonard Peltier. “Indigenous Day is a day that’s been long overdue for any type of recognition,” says Peltier. “I am not going to give up, because we are not free yet. We are in danger. Trump and these organizations, they’re talking about doing away with our reservations and our treaties and everything else. … We’re going to stay here. You’re not going to get rid of us.”
Peltier is a longtime political prisoner who spent nearly half a century behind bars for a crime he says he did not commit — the 1975 fatal shooting of two FBI agents. In the final hours of his administration last year, President Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence, but his conviction has not been overturned, and he remains under home confinement on the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Reservation in Belcourt, North Dakota.
“It was one crime against the justice system after another in order to frame Leonard for the assassination of these two federal agents,” says David France, co-director of the new documentary Free Leonard Peltier. “And although he and his team were able to prove over and over that every bit of evidence used against him in his conviction was brought into question, he was never able to get a retrial.”
