Saturday, 9 March, early afternoon on Interstate 94 West: We are approaching the border between Minnesota and North Dakota when this bird suddenly appears on our right. Its wingspan exceeds the width of our Subaru station wagon. Doubt can spoil an experience, but at this moment there is no doubt: a bald eagle is flying next to us.

It is only a few seconds before it gains height and swoops away. Its yellow beak seems to glow at the tip of its black and white feathered body. We both take it as confirmation: We’re on the right track, on the way to Leonard Peltier. Hunter and I set off from Minneapolis in the morning. I had visited Leonard Peltier twice in prison with Hunter’s father, ‘AIM photographer’ Dick Bancroft, until Leonard was no longer allowed to receive journalists after 2003.

Barely three weeks earlier, on 18 February 2025, Leonard, now 80 years old, had left the notorious Coleman maximum security prison in Florida. The first photo shows him in a colorful ribbon shirt, his right hand clenched into a fist, triumph in his eyes. ‘They were able to capture my body, but not my spirit!’ he shouted to his supporters. Then he flew to North Dakota in a plane chartered by the indigenous organization ‘NDN Collective’. ‘NDN Collective’ had also purchased the house that was waiting for him in Belcourt on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. From now on, ‘NDN Collective’ will take care of his safety and his health.

It is one of those coincidences that have always fuelled the resistance of the indigenous people: At the crucial moment, it was at the end of last year, this financially strong initiative from South Dakota had come on the scene and prepared for Day X. Day X is never anchored in the calendar, it either comes unexpectedly or it doesn’t. Minutes before he left the White House on January 20 – on Day X – President Joe Biden used his power to release Leonard from prison to home confinement. From home, he has to report to his US parole officer every morning and evening.

Leonard was denied parole as recently as July 2024, and would not have been eligible for parole again until 2039.  The Associated Press leaked a letter that Christopher Wray, former director of the FBI, had sent to President Biden to dissuade him from any kind of clemency. “Peltier is a remorseless killer,” Wright wrote, „granting him any relief from conviction or sentence … would be an affront to the rule of law.“

What was it that made the President take action at the last minute? It was probably the devastating history of US government boarding schools – brought to light by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who had called for Leonard’s release when previously serving as a member of Congress. Last October Joe Biden officially apologized to Native Americans for & „the blot in American history“; at a ceremonial appearance with Secretary Haaland on tribal land in Arizona. There he publicly acknowledged more needed to be done to heal the wrongs of the past against Native Americans. In all previous negotiations of tribal leaders with the Biden administration Peltier was always acknowledged as a „boarding school survivor“.

A pardon would undoubtedly have been the kinder option. However, Leonard had always emphasized during his decades behind bars that only guilty people can be pardoned. He was innocent of the deaths of the two FBI agents who were shot dead on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota on June 26, 1975 at the height of what became known on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota as the Reign of Terror, leaving over 60 unsolved murders of AIM members and traditional supporters. Leonard was part of an AIM encampment to protect Lakota elders in the community of Oglala. All the evidence that led to Leonard’s extradition from Canada, where he had fled after the fatal shootings, and to his subsequent conviction at trial in North Dakota had been manufactured or falsified.

Claiming to need reinforcement to handle the increased workload, as a result of  “factionalism” that erupted on the Reservation after the 1973 takeover of Wounded Knee. After the firefight near the small village of Olglala, where the agents were killed, the FBI had turned the reservation into a de facto training ground for special agents. Over 300 agents descended on the Reservation, invading homes and conducting surveillance with Vietnam-era Huey helicopters.

The Anishinabeg of Turtle Mountain welcomed Leonard to the reservation with a powwow, dancing and singing, as captured on YouTube. He was presented with a quilt: the traditional star pattern framed by writing – LEONARD PELTIER FREEDOM FEBRUARY 18, 2025.

The house is on Sunset Street, we got told. Kind a joke on the reservation: ‘Sunset Street? Never heard of’ is the answer at the gas station. But someone who knows where Leonard lives is filling up. ‘I’ll take you there!’ Sunset Street is a rutted, potholed dead-end gravel road without a street sign.

His son Chaunsey opens the door. He has come from Oregon. Chaunsey was five years old when they took his father. My heart is still pounding; I’m as excited as before an exam. The last time I saw Leonard was over 20 years ago and after that I kept hoping for his release, with Clinton, with Obama, after the letters from Pope Francis to Presidents Obama and Biden. Leonard was a recurring topic of conversation in my family.

We step through the door. There he sits at the table with his nephew Steve Robideau and the filmmaker Preston Randolph: grey hair, eyes full intent (even though he can barely read with his failing sight), a smartphone on a stand in front of him, a cup next to it that is constantly refilled (I looove coffee), his right hand quickly raised into a fist when a photo is requested, behind him a picture he painted in prison when he was still allowed to paint.  He communicates with his engaging smile and warm voice that also characterizes his son Chauncey.

We hug each other. We tell each other what wants to be told.

Myrtle Poor Bear still rumbles inside him. The FBI had chosen her back then and declared her his girlfriend. She was supposed to testify that she had been standing next to him when he killed the agents. He didn’t know her, and she was in a bar at the time of the crime, far away from the scene. Her statement, fabricated by the FBI and signed by her under extreme pressure, led to his extradition from Canada to the USA in 1976. Now, according to Leonard, another violation has come to light by chance: At the time, the USA had promised Canada a donation of over 50,000 dollars for agricultural projects if the extradition took place.

I tell him how I was searched at the border between Ontario and New York State in November 1975 and interrogated by the FBI because my rucksack was full of evidence of Native American contacts. ‘You know, Claus, we are a big family,’ said the FBI agent. ‘Two of our uncles got killed. May be you can help us to find the one who did it.’

On the morning of January 20, Leonard reports, he retired to his bunk and resigned himself to the fact that he would end his life in prison. ‘I thought I’m gonna die here.’ Suddenly the news came that President Biden had signed a decree. ‘I thought another cruelty to fool me’.

We are talking about here and now and today and tomorrow. Trump, he says, will soon launch an attack on indigenous land and Indian sovereignty. But: ‘We are used to it. We are fighting this fight for 500 years!’

I talk about the rights of nature, which I have been committed to for a few years. He agrees and clenches his fist. I quote my late friend John Sotsisowah Mohawk: ‘The war of the future will be between the destroyers of the natural world and the defenders of the natural world.’

An hour has passed. An hour was agreed. He doesn’t want to let us go. We are given a tour of the house. A paramedic makes sure he doesn’t overexert himself and follows his medical plan.

What has he enjoyed most since his return? Not having to constantly repeat the number 89637-13 out loud: ‘In Coleman I had to repeat my number several times a day.’

A white, immaculate canvas is stretched out, waiting. His eye operations are imminent and he can hardly wait. Then he will paint again. He won’t have to worry about paint and brushes, he knows that: they will come from his supporters. A small office has been set up for him, which shows that he has not been idle since his return despite his visual problems. He has put a list of items he is missing online. Envelopes and stationery are among them. He wrote by hand during the decades he spent in prison, and he will hold on to that.

In front of a door hangs a sign ‘OFF LIMITS’: the bedroom. He pulls the door open and invites us in with a generous gesture. The welcome quilt is spread out on the double bed as a bedspread. He asks me to adjust the blanket before we take a photo.
Leonard, the gentle host and owner of the house. But this is nothing new. Each time when Dick Bancroft and I visited him in prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, we were depressed by the multiple iron doors that closed behind us until we reached the visiting room. Leonard cheered us up with his friendly gestures, his stories and poems.

Leonard is a caretaker. He will take care of things as soon as he has regained his strength. He will be a role model for the young people. He has left the cell when First Americans and their land base are under massive attack by a president with a criminal record. Leonard will be a spokesman in this resistance. He, whose spine they have not been able to break after 49 years, has an aura about him that will add weight to his words in the movement.  ‘They were able to capture my body, but not my spirit!’

LOOKING BACK, AFTER RETURNING TO GERMANY

It was a short journey through a violent country. The president’s battle cry ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ is a call for the rape of Mother Earth. It is a declaration of war against those tribal peoples who still hold the earth sacred. The small regions in their possession – called reservations – sting the eyes of the regime. hell-bent on exploitation and development. Originally they were prison camps for the Indian wars; the Pine Ridge Reservation was originally called Prison Camp 334. Adolf Hitler was inspired by them in the Nazi creation of concentration camps.

Trump could be similarly impressed by Putin’s treatment of Russia’s indigenous peoples. In Siberia, any movement towards cultural and political self-determination is brutally suppressed without notice, and shamans end up in psychiatric clinics.  Trump wants to erase memories: Indian names are a reminder of who inhabited the land before the European invasion. Reservations signify special rights and protected territory. They are also a reminder of genocide. Trump could turn the reservations into counties, taking away Native homelands, and end treaty obligations, such as the establishment of the Indian Health Service. Indigenous peoples are alarmed.

Is it time for a new Longest Walk by Native Americans to the center of theft and despotism? Leonard Peltier came home at a moment when the freedom of us all is in danger of being stifled. If we do not believe the impossible is possible, we will be powerless when the impossible occurs and is taken for granted overnight. The war against indigenous peoples is also a war against all those who are in favour of change towards peace and freedom. It is a war that will be unavoidable as long as we follow the resource-guzzling growth of capitalism. Hunter and I agree: indigenous resistance must therefore also be our resistance.