By Claus Biegert

Tara and I waited hourly for news from the USA. My daughter Tara, born in 2002, had grown up with Leonard, so to speak. She had been familiar with the name Leonard Peltier ever since she realized what her father, the journalist, was doing. She talked about him at school, took part in campaigns, followed the work on my film “I am the Indian Voice”, trembled at every pardon phase when a US President left office.  When it became known in 2016 that Pope Francis had written to President Obama asking for Leonard’s release, she rejoiced. Who would disagree with a letter from the Pope? His release was as good as certain for us.

But Barak Obama ignored the Pope’s request; the FBI was above the Holy See. Before, Bill Clinton had already been successfully intimidated when it became known that he was leaning towards a pardon. It was not the FBI alone though: Clinton had received a warning from then-Senate Majority

Leader, Tom Daschle, that it would destroy the Democratic Party if he signed the petition for clemency sitting on his desk.

Now, nine years later, Monday, January 20, 2025: in a few hours, a new US president will be sworn in. He is not new, he has been there before. What is new is that a person with a criminal record will become president, backed by lawless billionnaires of untold wealth. The weekend has passed without the hoped-for news. It was agonizing.

Pictures pass by: When I spend a night at jail in 1975 at the US-Canadian border near Akwesasne and was interrogated by the FBI while searching for Leonard. Then my two visits to the prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, together with Dick Bancroft, the photographer and AIM chronicler from Minnesota. Leonard welcomed us like a host inviting us into his living room for tea. He emanated the charisma of someone who cares for others.

The first time I saw Leonard, he was being led in in chains; that was in a courtroom in Los Angeles in the early 80s. My first reaction at the time: I would hire him as a babysitter. Years later, when I mentioned this to Nilak Butler, she said: “That was his job too, to look after the old and the young, he was a warrior who acted in the background.” In 1975, two years after Wounded Knee – she was 20 years old – Nilak was part of the camp near the crime scene on the Pine Ridge reservation, the property of the Jumping Bull family, where the two agents Jack Coler and Ron Williams were killed. Leonard never denied being there. He denies shooting them. He knows who did it, he often said, but his culture and spirituality would forbid him from naming the perpetrator.

Monday afternoon, the inauguration of the previous convict is approaching. Suddenly, at literally the last minute, the news hits the net: Joe Biden is releasing Peltier to house arrest.The decree signed by the president states February 18 as the date for the end of his detention. Four more weeks to go. I’m worried that this date will be delayed by the Bureau of Prisons. The FBI’s pincers are also aimed there. Too much harassment has preceded it. 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.“

So house arrest, not a reprieve. That seems only right for Leonard. Only guilty people are pardoned, was his argument for decades; he insisted on a new trial because from the beginning his prosecution was riddled with government misconduct, fabricated and suppressed evidence, and coerced testimony later recanted, to secure an unjust conviction by the all-white jury. Myrtle Poor Bear, the woman who claimed to be his girlfriend and to have witnessed him killing the agents, later claimed not to know him and to have been coerced by the FBI into signing a prefabricated statement. On the basis of that false statement, the Canadian authorities had agreed to Peltier’s extradition to the United States. Myrtle Poor Bear was not allowed to testify at the subsequent trial, where Peltier was sentenced to two life sentences. The charge was later amended from double murder to “aiding

and abetting” murder, after it was discovered the prosecutors had used falsified ballistics tests to frame Peltier. The government now concedes it does not know who fired the fatal shots, which prosecutors had attributed to Peltier. However, the sentence was upheld.

Now, after 49 years, Leonard wants to go home to his family in Turtle Mountain. He is 80 years old and seriously sick. His son Chauncey was 10, when his father was locked up. Leonard needs medical care, the warmth of his children, tribal ceremonies and someone to make him fry bread.  He wants to put his hand on the earth and see the sky above him. He wants to laugh, he hasn’t forgotten how to do that; when Dick Bancroft and I sat with him, we laughed a lot.

The reservation living conditions on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the Seventies were life-threatening. Kevin McKiernan, a photographer and journalist, stayed on the reservation in 1975. He later testified at a hearing of a US congressional committee that the FBI chief of operations for the region confided to him later that the Bureau had trained over 2000 special agents on the reservation in the two years after the occupation of Wounded Knee. The FBI worked closely with the Tribal President, arming his specially created vigilante militia, the Guardians of the Oglala Nation, called the GOONs, in tandem with the US Bureau of Indian Affairs police. On the other side, the traditional Lakota residents stood shoulder to shoulder with the AIM resistance movement. It was a civil war.

The circumstances surrounding the civil war led a jury in 1976 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to acquit Bob Roubideaux and Nilak’s husband Dino Butler for the killing of the FBI agents on grounds of self-defense. They were among the wanted along with Leonard Peltier, but Peltier had fled to Canada. If he had stood trial with both of them, he would probably have been acquitted.

The story of Leonard Peltier is the story of the war after the Indian wars. It epitomizes a racist historical pattern of marginalizing Indigenous peoples, silencing their voices, and criminalizing their resistance. Traditional values of Indigenous societies stand in the way of ruthless land theft for exploitation of the natural environment by US capitalism and corporate oligarchy. From their profit-driven perspective, there are treasures under Indian land, and they need to be exploited to maintain the American Way of Life – no matter the collateral damage. “Drill, baby drill” is the invaders’ war cry. Indigenous worldview wants to protect Mother Earth as its sovereign right. Confrontation is inevitable.

Peltier was denied parole as recently as last July, and would not have been eligible for parole again until 2039.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 negotitions of tribal leaders with the Biden administration Peltier was always acknowledged as a „boarding school survivor“.

„As long as Leonard Peltier is not free, we are not free!“ This statement was heard over decades. I remember filmmaker Michael Moore using these words 2012 at an unforgetable concert with Harry Belafonte and Pete Seeger at the Bacon Theatre in New York City. Leonard’s „freedom“ comes at a time when the freedom of all people of Turtle Island is at stake.