‘We went from invisible to visible’: Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier navigates changed political landscape

NINA MOINI: Leonard Peltier has long been a leading figure of Native American political activism and resistance. He's been a key part of the American Indian Movement, which was founded in Minneapolis in the late 1960s. Peltier, as a member of AIM, engaged in on-the-ground activism in the organization's early days. The movement demanded better treatment of Native Americans living on and off the reservation, including respecting treaty rights, employment opportunities, better health care, and education.

After spending nearly 50 years in prison, Peltier now lives at his home in North Dakota on the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Reservation. Back in 1977, Peltier was convicted of murdering two FBI agents during a shootout two years earlier on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

REPORTER 1: More than 100 heavily armed government agents sealed off the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota today and searched for the men who killed two FBI agents there yesterday. The FBI has brought in aircraft and an armored military vehicle to use in the search.

NINA MOINI: It was June, 1975. FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams were searching Pine Ridge for a man suspected of robbery and assault. It was a time of immense tension on the reservation, tension between activists and the American Indian Movement and some tribal leaders, and tension between AIM and law enforcement. In a gunfight, the two federal agents were shot and killed at point blank range. Joe Stuntz, a young Native American man and AIM member, was also killed. His death was never officially investigated.

REPORTER 2: The entire case against Leonard Peltier turns on a single bullet shell casing found at the scene of the murders. 10 years ago, FBI Special agents Coler and Williams drove onto the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to serve search warrants on a robbery suspect. According to the government's records--

NINA MOINI: The government charged that one of the leaders there was activist Leonard Peltier. For the past half century, Peltier has maintained his innocence in the killing of the FBI agents. Last January, President Joe Biden commuted Peltier's sentence before leaving office. Though not a pardon, Biden noted that the 80-year-old Peltier should be able to spend his remaining days in home confinement. Many people in law enforcement bitterly opposed Peltier's release.

Over the half century Peltier spent in prison, his image appeared on untold numbers of banners, bumper stickers, and websites, as a symbol of struggle and liberation. Activists, political leaders, and celebrities called for his release for decades. Now that Peltier is back home, he faces a much different political landscape for Native Americans.

Reporter Allison Herrera visited with Leonard Peltier and with several Indigenous activists he inspired. Today on Minnesota Now, we'll hear Allison in conversation with MPR Native News Editor Leah Lemm about what she found. We won't be relitigating the crimes Peltier is accused of committing. Instead, Alison explores other aspects of Leonard Peltier's life and how American Indian activism has changed over the last half century.

LEAH LEMM: Allison, you traveled to the Turtle Mountain Reservation up on the border between North Dakota and Canada earlier this summer to visit with Leonard Peltier. He was about four months into his commutation of his prison sentence. You reported on how he's doing since his release, his health, and how he's doing generally. And you spent a whole day with him. And we wanted to tell a longer story about what's changed since his incarceration. What did you find, Allison?

ALLISON HERRERA: Well, Leah, I knew there was a larger story to be told about the arc of the American Indian Movement and its influence on Native politics and how life for Native people has changed since the days of the American Indian Movement, formed in the early 1970s. So I interviewed a bunch of people, some who grew up hearing about Peltier, and some people who covered his trial, and those who grew up in the movement.

And the other thing I wanted to more about was Leonard Peltier himself. What was his early life like that some of our listeners might not about? I wanted to about some of the events that shaped his life. What was it like growing up in Belcourt, North Dakota, in the 1950s? I talked to Leonard a second time since I visited him on the reservation over Zoom. And Leonard went to Sun Dance in South Dakota after my first interview with him in June.

LEAH LEMM: And for some context for our listeners, the Sun Dance is an incredibly important ceremony for Indigenous people. It lasts several days and features drumming, singing, dancing, and fasting. The Sun Dance was outlawed by the federal government in 1883 as part of a broader campaign to suppress Native culture and assimilate Native people.

The ban on practicing Sun Dance wasn't fully lifted until 1978. That's when the American Indian Religious Freedom Act was passed by Congress. So Leonard Peltier went to this year's Sun Dance in South Dakota. And it was his first time back in that state since the shootout in 1975, involving the two FBI agents.

ALLISON HERRERA: Yeah, Leah, and here's what he told me about it.

LEONARD PELTIER: I was allowed to go for four days. And it was awesome to see so many young people participating in a ceremony that when we started to implement it and get it really going, there was probably a third of the participants in the one I attended. But that wasn't the only one. There was over 80 ceremonies going on around just Pine Ridge alone. So it was not only amazing, but it made me feel so pleased to know that our efforts to restore our religion was a success and is still growing.

LEAH LEMM: So I understand you learned a little more about Leonard's early life, where he grew up and what shaped him. What did you find out?

ALLISON HERRERA: One of the biggest things Leonard talked about was attending the Wahpeton Indian boarding school near the Sisseton-Wahpeton nation in South Dakota. That experience shaped his later years in the American Indian Movement, or AIM.

LEONARD PELTIER: I joined the group. It was already there. It was called the resistance. I think that was really the beginning of my activism because I was very pissed off that they took me out of my home. And the last thing I seen was my grandmother crying and begging me to look out for my sister, Betty, and my cousin, Pauline, and to take care of them and stuff like that. I was nine years old.

I was trying to escape from there. And I went across the Red River. This was in the spring. And the ice was too thin. And I went under the ice right at the edge of the river. And I grabbed a limb and saved my life and almost drowned. If I hadn't grabbed that limb, I would have gone under the ice. We had beatings for that, too.

LEAH LEMM: So let's fast forward now to 1972. Leonard participated in what was called the Trail of Broken Treaties. That was a big protest by numerous tribes that culminated in a cross-country protest caravan to Washington, DC. What did Leonard tell you about getting involved in that

ALLISON HERRERA: Well, that action was meant to put pressure on the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or the BIA.

LEONARD PELTIER: This building was supposed to represent us. It was built to take care of us and to make sure our rights were not violated, our lands were not stolen. And it did not take care of us. It was not supporting our treaties. It was not doing the job they were supposed to be doing, what it was created for.

ALLISON HERRERA: Many activists believe that the BIA was taking and mismanaging Native land. Leonard told me he saw how angry Native people were, at how they were being treated by the federal government.

LEONARD PELTIER: I understood, like so many of us did, that this was probably the greatest oppressor of modern times of Native people.

LEAH LEMM: Peltier's political involvement didn't start with AIM. You heard from him that it was sometime in his teens that he started listening in on tribal council meetings on Turtle Mountain?

ALLISON HERRERA: That's right. When Leonard was 13, he returned to the Turtle Mountain Reservation to live with his dad.

LEONARD PELTIER: I just went because they usually had something to eat there at these meetings and because I was hearing the people talk about the tribal councils, and the government, and everything else. And I guess that was basically a training for me of the movement.

ALLISON HERRERA: And it's in these meetings he learns about an act of Congress that was passed in 1953 to terminate the Turtle Mountain Chippewa as a tribal nation. This was happening during the Termination Era, when Congress wanted to terminate some tribes. He said he heard about it from some of the elders talking.

LEONARD PELTIER: Corruption in a government, the government not paying what they owed us, taking over lands, stuff like that.

LEAH LEMM: In 2024, President Biden apologized for the federal government's role in boarding schools. Leonard is a boarding school survivor. What did he say about that?

ALLISON HERRERA: He said, that's great. But he wants the federal government to help return the remains of children who died at those boarding schools and return them to their tribal communities.

LEONARD PELTIER: Well, I appreciate their apology. But why don't you give us the funding to find those bodies so we can bring those kids home?

ALLISON HERRERA: That apology from President Biden represents another shift by the federal government since early AIM activism. I'm not sure Leonard and other Indian activists ever dreamed of the federal government apologizing back in the 1970s.

LEAH LEMM: And when you talked to Leonard, you told me he was pretty amazed at some of the changes and advancements that have happened over the decades he was in prison, not only on his reservation at Turtle Mountain, but on a national level.

ALLISON HERRERA: Yeah. One thing he mentioned was this thing called the Feather Alert. Peltier was surprised when he heard about this new law that requires law enforcement to send out an alert when a Native person goes missing under suspicious circumstances or may be in danger. Native leaders have been pushing for an alert system because of the high rates of violence and abductions that occur in tribal communities.

LEAH LEMM: So you talked with Leonard Peltier about changes that have happened for Indigenous people since he joined AIM in the 1970s. You also talked with other people about how his activism influenced them. Who else did you speak to?

ALLISON HERRERA: Well, I spoke with the Indigenous Protectors Movement. Vinnie Dionne and his wife, Rachel Dionne-Thunder, and Crow Bellecourt founded the Indigenous Protectors Movement, which is a public safety organization that's seen as a kind of a grassroots alternative to traditional policing in Native communities. I met up with Vinnie last month on a very hot August afternoon, as he was preparing to go out into the community in South Minneapolis, where he runs talking circles. That's where people get together to talk about what's going on in their life and some of the challenges they're facing.

VINNIE DIONNE: I do them three days a week. And so the first half is a talking circle. And then we go out in the community and we go pick up trash.

ALLISON HERRERA: Cool.

VINNIE DIONNE: And then we pay them a small stipend. And so they're used to this, getting this little bit of money.

ALLISON HERRERA: I wanted to visit with the Indigenous Protectors Movement because Vinnie Dionne grew up in Little Earth, a Native preference housing development in South Minneapolis. He said, even though he wasn't directly aware of AIM as a boy, he benefited from some of the changes they fought for in Minneapolis.

VINNIE DIONNE: Our group at Little Earth, I had no idea at the time that AIM was really big into making it an all-Native housing complex. Even with the schools, I guess I didn't realize any of that. The Peacemaker Center-- I did know that was AIM run, but that's where I learned how to play baseball and basketball and all these sports things. So I didn't realize until I got older and understanding that, how much AIM has shaped my life.

LEAH LEMM: I know you also talked with Rachel Thunder. She helped organize the Walk for Justice, which was a more than 1,000-mile trek in 2022 that started in Minneapolis and ended in Washington, DC, to raise awareness about Peltier's case and to the issues of Native people. This was before his sentence was commuted by President Biden. How did Rachel Thunder hear about Leonard Peltier and his case? How did the walk start?

ALLISON HERRERA: Well, Rachel Thunder is part of the Grand Governing Council of AIM and is also the Vice President of the Indigenous Protectors Movement. She said the walk started with a dream she had about Leonard Peltier in prison.

RACHEL THUNDER: He would just be sitting on his bed. I would never be able to see his face. And he would always just be sitting there, with his face in his hands. I would just say to him, I would be like, Leonard, don't worry. Your people are coming to get you. AIM is coming to get you. They had seen so many walks happen. And Leonard was still in prison. They'd seen ceremony after ceremony. They had seen rally after rally. And it's like, how many times are we going to try to do this? And I think a lot of times, it takes that youthful energy. It takes that new energy to continue to keep things to be relevant because we can't ever give up.

LEAH LEMM: So what did Thunder and Dionne say about AIM's activism? How did it play a role in getting policies changed for Native people that improved their lives?

ALLISON HERRERA: One of those policies that Rachel thunder mentioned was the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which was passed in 1978. Prior to that passage, a lot of aspects of Native religion were outlawed. Here's Rachel.

RACHEL THUNDER: When Leonard went to prison, it was illegal for us to pray. Sun Dances were being raided by the FBI. So imagine going into prison to that, and then coming out here, and seeing how strong we are.

LEAH LEMM: You also spoke with Crow Bellecourt. His dad, Clyde Bellecourt, helped found AIM. And one of the initiatives that AIM spearheaded was education that helped Native people connect with their culture, especially among people who lived in urban areas.

ALLISON HERRERA: That's right, Leah. Crow attended Heart of the Earth Survival School in Minneapolis, which was the school that, like you said, connected them to their culture. I asked Crow about it.

CROW BELLECOURT: It started in the basement of the original AIM office on Franklin Avenue, with just four brothers that were being picked on in the Minneapolis Public School system. And AIM said, well, let's do something about that. So it started off with a few kids. And then I went to school there in the late '70s. And it was K through 12. So it was like a big family.

Monday mornings, when we went in to school, the very first hour of school was called Circle Time, where everybody got tobacco. We prayed. They brought the sacred pipe out. And they smoked the pipe. And we sang and danced on the drum. And then we learned math, history, all the science, all the other classes you're supposed to take. But with that, we learned about our culture. We learned about our history, not their history, our history.

ALLISON HERRERA: It's that kind of education that AIM wanted to get young kids involved in, something that taught them about where they're from and some of the lifeways they were disconnected from after leaving the reservation.

CROW BELLECOURT: And we also went to wild rice camp. We went to deer camp. And we went up north, got in the woods, maple sugar camp, things like that. And then on Fridays, the last hour of school, before we got sent home for the weekend, we had Circle Time again, smoked the pipe, prayed, tobacco offerings to the fire.

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LEAH LEMM: I'm Leah Lemm from MPR News. And you're listening to a conversation I'm having with reporter Allison Herrera. She's been talking to Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, who's now living on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, after spending nearly 50 years in prison for the murder of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1975. His sentence was commuted by President Joe Biden in January of this year.

Education wasn't the only thing that changed during the time when AIM was active. There were other policies, too, like the one Thunder mentioned about being able to practice our religion openly. Who else did you talk to about some of the laws or policy shifts that were taking place?

ALLISON HERRERA: The other person I talked with was Reid Raymond. He now works for the Hennepin County Attorney's Office. But he was in high school and then college during the time of Wounded Knee and other very visible AIM actions. Then, when Peltier was on trial for the murder of the two FBI agents, Reid Raymond was working as a journalist with MIGIZI. That's a Native community organization in Minneapolis. Reid Raymond covered Leonard Peltier's trial from a Native perspective, and he told me that he saw a cultural shift happening, where AIM influenced tribal leaders, policymakers, and such.

REID RAYMOND: Well, AIM shook the country up. AIM was the voice of unhappy Native American people who had been mistreated and abused for many, many years. And it was basically, in a nutshell, AIM stood up and said, we are going to fight for ourselves. We are going to solve our own problems. We disagree with how we've been treated. And Phillip Deere said--

ALLISON HERRERA: Philip Deere was a Muskogee spiritual leader that was active with AIM. Phillip Deere said AIM made Mr. Indian get off the fence. In other words, were Native people going to side with taking action and taking control of their own lives, or were they going to continue to be under the thumb of the United States government? And the reason I'm saying that, under the thumb, it was very literally, tribes could do nothing without approval from the Secretary of Interior.

LEAH LEMM: So if AIM made Native people get off the fence, what did they do? What did that mean?

ALLISON HERRERA: Raymond said it was about organizing to get funding for the National Indian Health Board and other Native organizations, too.

REID RAYMOND: There was also the National Congress of American Indians, which is a conglomeration of the leaders of the Native organizations across the country, and then also all the tribes. They were very active. There was also the National Tribal Chairmen's Association that was very active. And they were all moving forward at the same time.

But AIM was the one that was out in the forefront, advocating and, in a way, making people understand the injustice that had been perpetrated on Native people. And it helped a great deal. And I think it provided an incentive for Native people to take action.

ALLISON HERRERA: I asked Raymond about another piece of legislation, one that continues to have significance and helps tribal nations with self-governance. That's the Indian Self-Determination and Education Act, which was passed in 1975.

REID RAYMOND: I don't think any of it would have happened if AIM hadn't been advocating. But also, AIM wasn't doing all the work. There were lots of people that were not members of AIM that were working hard to get things done, like members of the National Tribal Chairmen's Association. I don't think all of them identified as being AIM. But they were very active in the Indian Self-Determination Act. And they pushed for writing the regulations themselves, instead of having the bureaucrats and the Bureau of Indian Affairs write them.

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LEAH LEMM: So, Allison, this huge piece of legislation gets passed during the time when AIM was taking these very public actions. What are some of the other laws and policies that were passed?

ALLISON HERRERA: Well, in 1978, the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed, a law that was just strengthened two years ago after the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of tribal nations. That act is aimed at helping keep Native families together. And it's especially important because of the tremendous harm done during the boarding school era.

LEAH LEMM: And another shift that happened since Leonard Peltier's decades in prison, Deb Haaland was the first Native American to lead the Department of the Interior. And that was during President Joe Biden's administration.

ALLISON HERRERA: That's right. To go from an agency where you felt like you had to occupy the building-- I'm talking about the BIA building in the '70s-- to having an agency run by a Native person, that's huge.

LEAH LEMM: And I know you also talked with Holly Cook Macarro. She was on Leonard's clemency team, along with people from NDN Collective, which is spelled N-D-N. Who is she, and what is NDN Collective?

ALLISON HERRERA: NDN Collective is a Native-led nonprofit in South Dakota. And Holly Cook Macarro is a citizen of the Red Lake Band of Ojibwe here in Minnesota. She's also a lobbyist and has worked on Native issues in various political administrations. And she advocates for policies, Native policies. She told me how she got involved in Leonard's case.

HOLLY COOK MACARRO: When I dug deep and began to learn about how he had just been railroaded by the so-called justice system, I spent hours just reading so much, talking to folks. Let's figure out how we do this. What's the best way we can get Leonard out of-- I felt the FBI narrative had been so effective and so pervasive, not just in the administration, but in Indian country as well.

And so telling that story to the folks who were doing Indian Affairs, whether it's in a congressional office, or whether it's in the White House, or the Department of Interior, I really had to get through some of those false narratives that had been so effectively pushed and supported by the FBI for so long. And then when it came right down to it, at the very end, if Secretary Haaland had not been part of this, this absolutely would not have happened.

LEAH LEMM: Another person involved in helping with Leonard's case and with his clemency was Nick Tilsen, CEO of NDN Collective. Can you tell me more about Nick?

ALLISON HERRERA: His parents met at the Wounded Knee occupation in 1973. Nick Tilsen's family was part of the Oglala Civil Rights organization that invited AIM to Pine Ridge in the first place. His grandfather, Kenneth Tilsen, was a lawyer, based in the Twin Cities, that represented many people involved with AIM. And Nick Tilsen remembers riding Leonard a letter when he was still a teenager.

NICK TILSEN: It was pretty simple. I said, I believe that-- at first, I thanked him for standing up for our people. And I said that I think that it's wrong what happened to him and that I would fight for him until the day that we freed him.

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The story and struggle of Leonard Peltier was always a present thing. I'm pretty sure they had all these kids lined up, sealing envelopes with his face on it to do mailings to try to raise money for him.

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ALLISON HERRERA: And fast forward 50 years, and that's exactly what Nick Tilsen did.

LEAH LEMM: What did he tell you about how he got involved with freeing Leonard?

ALLISON HERRERA: I'll let Nick tell this story.

NICK TILSEN: My heart being broken a few times in the struggle to free Leonard Peltier, even dating all the way back to the Clinton administration, to find out that his name was on the clemency list, and then the next morning, his name was off the list. And we never knew what happened. And so there are certain people he trusted that some of us didn't trust.

I had a conversation with him. And I said, I'm not dealing with any third party. I'm not dealing with any of your white people. I will talk with you directly. But I'm not going to deal with all of these other people because I'm working for you directly. And in all those meetings that we had, we always would start those meetings with prayer because he always needed to also get grounded.

LEAH LEMM: So Nick Tilsen is an organizer and has done a lot of work with Native communities all over the country. What did he say about the influence of AIM and the changes it brought about?

ALLISON HERRERA: He believes it created conditions to make systemic change.

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NICK TILSEN: I don't believe that without the American Indian Movement and the strong stances that they took, that you would have an Indian Self-Determination and Education Act, that you would have a Native American Freedom of Religion Act, or I don't even if you'd have Indian gaming.

And I'm not saying that the American Indian Movement did, quote, unquote, "all of the advocacy" for all those things to happen. But their activism and their leadership and tenacity created the conditions because when you build a movement, and it changes the normal flow of things, and it holds a mirror up to the country, it changes the conditions. And when you change the conditions, you create opportunity for others to move things forward.

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HOLLY COOK MACARRO: Dear Parole Board, I'm writing this letter concerning my son, Leonard's, parole hearing on the last part of August. I would like to have Leonard home.

LEAH LEMM: This is Holly. Cook Macarro reading a letter that Leonard Peltier's father, Leo, wrote while his son was in prison. It was in one of the many boxes of Peltier's belongings in his garage on the Turtle Mountain Reservation.

HOLLY COOK MACARRO: He would be a big help to me, as I've been undergoing dialysis and go for my treatments twice a week. We have a large apartment, and he would have his separate room. It would be good to have him back in the family atmosphere again. He would be an asset to our community because of his cultural and spiritual awareness. He could help a lot of young people here. We hope you take these things into consideration, as it will mean a lot to me, to us, to have my son home again. Thank you, Leo Peltier, July 24, 1986.

LEAH LEMM: Why did you want us to hear that letter, Allison?

ALLISON HERRERA: I just think it shows the lengths and the efforts people have gone to help get his sentence commuted.

LEAH LEMM: So how does the Indigenous Protectors Movement carry on the legacy of AIM?

ALLISON HERRERA: Well, Vinnie Dionne and others see it as a continuation of what AIM was doing in the 1970s.

HOLLY COOK MACARRO: Because we really saw this niche here, especially in South Minneapolis, for Indigenous advocacy, for Indigenous activism, for doing these community-building based things to empower and strengthen our people so that we can fight these issues and bring our people into a better day.

LEAH LEMM: What does Leonard Peltier think about the American Indian Movement and where AIM fits in today?

ALLISON HERRERA: I asked him about that, and he said, even with the new organizations that have emerged, AIM is still important.

LEONARD PELTIER: I don't think it's time for us to dissolve yet. We still are needed, going to be needed. There's still racism, open racism against us. And we're going to have to fight for the rest of our lives, anyway, for our people. So I think they're still needed.

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LEAH LEMM: So to wrap up, Allison, after spending nearly 50 years in prison for his role in the killing of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation, what does Leonard Peltier say about how he wants to be remembered?

ALLISON HERRERA: I asked him about that at the end of our interview.

LEONARD PELTIER: Well, as somebody who loved his people, believed in his people, believed in our rights, our culture, our religion, and would fight and die for it.

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NINA MOINI: Our story on Leonard Peltier was produced by Allison Herrera, with help from Leah Lemm, Chris Julin, Derek Ramirez, and Stephen Smith. You can read and listen to more of Allison's reporting at mprnews.org.