‘We went from invisible to visible’: Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier navigates changed political landscape
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Vinnie Dionne steps out from an air-conditioned trailer in south Minneapolis into the hot August sun. It’s muggy and the sounds of nearby Highway 55 roar as he points out the area he and his crew will be working.
Dionne runs a regular meeting with a few Native people out of a refurbished construction trailer near the newly opened Red Lake housing development off of East Franklin Avenue.
“The first half is the talking circle, and then we go out in the community and we go pick up trash,” said Dionne, as he points to an area underneath the highway bridge.
Dionne grew up in Little Earth, a Native preference housing development in south Minneapolis. After a stint in prison, Dionne turned his life around. With his wife Rachel Thunder and Crow Bellecourt, they co-founded the Indigenous Protectors Movement, a public safety organization that’s seen as a grassroots alternative to traditional policing.
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He said even though he wasn’t directly aware of the American Indian Movement growing up, he benefitted from some of the changes the Native American activist group fought for in Minneapolis.
The American Indian Movement was formed in the late 1960s in Minneapolis as a response to the police brutality against Native American people in the city. It grew to a nationwide movement that advocated for the civil rights of Indigenous people who called for respecting treaty and land rights.
“I had no idea at the time that AIM was really big into making it an all-Native housing complex, the Peacemaker Center. I didn’t know that was AIM-run, but that’s where I learned how to play baseball and basketball,” Dionne recalled.
Bellecourt is the executive director of the Indigenous Protectors Movement, and he remembers attending Heart of the Earth Survival School in the late 1970s.
“The school was like a big family. On Monday mornings when we went into school, the very first hour of school was called Circle Time, where everybody got tobacco,” Bellecourt recalled the ceremony, a pipe being brought out and the students singing and dancing on the drum.
“Then we learned math, history, all the science, all the other classes we’re supposed to take. But with that, we learned about our culture. We learned about our history — not their history, our history.”
Heart of Earth Survival School was founded because of a provision within the Indian Education Act that allowed Native people to have control over their education, after decades of boarding school policies that sought to destroy Native culture. It was also one of AIM’s key achievements.
When Dionne got out of prison, he was looking for a place to focus his energy; and that’s when he turned to the Walk for Justice, one of the many community-led actions that sought to raise awareness for Leonard Peltier. It’s also how he met his wife, one of the organizers of the walk.
“I always had known about Leonard,” Thunder said. “I’m 33 years old. That was just like a known fact that Leonard Peltier was in prison.”
In 2022, Thunder helped organize the Walk for Justice to raise awareness about Peltier’s case and to the issues Native people face. The trek was more than a thousand miles, stretching from Minneapolis to Washington, D.C.
She said it started with a dream.
”[Peltier] 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, like, 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,’” Thunder said.
Fast-forward to January 2025, when former President Joe Biden commuted the AIM activist’s two life sentences. Thunder and her husband Dionne waited on the official statement from Biden. Moments before Biden left office, the couple found out that Peltier was being sent home to serve the rest of his sentence on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation in North Dakota.
Both Thunder and Dionne grew up knowing about Peltier, as well as the work AIM did to combat what they saw as police brutality in Minneapolis and bring public attention to the injustice Native people endured both on and off the reservation across the country.
Now, more than 50 years later, AIM’s legacy is still associated with several on-the-ground actions: the Trail of Broken Treaties in 1972; the Occupation at Wounded Knee in 1973, where they brought attention to the violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie treaty involving the Black Hills; and the shootout at Oglala on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation that resulted in the death of two FBI agents.
In 1977, Peltier was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of two FBI agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, after the 1975 deadly shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The shootout also resulted in the death of Joe Stuntz, a Native American man and member of the American Indian Movement.
Organizers like Dionne and Thunder, those who work in public policy, tribal leaders and a host of other lawyers and professionals say that AIM sparked changes to laws and policies that dramatically improved the lives of Native people, starting in the 1970s.
Policies like the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, the Native American Religious Freedom Act, the Indian Child Welfare Act and the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act were all passed and inspired by the work of AIM resistance, activists say.
“ When Leonard went to prison, it was illegal for us to pray,” said Thunder, referring to the federal government’s outlawing of Native American ceremonies. “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.”
Peltier has been out of prison since February. He can travel to medical appointments and travel more than 100 miles from home with special permission from the Bureau of Prisons. In July, he attended the Sun Dance ceremony in South Dakota. He told MPR News it was “awesome” to see so many young people attending.
“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,” Peltier said over a Zoom interview with his Pendleton coffee mug in hand.
The Sun Dance ceremony was the first time Peltier visited the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation since the shootout with the FBI.
Growing up on Turtle Mountain
Peltier was born on Sept. 12, 1944, in Grand Forks, N.D., and was raised on the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Reservation by his paternal grandparents after his mom and dad divorced.
Peltier remembers hauling water and hunting with his grandfather, with whom he had a close relationship.
“I idolized my grandfather,” Peltier said. He grew up in poverty, but he recalled how well liked he was and their times going out hunting and identifying trees and plants.
When Peltier was around 8 years old, his grandfather passed away.
“Of course I missed him. I was standing at the foot of his bed when he died,” he said. “I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I heard everybody was crying and all that stuff, and I just stood there and watched.”
He was taken away to the Wahpeton Indian Boarding School near the Sisseton Wahpeton Nation at 9 years old, after his grandfather died and his grandmother wasn’t able to care for him or his siblings.
Peltier said he almost drowned crossing an icy river at age 10 trying to escape the school. He says he endured beatings and abuse, motivating him to join a resistance movement formed by other young Native people attending boarding school there.
“It was called The Resistance,” Peltier said.
After boarding school, Peltier returned to Turtle Mountain and lived with his father. It was the 1950s, during a time when the federal government sought to terminate tribal nations, also known as the Termination Era.
He remembers going to tribal council meetings, at first out of boredom and hunger — the meetings had food. Then, he gradually started to listen and pay attention to the discussions people were having around federal policies. He learned a lot about the history and what was happening on Turtle Mountain. In 1953, Congress passed a bill to terminate the trust status of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.
“Corruption in the government, not paying what they owed us, the taking of our lands,” Peltier said about the conversations taking place. “The government not paying what they owed us for taking of our lands, the brutality that they faced by the police. Stuff like that.”
Peltier moved to Seattle in 1965, where he founded a transitional recovery residence and participated in Native American community activities. He became active in the American Indian Movement in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. In 1972, he participated in the Trail of Broken Treaties that occupied the BIA building. His activism led him to Pine Ridge in 1975 and ultimately to his incarceration for killing two FBI agents.
While in prison, Peltier thought a lot about his grandfather and the lessons he learned from him.
Since his incarceration, one particular federal policy that affected Peltier was scrutinized. The federal government acknowledged its role in creating the federal boarding school system that sought to separate Native children and erase Native culture. The Department of Interior, under the leadership of former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, produced two reports that explained the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ involvement in those policies in detail.
Policy change
During the fall of 2024, Biden apologized for that treatment.
“I appreciate their apology, but why don’t you give us the funding to find those bodies so we can bring those kids home?” Peltier said of the statement and ongoing work to repatriate the bodies of Native children who died at boarding school back to their tribal communities.
Holly Cook Macarro, a citizen of the Red Lake Band of Ojibwe, remembers getting a call when she and her husband Mark Macarro were visiting the University of California, Berkely campus for parents weekend.
Macarro is the tribal chair for the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians in California and president of the National Congress of American Indians, an organization that brings together tribal leaders of Native nations and organizations.
The call was an invitation for Macarro to attend the apology with Biden at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona. He wasn’t just going to attend, he was going to ride with Biden on Air Force One. Both Cook Macarro and Macarro — and those working on getting Peltier released from prison — knew this would be one of the last times to talk directly with Biden about clemency for the activist.
“We thought, this will be one of the last times a tribal leader has to speak directly to President Biden about Leonard Peltier and what it means to Indian Country,” Macarro said.
Macarro told Haaland what he intended to do. Haaland was the first Native American to head the Department of Interior. Never before had a Native American politician had the ear of the president like Haaland had, an influential shift since Peltier’s incarceration. Another shift are the laws and policies on missing and murdered Indigenous people.
Peltier was amazed when he heard about the Feather Alert in North Dakota, a law that would require law enforcement to send out an alert when a Native person goes missing or is at imminent risk.
According to a study done by the Department of the Interior, violence committed against Alaska Natives and American Indians far exceeds the national average.
“More than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women (84.3 percent) have experienced violence in their lifetime, including 56.1 percent who have experienced sexual violence,” according to a study by the National Institute of Justice.
“At least they got to investigate. Right?” Peltier said. He recalls a time during his activism with AIM when he says “no one thought twice about missing Native people.”
“We went from invisible to visible,” said Cook Macarro.
Cook Macarro became involved in the pursuit of clemency when Nick Tilsen, the executive director of NDN Collective, reached out to her with a legislative plan to get land returned in the Black Hills. Growing up in northern Minnesota, Cook Macarro said she wasn’t an activist, and you didn’t see the same kind of deference paid to AIM as the Twin Cities. Her parents were political but not activists.
“But 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,” Cook Macarro said,.
She said she would spend time on phone calls that she felt weren’t the best use of her time. Instead, she wanted to roll up her sleeves.
“I just want to do the work. You know, let’s figure out how we do this. What’s the best way we can get Leonard out, you know? Is it a grant of clemency?” Cook Macarro asked.
“For about nine months, we worked very hard with some key relationships that we had, on kind of an internal compassionate release that would’ve allowed Leonard to go home,” Cook Macarro said about the efforts she and NDN Collective and others took.
Without Haaland, she said Peltier’s release would not have happened. Cook Macarro said Haaland can come off as “low-key” but is a “pretty adept politician.”
“When it came right down to it, at the very end having those conversations, if Secretary Haaland had not been supportive of this, this absolutely would not have happened,” she said.
A kind of fusion
Reid Raymond covered Leonard Peltier’s trial in Fargo, N.D., as a young journalist for Migizi communications. He now works for the Hennepin County Attorney’s office.
When Peltier was on trial for the murder of FBI agents, Raymond was working as a journalist with Migizi and covered the trial from a Native perspective.
Raymond was working in Washington, D.C. as an intern when he saw a cultural shift happening — AIM influenced tribal leaders, policy makers and others.
“AIM shook the country up,” Raymond said. “Basically, AIM stood up and said, we are going to fight for ourselves. We're going to solve our own problems. We disagree with how we’ve been treated.”
Raymond described a fusion among AIM, policymakers and tribal leaders. Their actions worked in concert with one another to pass laws like Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act in 1975 and to secure funding for organizations like the National Indian Health Board and Indian Health Service.
He also cited the National Congress of American Indians and the National Tribal Chairman’s Association, who were also inspired by what AIM was doing.
“They were all moving forward at the same time,” Raymond said. “But AIM was the one that was out in the forefront, you know, advocating and making people understand the injustice that had been perpetrated on Native people. It helped a great deal, and I think it provided incentive for Native people to take action.”
One of those problems was education. After years of enduring boarding schools, Native people advocated for more culturally appropriate education.
During his high school years, one of the policies passed through Congress was the Indian Education Act in 1972, championed by Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
Culturally centered education was a key point of the AIM agenda, which is why they established the Heart of the Earth Survival School.
Raymond recalled Phillip Deere, a traditional Muscogee leader from Oklahoma who was involved with AIM, saying that “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?” Raymond said.
There was a time, he said, that any decisions tribal governments made needed approval from the Department of the Interior.
“Every tribal resolution for many, many, many years had to have a signature block at the bottom of the resolution where the area superintendent would sign off on it. Now tribal governments are exercising their sovereignty. Someone said to me the other day that we didn’t hear much about sovereignty until AIM came along.”
Prayer and song
Nick Tilsen is the founder and CEO of NDN Collective, a Native-led nonprofit based in South Dakota. His parents met at the Wounded Knee occupation in 1973. His mother’s family was part of the Oglala Civil Rights Organization that invited AIM to Pine Ridge. His grandfather, Kenneth Tilsen, was a lawyer based in the Twin Cities who represented many people involved in AIM.
Tilsen remembers writing Peltier a letter when he was 13 years old. He said the contents were pretty simple.
“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.”
Fast-forward almost 30 years later, and Tilsen stood outside of the gates at Coleman, a maximum security prison in Florida, waiting for Peltier to walk through the door.
The nonprofit Tilsen leads started working on clemency for Peltier when he became ill with COVID-19. Peltier suffers from diabetes and was in a higher risk category.
Tilsen said he reluctantly became involved with getting clemency for Peltier.
“My heart being broken a few times in the struggle to free Leonard Peltier, even dating all the way back to the Clinton administration,” Tilsen said.
During the final days of his presidency, many people speculated that former President Bill Clinton was set to pardon Peltier, but it never happened.
“I was a young organizer at the time when that was going on, and that was devastating, to find out that his name was on the clemency list and then the next morning, you know, his name was off the list,” he said.
Peltier told Tilsen that he trusted him because he knew his family and that he liked his grandfather.
Then the work began. Tilsen said every meeting began with prayer and song.
“The only way that Leonard is ever going to be free is if it’s founded in prayer,” Tilsen said.
Those prayers worked, along with all of the federal engagement Macarro did with people within administration. Tilsen and NDN Collective worked with their social media team to put out updates and messages. It was about controlling the narrative: that Peltier, who has spent most of his life behind bars and is in poor health, was wrongly convicted.
It also helped that the nonprofit purchased a home for him.
“Let’s give him something that was taken away from him. He probably didn’t have his own home since he was taken away at the age of 9 when he was taken to boarding school,” Tilsen said.
Tilsen said it wasn’t just NDN Collective, but tribal leaders, the National Congress of American Indians and Haaland advising Biden on issues within Indian Country.
He said he and his team were deployed to Florida the weekend of inauguration where everyone was on pins and needles waiting for the announcement on the White House website. They had exhausted all of their political capital, even getting the late Pope Francis to talk to Biden about Peltier.
“And probably like a few minutes before the decision, the air got really calm and a freaking eagle showed up,” Tilsen said. “It circled the prison and it was right above us. And I remember thinking every ceremony that’s ever been done for him and all the people that prayed for him, it matters. Like, it’s going to happen.”
AIM is still needed
Thunder, Dionne and Bellecourt say that AIM has evolved. It still has the same goals: advancing the rights of Indigenous people. They saw a need for the Indigenous Protectors Movement within the community, especially during the riots in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. People from AIM and Little Earth patrolled the neighborhood, making sure people’s homes and properties were safe.
“We’re filling some of those shoes now, just, you know, under a different name. Like I said, I’ll always be AIM,” Thunder said.
Dionne said what he’s doing is a continuation of the movement.
“We are setting up thinking about the next generation: How do we give them the resources, the tools for them to succeed to them, for them to be better than us?”
Peltier also said there is still a need for AIM. He says there is still racism and thinks that the current administration’s policies are trying to harm Indigenous people.
As for his legacy, he said he has no regrets.
He wants to be remembered as somebody who loved his people and “believed in our rights, our culture, our religion and would fight and die for it.“
Audio transcript
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.
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