The Chopping Block: Leonard Peltier is finally free. So why does no one care?
The most famous political prisoner in North America was released to minimal fanfare.
For years, Leonard Peltier was called North America’s Nelson Mandela.
Amnesty International consistently advocated for his release, and in 1999, they labelled him a political prisoner. Archbishop Desmond Tutu called his conviction a “blot on the judicial system” of the United States.
Here in Canada, Peltier’s case was the kind of issue that brought together ideological enemies. There was a time when both the Reform Party and the NDP were arguing that he should be freed. Even Peter Worthington, the deeply-conservative founding editor of the Toronto Sun, was a vociferous advocate on behalf of this politically-radical Indigenous man who had been convicted of murdering two FBI agents.
And yet, when Peltier’s sentence was commuted by President Joe Biden in the last minutes of his presidency, the response was surprisingly muted here in Canada.
In fact, the Assembly of First Nations, which had been calling for his release more than two decades, had officially rescinded their support for him just last year.
So what happened?
Peltier had been a foot soldier in the American Indian Movement (AIM), which had been founded in the slums of Minneapolis in 1968. Over the next few years, AIM became one of the most influential radical political organizations in North America.
They occupied Alcatraz Prison and the US Department of Interior in Washington. And in 1973, they helped organize the occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, which had been where the American army had massacred more than 250 unarmed Lakota in 1890. The occupation had been spurred by the corrupt and brutal conduct of the Oglala tribal government, led by Dick Wilson, who was supported by the American government. It was also an attempt to bring attention to the repression of Indigenous peoples in United States, and the government’s failure to uphold treaties. The American government responded with overwhelming force, but AIM held out for more than two months.
Once the occupation ended, Dick Wilson’s corrupt regime instituted a “reign of terror” on the Pine Ridge Reservation, specifically targeting anyone aligned with AIM. Dozens of people were murdered during a three-year span. And the FBI, worried about the spread of radical Indigenous liberation ideology, swarmed the reservation, in support of Wilson’s goons.
Leonard Peltier arrived in Pine Ridge in 1975 in the middle of all of this chaos. He had been part of AIM for three years. And just a few months after he arrived, he and two other AIM member were involved in a shootout with the FBI. Two FBI agents and a member of the American Indian Movement were killed.
The facts of this shootout are in dispute.
Two AIM foot soldiers allegedly involved in the shootout were arrested less than two months after the incident. Peltier fled to Alberta, where he was arrested in 1976. The American government used false and coerced affidavits to secure his extradition from Canada. Which is one of the primary reasons his case had been a flash point in Canadian politics for many years.
The other two men who had been arrested for the murder of the FBI agents were found not guilty, on the ground of self-defence. But Peltier was tried separately. Prosecutors in his trial have been roundly criticized for allegedly suppressing exculpatory evidence. Peltier was eventually convicted of murdering both agents and given two life sentences.
The argument that Peltier wasn’t given a fair trial is incredibly strong. So why has so much support fallen off for him?
That has to do with the murder of Anna Mae Aquash. Aquash was a Mi’kmaq woman from Nova Scotia who became deeply involved in AIM in the late 1960s. She was at Wounded Knee and became part of AIM’s inner circle. As part of their often-illegal surveillance of radical movements, the FBI had planted numerous moles within AIM. And they deliberately tried to make other AIM members believe that Aquash was an informant for the agency, a tactic known as “snitch-jacketing.”
Aquash was murdered by AIM members in December 1975. Her murder was unsolved for many years, but in the 2000s, three members of AIM were convicted — John Graham, Arlo Looking Cloud and Thelma Rios.
Aquash’s activism and her murder have rightfully received a lot more attention in recent years, especially in the context of the thousands of missing and murdered Indigneous women in North America. And as a part of that, much of AIM’s legacy has been reassessed in light of the fact that some of them willingly murdered a comrade in cold blood.
A few years ago, Jordan and I put together an audio documentary about Anna Mae Aquash’s life and death for COMMONS called “They Buried Her Heart at Wounded Knee.” I urge you to listen to it if you haven’t.
The public support for Peltier has fallen off because of accusations that he had interrogated Aquash at gunpoint and in the months leading up to her murder. And while Peltier has never been accused of direct involvement in Aquash’s murder, his alleged conduct has cast a pall over his image.
In July of last year, the Assembly of First Nations rescinded their call to free Peltier, which would have been an almost unthinkable move even a few years ago.
So that’s the rundown of what you need to know. And if you want to know my personal opinion, I believe that both things can be true — that Leonard Peltier was given an unfair trial and should be released and that he may have indeed interrogated Anna Mae Aquash at gunpoint. Though as far as I can tell, no one has ever accused Peltier of any kind of direct involvement in Aquash’s murder.
But all of this is just context for what I wanted to share with you all.
Shortly after Leonard Peltier’s was released from prison, I called up Kevin McKiernan, a journalist who has covered this story longer and in more depth than anyone else. Not only was McKiernan at the Wounded Knee occupation (where he got to know Anna Mae Aquash), but he was the only journalist on the scene during the fateful shootout between the FBI and AIM.
Initially I was hoping to present this interview as a podcast, but due to some technical difficulties, our audio quality was too poor for that format.
McKiernan was recently involved in the documentary Free Leonard Peltier, which debuted earlier this year and has been gathering acclaim on the festival circuit.
In our interview, we talk about Peltier’s release, the AIM-FBI shootout, the false evidence used to extradite and eventually convict Peltier, and what we should take away from all of this.
(One last note: McKiernan and I didn’t go into too much detail about Anna Mae Aquash. If you’d like to learn more about her, please check out the podcast episode I mentioned earlier, where I talk to McKiernan in far greater depth about his experiences with Aquash).