the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Feb 17, 2025
American Indian activist Leonard Peltier is to be released on February 18, after spending 50 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. He will remain under house arrest.
Peltier was an activist fighting for Native American rights. He became a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM). In 1973, AIM occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota for 71 days to protest the failure by the U.S. government to honor treaties made with Native Americans and to protest corruption among official tribal leaders. Federal agents fired on protesters, killing two and wounding and arresting others, before negotiating with the protesters to end the occupation, promising to investigate the concerns raised by AIM.
In June 1975, two FBI agents in unmarked cars followed a pickup truck onto a nearby ranch where AIM members had set up camp. A shootout took place and two FBI agents and one Native American were killed. Though 40 Native Americans and over 150 FBI agents and cops took part in the gunfight, only three AIM members were charged, including Leonard Peltier.
Only Peltier was convicted of murder of the two agents based on testimony of “eyewitnesses” who later recanted their stories and an FBI agent who changed his story. Prosecutors claimed a bullet casing found near the agents’ bodies matched Peltier’s gun. Peltier was convicted and sentenced to two life terms in prison.
Later it came out that prosecutors withheld results of a ballistics test from Peltier’s lawyers showing that the casing did not come from Peltier’s gun; they also withheld 140,000 pages of documents. U.S. Attorney James Reynolds, who led the government’s fight against Peltier’s appeal, later admitted that Peltier’s conviction should have been overturned. Yet SIX presidents before Biden could have pardoned Peltier or commuted his sentence, including three Democrats, and none did.
Though the U.S. courts and law enforcement authorities did nothing about the violence committed against Native Americans leading up to the FBI agents’ shootings, Peltier spent 50 years in prison, experiencing beatings and long periods of solitary confinement. All because the politicians were unwilling to stand up to criticism from law enforcement to overturn a miscarriage of justice. Biden held out to the very end before granting Peltier some limited freedom, despite the fact that Peltier has diabetes and suffered a stroke that left him blind in one eye.
Through all this Peltier maintained his innocence and remains a symbol of the fight of Native Americans for some semblance of justice for the wrongs committed by this society against them.