Leonard Peltier is aware of his time is working out.
The Native American rights activist is 77, has critical well being points, simply survived an unpleasant bout with COVID-19 and is now serving his forty sixth yr in federal jail ― the place the U.S. authorities put him with none proof that he dedicated against the law.
Peltier and his supporters are holding out hope that President Joe Biden will lastly ship him residence. As a result of, if something has develop into clear with time, it’s simply how troubling Peltier’s imprisonment has been from the beginning. Prosecutors in his trial hid key proof. The FBI threatened and coerced witnesses into mendacity. A juror admitted she was biased in opposition to Native Individuals on day two of the trial, however was allowed to remain on anyway.
Even a few of the similar U.S. authorities officers who helped put Peltier in jail within the first place have since admitted how flawed his trial was and the way horribly the federal government has lengthy handled Native Individuals, they usually have urged clemency for him.
There may be cause to imagine that Biden might, eventually, give Peltier his freedom. He has already demonstrated a willingness to handle previous injustices in opposition to Native Individuals. Since taking workplace, Biden has made it a precedence to look at the federal government’s ugly historical past of Indian boarding faculties, to guard sacred Indigenous websites and cultural assets, and to handle the disaster of lacking and murdered Indigenous ladies. He additionally canceled the Keystone XL oil pipeline, a serious win for tribes and environmentalists.
Biden additionally selected Deb Haaland to guide his Inside Division, making her the nation’s first Indigenous Cupboard secretary. Haaland strongly advocated for Peltier’s launch from jail in her former position as a member of Congress.
In November, HuffPost pressed Haaland on whether or not she nonetheless helps Peltier’s launch in her position as inside secretary and whether or not she’s talked to the president about him. Haaland mentioned solely, “My ideas and emotions about this problem are well-documented.”
If solely Peltier had a couple of minutes alone with Biden himself. What would he say?
In a uncommon interview from his most safety jail in Florida, Peltier not too long ago advised HuffPost that his message to the president can be easy.
“I’m not responsible of this taking pictures. I’m not responsible,” he mentioned. “I want to go residence to spend what years I've left with my great-grandkids and my folks.”
Peltier mentioned he’s been following Biden’s efforts to help Native American rights and empower tribes, and if he had the president’s ear, he would give him credit score for that.
“I admire what you’re doing by giving us our nationhood again, our sovereignty again,” he mentioned he’d inform Biden. “I’m very grateful for that, as a result of that’s what I used to be combating for all my life.”
Earlier than he was put in jail, Peltier was a member of the American Indian Motion, or AIM, a grassroots group of activists centered on drawing consideration to federal treaty rights violations, discrimination and police brutality concentrating on Native Individuals. Again within the Seventies, the FBI was working a covert marketing campaign to suppress the actions of AIM. In actual fact, as time has revealed, the FBI is not less than partly answerable for the shootout that day on Pine Ridge Reservation, because it was deliberately fueling intra-tribal tensions there in an effort to disrupt AIM’s efforts.
At the moment, the FBI stays the most important impediment to Peltier getting out of jail, for no clear cause apart from desirous to defend itself from scrutiny over its previous wrongdoings. The bureau merely doesn’t need him to ever be launched. It not too long ago made that clear to HuffPost ― even once we didn’t ask. This was very bizarre. The unsolicited assertion it offered was additionally filled with misinformation, which indicators the FBI’s plan is to maintain recycling a flimsy, face-saving argument for protecting Peltier in jail till he dies.
Peltier mentioned he is aware of precisely what he would say to FBI Director Christopher Wray if he had the possibility to speak to him alone for a couple of minutes.
“Cease killing my folks. That’s all I'd inform him,” he mentioned. “Cease killing my folks. Arrest the folks which might be responsible of crimes on the reservations.”
Maybe Peltier’s biggest power is one thing the FBI can’t match: the endurance of his story. For many years, 1000's of people have been protesting his imprisonment ― together with U.S. senators, members of Congress, Native American teams, celebrities and human rights leaders like Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Coretta Scott King and Amnesty Worldwide, a corporation in any other case centered on political prisoners in different nations.
Simply final week, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, pressed Legal professional Basic Merrick Garland on the standing of Peltier’s clemency petition as Garland testified in an unrelated Senate price range listening to. The U.S. legal professional normal supplied a surprisingly weak response, saying he didn’t find out about Peltier’s case past what he’s learn within the press.
Pleas for Peltier’s launch are additionally occurring on the worldwide degree. On Tuesday, North Dakota state Rep. Ruth Anna Buffalo (D) gave an announcement on the United Nations Everlasting Discussion board on Indigenous Points demanding clemency for him.
“The case of Leonard Peltier demonstrates the failure of the U.S. felony justice system to supply actual justice for Native Peoples in addition to the government-generated setting of racism that constantly results in unjust convictions,” Buffalo mentioned in her assertion, which she learn aloud on behalf of the Worldwide Leonard Peltier Protection Committee. She urged the U.N. to push for “a method for reduction and justice for Leonard Peltier.”
Buffalo later advised HuffPost she felt her remarks had been “well-received” on the U.N. discussion board.
“I hope the studying of the assertion on behalf of the ILPDC may have a optimistic impact on the discharge of our elder, Leonard Peltier,” she mentioned. “I’m grateful for the a long time of advocacy in combating for justice for Leonard Peltier.”
“I’m not responsible. I want to go residence to spend what years I've left with my great-grandkids and my folks.”
- Leonard Peltier
Peltier is watching all of this play out from his jail cell. He will get common updates from supporters on information tales that come out about him and rallies being organized in his identify. He's surprisingly updated on present information. Generally folks mail him articles to learn, and when he can’t entry a related information story on-line, he has associates who will name in and skim it to him over the telephone, line by line.
Throughout HuffPost’s interview with Peltier, he did many of the speaking. He mentioned he was scared not too long ago by chest pains he’d had when he was strolling throughout the jail yard and that he hopes to get again to portray after being denied entry to the artwork room for years due to pandemic precautions.
Requested if he thinks he’ll make it out of jail earlier than he dies, Peltier mentioned he doesn’t know. Up to now, the White Home has both ignored HuffPost’s questions in regards to the president’s willingness to grant clemency to Peltier or talked solely in regards to the course of an individual should undergo for requesting clemency.
“Generally it appears like, properly...,” Peltier mentioned, trailing off. “I shouldn’t even be right here. ... I ought to have by no means been in jail to begin with.”
He's clearly nonetheless animated by the trigger for justice for Native Individuals that he was combating for with AIM so a few years in the past. He advised tales from his days within the Seventies, when he mentioned Indigenous ladies had been being routinely raped by white males who later obtained little or no punishment for it, and he and different AIM members would confront native regulation enforcement to do one thing about it.
Peltier particularly cited the case of former South Dakota Republican Gov. Invoice Janklow, who allegedly raped a 15-year-old Lakota schoolgirl, Jancita Eagle Deer, on the Rosebud Boarding Faculty on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. Eagle Deer was mysteriously killed by a automobile just a few months after she testified in opposition to Janklow, who was by no means charged.
“Native individuals are people and we had a society, a really superior society of our personal. We had been beneficiant folks. We gave. That was our downside,” he mentioned. “When the white man first got here right here, we gave an excessive amount of. That’s what we did. We opened up as a result of that’s the best way we had been introduced up. We've been nothing however abused for the final 300-some years.”
Peltier mentioned the truth that he has a powerful base of supporters who're nonetheless combating for him to get clemency exhibits that the extra folks study the best way he was put into jail, the extra folks “are lastly believing us” that the entire course of was unjust.
“How do I really feel about it? I be ok with it,” he mentioned of individuals interesting for his launch on the United Nations this week. “Possibly I’ll have the ability to go residence and die now.”
He paused earlier than including, “I’m nonetheless pissed off about what they did. What they did to me was unsuitable. It violated the entire Structure of america.”
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