The Life Of Leonard Peltier

The Life Of Leonard Peltier

With all, that’s going on in the world it seems there are most questions than answers and sometimes when you want direction to look forward we must look back.

Leonard Peltier is a Native American activist who after becoming one of the best-known indigenous rights activists in North America, was convicted in 1977 of having murdered two FBI agents.

After his unfair case and irregularities in his extradition his trial came to light, and his supporters consider him a political prisoner.

So why exactly is he in jail? Let us learn more about the warrior and The Life Of Leonard Peltier.

Early Life.

Leonard Peltier was born in the late summer on September 12, 1944, at the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa near Belcourt, North Dakota.

Being the 11th of 13 children, Peltier lived through poverty growing up and always felt as if the struggles he endured at the time were only happening to him.

When he was just 4 years old when his parents divorced. Later he and a sister were sent to live with their paternal grandparents on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, situated in Rolette county in northern North Dakota.

At the age of nine Leonard was sent to an Indian boarding school in Wahpeton, North Dakota. There he was subject to various forms of abuse.

After graduating, he was sent to Flandreau (South Dakota) Indian School, from which he dropped out in the ninth grade and went to live with his father on the Turtle Mountain Reservation.

It was there that his flame of activism was ignited in his heart when he experienced firsthand the U.S. government policy of termination which was the cruel withdrawal of federal assistance, including food, from those Native Americans on reservations in an attempt to force their assimilation into the modern Euro-American society. Many who were forced off their homelands were promised jobs and housing in the cities and like many other promises made by the government were not kept. Causing many to be homeless and a few to actually achieve what some would call success.

Then in 1965, Peltier moved to the traditional homelands of the Nez Peirce, Seattle. Although Peltier was a welder and construction worker, It was there he took the position of part-owner of an auto body shop where he employed other Native Americans and provided inexpensive repairs for those in need.

During that time his shop became a halfway house for Native American former offenders due to the financial and essential expenses the body shop ending up shutting down after some time. He also became involved in Native American land-claim issues, alcohol-abuse counseling, and the preservation of Native land in Seattle.

The Takeover Of Fort Lawton

On the morning of March 8, 1970, members of the United Indians of All Tribes scaled the fences surrounding Fort Lawton, an army base located at Discovery Point contiguous to the city of Seattle, among these members was no other then Leonard Peltier himself. The fort was slated to be decommissioned and the city intended to turn it into a park. After failing to persuade the city and federal officials that the land should be returned to Native people, a man named Bernie Whitebear and the UNIAT took action. 

Upon entering the facility they were faced with government machine guns and flamethrowers, the protestors were taken into custody. Peltier and the other Natives were beaten by the police at the time of arrest and beaten again when taken to their cells. When finally released, Peltier refused to leave the Army stockade until all the other protestors had been freed.

The Fort Lawton invasion was a response to the declining state of Native reservations and to the challenges faced by Seattle’s growing urban Indian population, as well as the government’s apparent lack of concern for either.

They didn’t get all that they wanted, but their militant action had some success. They were able to secure 40 acres of the land after Negotiations started in June of 1971 and were not completed until November. This was start of Leonard Peltier’s journey for better rights Native American people.

Late Peltier became an official member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in 1972.

The Trail Of Broken Treaties

In 1972, Peltier joined the Trail of Broken Treaties march scheduled to arrive in Washington, DC, in time for the presidential election.

A caravan of people from San Francisco, California, met up with a caravan from Seattle and many others from around the country. The four-mile-long group of people arrived early on the morning of Friday, November 3, just before Election Day.

The Native Americans had notified the Nixon Administration of their plans which included the presentation of a 20-point proposal for improving U.S.-Indian relations. The first of the peoples’ 20 Points demanded the restoration of their constitutional treaty-making powers, removed by the provision in the 1871 Indian Appropriations Act, and the next seven points concerned recognition of the sovereignty of Indian nations and the revalidation of treaties, including the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.

The fundamental demand was that the Native American people be dealt with according to “our treaties.” Other points were addressed to such related matters as land-reform law and the restoration of a land base, which would permit those people who wished to do so to return to a traditional way of life.

From the U.S. government’s closed-minded point of view, to recognize or negotiate treaty claims all over the country might necessitate the return of vast tracts of America to the true owners, which to them was a very dangerous idea indeed.

The church where they were supposed to stay was full of rats so they decided to go over to the Bureau of Indian Affairs building and speak with Louis Bruce, the BIA Commissioner, to see if they could get more adequate housing for their chiefs.

If they were then denied decent housing, the plan was to hold a “sit-in” in the building until they got results.

The government then stalled and sent in riot squads that evening to try to evict the protestors. The protesters then barricaded themselves inside and occupied the BIA building.

Reports of looting and vandalism by frustrated and angry Indians that caused damages “in the millions” were termed “grossly exaggerated” by Interior Secretary Rogers Morton.

According to Carter Camp, the young Ponca head of Oklahoma AIM, Most of the damage was done by the police.

The government decided to negotiate with the protesters, but only to end the occupation of the BIA building and not to resolve their original 20-point list of grievances. As usual, the government “promised” to look into the grievances and they never did.

They also promised not to prosecute the protestors for the BIA takeover but like always that turned out to be a broken promise broken as well.

Deceiving tactics to defuse the situation and end their own embarrassment, the government eventually provided vehicles and an early-morning police escort out of town plus under-the-table money, about $66,000, to pay the Indians’ return travel expenses. Some of the Elders even received first-class tickets back home.

After the Trail of Broken Treaties, AIM was classified “an extremist organization” by the FBI, and on January 8, 1973, the leaders on the Trail were added to the FBI’s list of “key extremists.”

From that point, the focus of the FBI’s was turned to AIM, and an organized “neutralization” of AIM leaders had begun.

On January 11, the White House in effect rejected the Trail of Broken Treaties’ grievances.

Wanted By The FBI

A mere few weeks after his return from the protest in Washington, DC, Peltier was falsely accused of the attempted murder of a Milwaukee, Wisconsin police officer in November 1972,

Leonard’s claimed that he had been set up by the police which turned out to be true and was eventually supported by several witnesses, including the police officer’s girlfriend who said the officer had waved around one of Peltier’s pictures, sent to the local police from FBI headquarters, announcing his ignorant intention of “catching a big one for the FBI.”

Peltier spent 5 months in jail before the Milwaukee AIM group could raise his bail, during which time the Wounded Knee incident had commenced. Seeing no reason to expect justice in a trial in which the word of an AIM native would be pitted against the testimony of two policemen, Peltier went underground soon after he was released in April 1973.

Leonard attended the Sun Dance held at the Rosebud Reservation during the summer of that year and then traveled to Seattle, where he rejoined the fishing-rights fight of the Puyallup-Nisqually. 

The news came of the murder of Pedro Bissonette – a Wounded Knee veteran and co-leader of the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization on the Pine Ridge Reservation, who knew every detail about the Dick Wilson regime and its dealings with the U.S. government and was shot to death on October 17, 1973, a victim of the Pine Ridge “Reign of Terror” – Leonard and other West Coast AIM members answered a national call for support at the funeral on Pine Ridge. After the funeral, Peltier returned to the West Coast. Having failed to appear for his pre-trial hearing in Milwaukee 3 months before, he was now a fugitive from justice.

The Take Over Of The Alexian Brothers Novitiate

On January 1, 1975, Peltier participated in the takeover by the Menominee Warrior Society of an unused abbey of the Alexian Brothers Novitiate in Gresham.

By now, Peltier had grown in popularity and stature, according to the FBI, as an “AIM manager.”

It was a statement of Indian rights that this group was making to the white world, but it also was a statement to their own people, who were seeking a restoration of the Menominee Nation’s sovereign tribal status, that being submissive and negotiating in accordance with the white man’s laws was not the way the Menominee people should stake their claim in the world.

Following a 34-day standoff, which lasted until Feb. 2, 1975, eventually drew hundreds of law enforcement officers, National Guardsmen, and reporters from throughout the country. Famous Actor and Indian rights activist Marlon Brando even put in an appearance and stayed one night with the protest group.

The occupation ended February 3, 1975, after the Alexian Brothers agreed to sell the building for $1 along with “other valuable considerations” to head off violence.

Later that year the brotherhood offered the novitiate to anyone who could put it to good use, noting it would be too expensive for the tribe to refurbish. Today the novitiate is abandoned and run done.

Incident at Oglala

A few months later from June 6 to June 18, 1975, AIM held its 8th annual convention in Farmington, New Mexico, where Leonard Peltier acted as the head of security.  Over 800 people attended the event. Peltier and other AIM members returned to Pine Ridge after the Farmington convention.

There were many unsolved murders and drive-by shootings on the pine ridge reservation, caused by a culture clash between traditional and Americanized Sioux. Because of this, the reserve asked for assistance from many bodies of governments but was met with silence.

After no contact from the government, the people of the reserve sent a letter to the United States government stating that it was now going to become a sovereign nation and separate from the United States.

The American Indian Movement (AIM) was then invited to the reservation to help assert traditional values. It was headquartered at a man named Calvin Jumping Bull’s property on the southern edge of Oglala.

For a few days, the AIM group on Pine Ridge crowded into a log cabin near the Jumping Bull home, but eventually, some tents were set up and a sweat lodge built in the woods of cottonwood, ash, and willow along White Clay Creek. This sweat lodge was about four hundred yards southeast of the compound where a slope descended from plowed fields on the plateau south of the house to the creek bottom.

Because of this large gathering of people a large military force for gathered outside of the reserve.

The camp was not an armed military camp hatching terrorist plans but a spiritual camp, there to support the Oglala people.

On the evening of June 25, huge dark thunderclouds gathered over the Black Hills, followed by wild angry winds and lashing rain that caused property damage all over the western part of South Dakota.

Such natural turmoil, according to their beliefs, foretold the event on June 25, 1975.

The Death Of 3 People

On that fateful day a young man named Jimmy Eagle, who was wanted for questioning in connection with the recent assault and robbery of two local ranch hands. Eagle had been involved in a physical altercation with a friend, during which he had stolen a pair of leather cowboy boots.

At approximately 11:50 a.m., FBI agents Williams and Coler, driving two separate unmarked cars, spotted, reported, and followed a red pick-up truck that matched the description of Eagle’s.

Many various stories have been told, some telling that the AIM group shot first or the FBI shot first but one thing is for sure 3 people ended up dying that day. the two FBI agents and another Native American man named Joseph Stuntz.

After the first shots started the military already surrounding the reserve very quickly mobilized and started a firefight with the AIM which lasted until about midnight.

Because of low visibility the FBI retreated for the night. Peltier ended up escaping and fled into Canada.

Peltier Caught

Peltier eventually was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and later was extradited to the United States.

Exclusively on the basis of the testimony of a woman named Myrtle Poor Bear, a woman who ultimately was found to be mentally unstable and unable to testify at Peltier’s trial.

In 1977 Peltier was convicted on two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences. After his conviction, the courts repeatedly rejected petitions for a new trial, though his lawyers continued to challenge his conviction on the basis of findings of judicial error in the original trial, fabrication of evidence, suppression of favorable evidence, coercion of witnesses, and the U.S. government’s admission of fraudulent behavior.

Among the many of the numerous controversies associated with the Peltier case are these: there are no known witnesses to the deaths of the FBI agents; the gun that fired the fatal shots is not known; the identification of the vehicle that led the agents to Jumping Bull is in question, and the FBI has actually admitted to withholding thousands of documents pertaining to the case.

In 1979 Peltier was transferred to Lompoc (California) prison, where he learned of plans to kill him. Allegedly in fear for his life, Peltier escaped from Lompoc, but he was recaptured a few days later.

An additional 7 years were added to his two consecutive life sentences, but that judgment and sentence were later reversed.

In 1985 he was transferred to Leavenworth penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. During his time there Peltier wrote Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance in 1999.

Peltier was moved in 2005 to the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere before ending up in Coleman Maximum Security Prison, Florida where he still resides.

Leonard Peltier is now 75 years old

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