‘Good faith effort’ frees 80-year-old Indigenous activist after nearly 50 years of imprisonment.

This story was filed on January 20, 2025 from Spearfish, South Dakota, for Esperanza Project partner publication Buffalo’s Fire.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s eleventh-hour action to free Leonard Peltier grants the internationally acclaimed political prisoner a chance to return to his North Dakota homelands after nearly 50 years behind bars. The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa citizen was imprisoned following the 1975 shooting deaths of two FBI agents on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The outgoing President commuted his sentence of two life terms to home confinement.

Para leer la historia en Español, ve a Campaña Internacional Logra Liberar al Prisionero Político Leonard Peltier

Backers worldwide of his claim to innocence consider his captivity emblematic of an ingrained national policy of racism against American Indians. “Nothing will give five decades back to Leonard Peltier, his family, and Indian Country,” Nick Estes, assistant professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, told Buffalo’s Fire. “President Biden’s last-minute release is a moral indictment on the system and people who have kept Leonard unjustly imprisoned.”

Estes is the author of Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation, among other titles. “Where this system failed him, grassroots Indigenous people kept his campaign for freedom alive, despite campaigns of misinformation and slander,” Estes said. “Millions around the world have supported his release.”

The announcement’s timing on the last day of Biden’s administration coincides with the observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The assassinated Black civil rights leader’s late wife Coretta Scott King once said, “Mr. Peltier’s unjust incarceration remains a festering sore that impedes better race relations in America.”

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