Prisoner of Conscience The life and persecution of Leonard Peltier
By Alex Reinsch-Goldstein Flawed trials, jailed activists, and efforts to suppress political opponents are the sort of thing that we associate with backwards dictatorships in distant lands. But that sort of injustice does happen far closer to home. An innocent man remains behind bars following a prosecution that bears all the hallmarks of the fraudulence and brutality that we condemn in others. This is the story of Leonard Peltier. On the morning of June 26th, 1975. FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams sped down a narrow road on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, looking for a young man named Jimmy Eagle, who was wanted for stealing a pair of cowboy boots. At about 11:50 in the morning, they spotted a red pickup truck matching the description of Eagle’s--following it, they turned off the road and onto a dirt track which led up to a small settlement called Jumping Bull. On the rise ahead of them were a few ranch houses and, concealed in a gulch, a camp of American Indian Movement (AIM) members who had come there to escape the violence of the reservation. Somewhere on the track below Jumping Bull, someone fired the first shot--we probably will never know who. Bullets began flying back and forth between the agents and the occupants in the truck, who were later joined by those at the Jumping Bull camp who heard the firing. The agents radioed that they had followed a red pickup to Jumping Bull, they had been fired on, they were wounded,
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and they would be killed if help didn’t arrive soon. Help didn’t come, and within ten minutes Coler and Williams were dead. The FBI and Bureau of Indian Affairs police surrounded Jumping Bull in the afternoon. After one AIM member was killed and others were arrested, the manhunt immediately began for those who had escaped. Among them was an AIM activist named Leonard Peltier. AIM members who were suspected of taking part in the shootings were tracked down and arrested. Several months later, AIM member Bob Robideau was driving Peltier’s station wagon on a Kansas highway when ammunition in the car exploded and caused a fire. When law enforcement arrived at the scene, they found Agent Williams’ rifle, as well as a rifle belonging to Peltier. Another AIM member who had been present at the shooting, Darrelle Butler, was found and arrested--and Agent Coler’s gun was later discovered in his car. Peltier had meanwhile fled to Canada. He was declared a prime suspect--though the FBI felt that Butler and Robideau’s possession of the agents’ weapons was enough to build a case against them separately if they could not immediately get Peltier. A federal jury acquitted Butler and Robideau--them taking the agents’ guns was not enough to convince the jury that they had fired the fatal shots. After the acquittal of Robideau and Butler, the US government sought to get its hands
on Peltier. An extradition warrant was issued, and on February 6, 1976, seven months after Coler and Williams were killed, Peltier was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and sent back to the United States to face trial. In April of 1977, Peltier was convicted for the murder of agents Coler and Williams. He was given two consecutive life sentences, condemning him to die in prison. Who was Leonard Peltier, and what led to that fatal day on Pine Ridge? Peltier’s life began as was common for native people in the middle of the 20th century: hardship, poverty, alienation, forced assimilation. Reservations were being broken up and recognition of tribal sovereignty ended under the Termination Act. Thousands of Native Americans moved to the cities; it was there that they founded organizations like AIM. Born the 11th of 13 children in 1944, Peltier was sent to an Indian boarding school where native language and customs were forbidden, and they were forced to dress, act, and speak like white men. He dropped out in ninth grade and moved around the West. It was in Seattle that he first discovered activism, founding a halfway house for native former prisoners and working with Seattle’s native people to legally regain confiscated land. In the early ‘70s, he joined AIM. Originally founded in Minneapolis in the late 1960s, AIM was at its zenith in those days--staging protests
