The New Yorker:

The Native activist spent nearly fifty years in prison for the killing of two F.B.I. agents. In January, Joe Biden commuted his sentence, and he went home.Leonard

By Nick Estes

Earlier this year, it seemed as though the final chapter of Leonard Peltier’s story had been written. The eighty-year-old is serving two consecutive life sentences for the 1975 killing of two F.B.I. agents, Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, which he says he didn’t commit. Having exhausted legal channels for appeal, and been denied parole, it appeared that he would die in prison. But, during the final moments of Joe Biden’s Presidential Administration, Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence to home confinement. Peltier is now home, at the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, in North Dakota.

When I called him after he got there, one of the first things he said to me was, “We were at war.” That war had already begun when Peltier was a child. In 1953, when Peltier was nine, Congress passed a bill to terminate his tribe, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. The government’s actions were part of an attempt to end the trust status of tribal lands and the protections that came with it. The Red Power Movement, which advocated American Indian political and cultural autonomy, arose to reverse this agenda, and activists such as Peltier came to see themselves as engaged in a twentieth-century battle akin to the one their ancestors staged in the nineteenth century against the tide of western expansion.

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