As He Awaits Release From Federal Prison, Leonard Peltier Is Still in Danger, Advocates Say
There are happy endings. There are Hollywood endings. And then there is the ending to the new film Free Leonard Peltier.
Peltier had been imprisoned for well over 45 years when David France and Jesse Short Bull decided to make a documentary about him. The Native American activist is serving two life sentences in federal prison for killing a pair of FBI agents in a shootout at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975, even as he maintains he didn’t do it. The FBI and other law enforcement groups have campaigned hard against any change in Peltier’s sentencing.
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All of that formed the arc of Free Leonard Peltier, which premieres Monday at the Sundance Film Festival. It seemed fated to end like so many stories of Peltier, who is an almost folkloric symbol of Native American independence and resistance — with those hoping in vain for his release. After all, lawyers and activist groups had never succeeded in moving the needle before, over a series of appeals and maneuvers dating back to the 1970s.
Yet last Monday, resolution finally came, and in the most dramatic fashion possible. With exactly 14 minutes left to his presidency, President Joe Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence. The Native American activist will be released 30 days from the commutation, on Feb. 18, to serve the remainder of his sentence in home confinement.
“It was a nail-biter for sure because of the FBI coming in at the last minute and having major influence,” Nick Tilsen — an activist from the Oglala Lakota Nation who founded the Indigenous-minded NDN Collective and is one of the central characters of the film — told THR on Sunday.
Once the order came, the movie changed, too — literally. As recently as a week ago, Free Leonard Peltier ended with its now 80-year-old subject simply plaintively hoping he’d be released one day. The new cut premiering in Park City Monday features a fresh coda — Tilsen and other activists, including Holly Cook Macarro, a member of Red Lake Nation, celebrating in a parking lot at the Coleman Federal Penitentiary as the news comes in. The activists and film crew went there and waited outside for three days wondering if the order would come. It almost didn’t.
“I became so worried. I thought, ‘The FBI is running this clock out on us,’” Cook Macarro said in an interview.
“It was an excruciating wait. As every hour ticked by, it seemed more unlikely. Biden and Trump were already seated [at the inauguration],” France says. And that was just that day. “For the longest time,” he says, “we didn’t expect it at all.” Now the movie has changed its title for advocates, going thrillingly from verb to adjective.
But even as they celebrate, the advocates worry about Peltier’s safety. He is believed to be in poor health, suffering from a host of medical conditions. And many in law enforcement have seen his freedom as anathema — a grave injustice — giving activists cause for concern.
“This window of time we’re in right now is dangerous for Leonard,” Tilsen says. “That facility doesn’t have the ability to meet his health conditions. And he’s been a primary target of the FBI for 49 years. So this period of time is dangerous for his health and is dangerous for his safety. We want to make sure people understand he’s not free yet.”
Built around a prison interview with Peltier more than four decades ago (he has not been allowed to speak publicly since the 1990s), France and Short Bull’s film weaves a narrative of a shootout that, far from the tit-for-tat escalation that some mainstream media accounts portrayed, was an incursion by the U.S. government onto Indigenous lands.
The shootout resulted in the deaths of FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams as well as Native American Joe Stuntz, and has since become a kind of touchstone for both sides. Many Native Americans felt this was the latest example of colonial exploitation; the FBI, even to this day, sees the incident as one of the most brazen assaults on their own and has lobbied hard for the punishment of the suspects. (Former FBI director Christopher Wray had been vocal about not amending Peltier’s sentence.)
Three Native Americans were prosecuted for the deaths of the FBI agents; Peltier was convicted while Robert Robideau and Dino Butler were acquitted. No action was taken in the death of Stuntz.
The film both tracks the incident, blending archival material and re-creation, as well as the legal maneuverings that followed. Injustice is on its mind, especially with an extradition of Peltier from Canada built on what appears to be a false affidavit, as well as the denials of parole and appeals that in the film’s portrayal are nothing less than a sacrifice of an innocent man on the altar of FBI appeasement.
The efforts to free Peltier got closest in 2000, as Bill Clinton was leaving office and a pardon seemed imminent. It never came, a decision that caused a rift between Peltier advocate David Geffen and the Clintons that echoed all the way to the mogul supporting Barack Obama in 2008 and may have even extended to Geffen’s DreamWorks partner, fundraiser extraordinaire Jeffrey Katzenberg, doing the same. (The movie also has a kind of full-circle quality after Incident at Oglala, the 1992 doc from Michael Apted that Sundance Institute founder Robert Redford narrated, which also looked at the killings of the agents.)
Peltier had steadfastly refused to confess to the murders despite how it would have helped his bid for parole or even a pardon. In the film, Peltier says he’s “guilty of standing up for my people’s rights; I’m guilty of trying to stop the oppression I’ve experienced and I’ve seen my people experience.” But he is not guilty of murder, he says.
No one disputes that Peltier was shooting that June day. But the government and Peltier’s account differ widely in what the shooting led to — prosecutors say he shot the agents execution-style, while Peltier says he was nowhere near them and is simply being made an easy scapegoat.
“People know where my heart’s at. I’m not a cold-blooded killer,” Peltier says.
The instance of perceived injustice at the hands of an uncaring U.S. government has served as a metaphor for many Native Americans. “Everything that has happened to him is a mirror of what has happened to Indian people throughout history,” Tilsen says in the film.
The clemency, as a result, has been especially satisfying. “It’s a good day to be Native American,” Cook Macarro says was her reaction when the news came.
France notes that even with the commutation, a lot is still left unresolved. “The FBI has never had to reckon with its history in Indian country, which is a history of tragedy and trauma. As long you focus on the guy who you think did the killing, you haven’t had an open airing of what happened,” he says.
Tilsen says he agrees with that while also feeling the clemency on a personal level.
“Uncle Leonard is going to come back home,” he says. “And we’re going to continue illuminating the story of not only what he did but what the American Indian Movement did for everybody in fighting for Indigenous and human rights.”
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