By Mordecai Specktor
Leonard Peltier in Minneapolis
It was a surrealistic experience to enter the Minneapolis American Indian Center on Nov. 8 and see Leonard Peltier, the American Indian Movement (AIM) activist who served nearly 50 years in federal prison until his release in February, greeting friends and posing for pictures in a reception room near the front door.
Several hundred people were on hand to honor Peltier’s sacrifice and to watch “Free Leonard Peliter,” a new two-hour documentary about his case. The “AIM Song” was played several times. Prior to the film screening, several people spoke, including Darrell G. Seki, Sr., chairman of the Red Lake Nation, which was a sponsor of the Nov. 8 event.
It occurred to me that many of the people in the room were AIM activists, their children and grandchildren. AIM was created in 1968, in Minneapolis, as a street patrol monitoring the cops that frequently brutalized vulnerable Native residents along Franklin Avenue.
Peltier’s sentence was commuted by outgoing Pres. Joe Biden, in one of his final acts as president. He is more or less under house arrest, living on his homeland, the reservation of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa (No. Dakota). There were previous efforts for a commutation of sentence for Peltier when the terms of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were ending, but neither of them bothered to free Peltier. The FBI continually lobbied and demonstrated to keep Peltier locked up and it seemed that their desire to see him die in prison would prevail.
Most of Peltier’s AIM comrades from the old days have gone on to the Spirit World. However, Dino Butler accompanied Peltier during his visit to Minneapolis. Butler was one of the AIM warriors present at the June 26, 1975, shootout at Oglala, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation (So. Dakota), in which two FBI agents and Joe Stuntz, an Indian man, were killed. As the documentary depicted in an incredible sequence, Peltier, Butler and several other AIM activists escaped the barrage of gunfire by following the path of an eagle. The group passed through a culvert under a road where federal agents and BIA cops had gathered.
Butler and Bob Robideau, who was Leonard’s cousin, were eventually arrested and tried for the murder of the FBI agents, in federal court in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Their attorneys argued that they had acted in self-defense, and they were acquitted by a jury.
That left Peltier as the lone Indian on whom to pin the murders of the FBI agents. He was extradited to the U.S. from Canada on the basis of three contradictory affidavits coerced from Myrtle Poor Bear, who variously claimed that she was Peltier’s girlfriend and that she saw him shoot the FBI agents. In reality, the first time Peltier ever laid eyes on Poor Bear was at his trial in Fargo, No. Dakota — where she appeared as a witness for the defense. At the conclusion of a sham trial presided over by Judge Paul Benson, Peltier was convicted of aiding and abetting the murder of the FBI agents, in April 1977, and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.
At the Peltier honoring event in Minneapolis, I ran into a few friends. Kurt Seaberg reminded me that he traveled with the late Dick Bancroft and I to Peltier’s 1984 evidentiary hearing in Bismarck, No Dakota. Bancroft photographed many of the significant AIM events going back to the early 1970s.
My recall of the trip to Bismarck is a little hazy. I do remember sitting across a café table from Peter Matthiessen, the acclaimed American writer who wrote a book about the Peltier case titled “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.” Matthiessen died in 2014. And I remember a conversation with an AIM activist who was at Oglala on the day of the shootout; he told me that Matthiessen’s account of the firefight was wrong.
I had a brief chat with Leonard as he made his way to the gym at the Indian Center. I mentioned my two prison visits more than 40 years ago when he was locked up in the Marion, Illinois, and then the Springfield, Missouri, federal prisons. On both prison visits I was accompanied by Dick Bancroft.
I would like to have a longer conversation with Leonard one of these days. He doesn’t see too well and is receiving medical care for a number of medical conditions that were not effectively treated during his decades behinds bars. He’s 81 and has spent most of his life in federal prison.
Leonard has a greater measure of freedom in his home at Turtle Mountain than he did in the federal prison at Coleman, Florida. However, society is still a mess, riven with inequality, poverty and war. A degenerate criminal occupies the Oval Office, again. Anyway, I hope that Leonard can find moments of joy and beauty on the outside.
