Originally published in the Winter/Spring 2025 edition of the Virginia Defender, issue 76, printed March 26. Reproduced here for accessibility and archival purposes. To find other stories in the Winter/Spring 2025 issue or to download the full PDF, see this post. For other issues dating back to 2012, see the Full Issues page.

Staff Report. Photo credit: NDNCOLLECTIVE.

“Today I am finally free! They may have imprisoned me, but they never took my spirit!” said Leonard Peltier upon his release Feb. 18 from Coleman Penitentiary, a federal prison in central Florida. “Thank you to all my supporters throughout the world who fought for my freedom. I am finally going home. I look forward to seeing my friends, my family and my community. It’s a good day today.”

After spending nearly 50 years in prison, Indigenous freedom fighter and former American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier, now 80, is finally home.

Responding to urgent appeals from Peltier’s many supporters, President Joe Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence on his last day in office.

The decision was not a pardon, and means that Peltier, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in North Dakota, is to serve the remainder of his life sentence confined to his home and nearby community in the Turtle Mountain Reservation near the Canadian border. Tribal members arranged for his new home.

“I’m going to spend the rest of my life fighting for our people, because we ain’t finished yet. We’re still in danger,” Peltier told a reporter from The Associated Press.

In 1975, as an AIM member, Leonard Peltier took part in the historic, 71-day occupation of the village of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, the scene of the 1980 U.S. Army massacre of some 300 Lakotas near Wounded Knee Creek.

After two FBI agents were shot and killed in a confrontation with AIM members, Peltier was convicted of the slayings and sentenced to two two consecutive life sentences. A woman who claimed to have seen him shoot the agents later recanted her testimony, saying it had been coerced.

Peliter has always maintained his innocence and his imprisonment became a powerful symbol of the oppression suffered by Indigenous peoples at the hands of the U.S. government.

In a statement, the National Congress of American Indians said the case “has long symbolized the systemic injustices faced by Indigenous Peoples.”