Leonard Peltier is still challenging in the AP interview, maintaining innocence and promising continuous activism | News from the world

Belcourt, ND – More than 50 years after a shooting in the Indian Reserve of Pine Ridge took him to a federal prison, Leonard Peltier is still challenging.

Despite being convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, he maintains his innocence in the murders of two FBI agents in 1975 and sees his new freedom, the result of a switching of former President Joe Biden, as the beginning of a new phase of his activism.

“I’m going to spend the rest of my life fighting our people, because we still don’t end. We are still in danger, ”said Peltier, now 80 years old, in an exclusive interview with Associated Press in his new home in Turtle Mountain Reservation, his tribal homeland in North Dakota, near the Canadian border.

There among the rolling hills, often covered with snow, he will fulfill the rest of his sentence for house arrest.

Born in an era of violent hostility between the US government and indigenous peoples, the former member of the American Indian movement has now entered another politically volatile moment in the country. He said that the threats that the emergence of the extreme right, as well as the federal government, pose for tribal nations and indigenous peoples, understand well. He believes that, as previous administrations, President Donald Trump will come through minerals and oil in tribal lands.

“You don’t have to be violent, you don’t have to do nothing like that. Simply go out and ask yourself, ”he said this week, in his first sitting conversation with a journalist in more than 30 years. “We have to resist.” FBI and American native activists: a volatile mixture

Peltier was part of a movement in the late sixties and seventies that fought for the rights of American natives and tribal self -determination, sometimes occupying federal and tribal properties.

The movement caught the headlines in 1973 when he took over the town of the knee injured in Pine Ridge, which led to a 71 -day confrontation with federal agents. They also protested in Alcatraz and at the headquarters of the Office of Indigenous Affairs. For many members of the American Indian movement, or AIM, its activism was part of the resistance legacy that extended to the country’s foundation.

The day of the shooting arrived in the middle of high tensions in the Pine Ridge reserve, where residents felt that the strong presence of the FBI was a threat to the autonomy of the people. The members of Peltier and others AIM entered into a confrontation with the agents Jack Coler and Ron Williams when the agents led to a rural property where AIM members stayed. Both agents were shot dead, along with Joseph Stuntz, another AIM member.

The FBI says Peltier shot the agents at a short distance. In a letter sent to Biden last year that opposes his release, former FBI director Christopher Wray called Peltier a “murderer without regrets.”

His fault is clear for many, including North Dakota governor Kelly Armstrong.

“More than 20 federal judges confirmed his conviction, and he was denied probation last July,” Armstrong said in a statement to the. “There was no legal justification for his release. I should still be in prison. ”

Peltier was not forgiven; Biden said he was traveling Peltier’s sentence due to his age, his decline health and the long period he had already been in prison.

Peltier has acknowledged that he was in the shooting, but says he acted in self -defense and that he was not the bullets killed the agents. He believes that the FBI and prosecutors were looking for someone to culpara, after their two coacked were exonerated by self -defense.

“They wanted revenge, and they didn’t know who was responsible,” Peltier told the kitchen table of his new home. “And they said ‘put all the weight of the US government in Leonard Peltier, we need a conviction.’ And when they say you have no rights,” he said.

Amnesty International and dozens of political leaders around the world called Peltier a political prisoner of the United States, questioning the equity of his judgment and condemnation. James Reynolds, former American prosecutor in northern Iowa, whose office supervised the procedures after conviction, urged clemency in a letter to Biden in 2021. He wrote that prosecutors could not prove that Peltier shot the fatal shots and called his imprisonment “unfair.”

Peltier’s grandson, Cyrus Peltier, remembers visiting him every weekend in Leavenworth, a federal prison in Kansas. He did not always understand why his grandfather not only told the probation board that regretted the crimes and, hopefully, gain his freedom.

“And he would say ‘Well, that’s not for what I am fighting, Nieto’,” recalled Cyrus Peltier, now 39, from his home in North Dakota this week. “I regret what happened to those agents, but I’m not going to sit here and admit something I did not do. And if I have to die here for that, I’m going to do it.” A life behind bars, but I always hope for freedom

In prison, Peltier’s fame only grew, while accumulating the support of prominent political leaders worldwide and celebrities in the United States and became a symbol of injustices against Native Americans.

He said that they were all his support letters and acts of protest for his release that kept him underway.

Peltier said there were moments in recent years in which he began to lose hope that he would ever see freedom. His denial of probation in July was another overwhelming blow.

“They gave me strength to keep alive and know why I was in prison,” he said.

Many people, leaders and indigenous organizers pressed for decades for the launch of Peltier.

However, some who believe that Peltier participated in the murder of AIM, Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, in 1975 fought against her liberation. Two other AIM members were convicted of the crime.

“His ability to say that he is free and that he is going home denies all the fact that Anna Mae could never go home,” said Aquash’s daughter, Denise Pictou Maloney.

In his interview with him, Peltier denied having known Aquash’s death. ‘I didn’t give my life for anything’

In the end, Biden listened to the lawyer of the former Secretary of Interior Debaland, member of the people of Laguna and the first American native to direct the Department of the Interior. Peltier was released on February 18 and returned to North Dakota.

A week later, he often wakes up at night that everything is a dream and that he is still in a cell.

Peltier remains confined in his home and nearby community. But now it has access to medical treatment for routine for its many health problems, including an aortic aneurysm. It moves with the help of a cane or a walker.

He is encouraged by the many people who come to visit him and leave gifts as medallions with accounts, letters and works of art, who are accumulating at home.

Peltier wants to make a living selling his paintings, as he did in prison, and plans to write more books. He also wants to train young activists about the threats they will face.

When he was in prison, lying in his bunk at night, he often wondered if his protest efforts resulted in any change. Seeing young native activists today to continue fighting for the same things gives meaning to the 49 years that was imprisoned.

“It makes me feel so good, man, he does,” he said, containing tears. “I’m thinking, well, I didn’t give my life for anything.”

The writer of Associated Press Jack hard on Bismarck, North Dakota, contributed to this report.

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