Leaders: Peltier release could encourage more Indigenous people to vote

In 1974, President Richard Nixon issued a limited presidential pardon to convicted killer William Calley of My Lai Massacre fame after he and American troops, some under his command, raped and butchered some 500 unarmed Vietnamese people in 1968. 

Leonard Peltier is guilty of far, far lesser offenses. 

After being convicted in 1977 he was sentenced to two life terms for being present at the killing of two enemy combatants under the fog of war on a battlefield inside the Oglala Lakota Nation in occupied South Dakota in 1975. 

Peltier applied for compassionate release in 2018 and again in 2020 but was always denied because Donald Trump despises American Indians. 

In a letter dated April 24, 2021 former New Mexico US Representative from the Third District Deb Haaland now Secretary of the Interior and Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ, 3rd District) asked Pres. Joe Biden for a grant of clemency and the release of Leonard Peltier, a 78-year old tribal citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Peltier attended the Flandreau Indian School in the late 1950s where my mom practice-taught in the mid 1960s and learned first hand how Indigenous Americans were made to write in English.

Peltier has six surviving children and his eldest son, Chauncey is co-founder of the Indigenous Rights Center in Albuquerque but lives in Portland, Oregon. Native Americans overwhelmingly turned out to vote for Joe Biden and efforts led by the Democratic National Committee's Native American Caucus to convince the Biden White House to grant clemency are ongoing.

Fawn Sharp, the president of the National Congress of American Indians, said in a Monday letter to Biden that he regularly talks about his commitment to strengthening the federal government’s relationship with Native communities. In another letter sent to Biden on Wednesday, Suzan Harjo, a longtime Indigenous rights advocate and 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, traced her professional history with the president from the 1970s through 2014. A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment about whether the president is weighing clemency or has seen the new letters about Peltier. [Top Indigenous Leaders Press Biden On Why He Hasn’t Freed Leonard Peltier]

The United States' longest war wasn't in Afghanistan; it was against Indigenous Americans and ran from about 1785 to at least 1975. Leonard Peltier is a prisoner of that war.

Image: NDN Collective.