"We were at war:" Nick Estes interviews Leonard Peltier

America's longest war is still being waged against the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and Leonard Peltier was a prisoner of that war. 

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.

When I called him after he got there, one of the first things he said to me was, “We were at war.” That war had already begun when Peltier was a child. In 1953, when Peltier was nine, Congress passed a bill to terminate his tribe, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. [Nick Estes: Leonard Peltier’s Story Isn’t Over Yet]