‘He's going home': new film documents the fight to free Leonard Peltier

The Guardian

30-01-2025

Of all the documentaries at the Sundance film festival this year, perhaps none is as timely as Free Leonard Peltier, Jesse Short Bull and David France's film on the Indigenous activist imprisoned for nearly half a century.
Peltier, now 80 years old, is serving consecutive life sentences for the killing of two FBI agents during a shootout at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1975, though he has maintained his innocence. Activists, celebrities and liberation advocates such as Nelson Mandela have called for his release for decades, citing railroaded justice and evidence of prosecutorial misconduct; the FBI and law enforcement, meanwhile, have campaigned vociferously against any commutation of his sentence.
Short Bull (Lakota Nation vs the United States) and France began working on the documentary after Peltier had already served 45 years, as a new generation of activists worked to free the longest-serving political prisoner in the US. 'If you're Native American in the United States, you know the story of Leonard Peltier,' says activist Holly Cook Macarro (Red Lake Nation) at the film's outset.
The 110-minute documentary underscores Peltier's status as an icon of Native American independence and resistance, connected to more than half a century of Indigenous activism in the US, from the civil rights organizing of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the 1960s, to the protests at Standing Rock in 2016, to the recent lobbying to free him. Peltier 'fought for many of these things we're direct beneficiaries of – cultural resurgence, Native American Freedom of Religion Act, Indian Self-Determination Act,' says Nick Tilsen (Oglala Lakota), founder of Indigenous-led civil rights group NDN Collective in the film. 'It's just been a part of the lexicon of being in the movement.'
It seemed that the arc of the film would not end in change – Free Leonard Peltier captures some of a July 2024 hearing in which Peltier was once again denied parole; the original finished version of the project ended with a clip from a 40-year-old interview with Peltier, who hasn't been allowed to speak publicly since the 1990s, hoping that he would one day be released.
But on 20 January, with 14 minutes remaining in his presidential term, Joe Biden commuted his sentence, allowing Peltier to serve the remainder of his time in home confinement – and sending the documentary team scrambling to the edit room with a week until their premiere. The film now concludes with a highly emotional note of triumph, as activists hug and sob outside the federal correctional complex in Coleman, Florida.
Notably, the commutation does not admit wrongdoing on behalf of the state. It will enable Peltier, who suffers from numerous health ailments, to 'spend his remaining days in home confinement but will not pardon him for his underlying crimes', according to a White House statement. The film outlines why, weaving a narrative of generational activism and miscarried justice that frames the shootout at Pine Ridge not as blow-for-blow escalation, as it was portrayed by mainstream media at the time, but as government incursion on to Indigenous land.
Several elders of AIM, founded in Minneapolis in 1968 by Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt, appear in the documentary, attesting to the injustice of Peltier's incarceration as well as the movement's intentions. Forged by the civil rights protests of the 1960s, AIM targeted the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) for its destruction of culture and identity through oppression and forced assimilation. 'Trying to be an Indian is a daily struggle itself,' said Peltier in the 40-year-old interview excerpted in the film. 'AIM was fighting back, all over the country. We were all living under the same type of oppression.'
Peltier helped manage a weeklong occupation of the BIA office in 1972, as part of an effort to address the 'Trail of Broken Treaties', calling for the restoration of the treaty-making process, the legal recognition of existing treaties and the return of 110m acres of land, among other demands. At Pine Ridge, Peltier was defending against what many Native Americans saw as further theft of their land; the film suggests that the FBI was spying on residents and knew that AIM was shifting its focus toward mining practices in the area. The day of the shootout, Dick Wilson, the controversial tribal chairman with a private police force and ties to the federal government, signed away one-eighth of the reservation's land.
The shootout killed the FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, as well as a Native American, Joe Stuntz. No action was taken over Stuntz's death. Three Indigenous activists – Peltier, Robert Robideau and Dino Butler – were prosecuted for the agents' deaths. Robideau and Butler were acquitted on the basis of self-defense. But Peltier was convicted, based on prosecution tactics that are 'enough to make the authorities hang their head in shame', says James Reynolds, a former US attorney who handled the prosecution and has since called for Peltier's release, in the film.
No one disputes that Peltier was shooting that day. The FBI has maintained the shootout represented a brazen attack on its agents, and that Peltier shot the agents execution style. The FBI director, Christopher Wray, personally advocated against Peltier's parole in July 2024, calling him a 'remorseless killer who brutally murdered two of our own'. Peltier says he was nowhere near the agents and is being made a scapegoat. He has maintained his innocence, and refused to confess even though it would have helped his efforts at parole. 'People know where my heart's at. I'm not a cold-blooded killer,' he says in the film.
Peltier's imprisonment, perceived as injustice at the hands of a callous US government, continues to serve as a metaphor for many Native Americans. 'Everything that's happened to him is really a mirror for everything that's happened to Indian people throughout history,' says Tilsen in the film.
Peltier is not yet out of prison; he will be released 30 days after the commutation, on 18 February, at which point he should return to a new home at the Turtle Mountain Indian reservation in North Dakota. His life remains in danger, according to advocates. But the film ends on a note of hard-earned hope – 'we got through!' says Cook Macarro through tears. 'He's going home.'
Free Leonard Peltier is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution