Earlier this year, it looked as if the last chapter of the story of Leonard Bellter was written. The eighty -year -old spends two consecutive sentences to kill two FBI agents in 1975, Ronald Williams and Jack Koler, who says he has not committed. After denying legal channels to appeal, and the conditional release was deprived, he seemed to die in prison. However, during the last moments of Joe Biden’s presidential administration, Biden overcame the Peltire’s penalty for home imprisonment. Peltier is now at home, at the Turtle Mountain Indian Reserve, in North Dakota.
When I called him after arriving there, he was one of the first things he told me, “We were in war.” That war already began when Pelitier was a child. In 1953, when Peltier was nine years old, Congress approved a bill to end his tribe, TURTLE MOUNTAIN in Chippewa. The actions of the government were part of an attempt to end the confidence of the tribal lands and the protection that came with it. The red power movement, which defended the Indian -American political and cultural independence, arose to reflect this agenda, and activists such as Billarier came to see themselves as participating in a battle in the twentieth century closer to the battle organized by their ancestors in the nineteenth century against the expansion of Western expansion.
In 1972, Peltier joined the American Indian Movement, among the most confronted red energy groups, which were established, a few years ago, by Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt and others. This fall, goal Helped in organizing a convoy across the country called the trail of broken treaties, which ended in the seizure of the headquarters of the Indian Affairs Office, in Washington, DC, demanding the cancellation of the termination legislation and the renewal of the federal treaty relations with the tribes. goal Their colleagues collected from the various tribes who shared similar life stories and who decided to restore existential threats facing tribal life. Many of them were taught to feel disgraceful in culture and the original language in Indian internal schools; Others had been crucified due to prison periods or the harsh facts of urban poverty. Everyone was trying to create a meaning from the life that seemed to be taken away from them. This means staying alive by any means, and as it was for their predecessors, this sometimes means capturing a weapon.
After the trail of broken treaties, the FBI also adopted the war tactics of its increasing efforts against goal. In 1973, the federal government conducted a seventy -day blockade against hundreds of goal The members and dissidents Oujalas who were hiding in the wounded knee, the site of the necklace massacre on the Indian Pine Ridge Reserve, to protest against a tribal government led by a man named Dick Wilson. The government has sent hundreds of FBI agents, American guards, and others to wounded knee trenches, armed with military equipment, including armored staff and tear gas. Their opponents were mostly armed with hunting rifles. Federal forces killed two men during the siege, the first among many goal Next deaths. Meanwhile, Billatier was sitting in Milwoki prison, and he faces a charge of attempting to kill a different protest. He was acquitted later.
Violence increased only in the reservation in the wake of the occupation. Dick Wilson, his group “idiot A ” – private militia called a nation’s parents – for complete revenge goal And its supporters, and goal revenge. There were strikes and crimes of murders during what was called the era of terrorism. Increased the presence of the FBI in Payne Ridge did not help matters. By the spring of 1975, Peltier created a camp in Oglala, which provides protection for the elders. A secret note of the Federal Investigation Office described the new office’s job as a “paramilitary law enforcement in the Indian country.” The atmosphere was in Payne Ridge explosives.
On June 26, 1975, the agents Williams and Koller were in reservation to serve the orders of theft and attack, according to the Federal Investigation Office, when this was followed by shooting. Pelitier was arrested in Canada. The defendant, Bob Rubido and Dino Bater, were arrested in the United States, and they first tried, and they were acquitted on the basis of self -defense after their lawyers provided evidence of the circumstances flying on the reservation and aggressive measures of the Federal Investigation Office when Belt was tried separately, and after several months, his defense judge was prevented from similar evidence to the appearance of a less sympathetic inch. A fully white jury convicted him of two charges of death.
A few months after the shooting, another prominent member of goalAnna May Akash, disappeared, and found later dead. For years, rumors were generalized that she was killed by other members of the group who were suspected of being experienced. Pelletse was publicly linked to killing her, but he denied any involvement and was not charged at all. Others are suspected of covering the FBI. A secret report detailed the potential knowledge of the office with deaths months before the discovery of the Akouesh body.
Peltieh spent the next five decades in the federal prison, claiming that the potential prison and murderer laboratories have presented new risks. Abroad, his supporters raised his personal file as a political prisoner, and pushed the FBI. In 2000, hundreds of agents walked in front of the White House, demanding that President Bill Clinton not grant the mercy. In Laa, two former two goal The members were convicted of killing Anna May Akash, although the alleged conspirators, Thida Nelson Clark, was not accused, and it appears that the trials have issued more questions than the answers.
However, there is still overwhelming support for Peltier’s freedom in the Indian country, especially in the Pine Ridge Reserve, where the memories of violence for more than half a century still feel refreshed. In 2016, in 2016, the permanent rock protests against the Dakota pipeline for arrival motivated a new era of original activity, and in recent years, the original activists have taken the Peltier campaign. His freedom was seen as part of a broader effort to address destructive federal policies, including the Indian rise system, which Billaty was exposed to. When the reservation line was crossed in February, it was as if a prisoner of the longest war in the country finally returned home.
We talked, by zooming, for several hours in the spring. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you start by presenting yourself?
My father was a French Chibia Kry from a mountain turtle. My mother was Lacotta and granted from Lake Spirit. I grew up here mainly on Turtle Mountain and what was called Fort Totten, in the past, but the real name, today, is Siril Lake. I grew up in both countries. We are countries, we are not reservations anymore. We have opened the doors to freedom as much as possible, but we still have ways to go.
I spent five decades behind bars. Did you expect your President Biden to divorce you?
No, I believed that they were only late, and I would have died in prison. Some people told him, if he did nothing, this will be a political suicide of the Democratic Party, because the indigenous people will move away from it. But this is not the real reason that I am allowing – they were looking for a way to allow me to leave. So I told Holly [Cook Macarro, a lobbyist and activist]”I ask him about the compassion and ask him to be imprisoned at home.” This is how we got to the house.
