Happy Birthday, Leonard Peltier

Leonard Peltier was born in 1944 on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, one of thirteen children, and by age nine the government had already pulled him from his family and shipped him off to a boarding school built to strip the Indian out of Indian kids. He didn't need a textbook to learn what Washington thought of his people. He lived it.

He grew into the fight. By the early '70s he was standing with the American Indian Movement, standing up for people who'd been getting run over by federal policy and overreach for generations.

In June 1975, two FBI agents died in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and Peltier ended up serving fifty years for it, on a conviction built on a coerced extradition from Canada and a fabricated affidavit.

Amnesty International raised concerns about the fairness of his trial. Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Mother Teresa all called for his release. He sat in federal prison anyway, decade after decade.

Then, on his way out the door in January 2025, President Biden commuted his sentence, and by February, Leonard Peltier walked out a free man for the first time in half a century.

Today isn't just a birthday. It's a man who outlasted the system built to erase him.

Happy birthday, Leonard. You're still here, and that's the whole point.

— Vincent Easley II
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