A letter to Leonard Peltier
April 16th, 2025
By Winona LaDuke
You sent me a postcard in 1984. It’s a picture of myself, author Peter Matthiessen and a few more of us in Fargo, right after your Bismarck evidentiary hearing in October. We had scraped together money and purchased a billboard downtown Fargo that said “Free Peltier.” We were proud of ourselves that day. That’s in the photo’s background.
You wrote a sweet note to me, the return: #89637-132, from Marion Federal Penitentiary. I’d gone to see you there. We had a good visit, understood each other and what we were to do in our lives. That was the super maximum penitentiary that they put you into right after the trial, an entire prison full of mostly black and brown people. I got a splitting headache from being there.
That was a long time ago. It turns out I’m not much of a pen pal. But I thought I‘d write back…okay….forty years later.
Welcome home, brother. Welcome back home, Giiwedinong, here in the northland….Welcome to Akiing, the very land to which you belong. You came before the snow geese, so plentiful in number, you came with the blizzards, and you brought us joy and some feeling of peace. And I think it’s time to plant our gardens soon.
It’s April 6, 2025, forty-eight years after the U.S. government rested their case against you in the Fargo trial. Days later, they would send you to prison.
Like many of us in the American Indian Movement, we said a prayer for you and thought of you always at feasts and ceremonies. Nilak and Dino Butler, John Trudell, Norman Brown, Jean Roach and so many worked decades for you, sun danced for you, and the spirits told them that you would be free. That’s what they told me. The tragic circumstances which put you in prison framed our reality. I am glad to see you free today.
I, like you, am a member of the American Indian Movement. I joined in 1977. I was a young Ojibwe student at Harvard. I heard Jimmy Durham talk from the International Indian Treaty Council, the international wing of the American Indian Movement, and he changed my world. I signed up for the movement, I believed in justice and self-determination. I believed in Mother Earth. And I still do.
My first trip to Fargo was to the federal court house for your trial. Louise Erdrich and I were there, young women. That hearing didn’t go well for you, that’s for sure, although Bob Robideau and Dino Butler had already had their charges dismissed by the Cedar Rapids jury. North Dakota was not known for kindness to Native people. Still isn’t. We believed in you.
I worked for the National Indian Youth Council in Albuquerque the next year and then started working in South Dakota, on Pine Ridge, where uranium mining companies were hovering around like hyenas, ready to take more Indian land and water. It was a time of terror for Indian people. Navajo men were being tortured and mutilated in Farmington, their killers getting two years and a release. In Minneapolis, police were beating…
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