Indigenous Political Prisoner Leonard Peltier Welcomed Home After Release

Native American activist Leonard Peltier traveled to Belcourt, N.D., on Tuesday after being released from a Florida prison.

Ron Leith watched as Peltier arrived in Belcourt to the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Reservation.  Leith, an Ojibwe writer and activist, said, “As many people as possible came from the reservation and made this welcoming committee.”

Leith said there was a procession of cars, including the one with Peltier inside, that drove onto the reservation while the welcoming committee gathered along the sides of the road.

“From the boundary, for about a mile onto the reservation, there were cars and people and signs, and on both sides of the highway for a long time, long ways. And it was just a magnificent sight,” said Leith.

Nick Tilsen, founder and CEO of the Indigenous-led organization NDN Collective, was by Peltier’s side as they drove to the reservation. NDN Collective, among other partners, were significant advocates for Peltier’s release. The organization also arranged Peltier’s travel and housing.

Tilsen said of the welcome, “It was so beautiful. And [Peltier] looked at me and he’s like, ‘I did not expect any of this.’”

“Even though it was cold, he kept his window down the entire time and acknowledged and waved at every single person,” said Tilsen. The temperature at the time was below zero degrees.

Tuesday evening, a crowd of Peltier’s supporters and family members came together for a welcome dinner at the Sky Dancer Casino & Resort.

Leith was at the celebration and he estimated at least 300 people were in attendance, with more arriving. Though Leith said that Peltier was not in attendance.

“He went home, you know. He’s had quite the day.”

In 1977, Peltier was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of two FBI agents. Though not a pardon, former President Joe Biden granted him clemency as one of his final official acts. Peltier’s sentence commutation announcement came minutes before Biden left office.

Peltier is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band and will serve the remainder of his sentence in home confinement on his tribal homelands at Turtle Mountain.

For years, activists and supporters had been petitioning for the release of the 80-year-old, whom they say had been wrongly convicted of killing FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams in 1975.

In a news release from NDN Collective on Tuesday morning, Peltier said, “Today I am finally free! They may have imprisoned me, but they never took my spirit!”

In the news release, Peltier thanked his supporters all over the world who helped fight for his freedom. “I am finally going home. I look forward to seeing my friends, my family, and my community. It’s a good day today.”

“Leonard Peltier is free! He never gave up fighting for his freedom so we never gave up fighting for him. Today our elder Leonard Peltier walks into the open arms of his people,” said Tilsen in Tuesday’s statement.

“Peltier’s liberation is invaluable in and of itself — yet just as his wrongful incarceration represented the oppression of Indigenous Peoples everywhere, his release today is a symbol of our collective power and inherent freedom.”

The festivities continued Wednesday at the Sky Dancer Casino & Resort event center on the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Reservation. NDN Collective assisted Peltier with travel and lodging arrangements and hosted the event.

The large event space was set up with a tipi in the middle. The welcome started with a song from a drum group, while Peltier was brought into the room. People spoke to the crowd, a prayer was offered, and Peltier was gifted a traditional star quilt.

Korina Barry, the action managing director of NDN Collective, helped lead the welcoming. She has also been a part of the efforts to bring Peltier home.

“Incarcerated people, too often, that reentry back into community is not supported. Often prisons just open the door, give them their bag of stuff and send them on their way. And we’re not going to let that happen to our elder,” she said.

Some relatives whom he has yet to meet were there in celebration.

Robin Clauthier said she is one of those relatives. She grew up learning stories about him, believing in his innocence. Now, she says she looks forward to getting to know Peltier.

“I think he’s going to do good. And I feel like all of this will be, it’s worth something. It’s meaning is more than life,” Clauthier said.

Peltier spoke Wednesday afternoon, as well. He shared personal anecdotes of his time in prison, and the significance of the Indigenous community in their efforts leading up to his release.

“I want to also mention that from the day one, from the first hour I was arrested, Indian people came to my rescue from all over the country … and they’ve been behind me ever since,” Peltier said. “It was worth it for me to be able to sacrifice for you.”

“I want to say thank you. Thank you very, very much for showing me this.  Much pride in being this important. It was surprising. It was a total shock. It was surprising to see all of you lined up there and welcoming me home.”

Peltier then spent some time greeting many of the folks in the room, shaking hands, smiling and getting acquainted with his community and family. He also signed a few autographs.

In January, over 120 tribal leaders across the U.S., including more than a dozen from Minnesota, called on Biden to grant clemency to Peltier.

“For the majority of his life, Leonard Peltier has been serving a sentence based on a conviction that would not hold up in court today and for a crime that the government has admitted it could not prove. Mr. Peltier’s continued incarceration is a symbol to Native Americans of the systemic inequities of the criminal justice system in America,” said the letter published to NDN Collective’s website.

Attorney Kevin Sharp, who was on Peltier’s legal team for five years, echoed the need for justice. He said, “This isn’t just about Leonard Peltier and this one case. This kind of injustice, I hate to say it, happens way too often, right?”

Not everyone supported the commutation. Former FBI Director Christopher Wray expressed criticism in a January letter to Biden, stating that granting “Peltier any relief from his conviction or sentence is wholly unjustified and would be an affront to the rule of law.”

U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-South Dakota, said in a written statement in January, “This commutation was another unfortunate mistake by the Biden Administration, and I asked the White House not to do this.”

“More than twenty federal judges and Biden’s own FBI Director agree — Peltier’s convictions and sentence must stand.”

Peltier is a member of the grassroots Native American organization the American Indian Movement, or AIM, which was formed in Minneapolis in the late 1960s during a nationwide struggle for civil rights.

In 1975, FBI agents were attempting to serve an arrest warrant for another individual on the Pine Ridge reservation in Oglala, S.D. They spotted and followed a pickup truck in which Peltier and a few other men were inside traveling back to their campsite where fellow AIM members were located. A shootout ensued.

Peltier and others were charged with two counts of first-degree murder of the FBI agents and aiding and abetting. With an already outstanding warrant, Peltier fled to Canada. Later, he was extradited back to the U.S. in 1976 where he faced charges of two counts of first-degree murder. The other men were tried acquitted on the grounds of self-defense.

Peltier was found guilty in 1977 and has been serving two consecutive life sentences. He has acknowledged his presence and shooting a firearm at a distance but maintains his innocence in the killing of agents Coler and Williams.

Peltier’s release marks an end to what he and others have said is his fight for justice. But through it all, Tilsen said he walked out of prison with dignity.

“He walked through the doors, and he shook the hands of all the corrections officers and the transition team over there,” Tilsen said. “All of them, you know, respected him and he respected all of them and they were all happy for him to go home.”

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=17080

Update and Thoughts from Behind the Walls — Caleb Freestone

It’s January’s full moon, the Wolf Moon. As I approach three months incarcerated, a quarter of my sentence should I serve it in full, I thought I’d write you all. I exist, although surely there are those who wish the world forget me.

Yazoo isn’t as bad as I expected – Miami-Dade jail is certainly far worse. At least we aren’t fed bricks (bologna or pb+j on bread wrapped in plastic). However, the isolation is awful by design. My spouse is my greatest comrade, the strongest person I know, 15 hours by car, they’ve visited 11 days and hope to return this month. Just seeing them, tension instantly melts away. My face soon hurts from smiling so much. Prison is war waged upon the soul, but love and solidarity are our greatest weapons in this fight. The holidays are over, the trips from South Florida will be shorter, but every moment together is a blessing for us both.

An imperious desire to do evil hold 1,100 souls hostage here. No one deserves prison except those who choose to spend their careers keeping human in cages, torturing, starving, and cracking the whip in the attached sewing factory. They deserve this place. One day in prison is horrible, 366 are 366 times as bad. But five years? Ten? Thirty? A friend and his wife were locked up 37 years ago. She just got off probation and was finally approved to visit. Soon they will see each other for the first time in nearly four decades. They can briefly hold each other twice: at the beginning and end of the visit. May all find love so strong, may no love ever again be torn apart for so long. I know that I’ve found that eternal love.

“NONE ARE FREE UNTIL ALL ARE FREE!!!”

I think often of the tens of thousands of Palestinian hostages held by the settler-colonial state of Israel, an appendage of the U.S. Empire. Today, it was announced that 1,000 will soon be released. Sinwar, rest in power, leader of the Palestinian Resistance, called his 22 years in prison “the academy”, for he learned the way of his enemy. The violations for which those gulags are famous are less universal here in the imperial core… unless you’re trans. Unless you’re at FCI Dublin or San Francisco. Unless your name is Darren Rainey, rest in power, boiled to death in Florida State Prison, or any of the other countless names of the lynched, known and unknown. Another handful were released from Guantanamo, where extraterritorial ambiguity means endless torture. Many here in the U.S. awaiting execution were resentenced to death by prison. “We who all have life without parole sentences are the security deposit to keep prisons open and running from generation to generation,” -Angela M. Garza.

Each reprieve is a sad miracle yet together they are but a drop in the ocean. Generations spent their lives on plantation and generations still live in concentration camps rebranded “reservations” and “immigration detention”, often located on or near the ancestral lands of the indigenous internees. Even those who walk the streets have so little freedom: COVID relief aid built the largest and best armed police state in history with cameras on every street corner and cyberweapons to hack every device.

“ALL EMPIRES SHALL FALL!!! ALL EMPIRES MUST BE TORN DOWN!!!”

“Every(one) in prison has a baby-mama,” declares my friend Joker. He is Black. His words carry the generational trauma of chattel slavery when Black men were used as studs then carted away for their labor. Now this country criminalizes abortion and mass incarcerates whole communities. A Policy of forced birth becomes one of forced labor, to provide for the little ones. Some find legitimate work – often a McDonald’s uniform or a military uniform, a Walmart badge or a police badge. In other words, in order to raise a child with legitimate pay, most must become a wage slave or a class traitor, hands soaked in blood. Yet those jobs are so limited or pay so little; many parents end up here instead. Most prisoners in Amerikkka are imprisoned for being poor – selling drugs, fraud, organized “crime”, theft – for putting food on the table. Criminalizing abortion fills the prisons directly with patients and doctors and indirectly with parents trying to make ends meet. Prisoners are both the product (to transfer taxpayer money to private profit) and the labor (to keep the prisons running and manufacture goods with enslaved hands). “Slavery shall henceforth be abolished, except as punishment for a crime.” – the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The maximum pay here for an Adult In Custody is about $100 per month, but most are paid just $22 per month, barely enough to buy a month’s supply of phone calls to loved ones.

“Like flowers pushing up through the pavement, these gentle crimes keep me alive” – (unknown to me, spotted on a sticker in South Florida)

Mississippi really is beautiful. The crab grass planted at the prison’s construction is losing a protracted war to clover, wild lettuce, dandelion, and these gnarly purple flowers unknown to me. There are ancient trees in the distance, painted skies in the mornings and evenings; birds and skunks defy the barbed wire as voles excavate their burrows below. Yazoo City once burned to the ground thanks to the ghost of a witch burned at the stake seeking revenge. The rebuilt downtown was ravaged again by Walmart and now stands abandoned. Humans have not fared well here since Europeans brought genocide to the land. Yet that evil has only soaked as deep as the roots of the alien grass being routed by wild flowers yearning to be free.

I read. I write. I pretend heating instant noodles is cooking. I work out. I sift through the lies on CNN and Fox. I dream. I speak of the world as it could be. But mostly I learn. Here in the rotting carcass of this empire, there is such creativity, resilience, faith; we practice mutual aid and solidarity every day. We know who the enemy is. “Nothing in prison is free” was the first and biggest lie from a guard. Our bodies may not be free, but most of our possessions were gifts from one another, paid for in gratitude and reciprocity. The only things for sale are restricted or banned. Artificial scarcity is key to capitalism. Everyone is worse off for having come here, yet there are valuable lesson in the extraordinary nature of our humanity. These lessons are simply disdained by a society which worships domination and greed.

“I am truly free only when all human beings… are equally free.” -Mikhail Bakunin

The First Step Act and Good Time Credit will qualify me for release on April 10, 2025 as long as I am not written up. But they will hold me months past this date. The Second Chance Act already qualified me for a halfway house the day after I arrived. However, they keep making up excuses to delay the paperwork. The BOP has no discretion – these Acts are law. In practice, the BOP holds folx as long as they can. Overincarceration lawsuits will not win enough to cover lawyers’ fees unless one has been illegally held for over a year too long. So I remain in the belly of the beast at Yazoo City, Low 1, separated from my spouse and my community along with 1,100 others who deserve dignity and liberation as well. Meanwhile, states are criminalizing abortion and “fake clinics” continue to trick and manipulate folx from seeking actual medical care.

Please consider writing me, recommending books, sharing the details of our case, speaking up for bodily autonomy and the abolition of prison, distributing copies of this essay, and supporting my spouse and I:

chuffed.org/project/visitcalebf

Cashapp – $JadeF64

Instagram – @FTLauderdaleFoodNotBombs, @SolidarityFTL

In solidarity against all oppression,

Caleb Freestone

–

My name is Caleb Freestone. I am a community organizer, a peace activist, a husband, a gardener, a sailor, a cook, an artist, a writer, an abolitionist, an anarchist, a revolutionary in South Florida. I am a political prisoner serving 366 days at FCI Yazoo City for pro-choice graffiti in the style of Jane’s Revenge on three “fake clinics” in Florida during the Summer of Rage in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, allowing unrestrained criminalization of abortion healthcare.

“Liberation in our lifetimes and no mercy until then!”

Jan 14, 2025
Source: Mongoose Distro

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=16984

Virginia Officials Pathologize Desperate Resistance To Racist Prison Abuse: Kevin Rashid Johnson

Chadwick Dotson has been the director of Virginia’s prison system since September 2023.

Before this appointment, he was a chief judge in the Circuit Court for Wise County, Va. He was also a past prosecuting attorney and dean of students at the Appalachian School of law.

With a resume of numerous high level positions of public trust that affected the lives and liberty of many many people, the public would expect this man to have a high level of integrity, credibility and honesty. In fact, his job as a judge and prosecutor had him penalizing people, throwing them in prison and taking their property, for dishonesty. And now as head of a state prison system, he’s holding people in prison for the same acts.

Yet Dotson proved to be an extreme and unrepentant liar in the media, and interestingly, no one in the state’s government took issue with it.

Not one!

That’s because Dotson isn’t the problem, he’s the symptom of a corrupt system.

During October 2023 I brought public attention to several men at Va’s notoriously abusive and racist Red Onion State Prison setting themselves on fire in desperate efforts to be transferred out of those inhumane conditions. My reports were aired on Prison Riot Radio, Prison Radio and picked up by the Virginia Defenders newspaper, Interfaith Action for Human Rights and others.

In response numerous media outlets covered the story. The Richmond Times Dispatch was one. In a Nov 27, 2024 article in that paper Dotson went on record stating that my report was a lie. He was quoted as saying, “To be clear, these inmates did not set themselves on fire or self immolate.” He was further quoted from that time in a Jan 9, 2025 Richmond Times Dispatch article as saying the prisoners at Red Onion “did not set themselves on fire or self-immolate, as some reports ludicrously suggested.” This same article quotes Dotson as denying any such “self-immolating as a result of conditions at Red Onion.” All of his denials came in November 2024.

But contrast these statements with those of Virginia legislators who right on the heels of Dotson’s denials, confirmed the self-burnings in the New York Times on December 4, 2024. But worse still, were revelations in a Jan 8, 2025 article in The Appeal quoting internal email exchanges between the Red Onion assistant warden, major and investigator from September 2024 which state, “in the past three weeks” three prisoners “set Fire to themselves.” The emails also discussed criminally prosecuting these prisoners for “setting fires in their cells,” and admitted that five prisoners had been institutionally charged with “setting a fire damaging or injury to persons or property,” and “self mutilation.”

These emails alone reveal Dotson to be a blatant liar and made in statements to the public concerning the treatment and conditions of people under his care inside Virginia prisons.

But going further, on December 30, 2024 a Virginia delegate Michael Jones visited Red Onion in an unannounced visit and spoke to several prisoners and staff, including two of the men who set themselves on fire. Jones not only found numerous abusive conditions at Red Onion including racism towards Black prisoners, but he stated, that guys shouldn’t be suffer such desperation that they set themselves on fire as the only way they believe they might gain resolution of mistreatment.

Instead of admitting that prisoners were setting themselves on fire and addressing why, Dotson lied and then deflected the cause of the desperate acts onto the victims and, as the Red Onion emails revealed, proposed punishing the victims for seeking through desperate means to escape their suffering.

After he and all other officials magically glossed over the very fact that Dotson lied about the self-immolations and conditions at Red Onion, he claimed the self-burnings were indicative of the prisoners suffering mental illness because there was no reason for them to be upset about conditions at the prison. Once again, we have racist precedent surfacing.

In 1851 Dr. Samuel Cartwright published an article in the NEW ORLEANS MEDICAL AND SURGICAL JOURNAL, which pathologized resistance to slavery through the invented disorder of draptomania which he said, “manifests itself in an irrestrainable propensity to run away,” and dysoethesia oethiopeca which he said was characterized by the enslaved person breaking tools and evading slave work. In essence, seeking to escape and resisting racist enslavement and abuse was symptomatic of mental disorders.

Those who wish to rationalize and whitewash abuse and racism always villainize, penalize and pathologize their victims. How many accounts of slavery portray it as kind, gentle and beneficial to Blacks? Thus any resistance is insane and must be punished. This is the idea Dotson and the entire Va government who have been silent in the face of his exposed lies are projecting against the men at Red Onion, who resorted to the desperate extreme of setting themselves on fire in efforts to escape the racist abuses at the prison. Indeed, like multitudes of Blacks expressed in slave narratives, these men expressed willingness to die or burn their entire bodies to escape the dehumanization, racism and abuses at Red Onion. But they, like Cartwright said of the protesting slaves of antebellum times, are insane according to Dotson and company.

How dare these ungrateful dark creatures take issue with the kindness and favor showed them under Va’s modern system of slavery and racist abuses in its remote prisons.

The apologists of the slavery era lied, villainized, punished and pathologized those who protested the now-recognized racist inhumanity of that old system of slavery; just as Dotson and others are doing now in relation to their inhumane and racist prisons.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

All Power to the People!

source: Kevin Rashid Johnson

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=16823