Leonard Peltier was nine when he was taken from his home in 1953 and placed in an American Indian boarding school under government termination and assimilation policies. Four years later, he joined the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building, his first demonstration.
That early history forms the opening of Free Leonard Peltier, a Netflix documentary directed by David France and Jesse Short Bull. Released on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, 12 October 2026, the film follows Peltier from boarding school through roughly 50 years in prison and his eventual release.
Peltier, 81, is partially blind and has faced an aortic aneurysm, diabetes and multiple COVID-19 infections while in prison. He was born on 12 September 1944 at the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota, and is of Dakota, Lakota and Anishinaabe descent.
He moved to Seattle in 1965, where he worked as a construction worker and welder. In 1972, after meeting the founding member Vernon Bellecourt, he joined the American Indian Movement, or AIM.
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AIM was founded in Minneapolis in 1968 as a grassroots movement focused on Indigenous people displaced into cities after the US government had forcibly removed them from their land. The following year, the federal government sent hundreds of FBI agents, US marshals and other law-enforcement personnel to break up AIM’s 71-day protest at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, known as the Wounded Knee occupation.
On 26 June 1975, FBI special agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams entered the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. They had been sent to arrest a man accused of assault with a deadly weapon and the armed theft of a pair of cowboy boots.
At Jumping Bull Ranch, the agents encountered gunfire. Peltier was among three men present in a Chevrolet Suburban Carryall, as violence continued that spring between AIM and the militia of the reservation’s tribal government.
Williams radioed that he and Coler were under fire, then said both had been shot. The agents were wounded by gunfire and fatally shot at close range. They died 10 minutes after being shot, while local dispatch and other FBI agents were miles away.
Coler was 28 and Williams was 27. An AIM member, Joseph Stuntz, was also killed that day; no charges followed his death.
Peltier has consistently accepted that he took part in the shootout, saying he acted in self-defence, while denying that he fired the fatal shots. He made the same distinction in his 1999 memoir, Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance.
His co-defendants were acquitted on self-defence grounds. Peltier was tried separately in Fargo, North Dakota, before an all-white jury. After a five-week trial, the jury convicted him on two murder counts on 18 April 1977, and he received two consecutive life sentences on 1 June 1977.
He became the only person convicted of the murders of Coler and Williams.
The prosecution later came under scrutiny over evidence and witness testimony. Myrtle Poor Bear said she signed false affidavits in 1976 stating that she had seen Peltier shoot the agents after months of FBI harassment.
A Freedom of Information Act request also brought to light an October 1975 FBI teletype saying that an AR-15 recovered in September 1975 had a different firing pin from the weapon used in the reservation murders.
An appeals court wrote in 1986: “There is a possibility that the jury would have acquitted Leonard Peltier had the records and data improperly withheld from the defense been available to him.”
His convictions had been affirmed on appeal in 1978, and he remained in federal prison for nearly 50 years. Peltier declined plea deals over the decades because they required him to admit to a crime he said he had not committed or to renounce his activism.
The United Nations and Amnesty International described his imprisonment as arbitrary and regarded him as a political prisoner of the United States.
On 20 January 2025, Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence to house arrest on his final day in office. Biden cited Peltier’s age, health and time served, and said the trial had been marred by government misconduct, including false FBI affidavits obtained through coercion and threats of harm to a witness’s children, as well as withheld exculpatory evidence.
Peltier was released in February 2025 and transferred to the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota.
In the documentary, Peltier describes the commitment he says sustained him: “The people that knew me all my life, that knew me when I was young, knew that I was sincere in battling for our people, survival of our people. I love my culture. I love my religion, and I think we have a beautiful history.”
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