It’s the sort of twist no screenwriter would dare invent: “Free Leonard Peltier,” a persuasively well-researched and often infuriating documentary about the American Indian Movement activist convicted nearly a half-century ago of killing two FBI agents, had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 27, 2025 — precisely one week after Joe Biden, as one of his very last official acts as U.S. president, issued a commutation of Peltier’s life sentences.
The relatively brief final sequence in the film is obviously a last-minute addition to a completed feature, but never mind: Dramatically and emotionally satisfying, the scene is a welcome and fitting capper for a story that inarguably earns its happy ending.
It’s a story that has been brought to the screen twice before: Once as the factual inspiration for the fictions of “Thunderheart,” the 1992 drama directed by Michael Apted, starring Val Kilmer and Graham Greene; and again as “Incident at Oglala,” the acclaimed documentary also directed by Apted and released in 1992, narrated by Robert Redford.
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“Free Leonard Peltier” has an appreciably wider focus, placing the incidents detailed here in the context of America’s long and shameful history of exploiting, betraying and even murdering Native people. Skillfully entwining archival footage (including TV news reports and in-prison conversations with Peltier), newly filmed talking-head interviews and often shocking public records, directors Jesse Short Bull (“Lakota Nation vs. the United States”) and David France (“Welcome to Chechnya”) methodically fashion a potent history lesson that also is a compelling and complete portrait of Peltier.
Early on, we learn Peltier was brutally mistreated and forcefully assimilated in a government-run Indian residential boarding school during his youth, and later radicalized by such protests as the 1969-71 occupation of Alcatraz by Native American activists. After joining the American Indian Movement in the early 1970s, Peltier’s political activism drew him to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, to aid locals and AIM supporters in their sometimes violent conflicts with Richard Wilson, the reservation’s purportedly corrupt tribal leader, and his vigilante army, known as the Guardians of the Oglala Nation. (Evidently, the members of this paramilitary group actually enjoyed being identified, and feared, as “The GOON Squad.”)
The FBI supplied the GOONs with weapons and, when the need arose, cover for the illegal activities. Wilson had long waged campaigns of terror against AIM activists and anyone else who crossed him. (He is shown admitting as much in a brief, chilling news clip here.) But the bloodshed received very little national attention until the night in 1975 when two FBI agents, Ronald Arthur Williams and Jack Ross Coler, drove onto the reservation, allegedly following a suspect. They were fatally shot, and four Native Americans — Peltier, Bob Robideau, Dino Butler and Jimmy Eagle — were indicted for their murders. But only Peltier was convicted, and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences in federal prison.
“Free Leonard Peltier” serves in many ways as a brief for the defense, making a strong case for the claim that Peltier’s trial was rigged because local and government officials were enraged by the “not guilty” verdicts handed down to Robideaux and Butler, who claimed they were acting in self-defense. The jury clearly believed that, with so much GOON violence going on, AIM activists likely would feel entitled to shoot first and ask questions later if any strangers appeared unannounced on their land.
Determined nothing similar would occur during Peltier’s separate trial — charges against Eagle were dropped — the Feds and local officials stacked the deck by judge-shopping, withholding evidence, undercutting the self-defense claim and even producing a damning statement by a woman identified as Peltier’s “girlfriend.” (She would later claim she was pressured into giving false testimony after being threatened with the loss of her children.)
Ever since his 1976 conviction, Peltier has been a houseguest of the federal prison system. Despite passionate support from notables ranging from Marlon Brando (seen here in a vintage clip proselytizing on “The Dick Cavett Show”) to the pope, countless public protests by Native Americans and their allies, and after-the-fact revelations of flagrant FBI misconduct, he and lawyers have been repeatedly stymied in their attempts to get a retrial or pardon.
The good news of Peltier’s pardon means his long nightmare is finally over. But “Free Leonard Peltier” makes it very clear what a terrible injustice it has been for the serving of justice to have taken so much time. The final moments might make you smile, or maybe even weep. You’ll still feel very angry, however.