When I apologise to Leonard Peltier for keeping him waiting, he smiles and tells me not to worry - the thunderstorms that had delayed my flight to Kansas City for nearly 36 hours had passed over Leavenworth's maximum security Federal Penitentiary as well. And Peltier, icon of the American Indian Movement and focus of its claims of institutional injustice, knows a fair bit about waiting.
United States Prisoner 89637-132 has been waiting for just over 23 years. According to current plans, he'll be waiting 41 more - two consecutive life sentences for the murders of two FBI agents during a shoot-out on the Oglala Lakota Indian reservation on Pine Ridge, South Dakota, in 1975, plus seven for an escape attempt in 1979.
"I might get out of prison," he says, "but I ain't won nothing. They've taken my life. I have what's left, but I'm 54 now, and how much time do I have left? Twenty years, if I'm lucky? Twenty good, active years? Thirty? If I was released today, I've still lost."
In the years Peltier has spent in American prisons, he has acquired the status of legend. Among Peltier's supporters, his innocence of the murders is an article of faith; his travails are often compared to those of Nelson Mandela. Among Peltier's opponents, many have called him names that the out-going South African president might recognise: thug, killer, terrorist (in May 1995, in an open letter to President Clinton in the Washington Post, the FBI Agents Association described Peltier as "a vicious, violent and cowardly criminal who hides behind legitimate Native American issues").
What Peltier also shares with Mandela is a moral authority that grows with every passing year he is imprisoned. Some believe Peltier is an innocent man railroaded by a vengeful FBI, and some believe he is a bold warrior persecuted by a corrupt and greedy federal government for standing against the corporate pillage of the mineral wealth beneath his ancestral lands. Either way, an awful lot of people believe an awful lot in Leonard Peltier.
"Right now," says Peltier, who often seems faintly embarrassed by the fuss, "I'm getting letters from Indian people, from different reservations, talking about making me Chief of Chiefs, chief of all the reservations. Now, that'sÉ well, it's never happened. It's a very prestigious, very historical, very important position. And I've thought about this, and . . . what if it happens? Can I meet people's expectations? I don't even know if I want to become that. It'd be a headache. But I don't know if I have a choice. Whatever happens, I don't think my life is ever going to be my own."
Leonard Peltier is portly - "I should play more handball," he laughs, patting his stomach - and shuffles slightly when he walks. He wears his black hair long and swept down his back; a wintry grey has set in at his sideburns and moustache. Even in his crisply pressed prison khakis, he looks every inch the grandfather of seven that he is, and like nobody's idea of a public enemy. Perched on one of the under-sized plastic chairs in the visitors centre, Peltier is placid and cheerful. He laughs a lot, emitting a chuckle that wheezes and sputters like a car on a cold day. It is only occasionally possible to perceive anger, or a bereft sadness, behind the eyes in his still face.
"Leaders are chosen by the people," he continues. "This is what native people believe. So, yes, they've put me into that icon status, and so have a lot of non-native people. But it hasn't reached a stage where it's ridiculous. If I ever do think it's coming to that, I'll stop it. I can't walk on water."
The Leavenworth staff who guide me through a metal detector and two sets of barred doors seem bemused at the attention attracted by their most famous inmate. During his internment at Leavenworth, Peltier has been the subject of countless articles, several documentaries, a few books - most notably Peter Matthiessen's controversial epic, In The Spirit Of Crazy Horse, which zealously pursues the corporate conspiracy theory of events - and two films: Suzie Baer's 1991 Warrior and the 1992 Robert Redford/Michael Apted production Incident At Oglala. This morning, Peltier is embarking on a necessarily stationary publicity tour, making his first contribution to the canon of Peltier literature with a memoir called Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sundance.
The book came out in the US on June 26 -a significant date. It was on that day, in 1975, on the Pine Ridge Oglala reservation in South Dakota, that Peltier took part in a gunfight between American Indian Movement (AIM) members, and federal agents and police. The many who perceive Peltier's story less as one man's misfortune and more as part of an ongoing oppression of indigenous Americans are also fond of the coincidence that this confrontation occurred 99 years and a day after George Custer's 7th Cavalry were routed at Little Bighorn by the Lakota warrior Crazy Horse. (Peltier signs his letters "In the spirit of Crazy Horse".
I corresponded with him for a while before I was permitted to meet him.) "It's always a sad time," says Peltier, when asked what the anniversary means to him, "because of how my life turned out. Up at Pine Ridge, they have a gathering every year as a reminder to everyone that I'm still here, and of all the other things that happened at that time. We were not the guilty party. We had far more people killed than two FBI agents." Peltier is referring to a period remembered by Pine Ridge residents as "The Reign of Terror". In the early 70s, Pine Ridge was bitterly divided. On one side were residents sympathetic to the nascent AIM and its aggressive approach to issues of Indian civil rights and land ownership.
On the other side were those who were suspicious of the new movement, and content to rely on the handouts of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The latter group, unsurprisingly, was the model of Indian preferred by state and federal authorities, and they also had the numbers: in 1972, former bootlegger Dick Wilson, no friend of AIM, was elected President of the Pine Ridge Tribal Council.
Apparently believing that the BIA police patrolling Pine Ridge were insufficient to counter the threat posed by AIM to Wilson's power - or, depending on who is telling the story, to the mining interests behind him - Wilson used federal funds to establish a paramilitary security force: a praetorian guard popularly known as the Goon Squad. The Goons - they adopted the insult, claiming it as an acronym for Guardians Of the Oglala Nation - wrought well-documented havoc on the reservation, especially among AIM sympathisers (at least one former Goon, Duane Brewer, has since claimed that the Goons were armed by the FBI). Between 1973 and 1975, there were more than 60 violent deaths among Pine Ridge's population of 11,000, giving the reservation the highest per capita murder rate in the country. Most of these deaths remain uninvestigated. In early 1975, the terrified elders of Pine Ridge sought further help from AIM.
At this early stage in its history, AIM was flourishing. It had staged several high- profile direct actions: occupations at Alcatraz in 1969 and the BIA offices in Washington in 1972, and, in 1973, a 71-day armed siege on Pine Ridge itself, at Wounded Knee - the site of the infamous 1890 massacre of 200 or more unarmed Minnecojou Lakota Indians by Custer's old unit, the 7th cavalry.
When Pine Ridge called on AIM, one of those who answered was a 30-year-old Ojibwa Lakota, an itinerant labourer and sometime mechanic called Leonard Peltier. Peltier, born in North Dakota but since resident in Portland, Seattle and Milwaukee, was a committed AIM activist. He was also a fugitive, having jumped bail while awaiting trial in Milwaukee for the attempted murder of a plainclothes policeman. (Peltier claims that the confrontation that led to the charge was an anti-AIM set-up, and that he decamped - ironically, given later events - to avoid a kangaroo court; the case was dismissed in 1978 on the fairly fundamental grounds that the pistol Peltier was alleged to have fired at the cop was broken and useless.)
The events on Pine Ridge of June 25, 1975, are not much clearer for having been exhaustively examined in the years since. However, the basics are uncontested: a shoot-out commenced when two FBI agents in separate cars drove on to a ranch called Jumping Bull, where several AIM members and their families were staying in tents; the fight was swiftly joined by dozens of federal agents, BIA police and Goons. When the smoke lifted, three men were dead. One was 21-year-old AIM member Joe Stuntz Killsright, presumably shot by a BIA police sniper.
Nobody was charged over his death. The other two were Ronald Williams, 27, and Jack Coler, 28, FBI agents, wounded from a distance and killed at point-blank range. Four men were eventually charged with the first-degree murders of the two lawmen: Jimmy Eagle, Darelle "Dino" Butler, Bob Robideau, and Leonard Peltier.
"There have been many times I've wished that I hadn't been there, period," sighs Peltier, asked if he regrets any of his actions that day. "But, if I hadn't, maybe more Indian people would have got killed. One of the things I was successful in doing that day was getting women and children out of there. I feel very good about that. I'm not saying that I'm some extraordinary warrior, just that I'm fortunate that the Great Spirit guided me out of there, and bought those people with me. I don't feel guilty. I have nothing to feel guilty about."
The charges against Jimmy Eagle were dropped. Dino Butler and Bob Robideau stood trial for the murders of Coler and Williams in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in June 1976. The prosecution's case was largely that Butler and Robideau's undisputed participation in the fight was sufficient at least for conviction on an aiding-and- abetting theory (aiding and abetting first-degree murder carries potentially as heavy a sentence as first-degree murder itself). Amazingly, the all-white jury in this conservative country town acquitted the pair on grounds of self-defence - their attorneys had successfully argued that the tension on Pine Ridge was such that two unidentified armed men driving into a residential encampment, FBI agents or not, could hardly be surprised by a hostile reaction.
The saddest Peltier looks today is when he agrees that if he'd been tried alongside Butler and Robideau he'd be free now. But Peltier was in Canada, and by the time his extradition was secured, with the aid of phony testimony from a confused, frightened woman called Myrtle Poor Bear - who had never met Peltier, let alone been the girlfriend she claimed to be in her affidavits - he was the FBI's last hope of a conviction.
Their determination to depict Peltier as the gunman who executed Coler and Williams as they lay wounded didn't end with supplying bogus affidavits to a foreign government. Peltier's trial was moved from Cedar Rapids to the jurisdiction of Paul Benson, a less sympathetic judge in Fargo, North Dakota. Benson refused to admit the evidence of Goon terror on Pine Ridge that had been crucial to the acquittals of Butler and Robideau.
Nine years later, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, although affirming Peltier's conviction, acknowledged significant FBI misconduct relating to the Poor Bear affidavits and ballistics evidence presented at Fargo. Five years after that, Senior Judge Gerald Heaney, one of the Eighth Circuit panel that denied Peltier's appeal, wrote to Senator Daniel Inouye that "there is a possibility that the jury would have acquitted Leonard Peltier had the records and data improperly withheld from the defence been available to him in order to better exploit and reinforce the inconsistencies casting strong doubts upon the government's case".
The common dynamic when a prisoner protests his innocence is one of straightforward claim and counter- claim: the convicted says he didn't do it, the government says he did. While Peltier certainly says he didn't do it, the best response his jailers can muster is that he might have, or could have, or was in the vicinity when someone else did. As Bruce Ellison, one of Peltier's tireless attorneys, explains, there isn't even consensus as to what Peltier is serving time for. "It's a conviction for first-degree murder," says Ellison, "but the government now maintains that he is in prison as an aider and abettor."
There is, as Peltier points out, the interesting question of how long a man can be jailed for aiding and abetting what a court has already recognised as an act of self defence. "The prosecutor said himself, about ten years ago: ÔIf I was to prosecute Leonard Peltier today, I would never get a conviction.' " At Peltier's last parole hearing, on May 4, 1998, Federal Parole Commissioner Ray Essex told him, "I agree there is nothing that definitely states that you did the killing. But the circumstantial evidence indicates, in my opinion, that you were involved." The tape of the hearing does not record a reaction from Peltier.
"Of course I get angry," he says today. "He's a damned hypocrite. He's supposed to represent the justice system and the Constitution of this country, but he's telling me that they don't know if I'm guilty or not, and that I'm going to stay in prison anyway. This is not what my grandfather, and the grandfathers of most everyone in this country, fought world wars for. We fought for justice for all, for justice beyond reasonable doubt. So, of course I get angry. You'd have to be some kind of maniac not to. What they're saying is that somebody on that reservation killed those agents, that somebody had to pay, that I was convicted, and so I'm going to do the time. It doesn't matter if I'm innocent or guilty. I'm the one they got."
Conversely, sceptics have argued that Peltier today is as much a prisoner of his supporters as he is of Leavenworth: that if less fuss had been made of him, less hope invested in what he might achieve if released, then a government anxious to put an enormously embarrassing episode behind it might have freed him long ago.
"Maybe," allows Peltier. "But I think the reason I get the support I do is that people see that my 23 years in here haven't been used selfishly. I've created scholarships for kids - that's what we're doing with the money from the book - I've organised Christmas programmes for kids on Pine Ridge, different things like that. I've used my popularity and recognition that way. Maybe I shouldn't have. Maybe I'd have got out sooner." He shrugs. He doesn't sound convinced.
Law enforcement agencies often note, with a weary, knowing sigh, that the world's prisons are full of innocent people. Peltier has more than his word on his side. In 1995, Amnesty International wrote to the US Attorney General Janet Reno "to reiterate Amnesty International's continuing disquiet about this case". On March 22 this year, an early-day motion in the House of Commons, tabled by Tony Benn and supported by five other MPs, moved "that this House expresses its concern at the long prison sentence imposed on Leonard Peltier, a distinguished American Indian leader, for an offence he is alleged to have committed in 1975, by a court in America that withheld vital evidence that would have proved his innocence".
On February 11, the European Parliament passed its second resolution insisting on a presidential grant of executive clemency to Peltier. Its resolution notes several of the central arguments of Peltier's supporters about the weakness of the prosecution case and the propriety of his continued imprisonment, given his deteriorating health. In Lawrence, a short drive from Leavenworth, where the small headquarters of the Leonard Peltier Defence Committee is decorated with Peltier's oil paintings of Native Americana, the LPDC's young staff proffer a hefty folder of letters of support, from Jesse Jackson, Princess Christine of Belgium, Harry Belafonte, Robert Redford, Gerry Adams and the Dalai Lama, among others. Desmond Tutu has called Peltier's case "a gross miscarriage of justice".
In a coruscating foreword to My Life Is My Sundance, Ramsey Clark - Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson - declares, "Leonard Peltier has committed no crime whatsoever", and describes portions of the legal processes that condemned Peltier, now a Clark client, as "a shameful, criminal act". In fact, Clark is one of three lawyers who last month filed a petition of habeas corpus in Topeka, Kansas, challenging as "capricious and unconstitutional" the Parole Commission's decision to deny Peltier parole. The Commission has repeatedly refused to reconsider parole on the grounds that Peltier has not yet taken criminal responsibility for the deaths.
"If someone out there is looking out for you," says Peltier, "you can't believe how much that helps. So many things can cause a person to lose his mind in here, and so many times I've felt like giving up, but people throughout the world support me."
Peltier's words come softly and slowly, and he stumbles over polysyllables. A history of problems with his jaw - childhood lockjaw, a break, several unsuccessful surgeries - has left him with a mouth stuck 13 millimetres open. He suffers chronic headaches and watering eyes. He cannot chew food, and is forced to subsist on "soups, pastries, crap like that". The jaw is an ongoing source of conflict between Peltier and Leavenworth. In 1996, surgery on the jaw at the Springfield Medical Facility for federal prisoners sent Peltier into a coma, nearly saw him die from blood loss, and made the problem worse. Letters he wrote to his Defence Committee at the time talk of being housed in a punishment unit during his recovery. Unsurprisingly, Peltier has refused further treatment at Springfield, insisting that he be seen instead at another medical facility for maximum-security prisoners, but Leavenworth won't allow this.
"I guess it's part of the punishment," he says. "What else can I think?" Leavenworth presents its response, un-asked, as I leave: a printed statement that reads, in part, "Inmate Peltier's condition is stable and does not warrant prolonged, intensive treatment at a Bureau medical facility. As requested by the inmate, consideration for a change in diet is being reviewed."
On June 1, 1977, having been found guilty of killing Coler and Williams, Peltier stood before the court in Fargo and made his permitted pre-sentencing statement. Resigned to the maximum sentence, Peltier delivered a spectacular personal attack on the sitting judge, and an eloquent contextualising of his own story within the unhappy history of America's relationship with its native peoples. He laughs abashedly when reminded of the speech, as anyone might of some hot-headed, youthful aberration, but he's obviously, and rightly, still pleased with it: it appears at the end of My Life Is My Sundance as an appendix. This, according to Peltier's supporters, is where the real reasons for his continued incarceration lie. "They don't want him talking," says Ellison. "I think the government is intent on having him die in prison, and hopes the issues he raises die with him."
However, little of My Life Is My Sundance resembles the fulminations of a dissident firebrand. As Peltier argues, all AIM ever asked was that the US government apply its own laws. Peltier lays great emphasis on the 1868 Fort Laramie treaty, which ceded vast tracts of America to the Lakota nation, but which has, in practice, been ignored since those same tracts were found to contain priceless reserves of minerals. Treaty rights aside, a lot of Peltier's politics would earn the applause of Charlton Heston. He is keen on family and law and order, and not keen on gun control. ("What are you going to do in England if someone like Idi Amin gets in? You had Margaret Thatcher, which was pretty close.") When Peltier talks of helping the reservations, he does so in terms of encouraging manufacturers and retailers to make use of their tax concessions. When he discusses freedom for his people, he cites the moderate models of the recently recognised Inuit territory in Canada, and the new parliaments in Wales and Scotland.
"We would never say, although under the 1868 treaty we have the right to, that we are no longer part of the United States. I don't think there's anything to be gained from that. We have to play America at its own game. We can't go back to living in teepees and hunting buffalo. We have to make both worlds work." Peltier has an endearing habit of following up sweeping declamations on behalf of his people with wistful reveries about his hopes for himself.
"Really, I would like to build myself a home," he says. "I've had offers of land from reservations from all over the country. Maybe I could start another family - the kids would be in college by the time I pass to the next world. I'd like to take care of my grandkids, do my art, write more books - I can put things down on paper pretty well, a lot better than I can speak. I want to make films, too - Native American films. We need to tell our own stories."
Peltier says he's heard that two more films based on his life are in the works. One is a Native American production in which Peltier hopes he might be played by Steve Reevis, the Blackfeet actor who starred in Dances With Wolves. The other is a Hollywood affair to be directed by Steven Seagal. "I don't know what kind of job he'll do," grins Peltier. "I hope he doesn't turn it into a karate film."
It could scarcely make Peltier's story seem less extraordinary if he did. Little of the saga is more bewildering than the emergence, during a 1991 60 Minutes documentary on Peltier's case, of a hooded figure called Mr X. In an interview conducted by Peter Matthiessen and filmed by Oliver Stone, Mr X confessed, in detail, to killing Agents Coler and Williams. Though the interview upholds Peltier's claims, it seems to create unease among Peltier's supporters. As Ellison notes, a confession by another party makes no difference to Peltier while the government maintains that he is imprisoned as an aider and abettor.
"I don't know who he is," says Peltier, rather grumpily. "But somebody pulled the trigger. Call them Mr X, Mr Y, Mr Z."
Presumably, though - and it seems reasonable to suspect that this might be part of the FBI's logic - Peltier knows who Mr X, the self-confessed killer, is. "No, I don't. And if I do, I'm not telling. When you're in a military conflict, and you are captured and turn rat against your ownÉ I don't think there's a society in the world that forgives that, and we are no different. He was a brother. A soldier, and a warrior. We didn't start that conflict. We did not commit the terrorist acts perpetrated against our people. We were there to protect our people, and one, or maybe two, of our brothers killed those two men. Even if I knew who it was, I'm not going to turn against my own nation. I think the people who killed those 60 Indians should be in here, not me."
In one of his letters to me, Peltier had outlined the importance of his faith, in particular the sweat lodge ceremony that he and Leavenworth's other Indians are allowed to hold every Saturday. ("We get about 20 people," he smiles, "which is more than they get at the Christian service.") I wonder if he perceives, as the title of his book suggests, that his suffering serves some higher purpose.
"That's part of our belief," he nods. "I think what convinces me this is true is the fact that my case has kept Indian issues alive, and that's probably my purpose in this world. It has made a lot of Indians proud, given them something to look up to. We don't have anyone like that. Our leaders are long dead. We got Indian politicians, but they sold out. Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell could be screaming bloody murder to get me out of here, butÉ look, you call him and ask him, will you?"
I've tried. Before I came to Leavenworth, I left several messages for Nighthorse Campbell, the Colorado Republican who chairs the select committee on Indian affairs. I also called Canadian minister for justice Anne McLellan, and Joann Chase, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians. Not one of them would comment. In fact, not one of them even called back to say they wouldn't comment.
As I pack up to leave, I ask Leonard what he's got planned for the rest of his Monday. "I have to go back to work now," he says, glumly. Peltier earns a dollar an hour in Leavenworth's furniture factory - an assignment he objects to because the furniture is used in US military installations.
"I'll do that until 3.10. Tonight is commissary night, and I have to get a few items, and hopefully I'll be out of there by 5.30. It's a pretty nice day, so I might go outside and play some handball, or I might go up and paint. Around eight o'clock, I'll take a shower, write a couple of letters if I can, and at ten the doors are locked for the night." So pass Leonard Peltier's days, weeks, months, years and decades. "I sleep the best I can," he says. "I've got a two-inch mattress on a slab of steel. I sleep okay." n