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PBS News Hour - Segments

Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier on adjusting to life at home after decades in prison

PBS News Hour - Segments

PBS NewsHour

News, Daily News

4.11K Ratings

🗓️ 13 October 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

To many supporters, Leonard Peltier was a political prisoner unjustly punished for his activism with the American Indian Movement. To his critics, he is a remorseless killer of two FBI agents in 1975, a charge he denies. President Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence, restricting him to home confinement. Fred de Sam Lazaro spoke with Peltier on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Transcript

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0:00.0

To many of his supporters, Leonard Peltier was a political prisoner unjustly punished for his activism with the American Indian movement.

0:07.8

To his critics, he is a remorseless killer of two FBI agents 50 years ago, a charge he denies.

0:14.2

In the final minutes of his presidency, Joe Biden commuted Peltier's sentence, restricting him to home confinement.

0:20.4

Our Fred de Sam Lazaro recently visited Peltier on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota.

0:29.0

Can you see that screen or is it too small?

0:31.7

His sight is impaired among several health problems, time in prison compounding the toll of time itself.

0:40.3

Play, welcome home, Uncle Leonard.

0:43.3

Time has brought helpful technology and at his home today, Leonard Peltier is surrounded

0:49.3

by memories and art. Much of it his own work.

0:52.3

That's a drama right here.

0:56.2

I've always wanted to be an artist.

1:01.4

And then I painted murals and stuff before I went to prison.

1:06.6

And when I got there, I probably painted three, four hours of me.

1:09.2

And this guy was a modern day, a medicine man. That sustained him through the decades in federal prisons, he says,

1:13.2

as did moral support of fans and celebrities worldwide.

1:17.5

This was given to me.

1:19.2

One prized possession, this sculpture of an ancient indigenous warrior,

1:23.6

sent to him by then Bolivian president.

1:25.7

Evo Morales, the first full-blooded Indian president in this continent.

1:31.3

I'm very proud of it.

1:33.3

This home was bought for him by his supporters, a modest two-bedroom rambler,

1:38.3

but after a life in poverty or prison, it's an unimaginable luxury.

...

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