By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

While many brace for the return of Donald Trump to the White House, let’s remember that until Monday, January 20th, Joe Biden is still president, with all the power that confers. The Constitution grants the president the “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States,” to remedy a criminal justice system riddled with faults. One strong candidate for presidential clemency, as recently called for by Amnesty International USA, is 80-year-old Anishinabe-Lakota elder Leonard Peltier, who has been incarcerated for close to half a century for a crime he maintains he did not commit. This Thanksgiving weekend, when people across the US enjoy a holiday based on the myth of a shared meal between native people of Massachusetts and the English settler-colonists who would later violently displace them, President Biden should free Leonard Peltier.

The case of Leonard Peltier encapsulates the modern era of indigenous resistance. After centuries of genocide launched by Christopher Columbus and expanded by successive waves of European settlers, by the 1950s most of the surviving indigenous nations in North America had been contained in isolated and impoverished reservations. Hollywood appropriated, caricatured and monetized the vibrant mosaic of indigenous cultures. Many Native people moved to cities seeking economic opportunity but still faced racism and discrimination. Out of this, and amidst the civil rights and other social movements of the 1960s, the American Indian Movement, or AIM, was born.

In 1973, AIM went to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where a corrupt tribal government was working in league with federal and local authorities to violently suppress a growing movement to restore traditional practices – and to block extractive industries from exploiting traditional lands. More than 50 Lakota people and their allies were murdered there over a three year period.

On June 26, 1975, Leonard Peltier was present at an AIM camp on the property of a targeted family. The camp was fired upon by unknown assailants, and the AIM members returned fire. In the ensuing minutes, two FBI agents and one young AIM activist were killed.

Two AIM members were later arrested for killing the agents. At trial, the jury agreed that they had fired in self-defense and acquitted them. Leonard Peltier, arrested later, was tried separately and convicted. Peltier’s trial was marked by gross FBI and federal prosecutorial misconduct, with the coercion of witnesses, fabricated testimony, and suppressed exculpatory evidence.

When Peltier was on trial in 1976, Joe Biden, then a young US Senator, was a founding member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee was created after the explosive Church Committee hearings that investigated the unconstitutional and criminal conduct of the FBI and its “COINTELPRO” operations against civil rights leaders and organizations, including AIM.

A global movement grew, demanding justice for Leonard Peltier. Human rights icons like South African President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu called for his release, as did one of the federal judges involved, and, years later, one of the prosecutors who tried the case.

Amnesty International has campaigned for Peltier’s release for decades. The group recently sent a letter to President Biden, reiterating their demand.

“Over the decades at Amnesty, we have been calling on administration after administration to do the right thing by Leonard. He was in hospital in June, he was in hospital again in October. It’s time to give him a chance to spend his last days with his family and with his community,” Paul O’Brien, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, said on the Democracy Now! news hour.

In late October, President Biden traveled to the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, to formally apologize for the US government’s treatment of indigenous children forced into boarding schools.

“All told, hundreds and hundreds of Federal Indian Boarding Schools across the country. Tens of thousands of Native children entered the system. Nearly 1,000 documented Native child deaths, though the real number is likely to be much, much higher; lost generations, culture, and language; lost trust. It’s horribly, horribly wrong. It’s a sin on our soul,” Biden said.

Nick Tilsen, executive director of the Indigenous-led NDN Collective, responded on Democracy Now!, saying,

“What this means for Indian Country is that we hope that this is a beginning of an era of repair between the United States government and the Indigenous people, the First People of this land…He [Peltier] was in the Sisseton Wahpeton boarding school, in South Dakota. Leonard Peltier and many people who became leaders in the American Indian Movement were survivors of boarding school. They came out of that era, and then they resisted.”

If President Biden’s apology at Gila River was genuine, he could demonstrate it by commuting the sentence of Leonard Peltier. It would be a long-overdue gesture to indigenous people across the US, for which we could all give thanks.