Q&A: Leonard Peltier on Life After Prison, His Art, His Story and a Message to Native Youth

Editor’s note: Native News Online founder and publisher Levi Rickert interviewed Leonard Peltier on Monday, September 14, 2026.

Peltier, who turned 82 on September 12, discussed life after prison, his health, his artwork, an upcoming exhibition in New York City, a new documentary about his case, plans for a biography, the progress and challenges facing Indian Country, and his message to Native youth.

Peltier, an Indigenous activist and elder associated with the American Indian Movement (AIM), was released from federal prison on Feb. 18, 2025, after President Joe Biden commuted his sentence to home confinement. Peltier had spent nearly five decades behind bars following his conviction in connection with the 1975 shooting deaths of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.

Levi Rickert: Leonard, happy birthday! How did you celebrate it?

Leonard Peltier: Some of the family came down and they brought a couple of cakes and sang “Happy Birthday” and gave some gifts. It was different from any one I’ve ever had, so it was cool.

Rickert: How’s your health? We’re always concerned about your health, and I know our viewers want to know how you’re doing.

Peltier: As everyone knows, I lost 82 percent of my vision. Some of it is coming back a little bit. I have people based all over the world looking for treatment for me, and they’re all trying to help me get the correct treatment to restore my eyesight.

Rickert: You’ve been out of Coleman for about a year and a half. How are you doing? Are you feeling good and getting acclimated to a new life?

Peltier: Yes, I feel pretty good. I feel good about it, of course. It’s better than that prison cell, that prison period. It’s a million times better than laying in a prison cell.

Rickert: There is going to be an art exhibition in New York City beginning October 4. Your son and, I believe, your grandson are taking some of your artwork from prison to the 15th Street Friends Meeting House. Tell us about that art. You painted it while you were in prison, correct?

Editor’s Note: A selection of Peltier’s paintings will be displayed beginning on October 4 at the Fifteenth Street Friends Meeting House in New York City. The works are being transported from North Dakota by Peltier’s son and grandson.

Peltier: I’ve been doing art all through my education period and before that. As people know, when I was young, we didn’t have toys. We had to make our own, and we did.

I got very interested in artwork from the beginning because that’s a long history of our people. Our people have been doing artwork for thousands of years. We’ve got cave drawings proving that. We’ve got buildings and artifacts that also prove it. We’re a history of being artists.

We’re musicians. We’ve had some awesome musicians. Some of the biggest rock stars you’ve seen in the past were Native or half-Native people. So art was very common to all of us.

I used to practice drawing in dirt and stuff like this because we couldn’t afford pencils and paper. I continued doing that until I got into school, and then I really got into studying art.

To really begin my art career, I finally got started in activism. I had murals on political walls in Seattle and at our AIM offices and things like that. Then, when I got to prison, I again started to really get into doing my artwork.

Rickert: How many hours a day did you get to paint while you were in prison?

Peltier: Contrary to popular belief, people say we could do all that stuff ourselves. That’s not true. They claim everything was issued to us for free. That also is not true. We had to buy all that stuff.

If we made an order, sometimes it took two or three months to get the order because the stores didn’t immediately fill the orders. The prison held it in storage for supposedly research and investigation and stuff like this.

Sometimes it was there two, three or four months before we got our order. And we couldn’t draw in our cells. The prisons I was in did not allow us to do our artwork in our cells.

So we had to go to an area where we went and did our hobbies, crafts and stuff like that.

Rickert: My understanding is you produced more than 200 paintings. Is that right?

Peltier: Probably more than that. I think we started keeping track of them after about 200. People were advising me that they were going to be extremely valuable in the future, and we had to start keeping track of them.

So we did. We started keeping count of what I was painting, and I think the count we had was over 200.

Rickert: On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, October 12, 2026, the Free Leonard Peltier documentary is being released on Netflix.

Peltier: David France is the director. He’s a quite well-known director. He makes some very, very good documentaries. He came to me before I got out of prison, and he wanted to do a documentary for me on my case to help me get out of prison. I told him, “Well, yeah, go ahead, but you’ve got to do it the way I want it done.”

I’m tired of people making these documentaries, and it doesn’t really tell the whole facts of the case.

For example, we mentioned some issues like the Myrtle Poor Bear issue. The prosecutor who prosecuted the case made a statement when he was asked directly by the appellate court judges. Basically, he said, “Your Honor, I want you to know that the moment I read her affidavits, there’s not one scintilla of truth.”

We found out years later he was part of the people that helped her write the statement because she wasn’t a real witness. She was created. Nobody wants to present that. Nobody wants to mention that part.

They just say, “Well, Poor Bear might not be a real witness.” No. There’s no “might” about it. She’s not a credible witness.

That was the kind of agreement I made with David: If he would do all that, besides other issues, almost everything, I would go ahead and allow him to make it.

Anyway, he’s made it, and it’s a pretty good documentary. It’ll be out on the 12th.

Rickert: Do you have any plans to write a book yourself and tell the rest of the story?

Peltier: I’ve been offered to do my biography, so I want to start working on that. But I can’t write anymore because I can’t see, so I’m going to do it all by tape.

I found someone who’s a good writer. I like his style. He’s going to take my words and put them into a biography.

Rickert: Even with all the money that’s flowed into Indian Country from Indian gaming and governmental funds, we still have some of the highest rates of disparities in health care and educational attainment.

What do you think Native Americans should be doing? What should tribes be doing?

Peltier: I’m kind of proud of Turtle Mountain because a lot of our money is going into re-educating the students and teaching them culture and giving them something to do instead of taking that money and just throwing it away.

We’re buying back land at enormous increases in the sale of land. In fact, we’re doing such a good job on that, the state tried to pass a law here just the last three or four months where we could not buy back our own land.

Rickert: What would you tell Native youth right now? What should they be doing?

Peltier: We need you, kids. We need you to take our place.

I’m getting to be an old man now, even though I don’t feel like it. I’m going to be gone soon. I hope another 20 years, but we need people to take our place.

We need people to stand up and say, “No, you’re not going to do this. You’re not going to take our land, the rest of our land. You’re going to give back our land which you took illegally. You’re going to give back our rights, our treaty rights.”

That’s what I want to say to the young people.

WATCH the complete interview: