Leonard Peltier

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In 1965, Peltier relocated to Seattle, Washington. Peltier worked as a welder, a construction worker, and as the co-owner of an auto shop in Seattle in his twenties. The co-owners used the upper level of the building as a kind of stopping place, or halfway house, for American Indians who had alcohol addiction issues or had recently finished their prison sentences and were re-entering society. However, the halfway house took a financial toll on the shop, so they closed it down.

In Seattle, Peltier became involved in a variety of causes championing Native American civil rights. In the early 1970s, he learned about the factional tensions at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota between supporters of Richard Wilson, elected tribal chairman in 1972, and traditionalist members of the Lakota tribe. It was Dennis Banks who first invited Leonard Peltier to join AIM. Consequently, Peltier became an official member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in 1972, which was founded by urban Indians in Minneapolis in 1968, at a time of rising Indian activism for civil rights.

Wilson had created a private militia, known as the Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOON), whose members were reputed to have attacked political opponents. Protests over a failed impeachment hearing of Wilson contributed to the AIM and Lakota armed takeover of Wounded Knee at the reservation in February 1973. Federal forces reacted, conducting a 71-day siege, which became known as the Wounded Knee incident. They demanded the resignation of Wilson. Peltier, however, spent most of the occupation in a Milwaukee, Wisconsin jail charged with attempted murder related to a different protest. When Peltier secured bail at the end of April, he took part in an AIM protest outside the federal building in Milwaukee and was on his way to Wounded Knee with the group to deliver supplies when the incident ended.

In 1975, Peltier traveled as a member of AIM to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to try to help reduce the continuing violence among political opponents. At the time, he was a fugitive, with an arrest warrant having been issued in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It charged him with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution for the attempted murder of an off-duty Milwaukee police officer. (He was acquitted of the attempted murder charge in February 1978.)

During this time period, Peltier had seven children from two marriages and adopted two children.

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