ABSTRACT
Denied clemency by President Clinton, and ignored by Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, G. H. W. Bush, G. W. Bush, and Obama, American Indian activist and convicted murderer Leonard Peltier spends his time in solitary confi nement at a federal prison in Florida. Imprisoned for his role in the 1975 deaths of two federal agents in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Peltier has mounted multiple unsuccessful rhetorical campaigns aimed at securing presidential clemency for his crimes. Many varying accounts of the events at Pine Ridge have been offered since the time of the killings. A detailed account of the history of the Peltier case is not possible in a project of this length, neither is it necessary given the arguments I make herein (for exhaustive accounts of Pine Ridge and the Peltier case, see Churchill & Vander Wall, 1988; Matthiessen, 1992).
