'You're Not Going to Get Rid of Us,' Vows Leonard Peltier Amid Trump Assault on Indigenous Rights

Leonard Peltier, the Indigenous activist who spent nearly half a century in prison for murders he says he did not commit before outgoing President Joe Biden commuted his sentence last year, vowed Monday that Native Americans would resist the Trump administration's attacks on Indian rights and tribal sovereignty.

“We’re not free yet. We are in danger,” Peltier, 82, told Democracy Now! in an interview released Monday to mark Indigenous Peoples’ Day. “Trump and these organizations, they’re talking about doing away with our reservations and our treaties and everything else.”

Peltier—whose freedom struggle is the subject of a new documentary, Free Leonard Peltier, directed by David France and Jesse Short Bull—said: "Some people became greedy and selfish and murderous, and they tried to exterminate us because they wanted it all for themselves. Well, 500 years later, we’re still here, and I’m still talking, and I’m going to talk 'til I die."

"We just want to be left alone," Peltier said of Indigenous peoples. "Let us live our own lives. Let us have our own society we’ve had for thousands of years. What the hell? I mean, we don’t want to be part of a government that’s killing women, children, babies, and bombing every damn thing that they can, and talking about annihilating a race of people."

Peltier's remarks came as Indigenous communities across the United States face numerous federal policies and actions affecting their lands, cultures, civil rights, and access to critical services.

In Arizona, the Trump administration is moving ahead with a border wall opposed by the Tohono O’odham Nation, whose ancestral homeland straddles the US-Mexico border. A recent Arizona Luminaria investigation revealed that federal authorities used drones, surveillance equipment, and masked agents to monitor Tohono O’odham members and a prayer camp as the Trump administration moved forward with border wall construction through their ancestral lands.

The Arizona border wall and a similar barrier project in Texas' Big Bend region are among the numerous conflicts over Native lands and treaty rights under attack by the government. According to the National Indian Law Library’s 2026 roundup of Indigenous land disputes, tribes are fighting to protect sacred sites, recover ancestral territory, and oppose mining and development projects.

The Trump administration has also moved to shrink the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, drawing tribal leaders' condemnation of the loss of protections for culturally significant landscapes.

Education is also under attack, as Trump seeks to dramatically slash federal funding for tribal colleges and universities.

Meanwhile, the administration’s proposed changes to the 2030 census could make Native Americans less visible in federal data by removing questions about race and ethnicity from the decennial questionnaire, raising concerns about the consequences for federal funding, voting rights, and civil rights enforcement.

Peltier—who supporters long said was framed for the murder of two federal agents during a 1975 shootout at the Oglala Sioux Reservation in South Dakota—sounded a note of defiant perseverance during his Democracy Now! interview.

“We’re going to stay here,” he said of Indigenous peoples. “You’re not going to get rid of us.”