10/13/2025
Meet the Indigenous Peoples’ Week guest speakers! 🙌
Leonard Peltier — A member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Leonard is a boarding school survivor, an activist for Indigenous rights and a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM). His supporters consider him the longest-serving Indigenous political prisoner in the United States. For nearly 50 years, he was imprisoned for the June 26, 1975, death of two FBI agents who died during the June 26 shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Despite a lack of direct evidence, he was imprisoned until he was granted compassionate clemency in January 2025 by President Biden to serve the remainder of his life sentence at his home on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. Leonard maintains his innocence. His story has been the subject of multiple books and films.
Darelle “Dino” Bulter — An enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. He has spent his life dedicated to supporting Indigenous rights and ceremonies. During the 1970s, Dino became involved with the American Indian Movement (AIM), where he met Leonard Peltier. After the June 26, 1975, shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, Butler was arrested and later acquitted on grounds of self-defense along with Bob Robideau in a separate trial from Leonard’s. Dino spent much of his life advocating for Leonard’s release from prison. He also advocated for other Indigenous rights issues and ceremonial access for Indigenous people, both nationally and internationally.
Deborah Miranda — An enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation in California, with Santa Ynez Chumash ancestry. Deborah is a Thomas H. Broadus Professor of English (emerita) at Washington and Lee University. Her hybrid project, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Literary Prize. She is also the author of four poetry collections (Indian Cartography, The Zen of La Llorona, Raised by Humans, and Altar for Broken Things) and co-editor of the Lambda finalist Sovereign Erotics: An Anthology of Two-Spirit Literature.
