On July 3, fireworks will burst over Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe (the Six Grandfathers), the sacred Lakota mountain the settlers renamed Mount Rushmore. The four presidents blasted into the rock will glow above the Black Hills — land the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty set aside for the Lakota Nation.
The U.S. seized Pahá Sápa (the Black Hills) in 1877, after gold was found there. In 1980 the Supreme Court ruled the taking illegal. The Lakota refused the money the court offered and demanded the land back. They are still waiting.
The monument was another conquest. It was designed and directed by Gutzon Borglum, the white supremacist sculptor who began the Stone Mountain Confederate memorial in Georgia, attended Klan rallies, served on Klan committees and drew Klan money into that project. His crews used dynamite and drills to turn the Six Grandfathers into a shrine to U.S. presidents.
Roughly 500 miles northeast, on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, Leonard Peltier will be in the house where the federal government keeps him under guard.
Peltier, 81, is the longest-held Native political prisoner in the United States. He spent nearly 50 years in federal prison for the deaths of two FBI agents in a 1975 firefight at Pine Ridge — a case the government fabricated with coerced testimony, suppressed evidence and a claim it later admitted it could not prove.
President Joe Biden commuted his sentence on Jan. 19, 2025, his last full day in office. Peltier walked out of the penitentiary in Coleman, Florida, on Feb. 18, 2025, and was flown home. He did not walk free. He serves the rest of his life sentence under home confinement.
He calls the officer who supervises him his “handler.” He needs a written pass to travel 100 miles off the reservation, whether for medical care or a ceremony. Diabetes and cataracts have taken most of his eyesight. Visitors keep him fed with salmon, elk, moose and buffalo. “I was taken out of one prison cell and put into another,” he told Democracy Now in an interview aired Sept. 19, 2025.
A $103 million party for Trump’s friends
July 4, 2026, marks 250 years since the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. The Trump administration has turned the anniversary into a political brand and a cash register.
Trump put himself at the head of Task Force 250 by executive order on Jan. 29, 2025. Alongside the congressionally chartered America250 commission, the White House promoted Freedom 250, a Trump-aligned fundraising arm. Watchdogs say government money and private sponsorships have been pushed into Trump-aligned hands.
Since October 2025, roughly $103 million in federal contracts and grants has flowed to outfits run by Trump officials and allies, according to a report released in June 2026 by Public Citizen and the Revolving Door Project. The corporate sponsors are a roll call of the arms industry, Big Oil, tech, transport and agribusiness: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Palantir, ExxonMobil, Oracle, United Airlines, John Deere. Most have business pending before the same government staging the celebration. Palantir builds the data systems Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) uses to track and target immigrants.
Access is for sale. A half-million dollars buys VIP seating. One million buys a private reception and a photograph with the president. Two and a half million buys a speaking slot on July 4.
Since November 2025 the Interior Department has drained roughly $98 million from national park entry fees to refit the Reflecting Pool and the monuments around the National Mall. From December 2025 to April 2026 it moved another $68 million into the National Park Foundation, the nonprofit that houses Freedom 250.
The festivities opened with a tank parade through Washington on June 14, 2025 — Trump’s birthday. Since then came a cage fight on the White House lawn. In August comes a car race on the National Mall. The fireworks over the stolen Black Hills are the centerpiece.
They are also trying to stamp Trump himself onto the anniversary. In February 2025, Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina introduced the “Donald J. Trump $250 Bill Act,” directing the Treasury to print a $250 bill bearing Trump’s face and to scrap the 1866 law that keeps living people off U.S. currency. The measure stalled in committee, but Treasury moved anyway. In March 2026 it announced that Trump’s signature will appear on newly issued paper money — the first time a sitting president’s name has gone on U.S. currency. When the career official running the engraving bureau refused to authorize the $250 work as illegal, she was reassigned. A 24-year Army veteran, the first woman to hold the job, she signed off with a note that reportedly read, “The buck stopped here.”
This party belongs to the ruling class — the state, the war firms, the oil companies and the banks, saluting themselves on land they stole.
Selling seats and sponsorships is only part of it. The deeper aim is to make the ruling class’s version of history look sacred.
‘A false government’
Peltier has refused to bless the celebration with his silence. Speaking on Native News Online’s “Native Bidaské,” published March 2, 2026, he said Native people have nothing to celebrate.
He pointed to the Declaration itself. Its final grievance against the king complained that Britain had brought “the merciless Indian Savages” against the colonists. In the same breath, it denounced “domestic insurrections” — the revolt of enslaved people who sought freedom by fleeing to British lines and taking up arms.
That was the founders’ fear. Native nations stood in the way of land seizure. Enslaved Africans threatened the slave system. Britain had also blocked settlement west of the Appalachians, where its own royal proclamation had recognized Indigenous land claims.
The men behind the Declaration were slaveholders, merchants, landlords and land speculators. Their independence meant the freedom to keep enslaved people in chains and take Native land.
The Revolution was also a war for continental expansion. In 1779, Washington ordered the Sullivan campaign, which burned Haudenosaunee towns, cornfields, orchards and food stores. The new U.S. government was built for that work. Its army, treaties, courts and executive power were shaped in the wars to seize Indigenous land and open it to settlement, speculation and profit.
The same class that took the land and defended slavery still holds power. The U.S. is ruled by the billionaires, bankers, landlords, oil companies and war profiteers.
Peltier said Native people should use America 250 to tell the truth. “We’re no longer going to celebrate a false government until the truth comes out and they apologize to everybody for what they did,” he said. “Maybe we can start all over and build a real government of freedom and equal justice for everybody.”
The underside of ‘freedom’
Peltier knows what the U.S. government does to people. He joined the American Indian Movement in 1972, when AIM was fighting police violence and the theft of what little land remained. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program targeted Native resistance as a movement to be broken.
On Pine Ridge, in the same corner of South Dakota where the fireworks will burn, the FBI, federal authorities and tribal chair Dick Wilson’s GOON squad waged what survivors call the Reign of Terror against AIM members, traditionalists and their supporters. More than 60 were killed between 1973 and 1976.
When two FBI agents died in the 1975 firefight, the bureau needed a conviction. It extradited Peltier from Canada on affidavits from a Lakota woman named Myrtle Poor Bear, who swore that she was his girlfriend and had watched him shoot the agents. In truth, she had never met him and was not on the reservation that day. She later said FBI agents threatened her and her children until she signed. At trial, the judge refused to let the jury hear her take it back. In 1978, a federal appeals court called the government’s use of her affidavits “a clear abuse of the investigative process,” then let the conviction stand.
The government told the jury that Peltier executed the two agents at point-blank range. Its proof was a single shell casing the government tied to a rifle it claimed was in Peltier’s hands. After the trial, a Freedom of Information Act request turned up an FBI lab report, withheld from the defense, that contradicted the government’s claim. A federal appeals court agreed the report had been concealed and refused him a new trial anyway, ruling it would not have changed the verdict. The government that had convicted Peltier of pulling the trigger then admitted it could not say who did. At a 1985 hearing, its own lawyer told the court, “we can’t prove who shot those agents.”
Peltier served half a century because the government needed to break AIM and warn every Native fighter who came after it.
The fight that has not stopped
The same state that hunted AIM now sends ICE, FBI and federal agents against immigrants, Native people, Black communities, anti-war organizers and everyone else who stands in the way. Tribal governments have warned their members about ICE stops. Some have told ICE to stay off Native land.
At Fort Snelling in Minnesota, the U.S. Army held some 1,600 Dakota people — most of them women, children and elders — in a concentration camp over the winter of 1862-63. Many died. Survivors were deported west to reservations. The Minnesota Historical Society calls the stockade a concentration camp and the policy genocide. ICE now runs its operation from that same ground. In January 2026 its agents seized Native people there; one, a U.S. citizen and Red Lake Nation descendant, was held for hours until his mother brought his birth certificate. The old machinery of removal has a new badge.
Peltier tied today’s immigration raids to a 500-year campaign to drive Native people off their own land. He has watched ICE agents stop Native people on Native ground and demand papers. He praised the young people who refuse: “Who are you people to come into our country and tell us that we got to show ID?” He warned that the government in Washington is reaching for “full dictatorship.”
His message to the next generation was plain. Hold onto language, ceremonies and history. Then study the enemy. “We need to learn that so we know our enemy, and we know how to fight our enemy.”
The rulers will spend the summer celebrating 250 years of a system built on stolen land and slave labor. Leonard Peltier, locked inside his own home, keeps telling the truth about it. “The struggle still goes on for me,” he said. “I’m not going to give up.”
The award-winning documentary “Free Leonard Peltier,” directed by Jesse Short Bull and David France, is scheduled to begin streaming on Netflix on Oct. 12, 2026. The film traces Peltier’s life from boarding school and legal harassment to AIM, Pine Ridge, the FBI siege, the frame-up and the long campaign to free him.
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