Daily Inspiration Quote by Leonard Peltier

Peltier’s line lands like a blunt instrument because it refuses the polite euphemisms that usually cushion discussions of U.S. violence against Native people. He doesn’t say the law was biased; he says it effectively didn’t exist. The phrasing "still not illegal" is doing heavy work: it frames genocide and frontier vigilantism not as aberrations, but as an operating system that lingered well into living memory. "In them days" sounds colloquial, almost offhand, which sharpens the horror; the casual tone mimics how normalized that impunity was.

The bitter twist sits in the probation joke. Probation is supposed to be leniency, a soft landing. Peltier flips it into evidence of how little Native life counted: the "unfortunate" outcome for a killer isn’t prison, but the mild inconvenience of supervision. Then he goes even colder: "most of them were released immediately". The sentence structure is intentionally flattened, like a police report, echoing the bureaucratic way institutions launder brutality into procedure.

Context matters because Peltier speaks as an activist whose own life is entangled with the carceral state; his long imprisonment has made him a symbol for people who argue the law treats Indigenous defendants and Indigenous victims with fundamentally different seriousness. Subtext: the system isn’t merely prejudiced; it’s calibrated to protect settlers, officers, and local power, while Native communities absorb the costs. The quote’s intent is accusation, but also memory work: dragging a sanitized national story back into the realm of receipts.