Biography
Robert Hugh Wilson ("Standing Deer") was an enrolled Oneida from the Oneida Nations of Wisconsin and an active activist in the campaign to free Leonard Peltier.
In March of 1978, Wilson was being treated for severe chronic back pain in a prison hospital when he received a visit from a doctor named J. R. Plank, who asked him to inform on another inmate, Leonard Peltier. When Wilson refused, his medical attention ceased and he was transferred to solitary confinement. He lived in isolation and severe pain for six weeks. Under oath, Wilson states that he was visited by a person who demanded Wilson's help in neutralizing Peltier in exchange for parole by encouraging Peltier to attempt an escape, upon doing he would be shot.
Wilson ultimately did not comply. After meeting Peltier in 1978 at USP Marion, where Leonard made quite an impression on him, leading him to do whatever he could to help Leonard. Standing Deer wrote letters when asked to by the LPDC, and published articles and letters to the editor as well. Since his release from prison on September 4, 2001, he had been living in Houston where he continued to work for Leonard's freedom. At Leonard's request to serve on the LPDC Board of Directors, Standing Deer responded that he would "consider it an honor to serve if that will help him in his struggle to regain his freedom."
Standing Deer, born Robert Hugh Wilson (Choctaw-Oneida), became politically prominent during his imprisonment at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. After a 15-year federal sentence in 1976 for bank robbery, he met Leonard Peltier in 1978 and later swore an affidavit that authorities had recruited him to "neutralize" Peltier in exchange for medical care — a plot he refused, becoming a lifelong advocate for Peltier and Indigenous prisoners' rights. Paroled in 2001, he was stabbed to death in his Houston apartment in January 2003.
