Washington DC - President Joe Biden has said he is "looking at" releasing Indigenous freedom fighter Leonard Peltier as calls mount for him to use his executive clemency power before leaving office.

"Do us a favor and free Leonard Peltier," says President Frank Star Comes Out of the Oglala Sioux Tribe in a video shared on social media by the Indigenous-led activist organization NDN Collective.

"I'm looking at it," Biden responds.

The exchange reportedly took place Monday after Biden's keynote speech at the White House Tribal Nations Summit.

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Peltier, the US' longest-held Indigenous political prisoner, has spent over 48 years behind bars on charges of killing two FBI special agents in a 1975 shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation. His conviction is widely considered to be illegitimate.

Indigenous advocates and allies have urged Biden to grant immediate clemency to Peltier, a step he may take without congressional approval. The calls have amplified after US authorities in July denied Peltier's latest request for parole.

The 80-year-old member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa – an icon of the American Indian Movement – has spent his life fighting for the liberation of Indigenous Peoples from US settler-colonial oppression.

"Though they have entombed me in concrete and steel, I am a free man. They rounded up our people and put us in concentration camps they call reservations. We remain a free people," Peltier shared in a statement on the National Day of Mourning last month.

During Monday's White House summit, Biden announced a new Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument in Pennsylvania.

The boarding school system, of which Peltier is a survivor, was a tool of genocide intended to "kill the Indian, and save the man," in the words of the Carlisle school's founder, US Army officer Richard H. Pratt.

The system saw Indigenous children stolen from their families and placed in institutions which sought to eradicate their traditional languages, customs, and relations to the land. Many of the children were subjected to horrific physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and thousands are believed to have died.

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Biden in October issued a formal apology for the federally-backed boarding school system, calling it a "sin on our soul" and a "blot on American history."

The genocide of Indigenous Peoples, as well as the trafficking and enslavement of African prisoners of war and their descendants, form the foundation of US history.

Many of its processes – including land theft, economic exploitation, environmental pollution, police and vigilante violence, mass incarceration, forced sterilization, the denial of self-determination, and other state-sanctioned human rights violations – are ongoing.