The Beginning
The initial meeting of what would become the American Indian Movement (AIM) occurred on July 28, 1968, in a church basement in Minneapolis. A primary concern leading to the meeting was police brutality, but a wide range of other issues would soon become part of the new organization’s agenda, including better housing, employment opportunities, and education for Indians.
The turnout was large for that first meeting, about 200 people, and participants quickly got down to business. Clyde Bellecourt was made chairman and Banks field director. George Mitchell suggested naming the organization Concerned Indian Americans. That name prevailed for a time, but the initials CIA—evoking thoughts of a far different entity, the Central Intelligence Agency—would eventually lead to adoption of the group’s current name.
The ongoing practice of rounding up Indians by the police, which Banks had experienced many times firsthand, led to AIM members, wearing red berets so that they could readily be identified, patrolling the streets where Indians tended to gather. Not only did they monitor the proceedings, but they also filmed police activity. Other early AIM activities included providing legal assistance, fostering better communications between Indians and the broader community, and establishing an alternative school for Indian children named the Red School House.
Federal Termination Policy
The federal termination and assimilation policy was designed to end special relationships between the federal government and Indian nations and encourage Indians to become assimilated into the larger American society. It involved dividing up communally held reservation land and pressuring Indians to move into cities and towns. However, many who attempted to relocate found themselves facing language barriers, having great difficulty finding jobs, and confronting considerable racism. The result was that often rural poverty was merely replaced by urban poverty.
Termination placed tribes understate jurisdiction, opened up previous reservation land to the highest bidder (including companies interested in mining and water rights), and ended tribal courts and police forces. The policy was a great blow to Indian sovereignty.
The movement toward termination grew rapidly after World War II as, influenced by Senator Joseph McCarthy's hunt for communists, Indian communal life on reservations was perceived by many as being too close to communism to be tolerated. In 1950, Dillon Myer, who had administered the relocation of Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II, became Commissioner of Indian Affairs. His approach to relocation was to give Indians a one-way bus ticket to a city with little subsequent support.
Termination became official U. S. policy with passage of House Concurrent Resolution 108 in 1953. Shortly afterward, President Dwight Eisenhower signed Public Law 280, abolishing tribal courts and police on reservations in California, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, and Wisconsin. By 1962, the government had succeeded in forcing termination on 61 tribes. The Menomin-ees in Wisconsin finally were able to reverse termination in 1973.
Under President John Kennedy, the U. S. government largely abandoned the termination policy. Only when President Richard Nixon called for a definitive end to the termination program in 1970 would the policy be officially abolished, however.
Also established was an AIM radio station, KUXL. As a recruiter for the Honeywell Corporation, Banks helped other Indians to find jobs.
As Banks became increasingly involved in activist efforts to help other Indians, he nonetheless continued the heavy drinking that had marred his life since his Air Force days. That would change on New Year’s morning, 1970. As Banks describes the moment in Ojibwa Warrior, drink, depression, and a sense of failure overwhelmed him during the final evening of 1969, and he thought that he might be dying.3 He prayed fervently and resolved to quit drinking if he were spared. Finally, he fell asleep. The next morning he awoke, began fixing breakfast, and opened a can of beer. As he lifted the can to his mouth, he remembered his vow made the night before and emptied the beer down the
Sink. According to his account, he would not again have another drink. He also saw himself in a mirror—dressed in a white man’s gray suit, white shirt, and tie—and resolved to begin dressing in a more traditional Indian way. He would let his hair grow long, and soon a headband became almost a constant part of his wardrobe.
The Spiritual Center
Although Banks quickly recognized the important work that AIM was doing, he also sensed that something was absent—“something,” he wrote in his memoir, “that should be at the center of what we were doing.”4 That something was spirituality.
Learning of a spiritual reawakening that had been occurring on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, especially through the efforts of the Crow Dog family, Banks drove there in 1969. He found his way to the Crow Dog home, where he was welcomed by a large sign reading “Crow Dog’s Paradise.” Banks met Henry Crow Dog, who invited him in but grilled him with a series of questions regarding religious experiences, among them the Sun Dance and sweat lodge purification. Banks understood how little he actually knew about Indian spirituality, but he was anxious to learn. With Crow Dog instructing him, he participated in two sweat lodge purifications.
On Banks’s second trip to Rosebud the following year, this time accompanied by Clyde Bellecourt, he met Henry Crow Dog’s son, Leonard. The younger man was playing a pivotal role in reestablishing the Sun Dance, which had been strongly discouraged since the late nineteenth century and was formally outlawed by the U. S. government in 1904. The Sun Dance had been legalized in 1934, but not until 1979, after the signing by President Jimmy Carter of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, did the traditional dance with piercing become legal.
Banks and Bellecourt attended a Yuwipi ceremony conducted by Leonard Crow Dog, a ceremony intended to find out answers to certain important questions that one or more people had raised. Crow Dog, as the principal participant, had his hands tied and was wrapped in a star blanket; star blankets and quilts were a Lakota tradition hearkening back to early-morning awakenings to see the morning star, a symbol of not only a new day but also a new beginning. The ceremony involved prayers, songs, drumming, and ritualistic sharing of dog soup. It also included Crow Dog’s answers to the questions raised by the Yuwipi sponsor. Leonard Crow Dog would soon become the spiritual leader of AIM and play major roles in various AIM events, including the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.
Banks also resolved to participate in a Sun Dance, which he did in 1971. Another prominent medicine man, John Fire Lame Deer, organized and led the Sun Dance for Banks; Bellecourt; Russell Means, also a major AIM leader; and Lee Brightman, a friend of Banks. The participants danced for three days, staring into the sun. On the fourth day, they were pierced as an act of sacrifice.
Lame Deer slit Banks’s chest and inserted a wooden skewer that was attached to the skin, with the other end connected to a rawhide thong tied to the sacred cottonwood tree. Finally, the skewer tore free from his chest as he danced.
A New Political Force
The union of traditional Indian spirituality and culture with political action designed to advance civil rights has been a hallmark of Indian activism since the 1960s, and that combination was equally prominent in Dennis Banks’s efforts within the American Indian Movement. One of the first actions by Banks to attract national attention, however, was not initially an AIM event. After a brief occupation of Alcatraz Island, site of the federal prison that had been closed in 1963, by a group headed by Mohawk Richard Oakes on November 9, 1969, a larger party of about 80 calling themselves Indians of All Tribes arrived on November 20. Their purpose was to reclaim the island under the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868, which provided for the return of abandoned federal land to the native peoples who previously owned it. The rationale was sweetly ironic— using a treaty, the weapon for dispossessing Indians of so much over the years, against those who had initially fashioned the weapon.
Banks, Bellecourt, Mitchell, and other AIM members heard of the occupation and headed to San Francisco to join those already on the island. They arrived near the end of November. Banks stayed only a couple of days, long enough to establish AIM support for the effort. The takeover convinced AIM leaders of the tactical usefulness of the 1868 treaty, which had created the Great Sioux Reservation in western South Dakota, while also setting aside hunting grounds in Montana and Wyoming so long as sufficient buffalo remained for hunting purposes, a condition that would not long prevail. The occupation of Alcatraz continued until June 11, 1971, when the remaining 15 occupiers were forcibly removed. Oakes, who was part of the original occupying force, had left in January 1970 after his 13-year-old stepdaughter, Yvonne, died in a fall on the island.
In 1970, again using the Treaty of Fort Laramie as justification, Banks and other AIM members occupied an abandoned naval station in Minnesota near the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. When police and federal marshals arrived, they made their stand on the third floor of one of the buildings. In the ensuing battle, Banks was knocked unconscious.
The same year, a takeover of Mount Rushmore occurred. This effort was the brainchild of three Lakota women from Rapid City, South Dakota. The mountain, which is located within the sacred Black Hills, features the huge visages of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt. The point of the protestors was that four leaders of the nation that took the Black Hills from Indians and diverted portions of the area to such purposes as a World War II gunnery range and mining should not be represented there. Banks, Russell Means, and other members of AIM joined in the Lakota women’s effort, taking their place atop the mountain as well.
AIM achieved national news coverage at giving later that year with demonstrations at Plymouth Rock and aboard Mayflower II, a replica of the original Pilgrims’ ship. The protest was led by Banks, Means, John Trudell, and Floyd Westerman in response to an invitation from the Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Passamaquoddy tribes; these tribes had proclaimed an Indian national day of mourning in conjunction with the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing.
AIM members took over Mayflower II, lowered the British flag, and hoisted the American flag upside down. The reversed flag became an AIM symbol, appropriate from AIM’s point of view because an upside-down flag is an international symbol of distress. The protestors also dumped overboard dummies representing the Pilgrims. After two hours aboard the ship, they left peacefully when police arrived. Means and a few others then shoveled sand over Plymouth Rock, hiding the historic rock. Banks and other demonstrators also interrupted a costumed recreation of a Pilgrim feast at Plymouth Plantation.
Throughout 1970, AIM staged a variety of demonstrations against Bureau of Indian Affairs offices. BIA offices in Chicago, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and Littleton, Colorado, were occupied, as was a BIA warehouse in Gallup, New Mexico. Other demonstrations occurred at Fort Lawton in Washington State and on Ellis Island. The focus was on BIA abuses and the agency’s alleged failure to adequately represent Indian rights and concerns.
The Littleton sit-in led to police arresting 12 demonstrators, who became known as the Littleton Twelve. Banks and AIM members actively supported the Littleton Twelve by occupying a BIA office in Minneapolis. There, another 12 protestors, including Banks, were arrested. Ultimately, the BIA decided to drop the trespassing charges against Banks and his associates.
Protesting policies, as important as such actions were, paled in comparison to the extreme violence that awaited American Indians at virtually every corner. One of those corners was Gordon, Nebraska, where on February 14, 1972, Raymond Yellow Thunder, a Lakota, was fatally beaten. The brothers Leslie and Melvin Hare, according to Banks, beat Yellow Thunder, dragged him into an American Legion dance, stripped him from the waist down, and forced him to dance. Then the Hare brothers and others beat him some more and stuffed him into the trunk of their car. According to differing reports, Yellow Thunder was found either in the trunk or in his own pickup after he was eventually released from the trunk and made his way back to the used-car lot where he lived. In either case, his dead body was not found until February 20.
The Hare brothers were arrested but charged with only second-degree manslaughter and released without bail. The case likely would have ended there if not for the decision of Yellow Thunder’s family to ask AIM for help. Banks and other AIM members started for Gordon from South Dakota. Leonard Crow Dog prepared the AIM members by praying and sprinkling them with sacred gopher dust, Crazy Horse’s standard preparation before battle. Hoping to avoid a violent confrontation, AIM informed governmental and law enforcement officials of the activists’ pending arrival.
AIM took over the town hall and the mayor’s office without resistance and conducted their own grand jury to hear testimony. Negotiations with Gordon officials followed, leading to an agreement that a Gordon Human Relations Council would be created to encourage cooperation and resolve problems between Indian and non-Indian members of the community.
The trial of the Hare brothers took place in Alliance, Nebraska, and resulted in convictions for both men. Leslie was sentenced to six years in prison for manslaughter, Melvin to two years. The punishments were inadequate but considerably more than the defendants likely would have received without AIM intervention. The outcome was especially significant for a people accustomed to seeing Indians beaten and even killed without any justice done. It gave them hope that they might stand up against oppression and seek justice with some hope of getting it. As Severt Young Bear said:
People here still talk about Yellow Thunder and what happened in Gordon. When AIM came in and helped the family look into the death, that made the older people that are living out on the reservation out in the country—they kind of lifted up their heads, and were speaking out then. And they been talking against BIA, tribal government, law and order system on the reservation, plus some of the non-Indian ranchers that are living on the reservation and been abusing Indians.5
Banks mentions in Ojibwa Warrior that this early period of great political activity by the American Indian Movement was also very important personally to him, because he met a Lakota woman from Pine Ridge named Darlene Nichols, more commonly known as Kamook. Despite their age difference, 32 and 17, respectively, when they met, the two married and ultimately had four daughters and a son.
Trail of Broken Treaties
The primary AIM event of 1972 was the Trail of Broken Treaties. Its name was based on the Trail of Tears, the long forced journey of Cherokees from Georgia to Oklahoma between 1836 and 1840, as well as the long series of treaties that the U. S. government had violated over the years. Banks was one of the principal organizers of the event, which began with three caravans of Indians starting from Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles and making their way toward Washington, D. C., while picking up additional participants along the way. Banks’s caravan left San Francisco on October 6. The three groups met up in St. Paul, Minnesota, and arrived at Washington in the early morning of November 3; by that time, the caravan was some four miles long. Some of the participants continued on to the White House, circling it around 6:00 A. M. to alert President Richard Nixon to their presence.
Desperately in need of sleep, the participants were taken to a church and directed to its basement. Unfortunately, the basement was dark, dirty, and
Infested with rats. Angrily, they left the church and headed toward the Bureau of Indian Affairs building where they expected help. At the BIA building, Banks and the other leaders discovered from Bob Burnette, Anita Collins, and George Mitchell, who had gone ahead to set up meetings with government officials, that all of the meetings had been cancelled. Even a planned ceremony at the Arlington Cemetery graves of Pima Ira Hayes, who had helped to raise the flag on Mount Surabachi during the battle for Iwo Jima in World War II, and Winnebago John Rice, who was killed in action in 1950 during the Korean War after serving over three years in the Pacific during World War II, was first approved and then rejected by federal officials.
At first, no one—not even officials from the BIA—would talk with Banks and the other AIM members. Late in the morning, however, one official did come down to talk. Told that there was to be a meeting in the auditorium, he informed them that they were not to be inside the building. Not until the middle of the afternoon, when Commissioner of Indian Affairs Louis Bruce, of Lakota and Mohawk ancestry, arrived did anyone remotely supportive meet the new arrivals.
Bruce, whom Banks characterizes as “a fine and decent man,”6 read a memo from Assistant Secretary of the Interior Harrison Loesch instructing Bruce to offer no assistance. Loesch and Bruce exchanged several telephone calls, with Loesch ordering Bruce to expel from the building all of the AIM members and everyone else from their group. Ultimately, Bruce refused and was fired.
Guards attempted to force the Indians out of the building later that day but were repulsed, although those occupying the building constantly expected other attempts to use force to evict them. The days dragged on with no resolution of the dispute in sight. Two White House aides, Leonard Garment and Brad Patterson, met with some AIM members but reached no agreement.
AIM had developed 20 demands that leaders wanted to discuss with the White House. These points included establishment of a treaty commission to negotiate with Indian nations, restoration of significant amounts of land, abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, creation of a new unit within the Executive Office of the President to replace the BIA, protection of Indians’ religious and cultural integrity, and advances in health, housing, education, and employment.
By November 6, the situation looked dire. There was no agreement, and U. S. District Court Judge John Pratt declared the Indians in contempt and ordered their arrest. He further gave the Indians a 6:00 p. m. deadline to leave the building. Also on November 6, Interior Secretary Rogers C. B. Morton, attempting to depict the occupiers of the BIA building as unrepresentative of most Indians, declared:
For the honor and dignity of the 480,000 reservation Indians, all Americans should understand that the protesters are a small splinter group of militants. They do not represent the reservation Indians of America.7
Morton added that William Youpee, executive director of the National Tribal Chairmen’s Association, had informed Morton that the protestors who had taken over the building had little support from other Indians.
In fact, a great many tribal leaders did denounce the takeover. Their reaction did not represent limited rank-and-file support for the effort, however, but rather reflected the fact that many tribal leaders had risen to their positions by forming strong alliances with U. S. government officials, often at the expense of the people whom they were expected to serve.
Almost at the last minute, the 6:00 p. m. deadline was extended for 48 hours, and the administration agreed to negotiations through Fred Carlucci, director of the Office of Management and Budget; Leonard Garment, the presidential advisor on minorities; and Secretary Morton. The motivation for both the extension and the negotiations may have been to avoid a potentially violent confrontation the evening before the presidential election.
An agreement was reached on November 10 providing for consideration of the 20 demands by a White House task force with a response within 30 days, a comprehensive review of Indian policy by the task force, and $66,000, a figure requested by AIM to defray the expenses of the Indians’ return to their homes. The 20 demands ultimately were rejected, perhaps especially because they ultimately involved issues of Indian sovereignty. Nevertheless, Banks considered the Trail of Broken Treaties a great success, as it brought together members of about 200 tribes acting jointly for a just cause.
World History
