Pine Ridge
Banks began his post-prison life working in education at the Lone Man School on Pine Ridge Reservation as a drug and alcohol counselor and a running coach. Drawing on his background as a recruiter for Honeywell (a Japanese business group), the school board added development of a business plan to boost employment on the reservation to his duties. Honeywell supported Banks’s efforts by moving its computer circuit production to Pine Ridge and providing a training program. By agreement, ownership of the production business was transferred to the Loneman School after one year, the result being Loneman Enterprises.
Kamook started a business in which local women made quilts, shawls, and skirts. Kamook and Dennis Banks were not to be together much longer, however. By 1989, Banks had established a relationship with Alice Lambert, a photographer whom he met when she was covering a story involving him. He moved in with her at Newport, Kentucky, and they had a child on October 10, 1992—a son named Minoh (Good). In February 2004, Kamook testified that she had been a government informant since 1988 and asserted that she considered AIM leaders, including her former husband, to be implicated in or at least knowledgeable about the murder of Anna Mae Aquash.
Tim Giago
Resistance takes many forms, one of which is the printed word. No Indian journalist has contributed more to fostering understanding by and about Indians than Tim Giago (born 1 934). A Lakota born on Pine Ridge Reservation, his Indian name, Nanwika Kciiji, which means "He Who Stands Up for You," is appropriate given the focus of his long career in journalism.
Giago has published several newspapers focusing on Indian news and issues, starting with the Lakota Times (later renamed Indian Country Today) in 1978 at Pine Ridge. A second paper, the Pueblo Times, was less successful, lasting only a year. After selling his first paper, Giago began the Lakota Journal in Rapid City, South Dakota; after selling it in 2005, he started Indian Education Today. He returned from a short-lived retirement in 2009 with Native Sun News in Rapid City.
Giago has attacked tribal mismanagement, use of derogatory Indian names such as squaw, false Indian medicine men, racist Indian mascots, fraudulent Indian charities, and other societal ills. He has been willing to take unpopular positions—for example, at times opposing the American Indian Movement or running an FBI ad against freeing Leonard Peltier.
Giago is a publishing traditionalist, an approach that seems more pragmatic than ideological. In a press release regarding the Native Sun News, he stated that his paper would have no web site because most Indian readers lacked access to the Internet or even a computer.
The Native American Journalists Association was Giago's creation in 1984. In addition, awards have come regularly, including the H. L. Mencken Award from the Baltimore Sun, a Gold Quill Award for Outstanding Editorial Writing, an award for promoting minority journalism and bringing more minorities into journalism from the National Education Association, and induction into the South Dakota Hall of Fame.
Sacred Runs and Other Activities
Banks became less confrontational regarding the U. S. government after his release from prison, but he remained committed to AIM and actively engaged in planning events that increasingly took a more cultural and spiritual direction rather than having a strong political bent. For example, Banks became involved in opposing desecration of Indian graves that had been occurring in Kentucky. He was asked to head up reburial ceremonies and was instrumental in both Kentucky and Indiana passing legislation to discourage further desecration of graves.
The longtime advocate for justice for Indians also continued to work to free Leonard Peltier, who was sentenced in April 1977 to two consecutive life terms for the deaths of FBI agents Williams and Coler. The conviction remains
Highly controversial, with many viewing Peltier as wrongfully convicted and a political prisoner.
The arts also attracted Banks. He appeared in the films War Party, The Last of the Mohicans, and Thunderheart, and he recorded both his own original songs and traditional American Indian music.
Banks had organized the first “Longest Walk” in 1978 and returned to the concept of sacred walks and sacred runs as a means to foster international peace and understanding and to recognize the sanctity of Mother Earth. Recent events of this type include the 2006 Sacred Run from San Francisco to Washington, D. C., and a “Longest Walk” from Alcatraz Island to Washington, D. C., in 2008. Banks was instrumental in creating a twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the takeover of Wounded Knee that included four sacred runs from four directions, culminating at Wounded Knee. Participants included many who had been there in 1973, among them Russell Means and Leonard Crow Dog.
Back to Minnesota
The Wounded Knee celebration, Banks wrote, “completed one cycle of [his] life.”13 In 1999, he moved back to Minnesota with his son Minoh, his relationship with Alice having ended. Banks certainly did not retire, as he was involved in a number of activities, such as the sacred runs and walks mentioned earlier. He also served on the board of trustees of Leech Lake Tribal College, continued to counsel against drug and alcohol use, and traveled widely on speaking engagements.
Banks also returned to his roots in basic ways that he could share with Minoh. They hunted, trapped, and fished. They made canoes, drums, and other wooden items. They also harvested wild rice, tapped maple trees, and started a rice and maple syrup business.
On December 7, 2009, Banks was in an automobile accident, in which he suffered a compression fracture of the spine. He recovered, and has continued to be active in the American Indian Movement as National Field Director. He was scheduled to speak at the spring 2010 meeting of AIM but was forced to curtail his involvement in the meeting because of a commitment to attend a Hollywood showing of a recently completed documentary about his life, A Good Day to Die.
With additional plans under way, including a 2011 walk from California to Washington, D. C., Dennis Banks, one of the most significant figures in the Indian resistance movement of the twentieth century, was not yet ready to stop trying to make a difference in the twenty-first century.
World History
