Banks, who led protest at Wounded Knee, dies
Demonstrated across U.S. for Native American rights
Dennis Banks, who helped found the American Indian Movement and engaged in sometimes-violent uprisings against the U.S. government, including the armed occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, died at age 80, his family announced Monday.
Banks, whose Ojibwe name was Nowacumig, was one of several activists who founded AIM in Minneapolis in 1968, and he was a leader of the group’s takeover of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1973, in a protest against both the U.S. and tribal governments.
The village had been the site of a massacre by U.S. soldiers in 1890 that left an estimated 300 Indians dead. The occupiers held federal agents at bay for 71 days; two Native Americans died and several agents were injured amid the frequent gunfire.
Banks died Sunday night at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, surrounded by about 30 people, including siblings, children and grandchildren, said daughter Tashina Banks Rama. He had heart surgery earlier this month and was in high spirits until pneumonia he had contracted after the surgery took a turn for the worse on Friday, she said.
“Dennis Banks is somebody who had an indelible impact on history, not just in our native community but throughout our country,” said Anton Treuer, a professor of the Ojibwe language at Bemidji State University, citing how he demanded that the powerful take notice of American Indian concerns. “He was someone who was both loved and hated — depending on what circle you’re looking at.”
Banks and fellow AIM leader Russell Means faced charges stemming from the Wounded Knee occupation, but a judge threw out the case. However, Banks spent 18 months in prison in the 1980s after being convicted for rioting and assault for a protest in Custer, South Dakota, earlier in 1973. He avoided prosecution on those charges for several years because California Gov. Jerry Brown refused to extradite him, and the Onondaga Nation in New York gave him sanctuary.
Banks also helped lead a takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices in Washington, D.C., in 1972. And he was a participant in the 1969-71 occupation by Native Americans of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.
Banks lived near the town of Federal Dam on the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota and was a member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe.
In 2010, Banks joined several other Ojibwe who tested their rights under an 1855 treaty by setting out nets illegally on Lake Bemidji a day before Minnesota’s fishing season opener. He also went to the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota to join last year’s protests of the Dakota Access oil pipeline.
Treuer said Banks is remembered in the Native American community not just for his work in the rise of AIM, but for his efforts on the local level, such as focusing attention on racial disparities in the justice system, housing for Native Americans, treaty rights and teaching traditional ways to young people.