AIM activist Dennis Banks dies
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 Monday at age 80.
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, 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. “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 as part of a protest dubbed “The Trail of Broken Treaties.” And he was a participant in the 1969-71 occupation by Native Americans of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.