Dennis Banks
American Indian behind the second ‘Battle of Wounded Knee’
DENNIS BANKS, who has died aged 80, was an Ojibwe Indian from northern Minnesota who co-founded the militant American Indian Movement (AIM) and was a leader of its takeover of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1973.
Wounded Knee was famously the scene of an 1890 confrontation between the Sioux and the 7th Cavalry in which more than 200 Indians lost their lives. When, on February 27 1973, more than 300 armed Indians occupied the village, taking 11 hostages, it was widely seen as a racial conflict. Two weeks previously there had been protests at the Custer County courthouse at the state’s failure to charge a white man with murder over the death of an Indian man, and there were longstanding grievances over Indian land rights.
But the real spark for the protest appears to have been the failure of the Oglala Civil Rights Organisation to impeach Richard Wilson, president of the Oglala Lakota Sioux of the Pine Ridge reservation, whom they accused of corruption and suppressing political opponents with his own private militia.
Fought in the glare of television cameras, the second “Battle of Wounded Knee” veered from tragedy to farce as the Indians, who were soon joined by sundry counter-culture figures, alternately traded shots and negotiated with US marshals. One marshal was paralysed from a gunshot wound early on in the occupation; two Indians were shot dead; a black civil rights activist disappeared and is thought to have been murdered. It was estimated that as many as 500,000 rounds were fired by participants.
The 71-day stand-off ended on May 6 when the occupants of Wounded Knee surrendered. The village had been almost destroyed and would not be reoccupied until the 1990s.
Afterwards Banks and his Oglala Sioux colleague Russell Means, two of the ringleaders, were charged with assault, conspiracy and larceny, but the case was later dismissed by the federal court on the grounds of “prosecutorial misconduct”. In the years that followed, the government would move to rectify some inequities publicised by the siege. But Richard Wilson stayed in office and in the next three years the murder rate in the Pine Ridge reservation soared.
Dennis James Banks was born on the Leech Lake Reservation, Minnesota, on April 12 1937. At the age of five he was removed from his family and sent to a series of government schools for Indians, from which he often ran away.
Returning to Leech Lake aged 17, he joined the US Air Force and was stationed in Japan, where he went Awol. Arrested, returned to the US and discharged, he became involved in petty crime and spent time in jail for burglary. Released in 1968 and inspired by the civil rights movement, he co-founded AIM.
AIM staged a series of protests at high-profile sites before the occupation of Wounded Knee, including seizing a replica of The Mayflower and holding a prayer vigil on top of Mount Rushmore. Banks participated in the 196971 occupation of Alcatraz Island, the site of the former prison in San Francisco Bay, and in 1972 helped lead an occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington DC.
In 1975 he was found guilty of riot and assault during the 1973 confrontation at Custer that preceded the fracas at Wounded Knee. He jumped bail and fled to California, where he was granted asylum. In 1984, however, he returned to South Dakota voluntarily and was sentenced to three years in prison. Paroled in 1985 after 14 months, he returned to the Pine Ridge Reservation to work as a counsellor.
Later he founded a company that sold wild rice and maple syrup.
He is survived by 20 children.
Dennis Banks, born April 12 1937, died October 29 2017