American Indian Movement

AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT

AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT (AIM), an activist organization that came to national prominence in

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the 1970s, emerged during July 1968 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in response to police brutality committed against urban Indians in the Twin Cities. AIM's three primary founders were Clyde Bellecourt (Ojibwa), Dennis Banks (Ojibwa), and George Mitchell (Ojibwa). According to Bellecourt, 120 American Indians of an estimated 20,000 living in the Twin Cities at this time began to hold regular meetings in the area of Franklin Avenue and initially called themselves the Concerned Indian American Coalition. Later, two Indian women elders suggested the name "AIM" since the leadership of the organization was "aiming" to take action on several fronts to correct past injustices against Indian people.

AIM leaders organized Indian patrols to scrutinize police actions. The patrols located drunken Indians in bars before the police found them. The patrols carried citizens band radios to intercept police calls so that they could witness arrests and make sure that the arrested Indians were not abused. The patrol members wore red jackets with a black thunderbird emblem and became known as "shock troops" in the Indian neighborhood. Within a few months, the coalition structured itself as a nonprofit corporation with an Indian board and staff.

Among its other community activities in the Twin Cities, AIM started culturally oriented schools for Indian youths called the Little Red Schoolhouse and Heart of the Earth. These efforts were a response to the fact that at the junior high level, Ojibwa youths had a dropout rate of 65 percent in public schools. As more American Indians arrived in the Twin Cities via relocation, AIM provided temporary shelter and meals and developed an Indian elders program.

AIM became a national organization as widespread frustration over the urban conditions caused by the relocation of many Indians to cities led more Indian people to join the fight for Indian justice. Within four years of its founding, AIM had established forty chapters in U.S. cities, on reservations, and in Canada. Active chapters were in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Milwaukee, and Cleveland. Among the individuals in AIM who became national leaders were Eddie Benton-Banai (Ojibwa) and Mary Jane Wilson (Ojibwa), who were instrumental in the early formation of the movement; Vernon Belle-court (Ojibwa), Russell Means (Oglala), Richard Oakes (Mohawk), and Lehman Brightman (Lakota), who became director of Native American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley; John Trudell (Santee Dakota), who served as AIM national chairperson from 1974 to 1979; and Leonard Peltier (Metis), Anna Mae Aquash (Micmac), and Carter Camp (Ponca).

At the political level, AIM activists sought to bring attention to American Indian issues through a series of public protests, beginning with their participation in the nineteen-month occupation of Alcatraz that began in 1969. AIM activists protested at Mount Rushmore on 4 July 1971; at the Mayflower replica at Plymouth, Massachusetts, on Thanksgiving Day in 1971; and in Gordon, Nebraska, in February 1972, in response to the murder of Raymond Yellow Thunder. AIM members occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C., in November 1972 and initiated the nationwide Longest Walk in 1978, ending in Washington, D.C. Local chapters took over buildings in Wisconsin, California, and other states.

National attention peaked with two events, the first being AIM members' ten-week occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota (see Wounded Knee, 1973). Authorities charged Dennis Banks and Russell Means and put them on trial for their actions at Wounded Knee, while other AIM members were arrested and released. Following an eight-month trial in 1974, a federal judge dismissed charges against Means and Banks.

The second event, known as the Oglala Firefight of 1975, grew out of heightened tensions between Indian activists and the Federal Bureau of Investigation after the events at Wounded Knee. The FBI was involved with surveillance of all major Indian protests, working to subvert such protests and challenging AIM leaders. The firefight broke out on 26 June 1975 between AIM members and the FBI at the Jumping Bull family compound on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The deaths of two FBI agents in the conflict led to a nationwide FBI effort to find the killer, and Leonard Peltier was ultimately convicted of the crime. (Two alleged accomplices were acquitted in a separate proceeding.) Despite protests over many years that Peltier did not receive a fair trial, and international calls for his release, in 2002 he was still serving a prison sentence at Leavenworth, Kansas.

By the late 1970s, AIM no longer occupied national headlines, although it served an important purpose in altering federal Indian policy. During the 1970s, AIM split into two groups that put Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt on one side and Russell Means and his supporters on the other. This division remained unhealed, and AIM's politics were subdued due to conflict over leadership. Nevertheless, in the early twenty-first century it remained as one of the longest-lived national organizations representing American Indian issues.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Johnson, Troy, et al., eds. American Indian Activism: Alcatraz to the Longest Walk. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Nagel, Joane. American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Smith, Paul Chatt, and Robert Warrior, eds. Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. New York: New Press, 1996.

Donald L. Fixico

See also Indian Policy, U.S., 1900–2000 ; Indian Political Life ; Indian Reservations .