American Indian Movement

American Indian Movement (AIM), organization of the Native American civil-rights movement, founded in 1968. Its purpose is to encourage self-determination among Native Americans and to establish international recognition of their treaty rights. In 1972, members of AIM briefly took over the headquarters of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C. They complained that the government had created the tribal councils on reservations in 1934 as a way of perpetuating paternalistic control over Native American development. In 1973, about 200 Sioux, led by members of AIM, seized the tiny village of Wounded Knee, S.Dak., site of the last great massacre of Native Americans by the U.S. cavalry (1890). Among their demands was a review of more than 300 treaties between the Native Americans and the federal government that AIM alleged were broken. Wounded Knee was occupied for 70 days before the militants surrendered. The leaders were subsequently brought to trial, but the case was dismissed on grounds of misconduct by the prosecution. AIM also sponsored talks resulting in the 1977 International Treaty Conference with the UN in Geneva, Switzerland.

American Indian Movement. Of the various forms of ethnic and racial nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, the American Indian Movement (AIM) emerged as the best‐known “Red Power” organization. AIM got its start in 1968 when charges of police brutality in Indian neighborhoods in Minneapolis led Chippewas Dennis Banks and George Mitchell to assemble “red patrols” to follow police and witness arrests.

AIM soon evolved into a national group patterned after the Black Panthers, with chapters appearing in many cities. Especially popular among urban Indians, it quickly became a powerful force in the politics of many reservations as well. Members styled themselves as traditional warriors but drew on tactics of the larger civil rights movement. Russell Means, an Oglala Sioux, became AIM's principal spokesperson by staging attention‐grabbing actions, such as the 1972 demonstrations in Gordon, Nebraska, to protest the murder of Raymond Yellow Thunder, and the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan that same year, which concluded in a six‐day occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) offices in Washington, D.C. In 1973, Means was involved in AIM's dramatic seventy‐one–day siege of the village of Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, site of an 1890 massacre of Indians, as well as a fracas between AIM members and police in the Custer County, South Dakota, courthouse. In 1975, armed AIM members took over an electronics factory on the Navajo reservation.

By the late 1970s, AIM's popularity was fading as its militant, sometimes violent tactics became increasingly controversial. The government cracked down, imprisoning key leaders, and internal dissension split the ranks. Nonetheless, AIM's long‐term influence far surpassed its short lifespan. AIM not only contributed to a sense of pan‐Indian unity and to pride in Indian identity and heritage, but also drew national attention to Indian issues.
See also Indian History and Culture: Since 1950; Sixties, The; Wounded Knee Tragedy.

Bibliography

Peter Matthiessen , In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 1991.

Larry Burt

American Indian Movement (AIM) A militant organization emerging from the growth of a pan-American Indian identity in 1968 to advance American Indian cultural, legal, and property claims. Some of its members occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay (1969–71), when it offered to buy the island for cheap jewellery worth $24—the sum for which Manhattan Island had been bought from the Indians in 1626. Similarly, the Washington offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs were occupied in 1972, as was the village of Wounded Knee in 1973, scene of the last great US—Indian battle in 1890. In 1970 President Nixon formally repudiated the paternalistic policy of assimilation and adopted that of Indian self-determination. Since then the AIM has achieved numerous grants of land to Indian tribes and the return of ancestral burying grounds, while Native American cultural awareness has steadily increased. It has suffered, however, from competing rival groups representing American Indian interests, such as the National Tribal Chairmen's Association and the National Congress of American Indians. For its early policy of illegal occupation of property, one of its founders, Dennis Banks, was a fugitive from justice between 1975 and 1984. Despite the support during his period on the run of such governors as Jerry Brown of California and Mario Cuomo of New York, he received a three-year sentence for political violence and riot.