BANKS, Dennis J.

(b. 12 April 1937 on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation, Minnesota), charismatic social activist who cofounded and helped to lead the American Indian Movement, which was established in 1968 to raise awareness concerning the struggles and issues of Native Americans.

Banks, whose Native American name is Nowacumig, is a member of the Chippewa or Ojibwa people (sometimes called the Anishinabi or Original Woodland people). At age five, Banks was sent to the Pipestem Indian School, more than 400 miles from his home. Students attending the school, which was run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), were forced to speak English and punished when they spoke in their native language. He attended Pipestem for nine years, then went on to two more schools. In 1953 Banks joined the U.S. Air Force and served in Japan and Korea. Five years later he was discharged and returned to Minnesota.

Banks was unable to find steady work. He became involved with alcohol and petty crime and was jailed for burglary in 1964. His white accomplice received probation, but Banks spent almost three years in prison. Once he was paroled, he became involved in the community and helped to set up Little League baseball teams with George Mitchell, a future cofounder of the American Indian Movement (AIM). He returned to crime, however, and was convicted of forgery, for which he served a six-month sentence. While on probation, Banks violated his parole and was sent to Minnesota's Stillwater State Prison in 1967. At Stillwater he gained a reputation as an uncooperative inmate, spent time in solitary confinement, and read voraciously about the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, and Indian treaties.

Banks left prison with a new focus and a determination to improve the life of Native Americans. In 1968 he landed a job with the Honeywell Corporation and recruited other Native American employees for the company. Honeywell provided financial support for Banks's community projects and even granted him leave to form an Indian political movement. However, when Banks publicly criticized Honeywell's involvement in a number of defense contracts for manufacturing antipersonnel weapons and refused to recruit for the company, his employment ended.

In July 1968 Banks, Eddie Benton Banai, George Mitchell, Clyde Bellecourt, and 200 other Native Americans met in Minnesota and established AIM. Modeled on the Black Panther movement, AIM was born from rage fueled by federal government programs that required Indians to leave their ancestral lands and move into urban areas. The group chose an international symbol of distress for their official emblem: the upside-down U.S. flag. AIM's main goals were to increase employment opportunities, improve housing, and provide culturally appropriate primary and secondary education for Native Americans. AIM also sought to address the problem of police harassment of Indians. The group videotaped arrests and educated Indians about basic legal rights and procedures. The beatings and harassment that had been common declined; moreover, Indians began suing police for verbal abuse.

AIM made national headlines when a group of 200 Indians, with Banks as their spokesman, "reclaimed" Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay as Indian Territory; the occupation lasted from November 1969 to June 1971. Other AIM protests included a day of mourning on the Mayflower replica at Plymouth, Massachusetts, on Thanksgiving Day in 1970. When authorities failed to charge two white brothers who had beaten and murdered Raymond Yellow Thunder, Banks and two other men led a caravan in protest. As a result, the brothers became the first white men sentenced to prison for the murder of an Indian. Before the 1972 presidential election, Banks led another, larger AIM caravan—the Trail of Broken Treaties—which traveled to Washington, D.C. When officials refused to meet with the group, the caravan participants took over the BIA office for six days and renamed it the Native American Embassy.

Banks was a primary leader of AIM's most famous protest, the standoff at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on 28 February 1973. With the help of Vietnam veterans, the group captured and fortified the town, the location of the infamous 1890 massacre of Native Americans by U.S. forces. Federal marshals and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents immediately surrounded the protestors, creating a blockade. When the standoff ended on 9 May 1973, two Indians were dead, and several protestors and a marshal were wounded. Banks and another AIM leader, Russell Means, were arrested and prosecuted for their roles in the takeover. After a sensational, eight-month-long trial, the charges were dismissed on the grounds of prosecutorial misconduct. As a result of the stand at Wounded Knee, Banks became the most popular spokesman for Native Americans in the country.

Banks faced prosecution again for his participation in a courthouse riot in Custer, South Dakota, during the trial of a white man accused of murdering an Indian. This time Banks fled from his scheduled 1975 sentencing hearing. He surfaced in California, where he received amnesty from Governor Jerry Brown. Banks received an associate of arts degree from the University of California, Davis, and served as the chancellor of Deganawidah-Quetzecoatl (D-Q) University, a small, two-year college in Yolo County dedicated to the education of Native Americans. He also lectured locally and organized a spiritual run from Davis to Los Angeles. When Brown left office in 1983, Banks fled again, this time to the Onondaga Reservation in New York, where he remained for more than a year and organized the Great Jim Thorpe Longest Run from New York City to Los Angeles. Weary of isolation from his family and his people, Banks surrendered to the South Dakota authorities and served eighteen months of a three-year sentence.

Since his release in 1985, Banks has worked as a drug and alcohol counselor, persuaded Honeywell to build a computer factory in Oglala, South Dakota, headed the effort to free Leonard Peltier (who was convicted of the 1975 murder of two FBI agents at Pine Ridge, near where the Wounded Knee incident took place in 1973), and helped to protect Indian burial grounds. Since 1978 Banks has served as the director and coach of the Sacred Run, an international organization dedicated to the sacredness of all living things. He has also had minor roles in three films: War Party (1989), Thunderheart (1992), and The Last of the Mohicans (1992). Inspired by the revolutionary movements of the 1960s, Banks emerged from BIA schools and prison to become an influential and charismatic leader of the most significant Native American Movement in history.

Banks's autobiography is Sacred Soul (1988). Biographical information on Banks is included in Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1992), and Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane (1996). See also Current Biography Year-book, vol. 53 (1992).

Lisa A. Ennis