Dennis Banks
Dennis Banks was an Ojibwe from the Leech Lake reservation who founded the American Indian Movement in a Minneapolis meeting in 1968 to watch the police, led the Trail of Broken Treaties that occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington in 1972 and the seventy-one-day occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, spent a decade as a fugitive with a governor's protection, and died in 2017 as the elder of a movement that had changed what the country thought about its treaties. He was born in 1937 on the reservation, was taken at five to a federal boarding school where his language was beaten out of him, ran away repeatedly, served in the air force in Japan, and was in Stillwater prison for burglary when he read what was happening in the cities and came out to organise. AIM began as a patrol with cameras and police-band radios in the Indian neighbourhoods of Minneapolis and became in three years a national movement with red berets and a talent for the occupied building. In the winter of 1973, asked in by the traditional Oglala of Pine Ridge against a tribal chairman they could not remove, Banks and Russell Means led some two hundred people into the hamlet of Wounded Knee on 27 February, where the Seventh Cavalry had killed three hundred Lakota in 1890, and held it against federal marshals, the FBI and armoured cars for seventy-one days, with two occupiers dead and a marshal paralysed. It ended with an agreement that the government did not keep. The trial in St Paul in 1974 collapsed when the judge dismissed the charges for prosecutorial misconduct. Convicted in South Dakota for a riot at Custer the same year, he refused to serve. He was sheltered from 1976 by the governor of California, who would not extradite him, and then by the Onondaga nation in New York; he surrendered in 1984 and served fourteen months. He ran across the country in the sacred runs of the 1980s, acted in films, campaigned for Leonard Peltier, and taught. He died in October 2017 at eighty and was buried at Leech Lake.
- Lived: 1937 CE – 2017 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: activist
