Russell Means
Russell Means was an Oglala Lakota from Pine Ridge who became the American Indian Movement's most photographed face, led the occupation of Wounded Knee with Dennis Banks in 1973, ran for president of his tribe and of the United States, played Chingachgook in the film of The Last of the Mohicans, and argued with everyone including the movement he had made famous, which he left and rejoined and left. He was born in 1939 on the reservation and raised in the shipyards of Vallejo, California, where his father worked, and was a rodeo rider, a dance instructor, an accountant and a drunk before he found AIM in 1969 and became its national director the next year. He had the instinct for the picture. There was the Thanksgiving Day seizure of the Mayflower replica at Plymouth in 1970, the prayer vigil on Mount Rushmore, the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972 with the files thrown from the windows. At Wounded Knee from 27 February 1973 he was the negotiator and the voice, on the phone to the press and in the bunkers, and when it ended in May he was arrested. The federal trial in St Paul was dismissed for misconduct in 1974, and he was later convicted in South Dakota and served a year, during which he was stabbed. He was shot at several times in the 1970s. He ran for the Pine Ridge tribal presidency in 1974 against the chairman the occupation had been aimed at and lost an election that a federal commission found riddled with fraud, and again later, and in 1987 sought the Libertarian nomination for president of the United States. The films came after: The Last of the Mohicans in 1992, the voice of Powhatan in Pocahontas, Natural Born Killers. He declared the Republic of Lakotah in 2007, withdrawing from the treaties, which the Lakota tribes did not join. He died of cancer at his ranch in October 2012, having refused conventional treatment, and his ashes were scattered in the Black Hills.
- Lived: 1939 CE – 2012 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: activist, actor
