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American Indian Movement

The American Indian Movement (AIM) emerged from the broader context of ethnic/racial activism during the civil rights era in the United States. AIM was founded in 1968 on the streets of Minneapolis to monitor police harassment and abuse. From this original mandate, AIM quickly evolved into a civil rights organization fighting for Native American rights. This entry reviews its history and contributions.

Early Issues

Amid the many local struggles in which AIM members participated across the country, one major protest event drew national and international attention. In 1969, the group “Indians of All Tribes” began its occupation of Alcatraz Island. During the 19-month occupation, a major spokesperson was Dennis Banks, a founder of AIM. That same year, AIM founded an Indian Health Board in Minneapolis, the first urban-based health care center for American Indians in the nation.

After the Alcatraz occupation, AIM chapters were founded across the United States in major cities with significant Native American populations. During this time, some of AIM's most ardent leaders, such as Russell Means and John Trudell, were recruited to its ranks. Throughout these early years, AIM members expanded their vision for social justice by attacking inequalities on numerous fronts. For example, AIM occupied abandoned property at the naval air station near Minneapolis to focus attention on Indian education. In 1970, a legal rights center was founded to assist in alleviating indigenous legal issues.

In a series of demonstrations, AIM members publicly addressed Native American grievances. For example, on July 4, 1971, AIM members held demonstrations atop Mount Rushmore. On Thanksgiving Day, protesters took over a replica of the Mayflower at Plymouth, Massachusetts, painting Plymouth Rock red, and they used the ship as a public forum to air Native grievances. In 1971, AIM assisted the Lac Courte Orielles of Ojibwa, Wisconsin, in taking over a dam controlled by Northern States Power that flooded reservation land. The action led to an eventual settlement, returning more than 25,000 acres of Ojibwa land. That same year, the First National AIM Conference was convened to develop long-range strategies for future directions of the movement. Eighteen AIM chapters attended the meeting.

An Agenda of Issues

AIM continued to become directly involved in issues nationwide. In February 1972, Means led a caravan of approximately 1,000 people to Gordon, Nebraska, to protest the failure of local authorities to charge two Anglo men in the torture and murder of Raymond Yellow Thunder. AIM also organized a caravan to Washington, D.C. The central objective was to present a twenty-point solution paper to President Richard Nixon to address Native American grievances on the eve of the 1972 U.S. presidential election. In what was called the “Trail of Broken Treaties,” 2,000 people from reservations and urban areas across the country arrived in the capital in November.

When government officials refused to allow representatives to deliver their document about treaty rights and self-governance, approximately 400 AIM members and activists seized the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) headquarters in the Department of the Interior building. The six-day occupation ended only after the Nixon administration publicly committed itself to addressing each point. The occupiers left the building, but not before taking many confidential files discovered in BIA offices. The documents revealed many questionable government practices, including land and mineral fraud as well as the forced sterilization of Indian women. AIM came to Washington as a civil rights organization, and it left with the reputation for violent action. This reputation was magnified after the media focused on the vandalizing of the BIA offices rather than on the issues of indigenous sovereignty.

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