Dennis Banks: US civil rights leader who founded the American Indian Movement

Dennis Banks was a leading civil rights campaigner and the founder of the American Indian Movement, set up in the Sixties to highlight injustices against the US’s first peoples. Banks came to international attention during the 10-week siege of Wounded Knee when 200 armed Sioux activists took over the South Dakota town – 83 years earlier US forces had slaughtered 350 Lakota people there, at the end of the American-Indian Wars.

Banks, a member of the Ojibwa tribe, helped form the American Indian Movement (AIM) in 1968 to challenge what he and other activists considered the US government’s centuries-long exploitation of Native Americans. He traced his personal anger to his boyhood, when he was placed in Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools, which he compared to “concentration camps”.

A self-described “nightmare to the whole judicial system”, Banks spent periods as a fugitive or in prison for crimes associated with his demonstrations. To detractors, his apparent lawlessness did little to bolster his cause. But to supporters, Banks was a fearless defender of victimised peoples who, after years of oppression, had no recourse but dramatic resistance.

Along with AIM leader Russell Means, he became, as the Los Angeles Times put it, one of the “most famous Indians since Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse”, the tribal leaders who defeated George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.

Banks’s early protests included a siege of Alcatraz, the island off San Francisco where the infamous prison was situated. Later, in 1972, he participated in an AIM occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington.

But it is for his part in the occupation of Wounded Knee that he will be most remembered.

The 1973 uprising witnessed a confrontation between hundreds of Indians and hundreds of law-enforcement officers. Two Native Americans died, and a federal officer was paralysed in the ensuing violence. By the time the incident ended after 71 dramatic days, the world’s attention had been turned to the native American civil rights struggle as well as its tactics.

Banks and Means were charged with conspiracy, assault and theft in connection with the events, but a federal judge in 1974 dismissed the charges, citing government misconduct.

Banks faced more serious legal difficulty stemming from another demonstration, also in South Dakota, weeks before the Wounded Knee incident.

He and other AIM activists had gathered at the Custer County courthouse to protest after the alleged white killer of a Native American man was charged with manslaughter rather than the higher offence of murder. The demonstration resulted in injuries to protesters and police officers, the destruction of two police cars, and fires at government buildings.

“We had reached a point in history where we could not tolerate the abuse any longer,” Banks told Peter Matthiessen, author of In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, the 1983 book chronicling the “FBI’s war” against the American Indian movement. “These mothers could not tolerate the mistreatment that goes on on the reservations any longer, they could not see another Indian youngster die.”

In 1975 Banks was convicted of rioting and assault. Saying that he feared for his life in prison, he went on the run. His cause was bolstered by Hollywood figures including Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando, as well as by the legal representation of William Kunstler, the radical lawyer who died in 1995.

Banks found a haven in California, then and later on an Onondaga people reservation in New York. He surrendered to authorities in 1984, was imprisoned and then was paroled the following year.

Dennis James Banks – his Ojibwa name was Nowacumig, meaning “at the centre of the universe” – was born on the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota.

He described the experience of being taken to boarding school as a “dark day in the lives of all Indian children.”

“They are forcibly taken away from those who love and care for them, from those who speak their language,” he wrote in his 2004 memoir, Ojibwa Warrior. “They are dragged, some screaming and weeping, others in silent terror, to a boarding school where they are to be remade into white kids.”

He served in the Air Force in Japan, where he married a Japanese woman and fathered a child. The Los Angeles Times reported that he was married at least five times. His daughter Arrow Banks has said that he had 20 children and more than 100 grandchildren.

On his return from military service, Banks told America’s People magazine in 1984, “I was heading down a road that was filled with wine, whiskey and booze... then I landed in prison.” He said he served “two years, seven months and 18 days” for burglarising a grocery store while a white accomplice received probation. The experience galvanised Mr Banks to help found AIM.

During his sojourn in California, he taught classes at Stanford University. After his imprisonment in South Dakota, he said that he decided he “could best help by staying out of politics altogether.” He provided addiction counselling and ran a rice and maple syrup company that aimed to bring jobs to reservations.

Like Means, who died in 2012, Banks acted in films including The Last of the Mohicans in 1992.

Despite the efforts of AIM, residents of Native American reservations continue to live in what are universally recognised as disastrous conditions. Looking back on AIM’s work, Banks nonetheless saw progress.

“An awareness reached across America that if Native American people had to resort to arms at Wounded Knee, there must really be something wrong,” he said. “And Americans realised that native people are still here, that they have a moral standing, a legal standing. From that, our own people began to sense their pride.”

Dennis Banks, civil rights leader, born 12 April, 1937, died 29 October 2017

© The Washington Post