Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] The American Indian Movement (AIM)

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Aug 23, 2020 In this fascinating episode Nick Estes, Historian, author of "Our History is the Future" and co-founder of The Red Nation, joins Breht to discuss the history and legacy of the American Indian Movement, including the history of indigenous resistance in America, the origins and ideology of AIM, the Siege of Wounded Knee in 1973, the FBI's COINTELPRO, the Reign of Terror, and SO much more. Essential listening for anyone eager to understand Indigenous liberation movements and the ongoing fight for justice and sovereignty. This is a collaborative project between Rev Left Radio and The Red Nation Podcast Learn about, join, and/or support the Red Nation HERE Find Nick on Twitter HERE ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

On a cold night in February 1973, a caravan rolled through the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The cars were packed with 200 Indians, men and women, local of. Luglala Lakota and members of the urban militant group, the American Indian movement. They headed toward the hallowed ground of Wounded Knee, the site of the last massacre of the Indian Wars. Going into Wounded Knee that night, when it was dark and scary, and we were clinging to our weapons tightly. It was a full moon, and we knew that a battle was going to come. I was sitting there thinking of some of these young men that are around me.

Am I committing them to die? I was ready to do whatever it takes for change. I didn't care. I had children, and for them, I figured I could make a stand here. They were up to no good. I mean, why would they be traveling in a caravan with all these weapons and all these Molotov cocktails if they weren't going to engage? in some kind of destructive activity.

By the 1970s, native people, once masters of the continent, had become invisible, consigned to the margins of American life. Their anger and frustration would explode in wounded knee. We were about to be obliterated culturally. Our spiritual way of life, our entire way of life was about to be stamped out.

And this was a rebirth. of our dignity and self-pride. For the next 71 days, Indian protesters at Wounded Knee would hold off the federal government at gunpoint. Media from around the world would give the siege day-by-day coverage, and Native Americans from across the nation

would come to Wounded Knee to be part of what they hoped would be a new beginning. The message that went out is that a band of Indians could take on this government. Tecumse had his day and Geronimo, Sitting Bull, praise yours.

And we had ours. Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, we have a really, really fascinating one for you. We have on the historian and author of Our History is the future, Nick Estes, to talk about the American Indian movement. And more broadly than that, the massive history that goes back centuries in this country of settler colonialism and the historical place. that movements like AIM played and continued to play in that broader history. We even connect AIM up with current day movements. The George Floyd protests, for example, exploded out of Minneapolis.

That's the same city, of course, that AIM was founded in. And it's just a fascinating, deep dive into the history of one of, I think, the most important movements in American history, especially a revolutionary movement in American history. Nick Estes is, of course, also one of the co-founders of the Red Nation and Indigenous Resistance Organization, which we here at ReveLeft obviously love and support. And so, yeah, this is a fascinating episode. I'm extremely excited to get this out to listeners,

and I think it's absolutely essential to understand all of this history for anybody who claims to be on the left in this country and really around the world. Before we do that, though, I do want to say that, In this episode, we talk about Zachary Bearhills, long-time listeners of the show, particularly patrons, are probably familiar with Zachary Bearhills, who was murdered by police here in Omaha. I didn't get a chance to say it in the episode, but those officers were all let off. None of those officers were held due account, and they're all continuing to go out and live their lives after murdering on camera an innocent indigenous man who just needed mental health care. Our organizations here in Omaha have continued yearly to show support for the Bear Heels family. We do marches every year, paralleling the walk that he took before he encountered the police and were murdered by Omaha Police Department.

So I just wanted to make that clear up front and we'll continue to agitate and organize here in Omaha to get Zachary Bear Heels something like justice. And also if you like what we do here at Reve Left Radio, you can become a supporter of us on Patreon. The show really would not exist without the Patreon supporters. I know everybody, especially in this health pandemic and in this economic crisis, don't have a few spare dollars to support a show like ours, and I totally understand that. But for those who do, it really does mean the world to us, and it allows this show to continue. So that's at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio for anybody interested. in supporting the show. And in exchange, you get bonus monthly content. So without further ado,

let's get into this wonderful episode with the one and only Nick Esthys on the American Indian Movement. Enjoy. I'm in Takayapi. My name is Nick Esthys. I am a co-founder of the Red Nation organization. I'm also an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico and a citizen of the Lower Brule-Soo tribe. Wonderful. Well, Nick, it's, as we were saying before we started recording, it's an honor to have you on. It's been a long time coming. We've tried to have an episode a few times and just things have gotten in the way.

I know you're dealing with a lot of shit down in New Mexico right now on the organizing front. So we're very honored to have you on to talk about this crucial element of just revolutionary history broadly, but revolutionary history on this continent specifically. and that is, of course, the American Indian movement. I actually just watched some documentaries and prep for this episode, and although I knew the vague outlines of what AIM was about, the actual militancy, just the outright militancy, I mean, wounded knee, taking shots at feds, before that riots

where they're ripping face masks off cops and just bloodying them up. I mean, the militancy is really not well understood, I think, even on the left. So it was kind of a fascinating and wonderful history, and I'm glad to have you on to talk about it. Yeah, thanks for having me on, Brett. appreciate the show. I've learned a lot, even through Red Menace, and we actually use a lot of these episodes for political education in the Red Nation. So this is going to be contributing to the podcast that I run, too. Absolutely. That's beautiful. I love the little community that sprouts up

and using each other's shows to help educate our sort of cadre and organizations. It's a beautiful thing. So yeah, well, we have a huge amount of history to cover, so let's go ahead and dive into it. And I like to start with sort of a 101 overviews for people who might not be familiar with the topic at all. So for those who may have little to know idea what aim is, can you please give us like a bird's eye view of the movement and its historical relevance before we get into all the details? For sure. And I just want to start with a quote from Leonard Peltier because I think it really sets up who the American Indian movement was and is today and also defines the terrain of history that we're talking about. And so in the opening lines of Leonard Peltier's book, Prison Writings, which you can find. The subtitle is My Life is A Sundance, and this was published in the 90s.

And the opening lines of this book says, Innocence is the weakest defense. And what he means by this is he's saying that, like, in the court of law, an adversarial kind of court of law, and the courts of the conquer, one has to prove innocence or being guilty, right? And that's not a good way of understanding history because it really glosses over the kind of power of a movement like red power or the American Indian movement or any other indigenous led kind of resistance movement of the past and of the present. Because oftentimes in our kind of current historical moment, we tried to think of movements in the past as being, you know, faulted or, you know, being pure or, you know, not accomplishing their goals or failing. And I think that's the wrong approach, especially to a movement such as the American Indian movement. And so the first thing to recognize is that the American Indian movement formed in 1968 in the streets of Minneapolis, right, to address three things. And these three things are very critical and understanding the trajectory of the American Indian movement, but also a lot of the misconceptions and, you know, blatant kind of falsehoods about who aim was. and some of these these three things may you know surprise people and so the first thing that they formed to address was child removal

the second thing was police violence and the third thing was poverty which included employment and housing specifically for off-reservation indigenous people and communities and the first thing child removal you know is an incredibly important topic and i can you know i'll kind of break it down later on in this interview But one thing that's important to remember that in 1969, the year after the American Indian movement was reformed, and because of its advocacy and its activism and the success of its organizing, there was a study that came out that found that one in three indigenous children in the United States had been adopted out to white families. right? And this was working hand in hand with the churches as well as the Department of Social Services. And so this was, you know, we often think of the, we see the police violence stuff because it's what grabbed the news. It's what grabbed the attention of the media. But it's important to kind of like juxtapose, you know, that kind of the media sensation and the media portrayal of the American Indian movement with the work that it actually did in the communities and why it had such a widespread. base of support. And one thing that's also important to remember is that the founders of the American Indian movement, specifically people like Clyde Belcourt or Dennis Banks or Eddie Benton-Beney, they formed this organization while at Stillwater Prison, right, while they were incarcerated. You know,

somebody like Clyde Belcourt, you know, grew up in correctional institutions, right? And this, in his own memoir, The Thunder Before the Storm, he details how incarceration, you know, was the catalyst for the American Indian movement and it's organizing in prisons.

And he even makes the argument that incarceration at that time as he understood it as a young indigenous man going through a correctional institution to correctional institution was a form of relocation and termination and elimination. And he uses all of those words to describe his experiences through these

these carceral institutions because he didn't know what it was, you know, in his own words, to be an Indian. And he also didn't, you know, he didn't have the resources, you know, to be native culturally or politically outside of those institutions. And so it actually began with prisoners organizing in these correctional facilities, creating cultural. programs, creating spiritual programs that they had access, much like, you know, their Muslim or Christian brothers and sisters had to religious rights within the prison system. And so their idea was to, they're like, well, once we get out of prison, like, we're not going to have access to these ceremonies anymore, just because they're not, they're not widely

practiced, or we're not going to have access to this kind of space. And he even makes the claim that Native American studies, as we know, as an academic discipline, was founded in Stillwater Prison. And I think there's a lot of resonance to that. But he was his idea, he and many others, of course, their idea was to take that experience and the success of that model and really transpose it to specifically the urban indigenous experience in a place like Minneapolis. And of course, as we know, this was the catalyst for a much larger movement that eventually went to the United Nations. But it was originally founded on those three things. child removal, police violence, and poverty, and later those things evolved into three other

points, three kind of broader ideological points addressing the Bureau of Indian Affairs are actually calling for the abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and for people who don't know what that is, it was basically a holdover from Indian Department that began in the War Department, and then was transferred to the Department of Interior, I believe under U.S.S. S. Grants administration, you know, transferring the diplomatic relations, right, the international relations one would have with indigenous people to the Department of Interior next to wildlife and natural resource management, right? The Bureau of Land Management is housed there. And so this was a, you know, a scene by not just the American Indian movement, but a lot of sovereign, indigenous sovereignty movements at this time is a tyrannical arm. and the second one was to address, you know, Christianity, you know, with a caveat, not just Christianity in general, because as, you know, if you read any histories of the American Indian movement, you'll understand that the American Indian movement, much like, you know, the black freedom struggles, had allied themselves strategically, or even in some instances, came out of the churches themselves. And so the caveat with Christianity as being something that they're fighting against. against was Christianity in the sense of assimilation and genocide against indigenous people and the

role of churches in that. And the third thing was treaties and treaty rights. And, you know, I'll get into that much later, but that's the basic kind of ideological kind of underpinnings of the American Indian movement and really, really where it came from. It came from a working class background. And even some of the founders of the American Indian movement, that people who really really got it off the ground, they themselves were, you know, teamsters. They, you know, they had experience organizing in prison or, you know, so there was a very class consciousness around,

a working class consciousness around the Indian experience in the 20th century, but also it was combined, you know, and developed and sharpened in anti-colonial politic. And I think it's origins within that kind of underclass, that working class element, made it less appealing. even to certain indigenous people, you know, as we, as we will talk about later, but especially the indigenous folks who had aligned themselves with the liberal kind of settler state and had, you know, taken advantage and become themselves a kind of compradour class. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I've had my own personal experiences with the BIA weirdly.

That's probably for another show, but I lived off the edge of the Crow Reservation in my senior year of high school. My niece and nephew are, their father was, was. crow and so i had a lot of friends on the res and uh some interesting just uh engagements with the bia and me not being indigenous and so like they really had no control over me but i'm in a car full of you know of my crow friends and they told me to go home and arrested all of them there's a long weird history there um and then i also think it's really essential to to think about relocation it's a very unique part of this story but it's relocation as the continuance of

genocide of taking indigenous children out of their families and putting them with, as you said, adopting them out to white families to strip them of their entire cultural identity and really force whiteness upon them. And as we'll touch on through as we go throughout this episode and me and you talked about it before we started recording, almost every single one of these questions can be entire episodes of their own. And so I think we're both committed to coming back and doing deeper dives into some of the elements that we can only briefly touch on here since we're doing a full sort of 101 history of aim. So if there's some stuff that we won't fully be able to flesh out for people, there will be follow-up episodes where we do that. And I think it's

important to do that because, you know, even one of the questions that we have later on is just on wounded knee. And that could be a five-hour, you know, episode just in its own right, genuinely. And I mean that because of the nuances and complexities of that one singular event. So keep that in mind as we go through this. The last thing I'll say about aim is It's similar in some ways to what the Black Panther Party did, which among so many other things, they brought this idea of self-knowledge and self-love in the midst of a white supremacist society hellbent on you hating yourself and you being a second-class citizen and you seeing yourself as a second-class citizen. And so this radical going back to who we actually are resisting our ongoing genocide and loving who we are is a big part of this movement as well and a big part of its legacy, which will touch. on at the end.

But let's go ahead and get into the next question, which is the history leading up to the technical and official formation of AIM. So another huge question, but can you talk about the history leading up to AIM from the 1900s up through the 60, just to sort of give us some of that historical context? Right. And I think that's an important question, too, because sometimes AIM gets kind of exceptionalized within, you know, not just within red power movements, but also within the longer arc of indigenous resistance movements.

And so to be clear, you know, AIM wasn't really doing anything new. It was really just building on previous generations of, you know, resistance movements. So, for example, before AIM, you know, aligned itself with what we had as treaty council or what we now know as treaty councils, which were these kind of organizations that were trying,

that kept alive, the culture, the language, the political and historical knowledge of, you know, primarily, you know, this is something that happens in, like, La Cota and Dakota communities, but, you know, there are other treaty councils elsewhere, but, you know, while, like, let's say, like in 1905, they were creating the Soviets, right? The workers councils in Russia leading up to, you know, the first kind of revolution. And then later on in 1917, if you look at, like, historians such as CLR. James and, you know, Cedric Robinson, they trace, you know, the organic formation of, of, like black resistance right to the experience of chattel slavery but also European colonization and that's you know that they formed these kind of like organic affinity groups automatically and they didn't need like you know the the introduction of like revolutionary theory from Europe to really understand their conditions and to you know express their own notions of freedom and decolonization the same goes for indigenous people and so these fights for treaties

and land really began centuries before AIM was formed and AIM was just an iteration of a longer tradition, right? So, for example, in the early 1900s, you had the allotment system taking hold of Indian reservations, literally cutting in half and in some ways, you know, reducing some reservations to, you know, just a fraction of a fraction of their former selves. And there was there was no recourse whatsoever. The modern tribal government system, as we know it today, didn't exist until 1935 and didn't have its kind of political authority established, you know, not without its own problems through the Indian Reorganization Act, which was part of a New Deal legislation

kind of package for indigenous rights. But prior to 1935, if one was caught speaking their language, if one was caught practicing a certain ceremony, if one was caught wearing their hair long or giving away their items, you know, their wealth, as was common practice amongst many indigenous people, they could be subjected to the court of Indian offenses, right, which was codified with the, in the 1880s and something that was called the Civilization Regulations. And it's fascinating, even today, even mainstream historians, minus, you know, peep activists such as Suzanne Harjo or, like, bind the loria, very few mainstream historians really write about that. And these, you know, if you want to talk about

genocide policy, this is like literally the smoking gun. And it's something that you can't really find on the internet. It takes quite a bit of digging. And this is something, you know, I can, I can say with authority as, you know, being historically trained. But it outlawed, you know, just being Indian ontologically, you know, thinking in Indian, being Indian, and raising Indian children. So a lot of children at the height of the off-reservation boarding school system, I believe it was one quarter of all Native children were sent to off-reservation boarding schools. And over 75% of Native children were sent to boarding schools, whether they were on reservation or nearby a reservation.

So you have the decimation of the Indian family going into the 1900s. and you have this kind of like, you know, it's not without, I'm not trying to say it's a good thing, but the people who were implementing these programs had good intentions, and I'm not saying that in a liberal way. Some of them were actually outwardly aligned as leftists for the most part, who worked in these New Deal programs and really, you know, so for example, Archie Finney is a Numapu or a Nezpiers scholar who trained in Soviet Russia for anthropology. and actually worked under Franz Boas and he was a very, you know, he, you know, in the language of the U.S. left or U.S. politics, he was a progressive when it came to indigenous issues.

And he believed in, you know, implementing bilingual cultural programs for indigenous people in the 1930s. As part of the New Deal, he was actually one of the co-founders of the National Council of American Indians, which was formed in 1944, that was formed specifically,

to address the looming threat of termination, right? So as American Indians had served in World War I, not as citizens, right? They were granted citizenship or, you know, some people like to say citizenship was imposed on indigenous people because it wasn't on our terms, even though there were people advocating for citizenship. They were saying citizenship plus treaty rights or just treaty rights before citizenship or just treaty rights in general. But it was a way to undermine these kind of land claims.

And then, of course, in 1943, as the United States enters the war, American Indians, you know, serve overwhelmingly beyond, you know, their kind of demographic ratio to the larger U.S. population in the war. They go and see the rest of the world. They meet, you know, other colonized people from around the United States, but also around the world, and see that their conditions are very similar. They come back home, all the promises of, you know, being a veteran, you know, serving one's country. and now they're back in their prisons, right? And on these reservations, and they become frustrated. And not only that, there's a growing sentiment within Congress to do away with the reservation systems entirely. So the very country they fought for then becomes the enemy.

And so the National Council of American Indians forms, you know, and it has its own kind of issues. It takes a very kind of outwardly public anti-communist stance, aligning itself, seeing itself as kind of like the equivalent of, you know, the reconstruction of Europe post-World War II, oh, we need to reconstruct or rebuild native nations. And that, of course, isn't without its flaws. That breeds a new generation of intellectuals, specifically organizations like the National Indian Youth Council figures like Clyde Warrior, for example, who coined the term red power in response to the conservative nature of the NCAA or their National Council of American Indians. and saying that we need more than just assimilation within, you know, the colonial system.

And, you know, in the early 1960s, when Clyde Warrior was really active, that's what he was talking about. He introduced, or he didn't, you know, by himself, but he was part of a generation that introduced the language of decolonization and sovereignty to the broader kind of indigenous movement. And he was very controversial. You know, now he's celebrated as a figure, but at the time he was called a con. communists, you know, all these kinds of things. And he had a class-based analysis. And I encourage everyone to go and read his work. There's a really good biography by Paul McKenzie Jones about Clyde Warrior and his impact. And that really happened in the Southwest. And I think the regional kind of aspect of it is really important because he was influenced, I guess not he himself,

but the National Indian Youth Council formed in the Southwest as a younger generation of red power activists and they really were intrigued by the fissions in the northwest where in places like Washington, you know, a lot of the tribes up there were protesting the infringement of state game wardens on their fishing rights within the rivers. And they were getting arrested and they called them fission and they were inspired by or working in tandem, I should say, with civil rights activists and getting arrested for enacting one's treaty rights or enacting one's rights as an indigenous person to harvest food in a sustainable way. And so then they began kind of incorporating the tactic of sit in an occupation, right? And that was really something that

was foregrounded by the National Indian Youth Council, right? And so the tactics that AIM employed had already been sophisticated by a previous generation of organizers. And so it's important to remember that, you know, AIM came out of a broader kind of milieu of red power. organizations that it wasn't the sole organization. It was one of many organizations. And it had its own kind of relationship, you know, to these groups. The National Indian Youth Council, you know, was very formative in that. And I would say that what made it kind of a little bit different from like the American Indian movement and its later, you know, as it formed was the geographic nature. Because in the north, the politics are much different, right, than in the southwest here, where I'm calling you

from. And the American Indian movement was, I would say, by and large, in its heyday, a movement that was composed of Anishinaabe people alongside of Dakota and Lakota people. And they became kind of really the core members of this movement, whether it was in leadership or its base in general. Termination and relocation played an important factor. So termination, you know, was the attempted liquidation of tribes. It did actually terminate some tribes. And on top of that, there was a program of relocation that was introduced in 1956 that sent around three quarters of a million American Indians to urban centers and encouraged them to seek employment off the reservation. And that was a way to get Indians off the land. So it kind of flip-flopped as far as like Indian

policy because in the early 1900s, one could not leave the reservation. without a pass, right? And then in the post-war period, during termination and relocation, it was difficult for Indians to return back to the reservation, but these urban Indian centers that they formed became kind of the hubs of political organization and cultural revitalization in those communities. Yeah. Crucial, crucial history there. And it's really important, obviously, to understand that and not to try to conceptualize aim

as some discrete event in history. connected from everything that came before it because the members of AIM consciously saw themselves as, you know, sort of operating in this unbroken line of indigenous resistance. And that's a huge part of their entire self-conception. So that history is fundamental. One question on the termination policy, I think this was in the 50s when this really got up and going. And the ultimate goal, as you said, just to be clear was to basically get to a point where all the reservation system was completely depleted. All the indigenous people would just be thrown into normal mainstream American society and the hundreds of treaties would just basically be ripped up

and that was for a decade or so even more maybe the government's really main focus at that time is that a fair way to capitulate it yeah i would say that it would be a solid to maybe possibly some would say three decades of indian policy that was wasn't reversed until you know the 1970s under nixon of all people right yeah in the face of a lot of this resistance which which we'll get into. This generation of Indians in the late 60s, early 70s, who for the most part, they've been to boarding school or their parents have been to boarding school,

which was explicitly about getting Indians off the reservations to not be Indian and do not speak their language. For those Indian people, it was this moment in which you could see on television. There was another way. There was another possibility. It was electrified. There is one day.

There is one dark day in the lives of Indian children, the lives of Indian children, the day when they are forcibly taken away from, from those who love and care for them, from those who speak their language. They are dragged, some screaming and weeping, others in silent terror, to a boarding school, where they are to be remade into white kids.

By the late 19th century, the Indian wars were over. The United States seized on a ruthless strategy to assimilate nation. children to a subordinate place in white-dominated society. Government-run boarding schools. I was five years old. My mother was crying, and they were taking us off. And my sister, Audrey, who also, you know, was like a second mother to me,

and a very close friend as a sister. And my brother Mark, they were very sad. Within two hours or so, after the buses filled up, and we're down the road, this is the furthest ever been from my home in my life. And then, of course, it turns into evening, you know, we arrive at this place. I ended up in a place where nothing, nothing made any sense at all. You know, it wasn't home. I didn't know anything about school

nobody ever told me anything about school I didn't know what the education was I remember that I wanted to go home period didn't want to be that I just wanted to go home and we all had to strip down naked and then they put the DDT on us and they're line this up

and they're cutting our hair you have long hair you have braids and then that gets cut off and I would say within a matter of hour and a half we're standing there all looking alike

between the 1870s and the 1960s over 100,000 Indian children were sent to one of the nearly 500 boarding schools scattered across the United States. Through the agencies of the government, they are being rapidly brought from their state of comparative savagery and barbarism to one of civilization.

We couldn't sing any. any native songs or tribal songs. They just started using English. You could only, you could not use any other language. And we'd whispered. Passed the Bequashigan, Bequizsian, passed the Bradover. It's like I had to be two people, had to be Nowcombeg and had to be Dennis Banks.

Nowcomic is my real name, my Ojibwe name. Dennis Banks had to be very protective of now coming. And so I learned who the presidents were. And I learned the math. I learned the social studies. I learned the English. And now coming was still there. This is education that was promised us.

That was guaranteed us. through the treaties. But it wasn't. It's torture and brainwashing. They called us many different names. Savage. Dumb. We got beat for

looking like an Indian. Smelling like an Indian. Even speaking in Indian, everything I did. Their de-indian program, it failed. But the toll was devastating. It destroyed our family. It destroyed that relationship we had with our mother. I could never regain that friendship, love ship relationship that I had with my mother.

It wasn't there anymore. And that's what, to this day, I keep thinking that, you know, damn this government. What it did to me and what it did to thousands of other children across this country. So I know you touch on this a little bit in the first answer, but maybe we can go a little deeper. Can you talk about how AIM as an organization first arose, what they were responding to in their immediate area and what were their sort of initial goals or outlook? Sure. So just to get back to the question of Minneapolis, because this is really at the heart of the American Indian movement, and it still is to this day. I mean, there's,

the legacy of aim exists within Minneapolis. It's not even a legacy in the sense that it's still an active organization and still doing things in that sense. But when it was founded in 1968, you know, a lot of AIM members, you know, first and foremost, didn't, never carried guns. You know, so somebody like Clyde Bellcourt of Dennis Banks never carried guns or weapons. So the militancy, the idea that it was armed was a thing that was in response. responds to a specific moment in time and that was that was the repression that they experienced that wounded knee and that was actually a turning point for for the American Indian movement when it came to understanding armed self-defense you know one thing that's also important to consider

is at this moment in time even though there were antagonisms between people who you know were grassroots street level organizers like the American Indian movement and you know those who had aligned themselves with like the Washington elite they often worked in ways that kind of complimented each other. So, for example, LaDonna Harris was the wife of Ed Harris, who was a senator from, I believe, from Oklahoma. And she was, you know, a Comanche person, but, you know, because of her affinity with Washington, she could do things for the American New Movement that other, you know, other people couldn't do. And so one of the things that she said that was later proven true, but she made it up at the moment.

She said that 80% of natural resources left in the United States, such as timber, iron, uranium water, grazing, silver, gold, all kinds of those minerals and resources were on Indian lands. And it made a kind of economic connection to the question of termination and relocation. And so the American Indian movement formed at a street level, but it was thinking about this broader political context that the things that, you know, going out and filming the police brutalizing people on the weekends, you know, was part of this broader kind of growing anti-colonial movement. And they had teamed up with, you know, in

Minneapolis alone, they had teamed up with an organization called the Soul Patrol, which was black organizers who were filming the police brutalizing, you know, black people on the weekends or terrorizing black neighborhoods. And so they were working together in tandem. And we can see that these kinds of seeds of resistance and cooperation, you know, really culminated, you know, more recently with the George Floyd protests. But this was one of the things that they did. And they also began to look at public education in, in Minneapolis, because Minneapolis is the home of not just the Anishinaabe people, but also Dakota people and many different

indigenous people. And what happens in a public education setting is it's the site where the state begins, it's surveillance over indigenous people, right? Is this children, is this child, you know, what's this child's home life like, right? So when we think of Indian removal policies, a lot of times people think that this happens off, you know, are on the reservation. You have these missionaries going out and, you know, getting children or getting families to give up their children, which actually did happen.

There were wings in hospitals on the reservation that were dedicated to like nuns and social workers to basically convince native women to give up their children on birth, right? So that actually did happen, but the site of the state surveillance happened in the public schools when children would go to school. They would notice this child, you know, doesn't have the cleanest clothes or would make up excuses to call for standard intervention and remove that child from the family, put them into foster care or adopt them out, right? And so AIM actually was like, well, you can't do that anymore. So we're just going to create our own school because in 1970, Congress passed the Indian Education Act. And so they said, well, give us money then.

We'll create our own school. And of course, that didn't happen. So they had to fight for their own school. And what they ended up creating was what we now know as survival schools. And the first one was called Heart of the Earth Survival School. And it's still open to this day in some capacity. But, you know, people like Pat Bellinger, who's an Anishnabic activist, she was the one who really advocated for this kind of Indian education and autonomy within the community and created this first survival school. There were other schools that popped up afterwards.

You know, I think at the height of it, there were over 30 of them across North America on different reservations or in different cities. And you see something like DQ University that came up in Berkeley. That was the product of the Alcatraz occupation in 1969 because Alcatraz was actually taken over to create an Indian university, right? So what AIM was doing was just implementing what the movement itself, the Red Power movement itself, was advocating for from the very beginning. The other thing that's really important about this is, you know, there were over 3,000 native women between the years of 1973 and 1976 that were sterilized at Indian. health service hospitals or clinics. And this happened on the reservation as well as off the reservation. And there's a really good movie out there, a documentary movie, very tragic, but it's called Amma. It's the Denebizad word for mother. And it follows the stories of one woman, primarily

Jeannie Whitehorse and another person, Yvonne Swan, who have actually interviewed for the Red Nation podcast and talks about how, you know, entire generations of Indian women, indigenous women in this time period had been forcefully sterilized. Jeannie was herself sterilized, so too was a vaughn. And so there was these elements of, you know, education, health. And then the third one was housing. The American Indian movement founded one of the first urban Indian housing boards, as well as one of the first urban Indian health boards.

And part of the housing board was to actually create an urban Indian like, you know, low-income housing unit and that became little earth in Minneapolis, which still exists today, right? And so it was an effort to provide affordable housing for Indian families who moved off the reservation. And the final aspect, especially in the Minneapolis area of this, was employment. So the employment, this is something that often, you know, kind of gets lost within the larger history of the American Indian movement. But the American Indian movement was one of the best and still remains to the best labor rights activists for labor rights organizations in Minneapolis to get Indian people employed or to advocate on their behalf.

And so they actually created what is called the Legal Rights Center to advocate for or against discrimination in the workplace or in the health fields or in housing. And this was a, you know, this was a very interesting kind of incubator for a lot of civil rights lawyers and a lot of, you know, contemporary politicians who have a lot to say right now in the George Floyd protest. So like Keith Ellison, who's the attorney general of Minnesota and who's actually prosecuting Derek Chauvin, the white cop who killed George Floyd and those three other cops that were with him, he's the, he's prosecuting those officers, but he himself was a former director of this organization.

this legal rights organization that the American Indian movement founded. So there's, you know, that's kind of like the on the ground community organizational work that they did. And I believe Clyde Belcourt calls it the damn hard work that doesn't get recognized. And so I want to say that up front that this is like the kind of, you know, the unsexy work. You know, the stuff that doesn't really make headlines, but actually, you know, you know, to use Gramsci's phrase and talking about how history is made, lots of people, lots of revolutionaries, want to be the plow, right? They want to break the ground in the soil, but nobody wants to be

the fertilizer of history, right? And that actually makes the soil rich in nutrients so that plants can grow generation and generation, right? And so aim was both of those things. It was the soil, it was the soil and the seeds as well as the plow. And I think that's important. It's an aspect of the American Indian movement that often goes unrecognized. Yeah, absolutely, beautifully said. At this time too. We were talking two years after the official formation of the Black Panther Party and the same year that the Young Lords, which we have an upcoming episode on, formed as well in 1968. And there's a lot of communist, socialist, militant, nationalist ideas in all these different organizations at this time. So I'm curious as to what the ideology of aim insofar as it

had one, what it was during its sort of founding and directly afterward. Did it see itself as as a communist org, as a socialist org, or not at all. Was it informed by those things? I'm just trying to get an idea of the ideology here. Yeah, I would say it wasn't. I would say initially it was concerned more with what it understood as civil rights at the very beginning, but it was, I think, the tactics that it employed within the city of Minneapolis and then later elsewhere, you know, directly confronting power. It changed and it shifted. I would say that most it understood that you know most indigenous people have kind of an organic anti-colonialism not so much you know because we live in a settler colonial society that there isn't a natural affinity

between you know poor whites and poor Indians and in certain workplaces because of racism but also more importantly because of colonialism and one of the things that you'll find in a lot of literature of, you know, of the time period is that while they were sympathetic and allied to like, you know, organizations like the Black Panther Party for self-defense, they said that what the Black Panther Party lacked and it had nothing to do with Marxism, but was a full understanding of the settler state and how it had colonized indigenous lands. And it didn't mean that they worked against them. And in fact, you know, in the early years of the American Indian movement in Minneapolis, they worked hand in hand with, you know, a handful of Black Panther Party members. And it didn't mean. And in the city itself. And so I would say that it didn't, at moments in time, it didn't necessarily eschew communist or socialist thinking, but it didn't necessarily embrace them either. And I can talk a little bit at the end towards the divisions, you know, when we're talking about the divisions and the fractures that arose within the organization, that this itself

became a dividing line, right? And so it's also important to remember that, like, people. like Dennis Banks later on in his life, you know, openly identified as a, as a socialist. But other, you know, other such as, you know, Russell Means was openly anti-Marxist and anti-communist. But at the very beginning, it was more organized around sovereignty because that was a word that, you know, we say, we hear it all the time. I'm sure, you know, even non-native people hear what sovereignty is. But at that time, it was a bad word. word. It was something, you know, that created a lot of consternation amongst tribal leaders

themselves. And, you know, they were actually actively opposed to it. And there was a bumper sticker that AIM had that was called, you know, it just said, aim for sovereignty. And all the AIM members, you know, headed on their, on their, their cars. And, you know, when they went on the trailer broken treaties, you know, that's how they identified their, the friendly cars in the, in the caravan were, you know, this bumper sticker and at one of the events these tribal governments had formed this organization called the National Tribal Chairman's Association specifically to oppose the American Indian Movement actually took that bumper sticker in front in a news conference while the American Indian Movement was in Washington, D.C. and later took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters,

took that bumper sticker and ripped it in half. And they said, this is what we think of your sovereignty, right? And so it's important to remember, like, you know, as much as I would like aim to be, you know, left organization, you know, organized around these things is less important than the actual material conditions that they were, they were confronting, right, in that moment in time. Yeah, definitely. So, so not so much any, you know, political ideology, but really centered on sovereignty, on self-determination and a advanced critique of settler colonialism. Exactly. So what were some of the actions that AIM engaged in over the years? Some of them were really, really impressive.

And as I said earlier, incredibly sort of militant. And what other organizations did AIM work with? I'm just trying to get a feel for how they actually operated in the world and who allied with them at different times. The first actions that really launched, you know, besides like the community patrols, the AIM patrols, and these survival schools that they created, the ones that really galvanized,

the indigenous communities was the takeover of Bureau of Indian Affairs offices. And I think the first one that really launched AIM on the map was the takeover of the Denver office of the BIA. And then they realized, they're like, wow, people will listen to us if we take shit over. And so they started doing that, you know. And, you know, that became a common tactic. There was like dozens of them that happened throughout the country. I think.

And this was this like pulled in leadership like, you know, Dennis Banks. you know, there was, excuse me, Russell Means, not Dennis Banks, but there was a BIA office in Cleveland, Ohio, because that was a relocation center. And that's actually where Russell Means really became politicized, you know, and I think he became introduced the American Indian movement through these series of BIA office occupations. And so this really put the American Indian movement on the map. And they, you know, they sat around like, well, if we can get the attention of these administrators, these colonial administrators, and most of these BIA occupations,

they were for very kind of like simple demands, as we would understand them today, even though while they're advocating for the abolition of the BIA in general, they were saying like, well, you're an Indian organization or you're an Indian office, right? Why don't you employ Indian people, right? And so that was their demand.

You know, we want you to hire X amount of Indian people to run this or we want all Indian people to run this, And so they figured, okay, this is a really good way to get attention and to advocate our demands. They had no real on-the-ground role, I would say, in the occupation of Alcatraz, but nevertheless provided a lot of support to the Indians of all nations that had taken up the Alcatraz kind of movement. And people like Madonna Thunderhawk, who later becomes in the leadership of the American Indian movement, she was politicized. he was at Alcatraz and was politicized, you know, there. So too was John Trudel, the poet. He began, like, I believe, you know, it's claimed that it was the first Indian run radio station, right?

And I want to take a little bit of a step back for a second because I'm using terminology that people might be confused by. They're like, I don't want anybody to think they can go out and start calling us Indians. But I'm using it because it's the language that was used at that particular time. And even when they were trying to come up with a name for the American Indian movement, that was a point of contention because a lot of people found Indian offensive. And there was an AIM member named Alberta Downwind, one of the founding AIM members who said, listen, you know, Indian is the word they use to oppress us. Indian is the word we'll use to gain our freedom. And so that's why I'm using it in this context. And I advise nobody to use it in public unless you're an indigenous person.

person. And, you know, nobody called each other indigenous at that moment in time. It's something that was really a product of the movement, not just the A movement, but the Red Power movement. So the American Indian movement recognized the power of the media and the power of occupation, right? And so it got together with a whole host of different organizations. So in 1972 as, you know, the war in Vietnam intensified a very full-throated treaty movement had crystallized. And, you know, the American Indian movement wasn't like at the center of it. You know, you still had the organizers from the National Indian Youth Council, those who had, you know, fought and died in the fission struggles in the northwest coming together, but also

you had a militancy that had, that was, I would say, in some ways, a little bit more. radical in the Canadian context than in the US context, really coming together. So you had like organizations like the American Indian Movement, the National Indian Youth Council, the Canadian National Indian Brotherhood, among others. And it's important to note out that the Canadian National Brotherhood, Indian Brotherhood was in some ways further along in the sense of like it had existed for a longer period of time prior to the American Indian movement. But it was also, you know, making international connections. And I encourage everyone to read this book by George Manuel called The Fourth World.

And the introduction by Glenn Colthard really explains, like, the internationalism of the Canadian Indian Brotherhood, as well as other organizations in Canada. And so I don't, I don't want to, like, go without saying that this is important as well. It's also really fascinating to have a Canadian organization teaming up with the U.S.-based organization. like the American Indian movement to organize a mass caravan to Washington, D.C., in what became known as the Trail of Broken Treaties. And there was a Dakota activist named Hank Adams, and everyone should go look them up.

His work is really phenomenal. He was never American Indian movement, but he was adjacent to, right? He was also really good friends and collaborators with Vine Deloria Jr., the late Dakota thinker and scholar. and he drafted or at least, you know, came up with this idea called the 20 points. And as an organizer from the Red Nation, our 10-point program is based both on the Black Panther Party for South Defense's 10-point program as well as the 20-point program of the

Trail of Broken Treaties. And the first point is to reestablish treaty relations with the United States government. And that's an incredibly important point. This is a turning point for the American Indian movement at this time as well, because it really, it really kind of crystallizes that sovereignty claim and that claim for self-determination in nationhood, right? These were bad words, like to be a nation, to be a nation was to be illegal, to be a nation, you know, was to be against U.S. Empire. And so these were radical things that they were saying because in 1871, the United States arbitrarily or rather arbitrarily abolished treaty making with indigenous people. moving them into the Department of Interior under the grant administration and then beginning a process of consolidating, you know, the tribes and two prisoners of war camps and also not recognizing them as fully sovereign nations anymore. So that was an incredibly important point. The rest of those points became the foundations for what we now know as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. So if you look that up, you'll see you'll see a lot of the similar language. But it's important. to remember that this thing, you know, it wasn't just for show, it wasn't just for, you know,

media attention, but they actually had a plan. They had a plan that these 20 points were 20 points of legislation that the United States had to adopt to make it right for indigenous people, right? So they show up to Washington, D.C., and, you know, they demand a meeting with the president, and there's a lot of confusion about how that whole thing was supposed to happen. And you can read, you can read Like a Hurricane by Paul Chatsmith and Robert Warrior, where they detail the kind of the miscommunication that had happened, but also just the unwillingness of the Nixon administration to meet with this rowdy group of native people. So they showed up to Washington, D.C.

They had expected that there was going to be housing for them because there's thousands of people that had showed up. and they you know they ended up just sleeping the night or spending the night in an episcopal church where you know a lot of civil rights activists used and they were just like frustrated and they're like what the hell man like we have like a building here that's for us right you know and it was the bureau of indian affairs and so they get this idea that we're like well if the president won't meet with us Nixon won't meet with us Nixon didn't want to meet with them because it was an election year right it was leading up to November and they planned to occupy why

Washington, D.C. until November in the election to make Nixon uphold his kind of like his commitments to indigenous people. And so they go there and, you know, they take over, they basically storm the Bureau of Indian Affairs building. They take it over. They're not armed like whatsoever at this point in time. But the, you know, J. Edgar Hoover had done a really good job mobilizing his goons with the FBI to discredit AIM before they came into town. And that's why, that's why they suspect that there was such a hostile reception to this indigenous caravan that had come to town. And so at this moment in time, as early as 1972, there's already hints of Coenelle Pro's influence, not just within the organization itself, but also a counterintelligence

in a smear campaign against AIM as these unruly militants. And so the American Indian movement primarily, you know, leads this occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters. and, you know, declares itself an Indian embassy that will now establish relations with the United States government. Of course, that really pissed off a lot of Indian leaders who, you know, the FBI flew out to discredit them. And this was a common tactic.

And it still is a common tactic today. But they flew them out to discredit them. And that's where the ripping of the aim bumper happened. But eventually, you know, leading up to, I think it was after the election, the elections happened. And, you know, Nixon was elected. And AIM kind of had lost. the moral high ground, but they didn't want to leave the office, and they wanted like a strategic retreat. So they secured several tens of thousands of dollars to give out to people for gas money

to return home. In the meantime, they rented a bunch of U-Haul trucks and just stole the shit out of a bunch of Bureau of Indian Affair archives, which actually led to evidence that was used in several court cases around Indian claims. And so they did all that. And there's all these stories. They hit it in places like in Lumby territory in North Carolina, right? Because Lumby people aren't a federally recognized tribe. And the FBI was so stupid and racist that they didn't believe that Lumby's were actually indigenous people that still existed. So they hit a lot of these archives in like North Carolina and all over the country. But they became evidence that scholars like, you know, bindeloria used in his polemics or they became evidence

that was used in court cases against the American Indian movement itself. And so by this time, the American India movement, you know, had kind of established itself as a national organization. And they were also working with this other organization called United Native Americans. You know, Lee Brightman had headed that up. It was founded in the Bay Area. And there was a lot of affinity and crossover. They cooperated in leading an occupation on Mount Rushmore for quite some time. and we're like steps away from actually defacing that defilement itself, that abomination of

genociders and slave owners. But so there was a lot of this kind of, you know, cooperation with other indigenous organizations and there was, you know, there was a lot of antagonisms as well. But more importantly, AIM had established itself as the organization and that essentially can't be stopped, right? And we'll do things that other organizations won't do. And so the, you know, there were some, some of the folks in Pine Ridge, Indian Reservation, had heard of the American Indian movement. And so in February of 1972, as you know, it's really cold as hell in the winter, in the northern plains.

And so there was four white men, Melvin and Leslie Hare, Bernard Lutter, and Robert Bayliss. They kidnapped a 51-year-old Oglala elder named Raymond Yellow Thunder. They stripped him naked, beat him and forced him to dance as a drunk Indian for the entertainment of whites in a dance hall and basically left him to die in Gordon, Nebraska. And he was found several days later in a pickup truck. The circumstances of his death, you know, kind of remained mysterious to this day. They are not quite sure what actually led to his death if he died of exposure or the injuries that he had sustained at the hands of these four. white men and this is something that you know we call in the kind of indigenous vernacular or indigenous understanding border town violence right these white dominated settlements because that's what

there are you know every every city and town in this country is a colonial settlement right premised on the dispossession and genocide of indigenous people Omaha and some of them are a little bit nefarious like Omaha right it actually takes the name of the people that dispossessed and genocided. Exactly. But in all, you know, in these particular rural small white towns, right, that are bordering reservations, there's a lot of violence. And so Raymond Yellow Thunder became kind of a symbol of, you know, broader discrimination

and genocidal violence against indigenous people. And this is something I write quite extensively about in my, in my book, but also as part of a research collective known as the border town violence research group, we're coming out with the book next year called Red Nation Rising that details a lot of the kind of dynamics and has an anti-capitalist, a critique of, an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial critique of border town economies themselves. But it's here that, you know, white society, white settler society encounters the quote-unquote drunk Indian, right? Or, you know, criminalizes the drunk Indian, right? Because those two, it's always paired. It's not just being drunk. It's also being Indian, right? Those two

things are always always paired up in you can look at contemporary examples such as the the police slaying of somebody like zachary bear hills in omaha right he was he was diagnosed after he died of killing himself he was they literally made some shit up and said that he had died of excited delirium and killed himself and what is excited delirium it's like when somebody has quote unquote supernatural strength and aggressive behavior that's often caused by taking or ingesting drugs. And as we know, he didn't do any of those things, right? And the cops literally caught on camera, beating him over the head, tasing him several, several times.

I mean, just disgusting rhetoric after the fact. Yeah, and the practice of that is, you know, part of this notion or this practice of Indian rolling that not only cops participate in, right, because they say, oh, go back to the reservation, right? oh he doesn't belong here you know this zachary bear hills doesn't belong here get his mom on the phone let's get them the fuck out of here instead of like being like this guy's a human being who needs help right that's always been the mentality of white society or settler society to indigenous people and so settlers themselves become arms of the state when they enact the vigilante violence and i would

say you know it happens to other groups of people especially in the form of lynching of of black folks in like the the kind of post-reconstruction era and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, which continues on to this day. But for indigenous people, there's a specific notion of like spatiality that Indians don't belong off the reservation and that they must be policed or killed.

And so this is what, you know, the American Indian movement had kind of been doing already in Minneapolis, right? They've been challenging the cops. They're actually like fighting back. And they also created one of these things. this is something that also doesn't get talked about but if you read the memoirs of like

Clyde Belcourt or Dennis Banks or Russell Means they talk about these red ribbon grand juries and I love that name but these were like people's tribunals that they would set up and you know the American Indian movement in Minneapolis had been doing it for several years where like okay let's say

you know a superintendent creates harsh you know rules for suspending native children who, you know, speak their language or, you know, wear their hair long in classes or, like, there's an incidence of racial discrimination against native children in the classroom by a teacher or by a student, the red ribbon, you know, grand jury will convene a tribunal and call that superintendent or, you know, the school board to that tribunal. They'll subpoena them and they say, you're going to stand trial and be judged by the Indian community, right? And they'd create a little, you know, tribunal and say like, you know, this is what you have to do.

They would actually subpoena like the chief of police or the mayor sometimes. And even though, you know, there was, it was symbolic. It had quite a bit of meaning. And actually, you know, this is a side note. I actually saw one of these happen. When I was at the University of South Dakota finishing my undergrad, there was an assault, a sexual assault on campus. And the, you know, the assailant was identified as a Native American man.

And that's the only thing they ever said. And so they put up all these wanted posters of this like native, this like poorly drawn Native American man. And it was like it was just racist, right? It was like a like a complete form of racism and just discrimination like as if, you know, if he was white, would you just like, you know, make a generic like white description of a white man on campus? And there was a lot of, you know, people were pissed off and Vermilion is not a big city, right? Yeah. And so somebody's uncle, you know, was in the movement. and they call them up and then they have this red ribbon grand jury

and like we were you know as a native student there weren't very many of us on campus we were just like frankly like scared we didn't know what was happening you know with the cops and shit and you know we and so when aim we heard aim was coming to town we're like yeah they're going to finally do something and they showed up to the university of south dakota campus and they had one of these red ribbon grand juries and it was one of the most empowering things to see because you know you're marginalized within you know and this was like in the early this was in the 2000s like you're marginalized on campus you don't have any group to advocate for you Clyde Belcourt showed up and they created this little platform for them where they

all stood like as if they were sitting in judgment on the university and they called forward the president of the university they called forward all the like administrators and just chewed their asses and it was a huge I mean even like it was just a It just scared the shit out of them, right? And I witnessed that power, and that's what AIM was doing. That's what they did with Raymond Yellow Thunder. Had they not showed up with their big drum, you know, getting people to actually give a shit about native people's lives, those men who killed Raymond Yellow Thunder would have never been prosecuted, right? And so that was a huge psychological win for people like that lived in the Pine Ridge, India.

reservation is like these guys actually mean what they say you know and so they got they started recruiting on the reservation um they set up camp in in uh rapid city uh south dakota they formed a survival school in rapid city they began their own border town campaign against the rapid city the racist as rapid city police department who's still racist racist as shit i don't know any of you the listeners listen to it i lived there for quite a long time like i'm like i am a white passing native person living in the southwest but when I go home I'm a big Indian that gets pulled over all the time and so I'm always reminded I'm always put in my place when I return home that like you know like that I am you know that I'm an Indian person and I can't just walk around freely

as much as I want but down here it's like a different kind of racial dynamic right I'm just they just think I'm a tall Mexican with my last name but I'm constantly reminded as I go back home in a place like Rapid City, which is in the heart of the center of the Lakota and Dakota universe in Hesapa, which is the Black Hills, right? And so they created, you know, an organization there that was doing food distribution. There was a really nasty flood that wiped out the poor district of Rapid City, which included poor white people next to poor Indian people. And there was a lot of racial discrimination that happened in the kind of post-disaster fallout of that. I detail a lot of that in my book. And also I have a chapter I can share with you or whoever, if folks want to listen or

to read more about the urban indigenous experience in Rapid City. So they were up there doing work, you know, just feeding people trying to get like one neighborhood, which is now, which was called Sioux Sand Edition, actually hooked up to running water because at the time the city refused to hook up sewage and water and electricity to this settlement, this indigenous settlement that was kind of sitting outside of the city. So they advocated for those kinds of things, right? And around this, you know, the same time, there was, you know, there was the incident that happened with Wesley Bad Hartball who was murdered at a bar in Buffalo Gap. And this really like was like, you know, things were just piling up at this moment in time. You had somebody like,

Bill Janklow, who was the attorney general of the state of South Dakota, who was like, ran on an anti-indigenous, anti-AIM platform. He was elected because white people were like, this guy's the most racist. Let's elect him, much like they elect, you know, Christy Gnome today. But so there is this growing kind of like reaction and backlash from the white community at this moment in time. And so when Wesley Bouthert Bull was murdered and stabbed in the heart in this bar, AIM showed up, right? They contacted the Wesley Bouthert Boll's mother, and they said, you know, we're going to go in here. And I believe they weren't even like, I can't remember the exact charges, but they weren't going to charge him with like manslaughter. And so AIM with his mother showed up to the courthouse in Custer because that was, you know, that's the county seat, showed up to Custer of all places, right?

named after, you know, the leader of the 7th Calvary who we made famous by killing him in 1876. Otherwise, he would have just disappeared from the, you know, the annals of history. So they show up to Custer. And they originally just wanted them to increase the charges, you know, and have a trial by, trial by peers, which mean, you know, having Indian people who are elected to the jury, all those kinds of things. And so it wasn't like extreme. demands, but the response from the state or the county itself was extreme. They sent all these white officers. They ended up, like, you know, beating the mother of Wesley Bad Heart Bowl, who's, like, you know, in mourning of her son getting murdered. And then a whole confrontation ensues where

the cops and AIM members are eating each other up in the courtroom, punching each other, kicking each other. There's all this, like, you know, wonderful archival footage. They start like a cop car on fire, they're throwing Molotov cocktails at the courthouse. There's lots of fires and arsons that are happening. I believe several buildings are burned down and they arrest like hundreds of aim members and then haul them, including Wesley Baddard Bull's mother, and they haul them off to Rapid City and jail them there in the Pennington County Jail. Since its founding in 1968, the American Indian movement had been divisive.

Its militant tactics, controversial even among native people. Created in Minneapolis by young urban Indians fed up with police harassment, the group had shown a knack for generating publicity. Members had seized high-profile symbols, Plymouth Rock, the Mayflower, Mount Rushmore, and in November 1972 had occupied and vandalized the Washington headquarters of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Weeks later in early 1973, AIM took its campaign into the reservation border towns of South Dakota. In those days, there was a tremendous amount of racism,

especially in the border towns around the reservations. I mean, real racism, where Indians are practically invisible. There was towns you didn't drive through, didn't go through, especially women. You didn't walk down. street of any border town by yourself because you'd be accosted by any white man that felt like it just weeks before the occupation of wounded knee a white man killed an indian near custer south dakota 50 miles from pine ridge when local officials charged him with manslaughter

not murder 200 angry aim protesters came to town and you charge a white man Premeditated murder, you're judging with second-degree manslaughter. And we ain't going for it anymore. And I know this whole damn town is an armed camp. Hey, listen, white man, I have had all the bullshit from your race as I can take. When police barred them from entering the courthouse, A-members forced their way in. Just as we walked in through the door, then we were attacked by law enforcement. We were fighting and they come at maybe with the night sticks,

so I blocked it and took it away and started using it on them. I know I was right on the steps, you know, and things were happening, we bloodied the guy, we took the helmet away, we bled him up. blooding them up. Then I ran across to help get gas from the film station. We're filling up, making Molotov cocktails and busting the bottles on the building and the fire

and it just started on the wall and everything. Protesters set the courthouse ablaze and left Custer in shambles. There was absolutely an element in name that considered itself a revolutionary organization who were comfortably

around guns, who absolutely love the idea of AIM being outlaws, who just wanted to get it on. The confrontation in Custer caught the attention of the Oblala dissidents on Pine Ridge. Three weeks later, when their campaign to impeach Dick Wilson failed, they asked AIM for help. Calling an AIM is attractive, but it's a roll of the dice. It's roll of the dice because where aim goes, chaos often follows so that when those traditional chiefs bring in aim, they're doing this in full knowledge that as they go down the road, they don't know exactly what's going to happen. That really, like, shocked the state of South Dakota.

The state of South Dakota is like, holy shit, we have to take these guys seriously. We need to create a task force. And so around this time, as, you know, the cointel, the FOIA documents from the FBI reveal, the state of South Dakota was working with the FBI at this moment in time and creating like a counterinsurgency campaign against the American Indian movement, expecting them, you know, to move eventually into the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation where there was a lot of conflict between the grassroots organizers and the elected tribal council under the leadership. of Dick Wilson and Dick Wilson had taken, you know, what was once an 18-person council that represented all the districts and regions of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and consolidated it into five council members. And, you know, many people saw this as like closing or him clenching the fist of authoritarian kind of like rule within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation against the, you know, what we're called, what, you know, this word isn't without its own problems,

the traditionalists, right? That people who were. dedicated to that traditional way of life and governance that was based on clan system and like free affinity according to political organizing and the clan you know the clan based election system and it's too complicated to get into this podcast interview but suffice it to say it was very much represented by the the kind of the treaty what we now know is the treaty councils or the spiritual leaders of the pine ridge indian reservation and in by and large it was led by women, actually, people like Regina Brave, who was actually at Standing Rock. She was the last person to be arrested at Standing Rock, if you remember those images.

Regina Brave and people like Gladys Bissinette, and those two specifically were like very militant. Like, you know, Regina Brave would just go to bars in Rapid City just to kick the shit out of white cowboys who were known to rape Indian women, right? and so these people were like fearless in many ways and so they you know they saw this um the power of the american indian movement and that they were willing to you know really fight for the people and not just like in a in a kind of like symbolic way where we're going to hold a march and rally but really you know like punch people in the nose if it if it came down to it so the month that

the american indian movement really was raising hell in place like rapid city It was in 1973, right? A year after the Wesley Badhart murder and the Raymond Yellow Thunder murder. So in 1973 in February, there was an organization, as I said, that was led by people like Ellen Moose Camp or Gladys Bissinette and Regina Brave called the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Commission. And it was a grassroots organization made up of traditional leaders. And they got together and saw what AIM was doing. And so they called upon AIM to come to the reservation,

to take a stand. And at this moment in time, we now know, and it was also admitted by several of the members of the Goon Squad, the Guardians of the Oglala Nation, which is basically like a paramilitary organization that worked on behalf of Dick Wilson and the tribal government at that time.

We now know that they were being armed and in some instances trained by the FBI and the military. So they were getting armor-piercing rounds from, you know, the FBI's co-intel program, but then also, you know, these rounds were military grade. And so there was a connection to the military as well. And so the question was like, you know, in several of these interviews, you can watch them. There's been multiple documentaries made

about the American Indian movement. But one of the interviews that I can recall, there was a goon squad member who was talking about how he got these armor piercing rounds. And they were like, well, why would you need them if like aim was only armed with, you know, broken shotguns? and like, you know, a handful of rifles, hunting rifles. Literally, like, taped up rifles and shit. Yeah. And, like, even, I don't want to get into it now, but even the AK-47 didn't work. It was just a souvenir rifle.

And that became, like, the symbol of the wounded knee occupation, right? Yeah. And so they asked them, you know, the interview asked them, and he's just like, well, he's like, it wasn't about, it wasn't about shooting through armor. It was actually about shooting through houses, right? Yeah. And shooting into buildings and bunkers. and so there you know there was a direct coordination with the dick wilson and the the goons the guardians of oglala nation to you know crush the to terrorize and to crush this opposition movement that was growing and it's important to remember that these things are really complicated on the ground and so i'm giving you all like a simplified version for the sake of time but you know they were like this is and they say like oh these were the mixed breeds um

versus like the full bloods. And it's not actually quite that simple because some families were AIM and Goon, right? So it wasn't quite like, you know, clear like red and white, you know, to use that phrase. So this Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Commission called on AIM on February 27, 1973, in a late night meeting in Calico, which is like a small village in Pine Ridge. and the sort of customary chiefs of the Oglala nation, Red Cloud, Iron Cloud, Fools Crow, Bad Cobb, and Killsenemy, met with the American Indian movement and these traditional people and that deliberated about what was to be done.

And to be honest, from the oral histories that exist of this meeting, the women were like, the women like Gladys Bissinette and Ellen Moves Camp, were the ones who actually had the idea for an occupation of Wundini itself and like they were the ones who were demanding action being taken it wasn't it wasn't Dennis Banks

it wasn't you know the men it wasn't Russell Means it was actually these women pleading with them to take a stand and Moves Camp got up and said you know where are men where are defenders and these these these pleas really worked on people like you know Clyde Bell Car at Russell Means, Fools Crow, to take warriors to the hamlet of Wounded Knee, the site of the 1890

massacre at the hands of the vengeful Seventh Calvary, Custer's former unit. And so AIM would make a stand there for life and liberation of all indigenous people. It wasn't just a kind of parochial kind of, you know, oh, this is just for Lakota people. Because at this time, you know, AIM was made up of all kinds of different indigenous people from all over the world, to be frank. So the FBI, you know, is, is trailing the American Indian movement from all these actions and, you know, from one place to the next. And so it's important to kind of go through, like, this is like really where, you know, a co-intel pro kind of like rears its head at the wounded knee occupation. There was, you know, even if you watch some of the archival

footage when they would have meetings in Wounded Knee, they would actually stop the meeting because they knew that somebody in Wounded Knee was an FBI informant because the things that they would say and plan to do would then be leaked out to the U.S. Marshals and the FBI who were surrounding the place and they would know what they were doing. And so there's some archival footage where they were like, you know, they're actually calling people out in the crowd, whether it's warranted or not for being federal agents. That's the point to sow that paranoia and confusion. Exactly.

Yeah. Exactly. And, you know, according to an internal memo that was issued in 1967 from Kontelpro, entitled Counterintelligence Program Against Black Nationalist Hate Groups. The program stated goal was, quote, to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralized, targeted groups and their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to count the propensity for violence and civil disorder. Really beautiful language right there. Very evocative. and so this is what they were doing at this time you know at this time they were they understood this was going on they had somebody on the inside or at least were you know they were tapping the phones at the very least and so the 71 day takeover ensues uh there's a lot of consternation about the the use of firearms uh fools crew actually in some of his you know memoirs and interviews as well as with other aim members was actually against the use of weapons uh you know there was a this was a burgeoning kind of spiritual movement as well and there was conflicts about if one carries the pipe can one carry a gun in the other hand you know and so he was because he's like you know the statement that he had made he's like and they had a long conversation because when the warriors showed up they were all armed and there's these really beautiful images of them coming on to a wounded knee and they did it you know in kind of like a really quick and improvised fashion because at that point too they also knew that they were under surveillance and And if they gave any lead to the FBI, which had stationed itself in the Bureau of Indian Affairs

headquarters in Pine Ridge town, the town itself, they didn't, you know, they probably wouldn't be successful. And so they were expecting an occupation of the tribal headquarters, which is in Pine Ridge. And they were actually meeting in Calico, which is near Oglala, there's a small little village to the west of Pine Ridge. And they actually drove through Pine Ridge to get to. two wounded knee in this large caravan and all, you know, they're all like these goons, these, you know, the BIA, they're all ready for a firefight and they're just like seeing

these cars pass and they don't know what's going on. They're ready for them to take over the building and then they just leave town. And they're like, what the heck? So then they start heading north towards wounded knee and then they take over the village there. And, you know, at that time there was only one store and it was run by the gilder sleeves. And, you know, there's various accounts about the gilder sleeves relationship to the community itself. I think in wounded knee, there's, you know, several hundred people, but there's like, I believe there's like seven churches or something like that. And so the gilder sleeves, you know, were positioned right next to this church.

They had a grocery store. They were also kind of a creditor within the community. Some people say they were very mean. Other people say that they, you know, because the wife herself was from Turtle Mountain. so she was indigenous so they say that they had relationships but nonetheless when AIM came there they found all of these pond ceremonial items that were in glass cases you know and they liberated them um they liberated them according to themselves but according to the FBI you know they caused two million dollars in property damage right or whatever and so they

took over the grocery store and that became kind of the the food source for the you know the first couple of weeks and they didn't have like a long-term plan to begin with and you know i'll kind of cut short like what the you know the events of that particular occupation for the sake of time but they you know they didn't know how long they were going to be there but i guess you know the important thing is on march eighth nineteen seventy three american indian movement alongside the traditional leadership and spiritual leaders of the ogloala nation declared the independent Oglala nation and declared independence from the United States and, you know, said that their operating authority had its origins within the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which recognized

the sovereignty and independence of, you know, the quote-unquote Great Sioux Nation or the Ochetti Chalkhomi, the Lakota, Dakota, Dakota-speaking people. And so this was a huge thing, not just for the American Indian movement, but for indigenous people, the Ocetti-Shakomi specifically, because a decade earlier, the Ocheti Shakoi had chosen the path of reform and voting and had ran this massive voting campaign to basically vote against termination within the state of South Dakota, right? And so this was a, this was kind of like one year we're like voting against, you know, being terminated legally the next decade, we're declaring independence from the United States, right? It's quite a, quite a sweep of history. So it meant quite a

quite a lot to a lot of people. It really drew the ire of the federal government, U.S. Marshals and FBI agents surrounded the wounded knee church and fired millions of rounds of ammunition into the church itself. It's important to remember, like, again, that these people were not in the inside were not armed with, you know, anything but like hunting rifles in some instances or shotguns. They didn't have, they couldn't match the firepower of the United States government. But what they understood is that they had the power of the media. And so they would sneak, you know, CBS reporters, all kinds of reporters. There was actually a Soviet reporter who was there for a while embedded within,

causing all kinds of like suspicions that this was some kind of communist plot. Inside the village, the protesters had their own military operation, led by Indians trained by the government that they now took up arms against. There was a lot of people there that had been in Vietnam, and a lot of people had just been in the military. Some, older people had come in, and they'd actually been in Korea. They knew how to give orders. They knew how to take orders, and they knew how to do things that they didn't have to be told twice.

I knew we were making history for our people. It didn't all happen in the 1800s. We're still fighting in the modern day. I mean, that's how I felt that it was a continuation, and that's why I was not afraid. I was not afraid. In the 19th century, the Lakota fought furiously to defend their territory against relentless American expansion. In 1868, embattled Lakota chiefs signed the Fort Laramie Treaty to protect more than 30 million acres of their land.

But the United States soon reneged and forced the Lakota onto small, desolate reservations. Americans like to think that American Indian history is something in the past. I'm one generation removed from the genocide of my tribe. And every tribe in this country has a time of horror. I'm in a time of absolute horror when they were confronted by this invader. And some happened almost 500 years ago. But as they come across the plains, our time of horror came in the late 1800s, and we remember it very well. In the frigid winter of 1890, Chief Bigfoot was leading a group of Lakota, mainly women and children, to shelter on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

On the morning of December 29th, they were attacked by the U.S. Army on the banks of Wounded Knee Creek. My great-grandmother is Katie Warbonnet. She was a survivor at Wounded Knee. When the shooting broke out, she and her sister got Kikshanui, ran down into the ravine and made it to some plum bushes. And she could hear the firing and the firing and hollering. And then finally it was quiet. More than 300 Lakota people lay dead.

After remaining untouched in the ice and snow for three days, they were buried in a mass grave. The massacre would mark the brutal end of centuries of armed Indian resistance. For those who came nearly a hundred years later, wounded knee was sacred land. I walked over to a gully and I picked up some sage and I went to wash myself and I prayed to those ancestors

that were there in that gully and I said we're back we'll return my relations we belong This is where the television crews await the hour-by-hour events in Wounded Knee. This privileged position is protected by the Indian chiefs. Clearly the chiefs are anxious that this rebellion and its outcome receive as much publicity as possible. been very simple for the federal forces to go into Wounded Knee and take over. There would have

been some casualties, but probably the government would have considered them tolerable. What made it so interesting was that the Indians existed underneath a protective bubble of publicity and shame, because everybody knew that this was the site of the last massacre of the Indian wars. And the last thing the government wanted to see was a massacre on the same. same site. One week into the siege, all three television networks had stationed reporters in wounded knee. Polls estimated that more than 90% of Americans were following the crisis on the nightly news.

If they came and killed all of us, it would be recorded and it would be seen by the world, where the 1890 massacre wasn't. And if they didn't, if they decided that that media was there, so they don't want to murder all of us, well then the media is there to tell our side of the story. They wanted this stoic, you know, American Indian man with a gun. America's picture of the Indian, we didn't care as long as the word was getting out. After 37 days of conflict with the authorities federal, There was a lot of folks here.

A lot of foreign press were here. And he made it out to be kind of a cowboy Indian adventure, you know. More people wanted confrontation. That seemed to attract the viewers. You guys get up so tight and start panicking, and you get down on the press. And we want them to film this bullshit. They all heard him fire first with that autumn to open up.

with automatic weapons. We've got to get that film. We've got 22s in our hand against APCs. So don't be jumping on a press. The Justice Department. The news out of South Dakota held Indians around the country spellbound. Some were ashamed by Ames' armed display of defiance.

But many were inspired. But critical problems remained to be worked out. I left school and I mean another guy left And we drove in his car from, we were in Central California, and we drove up to Oakland. And from Oakland, we drove back to South Dakota. Up until those 73, when it started, I was never involved in anything politically doing with either Native Americans

or any other organization. I just felt like I should go up there, and I did. You all are not Oglala Sue. I'm going to Chip Watt. You're Chippewa, where are you from, Minnesota? What about you, sir? Where are you from? Winnevego, Wisconsin.

Cheyenne, Oklahoma. And you're not necessarily all members of AIM. We didn't say that. Are you members of AIM? We didn't say that either. We're here to support our Indian people. That are you in Rooney Neat. And at the same time, they were making, you know,

declarations and solidarity with the FSLN, the Sandinistas, Carlos Fonseca, the, you know, the Ortega, brothers in Nicaragua or with the IRA and in fact you know this is kind of a side note but I think it's important not to tell history chronologically but through ideas and through movement solidarity throughout time but in fact I was I did an interview with Bill Means who later became the director of the international Indian Treaty Council and it's also the brother of Russell means but he told me this really beautiful story about how when they first went to Nicaragua after the Sandinistas had won the elections, you know, they were in Carlos Fonseca Square.

And if people don't know who Carlos Fonseca is, he was like a big, you know, not only for Sandinistas, but throughout the world and especially for the American Indian movement. He was like a really, he was a revolutionary hero, right? And, you know, so these like, you know, Indians come from North America or from the U.S. You know, down to Nicaragua. They don't know anybody. Nobody speaks Spanish. And they're just kind of like in their motel and they're roaming around.

and the Sandinistas think that they're FBI agents because they're like, oh, they speak English. Well, they're like, find an interpreter. And so they start talking to each other. And they're like, you know, they explain who they are. And they're like, oh, yeah, we're with the American Indian movement. They're like, oh, my God, American Indian movement. Oh, you know, come, come, come, brothers. You know, like, you need to meet all of these people.

And so they met all the, you know, the officials of the San Danesa government, everybody who had been elected and every, they just got this warm welcome driving around in this car and then they went to Carlos Fonseca Square and in the square in one of the exhibits there's a communique that was issued by the American Indian movement during the Wounded Knee occupation in 1973

that stood in solidarity with the Sandinistas who were fighting the Samosa government and that's how much it meant to them right and so this you know this is important later on but also the IRA you know Vernon Belcourt became you know kind of this roving ambassador during the occupation and he did all of these tours you know in europe and elsewhere really promoting the message of what was why wound

knee was important and you know after bobby sands died he actually did he he danced on bobby sand's grave to honor his memory and my wife my partner melani yazi actually went and uh on a delegation as part of the red nation to visit um belfast and she met with some of the comrades who knew Vernon Belcourt and they had pictures of him and he was well recognized and well respected. So here we see the kind of seeds and the formation of this broader social movement that's going beyond just the reservation, right? The siege at Wounded Knee really was the wake-up call for the hemisphere, American Indians in the hemisphere, but it was also a wake-up call for around the world that Indian people had now

entered onto the stage of history once again, right? And so this is the importance of it, and this is why it pissed off the United States government so much and why they responded the way they did. So, you know, it said oftentimes that like the war was brought home. There's a lot of stuff coming out now, you know, which I think is important that, you know, shows that the counterinsurgency tactics that modern day police departments employ against protesters on the street or even political organizations came from the experience of Vietnam. I think what wounded knee proved because it happened during Vietnam is that the war never left

and it never had to come back home again because it was always here to begin with. And if you understand counterinsurgency, if you read the coin manuals from the military itself, they actually begin with international law and the Indian wars, right? And that's not a mistake. they understand that waging war against enemy combatants and non-combatants meant that you had to wage war against an entire population. That's what Indian policy is, right? That's a counter, it's a counterinsurgency doctrine. So what they employed at Wounded Knee was a combined counterinsurgency doctrine of misinformation, counterintelligence, as well as an overt kind of military maneuver.

That was actually found out after Wounded Knee and during the trials against the leadership, the aim leadership. trials. So I want to move on. We could talk about this for hours on end. But suffice it to say that there were two people who were killed inside wounded knee. Frank Clearwater, who was a Cherokee activist as well as Buddy Lamont, whose mother was one of the people, one of the elders at, you know, that Calico meeting that advocated for taking over wounded knee. So he actually, I believe that he was in Vietnam and then came home and was on leave and then got an honorable discharge. I don't know the circumstances,

but went straight to wounded knee after he was discharged from the military. But they were both killed by law enforcement. And, you know, at one point in time, things were looking really dire, especially after the killing of these two individuals. And a lot of the leadership wanted to have a kind of peaceful retreat. And it was actually those same women,

Gladys Bissinet and others who, you know, really shamed them and said, well, go home then. We'll stay here and we'll hold. will hold down, this church will hold down our freedom, right? Because they really were free in that moment in time. So the United States deploys its military, deploys its FBI agents, deploys U.S. Marshal Services combined with paramilitary troops such as the goon squad, alongside of, you know, state troopers who were patrolling the reservation boundaries, making sure Indians weren't coming on or off the reservation, had basically cut off the communications

of the siege itself and you know forced a tactical retreat there was an ongoing spiritual revitalization at this particular time and so they would often use the cover of a ceremony to do to perform like tactics against the u.s. government because they didn't they didn't know you know so like one tactic was they got people out by um pretending to have a ceremony four day ceremony and his teepee um and then leaving under the cover of darkness right um the another tactic was you know Leonard Crowdog who was a spiritual leader at the time of the American Indian movement led people in the cover of darkness after doing a ghost dance ceremony into the fields and like completely ghosting the FBI and this all of this military to this day they don't really understand

how they left and got away with escaping but there were people there who were arrested and it's important to remember that not everybody there was indigenous there were some white There were some white comrades as well, some black relatives who had taken up arms with the American Indian movement and the Oglala people. So after this, you know, a dirty war ensued on the reservation in what became known as the reign of terror were dozens of A members and anyone who was considered sympathetic to the American Indian movement wound up dead. So for example, John Trudell's family was actually burned alive in. you know, his house caught on fire and, you know, was due to arson while he was on a speaking tour. So they killed his entire family. There were, I believe, upwards to 36 unsolved murders on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation during this particular time period. Making it the murder

capital of the country at that time. Exactly. And, you know, like FBI is in charge of investigating these things. While at the same time, you know, waging that war against the American Indian movement itself. And so they don't give, they don't care about these people. And even, even to this day, a lot of tribal leaders will bring up these cases to say like, oh, you want us to do this, you know, oh, you want us to go along with this program, then solve these murders. Because we've been asking you for decades to solve these murders, these 36 people

who have been murdered, you know. And it's still, you know, I want to point that out because these people who are murdered during this time. They weren't Dennis Banks, you know, status or, you know, Clyde Belcourt or Russell mean status. They were just salt of the earth indigenous people who were patriots, you know, and they were poor. And that's, and they shouldn't go unrecognized. And, you know, they should be alongside of anime outquash's murderers as well. And so I always encourage people to look into those 36 murders. I can provide a link with the names in the show notes. So this happened, you know, in the aftermath. And it was a dirty war. It was a.

proxy, you know, a lot of people called it a proxy war between the U.S. government and the American India movement. And so there was a lot of violence that was happening at this particular moment in time. On May 8, 1973, after 71 days, the siege of wounded knee was over. In final talks with the government, AIM leaders agreed to disarm and submit to arrest. But many of the protesters were already making other plans. We asked the medicine man, we said, we want to get out of here. We don't want to leave no weapons here. So he says, we have a ceremony tonight, and we're going to pray.

So we prayed all night long. We sang this American Indian movement song. An honor song, a memorial song. Soon they started getting cloudy. The night evening started raining, wind, rain, so they couldn't shoot the flares. Lots of people walked out. The spirits had a lot to do with it.

The one that brought us out was an hour. And every time he'd hoot in a direction and we'd go that way. And they did it right under the marshal's noses. As the protesters fled wounded knee, a triumphant Dick Wilson toured the remains of the town. Dick, are you surprised at what you're seeing? I expected this.

Why? They're hoodlums, clowns. This is the way they live. Not only was Dick Wilson still firmly in charge, he would exact revenge on his opponents as the federal government looked the other way. The Oglalas don't like what happened. And if the FBI don't get them, the Oglala's will.

We have our own way of punishing people like that. Shooting on the reservation. You said it. We'll take care of them. After Wounded Knee was a period of time. time that the dissidents called the reign of terror. It was a time when Dick Wilson truly unleashed his forces on the folks who had supported Wounded Knee. In the three years following the siege, two FBI agents and more than 60 AIM supporters were killed, giving Pine Ridge

the highest per capita murder rate in the country. As the reservation spiraled into violence, the government went after AIM in the courts. One thing that Wounded Knee gave the federal government an excuse to do was to try to litigate the American Indian movement out of existence. You and your bunch of hoodlums take over down there. You destroy people's property. Within months, more than 500 indictments were brought against AIM members, most on minor charges that were later dismissed.

They succeeded in tying up AIME. in court, and aim at this point, with all those resources going into court, lost its way. So following the end of the occupation itself of Wounded Knee, the takeover of Wounded Knee, there ensued what are known as the AIM leadership trials. And at this particular time, some 65 American Indian movement defendants argued there's hundreds that were rounded up, but 65 of them took the stand against the, the United States government that it lacked criminal jurisdiction

in Ocheti Shakoi, which was guaranteed sovereignty under the 1868 Fort Lairmary Treaty, which is a very bold claim to make in the federal courts, to say the least. But it was a part of a strategy of Wickel Dock, which is an acronym

for the Wounded Knee Legal Defense and Offense Committee. So after they rounded up all the leaders and the wounded, or excuse me, the occupiers, the Woonini occupiers, they tried to really pin these cases and charges on two individuals, Dennis Banks and Russell Means, you know, for better or worse. But the, you know, this is often a tactic that the state uses. It tries to pin, you know, tries to identify leadership

to discredit it. And what's important to remember is that the phrase at the time among American Indian movement women was that men are the jawbone and women are the backbone, right? That the FBI is so racist and sexist that it doesn't believe that women can hold leadership positions. And so they never really went after women. They could just like operate relatively, you know, unnoticed because all the media attention focused on the men themselves and the braids and shades, you know, for better or worse. And so it's important to remember that these leadership trials aren't really reflective of leadership. ship in aim itself. But nonetheless, it became at the time one of the most expensive and

extensive court cases in U.S. histories. The Winnany trials lasted nine months and they cost about $5 million. But it's, you know, it's funny because it's not funny, but it is funny. But the government tried so hard to pin so much, like the most extravagant things on the American Indian movement. that it was actively participating in misconduct during the trials itself themselves. There's a good book called Ghost Dancing the Law that kind of details this, the shenanigans like the prosecutor or the state that FBI would try to pull and like, you know, witness tampering, all these kinds of things. They'd forged documents.

They'd just try everything in the book. And the judge himself was like, y'all are just ridiculous. Like, why do you do this? And ended up having to throw out the case. But there were some important things that came out of these cases. And one of them was, you know, we want to hold, much like the Red Ribbon grand juries, put the United States or put these settler institutions on trial. The Wounded Knee Legal Defense Office Committee wanted to put the United States government on trial. And so there's a really beautiful book called the Great Sun Nation sitting in judgment on the America or the United States, which is edited by Roxanne Dumbartiz, who was a witness to these trials.

but it's a condensed kind of version of the court transcripts of what took place. And so in them, lawyers like bind a lawyer Jr. and others, Ken Tilson, who is prominent aim, you know, legal defense in Minneapolis. And the Tilson family to this day is very prominent within the movement itself. But they wanted to, you know, take up the issue of jurisdiction, criminal jurisdiction, did the United States actually have criminal jurisdiction to enforce its own laws within the Indian Reservation? So they called it the Sue Treaty hearing and not, you know, a defense. They're going to go on the offense. And so they question the efficacy of the United States government and it's, you know, it's imposed kind of jurisdiction on Indian lands and said, well, you know,

we've never ceded sovereignty and that was never a part of these agreements. You don't sign treaty. with domestic dependent nations, right? Even though that's what's codified in your law. And so they use this moment to really dissect the colonial racist nature of U.S. federal Indian law. And I recommend anybody, like, if you think the law is here to save you, like, give me a break. The law has caught as it's codified in the United States is literally based on conquest. And that's what they proved in these hearings.

And that's what, you know, the Supreme Court in John Marshall or under John Marshall, the U.S. Supreme Court justice said that these laws of federal Indian law that were premised on the dispossession of indigenous people were codified within a document known as the doctrine of discovery, which pre-existed, you know, the formation or the idea of the United States, which was a Popple Bull, which basically divided the entire planet, right, not just like the Western Hemisphere, but literally divided the entire planet into, you know, what W. E.B. Du Bois would later call the color line, right? It divided, you know, this is for Portugal and this is for the Spanish crown, right? Black people are African. People can be enslaved

because they're not human beings. Indigenous people can be enslaved and have their land taken because they're not recognized as Christian nations, right? That's the foundation of the United States. That's the foundation of federal law in this country. That's what justifies law enforcement from, you know, beating up water protectors, the Standing Rock. That's what as law enforcement for killing black people with impunity, you know, in places like Minneapolis, like this is the foundation of settler law in this country. And that's what they exposed in these hearings. And they brought in, you know, all these elders, these elders who knew about the treaties, the people who were, you know, the knowledgekeepers who our traditions

were based on oral history. And the court and not just the court, but, you know, even knowledge production, as we know it within the Western Academy, is premised on. what is written holds the highest authority and what they found out in the course of these hearings is that the oral history amongst Lakota people just Lakota people was so precise in understanding the language that was written in a document over a hundred years ago that it could hold up and stand you know in law because and so that was one thing that was proven is that oral history is a legitimate form of knowledge and historical understanding and record keeping because these elders could name passages from the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty

and they couldn't even read English, right? So how does that happen? You know, and so these are the things that were proven in here. And at the end of the day, the judge was forced to acknowledge that the United States government, or he wasn't forced to acknowledge this, but he determined that the United States government did have jurisdiction because the, you know, Great Sue Nation as a legal, entity had, you know, been diminished in sovereignty by the U.S. However, he did agree with one thing, and this is the important thing, and this led to the, you know, the next kind of phase of the

American Indian movement. He said, you do not sign treaties with a domestic dependent nation, but this is not a matter to be determined by a federal domestic court. You have to go to some kind of international body. And so he upheld the idea that this, these treaties were international agreements between two sovereigns. So this became the impetus to create what was known as the International Indian Treaty Council, which is founded in 1974, near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. It wasn't quite on it. It was.

Parts of it were, but also parts of it weren't. At the time, a little background, at the time, the Indian Health Services, you know, created a false scare. on Hepatitis C outbreak on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, then canceled all public gatherings. And so parts of it were held on the reservation, but also parts of it were held in a place called Mo Bridge, which is across the river. It's a white border town. And so AIM reached out to all of its contacts throughout the world and 98 different indigenous nations from around the world from the hemisphere showed up. Over 5,000 participants came for several days of meeting.

So this is a new phase of the American Indian movement. And oftentimes if you read books such as like a hurricane, it really only details up into 1973 and that doesn't really talk about AIM afterwards. And a lot of AIM members are really pissed off about that. And they say, you know, AIM did a lot of things afterwards. And it's also it's a convenient narrative too to say like, oh, we don't have to pay attention to the American Indian movement after the wounded knee trials. But the reason, there were several kind of tactical decisions that were made or strategic decisions that were made in the American Indian movement and why they decided to go take their case to the United Nations. One was that they were under such state surveillance and repression that operating in public anymore was really difficult, right? There are feds following them everywhere.

And so oftentimes, you know, you're forced with several decisions. One is to go clandestine and to go underground, which some A-members had to do. I believe Dennis Banks was on the lamb for about a decade of his life and others, you know, had to escape for, you know, a variety of reasons. Or you can increase, you can use the public attention as a shield and as a protection, right? So you can't do anything to me because all eyes are on me or on us, I should say. So they decided with that latter tactic. They said, why can see ground right at this moment in time? We should be taking this to the international stage.

We have recognition. And the reason why a lot of this stuff doesn't get remembered in the kind of popular history is because U.S. media outlets at this moment in time kind of stopped paying attention to aim because they started more openly affiliating with the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, right? Third World Marxist decolonization movement. in Africa, in West Asia, and elsewhere, and even, you know, the Soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself, days were no longer America's Indians, right? They were no longer the friendly, not they weren't always friendly, but they didn't meet the

stereotypes of what Indian activism was supposed to be anymore in the United States. So US media largely, like, abandoned reporting and covering these events anymore because they were like, they believe the bad-mouthing and the bad-jacketing from the FBI, that these were just communist guerrillas that are allying with all these, you know, was what they called Trotskyist organizations. I'm sure the Soviet Union wasn't Trotskyist, but nonetheless, that was what they used to discredit them and to no longer follow them. And there's some really, like, funny, you know, as an aside, there's really funny breakup letters

that a lot of these journalists, like, wrote to the American Indian movement. And they're like, they're like, you know, I was up, I was with you all, you know, as a white man living in this country on stolen land for treaty rights and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But once you started talking to Africans and, you know, Palestinians, then you lost me on all that. And we don't want anything to do with you. But nonetheless, it proved very fruitful for the movement itself. Delegations were sent all over the world. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty became the working document for rights of indigenous people at the United States. nations. The Soviet Union adopted it. Saddam Hussein, of all people in Iraq, had adopted it as

like, you know, formative, like, indigenous rights document. Momar Gaddafi adopted it. You know, so it was a different time. It was a different time period. At this moment in time, you know, in 1977, the International Union Treaty Council took these claims to the UN and became an NGO achieved NGO status and then convened several really important like there was a Geneva conference that same year where they actually used the 20 points to start hammering out like a formative declaration on indigenous people and what's fascinating about this time period is it was the it was the anti-apartheid movement that really brought aim and the plo together or the Palestinian liberation movement together because it was

was an anti-apartheid document that recognized Zionism as a form of racism, and I believe this was in 1977 that this document came out, recognized Zionism as a form of racism, which is really huge at that moment in time. That was removed after Oslo, but it also recognized a formative version of indigenous rights or indigenous people and actually began using that term indigenous. And so, and this was created by the anti-apartheid struggle. And they were true international. The success of the anti-apartheid struggle was militant organizing of South African, you know, black folks against racial apartheid, against white supremacy, but also they couldn't be defeated because of the internationalism, right? If we remember the success of the Agilean revolution

and independence from France, it wasn't because they were militarily more powerful than the French colonial forces. It was even in the moment of like dark, dark days when the ALN had to go underground, it was like people like Franz Fanon and others who took this to the United Nations and exposed the crimes of the French government and they had no moral standing. And that was the inspiration for this particular indigenous rights movement at the United Nations was to expose the United States and to ally with these, you know, these movements throughout the world, the non-aligned movement, the Soviet bloc countries, all of those things. It wasn't because the American Indian movement was Marxist, right? They had people, individuals who identified

probably in private, you know, as being left or communist, but never publicly. And so this is where, you know, you get to kind of see the burgeoning of the movement, but also some fissures that happen. And in the meantime, you know, they're still doing this local, like, you know, work at the local level with, you know, the grassroots education, legal defense, you know, they're doing survival schools. There's like 32 survival schools that are created at this moment in time. An entire generation is being, you know, politicized. There's a really beautiful film that everyone should go watch. My friends are in it. My friend, Beth Castle, is one of the directors. She's been studying American Indian women in Warren, the women of all red

nations that formed as part of like an aim kind of women's organization within the movement. But she traces the history and story of Madonna Thunderhawk and her daughter Marcy Gilbert, two friends of mine and mentors of mine in their role in creating these survival schools and carrying on that struggle from, you know, wounded knee to standing rock. It's a beautiful film. Everyone should go watch it. But these were the kinds of things that they were still doing at this time. And the international scene was intensifying, right? And so there was questions about what is, you know, what is, you know, what is? the American Indian movement's affiliations with these left organizations, these left governments, these decolonization movements. And I'm kind of skipping ahead. So maybe I should stop and let you ask a question so they can answer. No, that's okay. I've been going on for a long time. Yeah, and I've been absolutely entranced. I mean, your historian background is really coming out because not only do you cover so much fascinating history, but you do it in a way that just never stops being engaging. So just to catch people up, you know, that's, you know, the aims

sort of formation, their early years leading up to Wounded Knee, the event of Wounded knee, the backlash not only from the U.S. settler government, but also from Dick Wilson and his sort of Contra-esque goon squad on the reservations, dozens of murders that were not properly investigated or investigated at all. And then the sort of just continuation and internationalization of the movement in the wake of all of that. So a bunch of ground was covered there, absolutely fascinating. But yeah, let's go ahead now and share. shift into the sort of later phases of aim and particularly I want to talk about some splits and you know like pretty much all revolutionary left wing movements particularly those that are put

under such immense state pressure splits and divisions do eventually occur can you talk about these splits and divisions that occurred within aim and sort of the fallout from it and how it affected the organization going forward right so around I believe it was 19 in the late 70s I should say because there's not like a definitive signpost there began to form what are what we're called like a semi-autonomous aim chapters and these really arose because there was disagreement and leadership you know Clyde Belcourt himself was there was an attempted assassination of him Carter camp also a leader of aim had shot him in Rosebud South Dakota in the chest nearly killing him. And again, these things are complicated because, you know, it's not that, like, Clyde Belcourt

went forgave Carter Camp after that, but he did, like, make amends, like, in an indigenous way, you know, like they had some kind of restorative justice that was dealt with. But there were increasing factions and factionalism and divisions that were growing at this particular time shortly after, you know, the Jumping Bull raid where, you know, that was where the American Indian movement was called in to protect these Oglala elders who were sympathetic to the American Indian movement in 1975. They set up a camp, which was like a culture camp. And, you know, somebody like Leonard Peltier, who is, you know, imprisoned at this current

moment in time on June 26th, no small irony, if anyone knows what June 26 is. It's the day that, you know, Custer rode into, or it's the day after June 20, the day after June 25th was when Custer wrote into, infamously wrote into a Lakota, Dakota, Cheyenne Arapaho encampment and then got wiped out. But these two FBI agents, you know, showed up to the jumping bull property under the auspices that they were investigating stolen cowboy boots. This is no joke. This is actually what they said. And according to testimony at the time, you know, the evidence that exists, these FBI agents were an unmarked vehicle. They didn't announce itself when they arrived. And there were legitimate threats of violence against people, right?

I talked about the reign of terror. And this was kind of at, like, you know, the culmination of the reign of terror on Pindridge. They showed up. And, you know, a firefight ensues. And these two FBI agents are killed as well as a young, indigenous man named Joseph Stee. stunts. And, you know, the largest manhunt in U.S. history ensues. There are four people who are ensnared, four aim leaders who are ensnared within this large manhunt. Leonard Paltier flees to Canada and three other individuals who are named in this suit. I think it's Dino Butler and

Bob Rubadu. I can't think of the third person. Anyways, they're brought up on charges. Those charges are dismissed because, again, the government is like, you know, know, it has no direct proof that they can, you know, that these individuals were even there that day or, you know, were carrying weapons or nothing. It was completely flimsy. And so those court cases are thrown out. And it was, you know, Leonard Paltier, who was basically framed up after he was extradited from Canada. And he came back to the United States and stood trial and, you know, serving two life sentences. He had one unsuccessful escape when he was out, I believe, in California, or somewhere in the northwest of this of the the country attempted escape on that that failed and

fell through uh but then after his arrest and a trial there was the murder of uh m a quash and this was a this is still to this day a very controversial case because anime a quash was um i believe in the rosebud reservation and you know her body was found on the side of the road by a white farmer, she wasn't identified immediately. And she had two bullet holes. And the initial autopsy said she died of exposure. And because of the American Indian movement and the family and her family, they advocated for an actual autopsy. And so they exhumed the body, cut her hands off in a form of desecration, and sent them off to an FBI crime lab, and later found through an independent autopsy that she had been shot in.

the back of the head with, you know, I think twice with a 22. So all these speculation ensues about who she was. Was she an informant? She was a Canadian citizen. And so there was a lot of speculation like when they got arrested, why was she released? Because if you are arrested by like the feds or anybody and you're a Canadian citizen, usually that means that you're automatically deported. And so there's a lot of speculation. The best kind of answer for that question I would say is that the FBI knew that she was a Canadian citizen, and if she was released, it would draw suspicion to her as an individual. And so that was one of the first attempts at badjacketing her. And so later on, much later, decades later, there were two, you know, the rumors still

swirl about NMA Quash's murder. There were two native men associated with AIM. It's unclear if they were actual AIM members themselves who were actually tried and convicted of that murder. And there's, you know, there's lots of speculation. And we may never. know who killed her, other than to say that a lot of the aspects and details of her case point to badjacketing her as a potential FBI informant or snitchjacketing her, saying that, you know, creating a climate of fear and suspicion around her. And, you know, she was an amazing activist by all accounts, everyone that knew her. They've actually tried to pin a lot of the guilt of her killing and assassination to people

like Leonard Peltier, and so this becomes, Peltier's case kind of becomes toxic in the sense and that, you know, he really represents the bondage and the fact that we are still, you know, captive people in this country because he represents the image of the American Indian movement. And so he, you know, he himself, there was a conspiracy against him, obviously, they couldn't actually even prove that the bullet, the shell casing that was in, that they used to victim was actually, you know, a gun that he owned or that he even carried, right? So there was no, like, direct evidence. Even the prosecution later on in his case that came out and said, this is like total bullshit, you guys. Like, we have to do something about this. But the FBI hates him

so much. The only time that the FBI has ever marched is against Leonard Peltier in Washington, D.C. And that was leading up to Bill Clinton's suspected, you know, exoneration of him. And then there was also, I was there in Washington, D.C. in 2016, very tragically, when his son hip passed away in a motel room next to me. He was actually, his son was the exact same age as his father had spent years in prison, right? He was like 41, I believe, or 40 years old. He died in a motel room next to me of, you know, complications due to diabetes. And the entire time we were there trying to lobby, it's the only time I've ever lobbied in my life. full disclosure like I don't believe in it but you know I was like I'll use like you know credentials

as like a somewhat you know normative dude in anatomy to advocate for him because I believe it's important but also just it's just so much injustice and we believe because of standing rock that he would be you know that Obama would look favorably because Obama didn't do shit about standing rock and I think the final kind of you know stabbing in the back I guess the shoving of the knife in the back of Indian country was when Obama just completely flat out ignored Leonard Peltier's case and didn't, you know, grant him clemency, which is not an admission of innocence, right? So he's still in prison right now. But every moment that we were in the Capitol building or somewhere meeting with local groups, advocacy groups in Washington, D.C.,

we were being followed. To this day, there is, you know, most of the FBI agents that are, that work this case, either not alive or are retired, right? So they have to create an institutional culture that's anti-Aim within it or anti-Peltier to get them to continue to discredit this man and the movement itself. But these divisions were so powerful that they, you know, I want to, I'm setting up the divisions themselves because you can't talk about, you can't say that these divisions were self-inflicted entirely, right? Just as much as you can't say drug, you know, epidemics exist in poor communities because poor communities just make bad decisions, right? You have to understand who the enemy is first before you understand why people are oppressed or how

they are oppressed. Exactly. Right. And so in this moment in time, there was lots of suspicion. You had the formation of these semi-autonomous aimed groups. Russell Means himself had very, you know, militantly stood with the Sandinistas. And, you know, even with the Soviet bloc, a country himself. was not like, you know, he was not like a Marxist by any means. But, you know, seeing it

a strategic ally and tool to, to advance indigenous rights. But it was really the Sandinistas that really, I guess, fomented those divisions to irreconcilable differences between factions of aim. And on one side, I would say that, you know, as much, and this is, this is me, like, this is probably the first time I've ever talked about this publicly on a podcast or anything. I would say that, like I say this with reservation and I'll just objectively state the facts. But Russell Means gave a speech at the Black Hills Survival Gathering, which is a huge overwhelming success in 1980 that evicted, you know, these uranium companies that were coming in to try to like mine uranium near the reservations and pollute the water. They're trying to implement

gold mining and coal mining again. So Black Hills survival gathering brought together environmentalists and, you know, white ranchers and white people and white minors, you know, who are in these reservations and successfully, you know, defeated them. But at that gathering, Russell Means made a speech called, for our nations to live, Europe must die. There's lots of speculation about who actually wrote that speech, and a lot of people believe that Ward Churchill wrote that speech. And Ward Churchill himself, you know, he's a controversial figure. As much as I'll say, his claims to be indigenous have been challenged I would say rather correctly in many ways but he had he and um russell means began to really work and collaborate together in this

moment in time and this was his like denunciation of communism of you know socialism but at the same time he was also he had resigned as a member of the american indian movement but nonetheless his like his credibility as an aim organizer, his legibility as an aim organizer was still recognized. So people really thought he was speaking on behalf of aim when he denounced Marxism and, you know, as a European kind of ideology of dead white men. And, you know, he at this moment in time, he really became a self-described libertarian. And, you know, he later ran as a VP, vice president on the ticket, the libertarian party ticket with the pornographer Flint after being denounced by aim, right?

So there's kind of these groups now that are like, this is where it gets kind of murky because there's national aim, which is still headquartered in Minneapolis and still very much run by, you know, the Bellcourt brothers, Vernon and Clyde. And, you know, then there's the semi-autonomous aim chapters, which is kind of loosely run by Ward Churchill and folks at Carter Camp, but not really. So it's really kind of murky about who's in charge and people are all saying their leaders. So aim in general had supported the Sandinistas and the first time I ever heard of the

Sandinistas is when my friend, Lakota Hardin, who was the daughter of Madonna Thunderhawk, said, hey, you should read Sandino's daughters. And I was like, what the heck? So I read Sandino's daughters and that's really actually what, you know, because it really, you know, inspired her as a young person and I read Sandino's daughters. It's amazing. Everybody should read it. And they should read Sandino's daughters revisited as well. But there was a, there was a lot of fascination and affinities with the Sandinistas. And you can't gloss it over in, you know, in any other way to say that they were very much, the aim was very much influenced by them. And we're actual like friends, not just like politically. aligned. And so when the American Indian movement had created the International Indian Treaty Council and really established norms or began to establish norms of indigenous rights within states, there was a lot of leftist governments like the Sandinistas who turned to the American Indian movement to say, hey, look, we're not doing this right. You know, like there's a lot of conflict,

especially with the mosquito Indians who live in the northern part of the country along the the Honduras border, they're sending in the contras, and they're going in, you know, which is short for the kind of revolutionaries, into the indigenous communities to recruit and arm them against the Sandinistas. And at the same time, the Sandinistas were making really bad, like, mistakes. And it really showed and revealed a gap in thinking, especially in Latin American Marxist movements, the indigenous question, right? that they just believed because they had no knowledge of this land that they could just send

you know peasant communities and peasant organizers to create agricultural communes as if the land was just open you know nobody was living on it so there was they were sending in you know trying to create these sandinisa communes and you know agricultural things in the north and they were being shot at by mosquito and there was a lot of conflict and the you know the and this wasn't this the thing is is that the mosquito Indians indigenous people, they are one of many indigenous people in Nicaragua. And some of the indigenous people in the coastal areas on the western coast in the south had actually fought with the Sandanises. I actually met some of them when I was in Venezuela. And so oftentimes people want to like just tag on to the mosquito issue and forget that there's

other indigenous organizations and other indigenous groups that had allied with the Sandinises and still do to this day. They identify a, as FSLN, because Daniel Otega, you know, actually implemented one of the most progressive indigenous policy platforms ever in the, in the history of the Western Hemisphere, which granted land, cultural, and language rights in the constitution of Nicaragua to indigenous people. And later on, you know, Venezuela did it, Ecuador did it, Bolivia did it. And so, like, it became like a model, you know, and so he's really credited with doing that. But at the same time, there was a legitimate concern with, like, the way that the Sandinista government was treating the mosquito Indians.

And so, Umberto Ortega and Daniel Ortega called on AIM, the International Indian Treaty Council to come and, you know, do a delegation to the mosquito, you know, villages and listen to what they said. And, like, what are their grievances against the government? What are their grievances against the contras? because not everyone just automatically aligned with the contros. And so they went on this extensive tour, Bill Means and others, you know, went on this extensive tours in mosquito communities and, like, gave an honest report back and said, you know, here's where you messed up. Here's what's working.

You know, this is the stakes that are involved. Like, everyone is just, you know, they don't want violence. They don't want to fight the contras. They don't want to fight the Sandinistas. They just want their land rights. They want their autonomy. And so, you know, the FSLN was like, okay, cool. That's what we're going to do.

And this is no joke. This is actually true. A year later, we're Churchill and Russell means, you know, we're in Washington, D.C. in a closed door meeting with Elliot Abrams. Oh, my God. Who is under Oliver North at this time. And this isn't speculation. This is just actually what happened.

God damn. And the reason why we know this is because Suzanne Scho and Harjo, who was, you know, sympathetic to AIM, and also amazing indigenous rights organizer. Everyone should know her name and look up her work. She's amazing, like absolutely, like, down for the cause. You know, in a different track than I am, you know, more kind of in the legislative realm and reform realm, but nonetheless gets it.

And she had found out about this meeting that they had had with Elliott Abrams. And she reported it to aim leadership. And basically they were asking the assistant secretary of state under all of her north, Elliot Abrams. that they wanted, you know, weapons to go and fight with the mosquito Indians and alongside the Contras. And to be fair, you know, at this moment in time, Means was espousing an anti-Marxist dogma. Like, it was red-baiting people in the organization.

Bill means his own brother disagreed with him. So it went, you know, it went between family members. And he believed that, you know, there was a third rail, I guess, or, you know, the third path in this whole situation in that we could respect and, you know, arm the mosquito Indians. And he, he claims that Misurata, the mosquito organization that has been, you know, funded by and continues to be funded by the CIA as a separatist organization against the Sandinisa government, was not taking CIA money.

And if they did, they did it because they meant well for the people, right? And so anyways, he and Ward Churchill go on this like boondoggle. expedition to the jungle and you know they're going to fight with the contros and they're going overthrow the same they need to government but they get trapped and they actually have to call the old aim members who they denounce to save them and so they send them down there and it's just kind of like this really shameful thing you know and it created a lot of divisions and at that moment in time like you know where Churchill and um brussel means create the autonomous aim which is, it's like a confederacy.

There's still autonomous aim groups. There's still national aim groups. These divisions still exist to this day. And they're kind of headquartered out of Denver, right? Orr Churchill gets a job at UC Boulder in ethnic studies alongside, you know, people like Vine to Lerre Jr. Russell Means is like, you know, between Denver and Pine Ridge. These divisions fester over time and it kind of comes to the head in the 90s around. the question of legitimacy of leadership because autonomous aim is continuing to organize

often to the detriment and against the National Aim chapter in Minneapolis. And, you know, it comes down to a tribunal that was held in the Bay Area where they called Vernon Belcourt and Clyde Belcourt to stand against, you know, these charges that were levied at them or leveled at them and to really account for the things that they did. And, you know, to be fair, like, Bernie Belcourt, you know, was arrested for cocaine use and there's, you know, there's questions about, like, substance abuse and way that certain individuals treated women and all those things. Like, those were like legitimate concerns. And like they were being addressed at that time. Whether that was accurately or fairly or with justice, I don't really know or with accountability. But those things were all admitted to by those members. And so they went, he went to the tribunal. And nothing really happened. And it kind of just dissipated. And I would say that at that moment in time, like, AIM became less of a kind of a national kind of movement that was, you know,

organized and doing all these things and kind of became more like embedded locally. So like here, there's like a Deney aim. There's a, you know, an A movement or an AIM chapter in the Navajo Nation. There's national aim, which is still based in Minneapolis. There's an autonomous AIM chapter, which is fairly large and fairly, you know, well organized and does a lot of work in the community in Denver, you know, so in Cleveland, there's all these kind of aim chapters that still exist, who they're affiliated with and who they, you know, align with kind of falls along those divisions, right? And at the same time,

a lot of the aim leaders pointed fingers at each other about who murdered or who was involved in the murder of anime Akwash, right? And the FBI has used Akwash's case as a way to continually to discredit the American Indian movement to this day. There's still a FBI agents who are going around and like giving speaking tours and now the sons of FBI agents are going around and giving speaking tours denouncing the American Indian movement. But I would say that even amidst all of this conflict and division, going back to the that those 20 points that were implemented or that were advocated for in 1970, 1972 in the trail of broken treaties and the successes of the movement and the international realm and galvanizing not just

people, indigenous people of this hemisphere, but around the world and really doing the diplomatic work, you know, even against the United States government, like the U.S., you know, even though U.S. doesn't respect the United Nations, they still have operatives there, you know, they still want to keep an image. They were actively working against the treaty council in the United Nations, even despite all of these things, you know, even with its own flaws, in 2007, you know, the Touchstone Document on Indigenous Rights, which is the Declaration on Rights of indigenous people was passed through the united nations which is a huge victory and you know all of these things like you know it's not like the bookend of a movement but they were like benchmarks of like

you know we're okay so the UN is limited and what it can do so now what now what right so all of those things happened and we have to remember even going to like the george floyd protest the reason why you know this was it was spontaneous but there was an infrastructure of resistance that was in place in that city that was, you know, with the black community, with the indigenous community. And it was because of aim, you know, that you had that heightened consciousness around police violence. And also, you know, the Soul Patrol going back to the 60s and 70s of black organizers being against police violence in that city. And, you know, Migazi Communications was a radio station that the American Indian movement had created in the city. And unfortunately, it was

burned to the ground during, you know, the, the protests, not really quite sure, definitely was arson, but they raised money to rebuild it and they saved, they managed to save many of the important archival documents. And so, you know, even with all those divisions, AIM was still operating, and I would say, and very much to this day is also operating. But I think those divisions really point to, you know, and this is me kind of editorializing in this particular, on this particular issue point to two things. First of all, an internalized anti-communism of indigenous movements, specifically in the United States, not so much in Canada, but specifically the United States and the red power

movement itself. And if you don't believe me, you should go read Lee Miracle's book, I Am Woman. She has a whole chapter on how the U.S. indigenous movement internalized anti-communism and the way that it was mobilized specifically against indigenous. women. So it had had those really ugly elements to it, which were no doubt influenced by co-intel pro and state repression. The second one is that no serious left or socialist movement in this country, like I can't really think of any socialist organization minus ours. And this is not me being sectarian, but just like the reason, it's the reason why we form the Red Nation

actually take seriously the question of decolonization as a principle or an organizing principle of socialist politics within the united states right um and so that is the lesson that we have to draw you know but also to remember and not to you know not to map on marxist you know or left political ideologies because oftentimes there will be anarchists who say like oh autonomous aims best represents anarchist philosophy and i was like no i don't really think so just as much i would say i don't think that you know it represents marxist philosophy i think that it has an organic anti-imperialism and an organic anti-colonialism that was very much sharpened and developed that actually transcended most left in socialist organizations and most

anarchist organizations at the time that has to be respected. And I encourage everyone to go back and read the newspapers that these organizations were publishing, that the children of these organizers were publishing. There's a really beautiful newspaper. called Oyatewi Chahou, which was written, it was actually edited by this Lebanese dude named Charles Aberresk, who was the son of James Aberrhusk, who was a senator at the time, who actually was kind of a side note, because we do live in different times. But, you know, he was a Lebanese. He was like, I think, the first Arab American senator in the U.S. Congress, and he came

from South Dakota of all places. but he grew up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation and had an affinity for indigenous politics and rights and he was actually like the most ardent defender of the PLO in the US Congress

and also His Bola he like would later on in life he would give interviews and be like propping up his Bola so much has changed but his son was really taken in by the movement he himself right now is actually

he's a judge in the tribal court system in Pine Ridge Charles Aberyst, and he has a law firm in Rapid City that, you know, does Indian rights representation, but they had, you know, this newspaper called Oiati Wichaho, where they would talk about anti-imperialism. They would talk about the Sandinistas, the PLO. They would talk about the Black Panthers. They would talk about all of these different movements that were happening throughout the world. But they were also encouraging people to understand what it meant by decolonization, anti-imperialism. What is imperialism? What is

capitalism. So there were those elements of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism within those movements that definitely have to be respected and are indigenous, you know, with a small eye to those particular political formations. And these things gave rise to things that we understand now as Native American studies or, you know, Native American and indigenous studies or even the term indigenous. It came through struggle. It came through bud. It came through sacrifice. It came through death assassination, people are still sitting inside of prisons, you know, so that we can, you and I can be having this conversation right now. That all has to be respected and that, you know, we also have to understand, you know, the limitations of that kind of

political formation and also understand the conditions in which it operated, right? And the divisions and why those divisions were created, but also why they were exploited by the colonizer and by these imperialists when it came down to it, right? And so we can't underestimate. You know, Emilcar Cabral, famous, you know, saying or title to one of his essays, you know, tell no lies, claim no easy victories. And I really think that that's what you have to, you have to take into consideration, especially when you're studying the history of the American Indian movement. Yeah. Absolutely. Nick, I could not have asked for a better guest to come on and cover this fascinating history. I was just absolutely learning so much from from listening

to you talk and you covered the legacy, what we can learn, the divisions and the splits. I think we could have you back on in the future specifically to talk about some of those documents about anti-communism and Marxism and flesh out that even more. A weird thing that I just thought of when you were talking is in the early, early days of Rev. Left, before I really had a big audience, I somehow stumbled upon Ward Churchill and reached out to him. And there's an early Rev. Left, like only Patreon episode, because I basically asked, oh, because I didn't know any of this, you know, so I was sort of naive in my own way. And I asked Ward Churchill, like, to introduce himself and he talked for an hour and a half,

unimpeded. And I just threw it up on Patreon years ago and kind of forgot about it. But now hearing all of this history and all those connections between the Contras and libertarianism and Russell Means, I'm going to go back and try to find that and just try to understand what I actually talked to him about. But, yeah, all of that is so fascinating. Is there, before I let you go and before I let you plug your, your wonderful organization, is there anything else that you, that you want to say, anything you want to finalize before we wrap up this conversation? Yeah, I just want to say one thing about, like, Russell Means and that, like, I'm not trying to discredit his legacy, but I'm also just trying to tell the truth. And I think that's our obligation as historians, but also, especially historians of the movement.

And I will say that he, you know, to his dying days, he was a patriot, you know, and that has to be. be that means something even despite the things that he did and that goes for a lot of the the american indian movement is that we often look at you know i'll just say this the we went from extermination to termination to self-determination we're currently in the era of self-determination right and we are in a moment in time that i think aim provided a pathway for us to struggle and their pathway of struggle was beyond, you know, the horizon of the settler state or seeking recognition for the injuries that the settler state has caused us and actually thought about nationhood.

I would say at this moment and time, maybe not within the last couple of months, but surely within the last two decades when AIM kind of fell out of favor and was no longer fashionable, but what was fashionable was to blame these indigenous revolutionaries for their failure is that a generation went by where the horizon of struggle became the state itself and seeking further incorporation within that state structure. And we are now seeing a return of a new horizon, I should say, beyond the settler state that aim was always advocating for to begin with. And that to me, you know, is why I'm a Marxist and a communist, is because history you know communism is is proof that history hasn't ended right and it doesn't mean that like

you have to be a communist to make history but it means that understanding that everyday people you know those those those incarcerated inmates at stillwater prison could not have known the kind of you know floodgates of history the ripples you know when they cast one stone it made it made a ripple in, you know, in the water in the pond. And then soon millions of stones came after and created tidal waves of history. And that's what we're at right now. And I think that has to be respected no matter what your views on Amar. Absolutely. Nick, I appreciate and admire you so much. Keep up the amazing work. Definitely will have you back on. Before I let you go, can you please let listeners know where they can find you, your work, and the Red Nation online. Sure. So the Red Nation

podcast is currently publishing once a week. You can find it in iTunes, Spotify. We just created a new podcast series called The Red Power Hour, which is hosted by my partner, Melanie, and also co-founder of the Red Nation. We just had a beautiful interview with Amanda Blackhorse. You should all check it out. But also just go to the Red Nation.org to find out some more about our politics and positions on certain things. And we're more active on social media. I don't run the social media accounts. But our comrades are so. beautiful and also I'm not the leader of the organization. I'm now a rink and file member and I'm just a content producer primarily and you know find us on Instagram, find us on Facebook, find us on

Twitter, find us on iTunes, you know, and just support our work and you know, yeah. Perfect. I also just want to say I've been listening to Rev Leff, you know, back in the day when you had the little folk punk introduction. Yeah. I like actually was been very much influence, you know, by your podcasting style, but also the fact that we need more voices on the left. So I really appreciate Rev. Left. And also Red Menace and all the collaboration that you've done with other podcasts, you know, so props to you, Brett. And hopefully one day we get a meet in person. Absolutely. I would love that. And thank you. That means so much coming from you. Long live the Red Nation. And yeah, I can't wait for the day when we meet in person.

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