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Longtime American Indian activist Dennis Banks walks on




Dennis Banks as a young man during the Wounded Knee takeover and as an older man.

Dennis Banks as a young man during the Wounded Knee takeover and as an older man.

Dennis Banks, a longtime national American Indian activist who was acquitted in the famed 1970s Wounded Knee takeover trial, has died, his family said early Monday. Banks was 80 years old.

“Our father Dennis J. Banks started his journey to the spirit world at 10:10 p.m. on October 29, 2017,” reads a post on Banks’ Facebook page signed by his children and grandchildren.

“As he took his last breaths, [son] Minoh sang him four songs for his journey,” the notice continued. “All the family who were present prayed over him and said our individual goodbyes. Then we proudly sang him the AIM [American Indian Movement] song as his final send off.”

Native News Online, a national website covering American Indian issues, reported Sunday in a dispatch from Rochester that Banks developed pneumonia following open heart surgery 10 days earlier.

“I know there are still many issues out there, many mountains to climb and many rivers to cross,” the news site quotes Banks as saying to friends and family during a recent hospital stay. “I am going to stretch my life out as long as I possibly can, but I won’t be a living vegetable.”

The family said Banks will be buried in his home community of Leech Lake in northern Minnesota with traditional services. Further information about arrangements are pending.

In 1968, Banks was among the founders of the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis, an activist movement that spread nationwide. Under Banks’ leadership, marches and takeovers became AIM’s signature tactics for years to come.

Banks participated in the 1969-71 occupation of Alcatraz, a Bay Area island that had been home to a federal prison. In November 1972, he led AIM in a takeover of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs building in the nation’s capital.

Banks and other AIM members made their biggest mark, though, in 1973, when federal agents clashed with hundreds of protesters occupying Wounded Knee in southwestern

South Dakota, the site of an 1890 massacre of Indians by federal troops.

Protesters and federal authorities were locked in a standoff for 71 days. Before it was over, two tribal members were killed and a federal agent seriously wounded. Banks and fellow AIM activist Russell Means were charged in 1974 for their leadership roles in the uprising.

After a trial in federal court in St. Paul that lasted several months, a judge threw out the charges on grounds of government misconduct.

“What we did in the 1960s and early 1970s was raise the consciousness of white America that this government has a responsibility to Indian people,” Banks said in explaining the motivation behind Wounded Knee. “That there are treaties; that textbooks in every school in America have a responsibility to tell the truth. An awareness reached across America that if Native American people had to resort to arms at Wounded Knee, there must really be something wrong.”

Banks also organized the Great Jim Thorpe Longest Run from New York to Los Angeles to demand the 1912 Olympic medals taken from the greatest of American Indian athletes be restored. In 1983, the medals were restored and given to Thorpe’s family.

His autobiography “Ojibwa Warrior,” was published in 2004. A movie about Banks’ life, “A Good Day to Die,” received best documentary honors at the San Francisco American Indian Film Festival in 2010.

Banks, or “Nowa Cumig” in his native language, was born on April 12, 1937, on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation. At age 5, he was placed at a boarding school in southwestern Minnesota, where he lived until age 17, when he joined the military and served in Japan.


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