Adios Ojibwa Warrior
Dennis Banks passed away this week. Below is his obituary from the New York Times.
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Dennis Banks, American Indian Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 80
by Robert McFadden
October 30, 2017
The New York Times
Dennis
J. Banks, the militant Chippewa who founded the American Indian
Movement in 1968 and led often-violent insurrections to protest the
treatment of Native Americans and the nation’s history of injustices
against its indigenous peoples, died on Sunday night at the Mayo Clinic
in Rochester, Minn. He was 80.
His
daughter Tashina Banks Rama said the cause was complications of
pneumonia following successful open-heart surgery a week ago at the
clinic. Mr. Banks lived on the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, where he was born and where he grew up.
Mr.
Banks and his Oglala Sioux compatriot Russell Means were by the
mid-1970s perhaps the nation’s best-known Native Americans since Sitting
Bull and Crazy Horse, who led the attack that crushed the cavalry
forces of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little
Bighorn in the Montana Territory in 1876.
Mr.
Banks, whose early life of poverty, alcoholism and alienation mirrored
the fates of countless ancestors, led protests that caused mass
disorder, shootouts, deaths and grievous injuries. He was jailed for
burglary and convicted of riot and assault, and he became a fugitive for
nine years. He found sanctuary in California and New York but finally
gave up and was imprisoned for 14 months.
He once led a six-day takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in
Washington, and mounted an armed 71-day occupation of the town of
Wounded Knee, S.D., on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Wounded Knee was the
scene of the last major conflict of the American Indian Wars, in which
350 Lakota men, women and children were massacred by United States
troops in 1890.
While
his protests won some government concessions and drew national
attention and wide sympathy for the deplorable social and economic
conditions of American Indians, Mr. Banks achieved few real improvements
in the daily lives of millions of Native Americans, who live on
reservations and in major cities and lag behind most fellow citizens in
jobs, housing and education.
To
admirers, Mr. Banks was a broad-chested champion of native pride. With
dark, piercing eyes, high cheekbones, a jutting chin and long raven
hair, he was a paladin who defied authority and, in an era crowded with
civil rights protests, spoke for the nation’s oldest minority.
To
his critics, including many American Indians, Mr. Banks was a
self-promoter, grabbing headlines and becoming a darling of politically
liberal Hollywood stars like Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando. His severest
detractors, including law-enforcement officials, said he let followers
risk injury and arrest while he jumped bail to avoid a long prison
sentence and did not surrender for nearly a decade.
Mr.
Banks and Mr. Means first won national attention for declaring a “Day
of Mourning” for Native Americans on Thanksgiving Day in 1970. Their
band seized the ship Mayflower II, a replica of the original in
Plymouth, Mass., and a televised confrontation between real Indians and
costumed “Pilgrims” made the American Indian Movement leaders overnight
heroes.
In
1972, the two organized cross-country car caravans on “Trails of Broken
Treaties.” They converged on Washington with 500 followers to protest
Indian living standards and lost treaty rights, occupied the Bureau of
Indian Affairs and held out for nearly a week, destroying documents and
the premises, until the government agreed to discuss Indian grievances
and review treaty commitments.
In
1973, after a white man killed an Indian in a saloon brawl and was
charged not with murder but with involuntary manslaughter, Mr. Banks led
200 American Indian Movement protesters in a face-off with the police
in Custer, S.D. It became a riot when the slain man’s mother was beaten
by officers. After he left town, Mr. Banks, who said he had merely tried
to ease tensions, was charged with assault and rioting.
It
was the last straw. “We had reached a point in history where we could
not tolerate the abuse any longer, where mothers could not tolerate the
mistreatment that goes on on the reservations any longer, where they
could not see another Indian youngster die,” he told the author Peter
Matthiessen.
Weeks
later, the siege that made Mr. Banks and Mr. Means famous across
America began when 200 Oglala Lakota and A.I.M. followers with rifles
and shotguns occupied Wounded Knee. About 300 United States marshals,
F.B.I. agents and other law-enforcement officials cordoned off the area
with armored cars and heavy weapons, touching off a 10-week battle of
nerves and gunfire.
Amid
wide news media coverage, the significance of the battlefield was not
lost on many Americans. Dee Brown’s best-selling book “Bury My Heart at
Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West” (1970) had
recently explored the record of massacres and atrocities against Native
Americans on the expanding frontier, undermining one of the nation’s
fondest myths.
Proclaiming
a willingness to die for their cause, Mr. Banks and Mr. Means demanded
the ouster of Richard Wilson, the elected leader of the Oglala Sioux
Tribal Council, whom they called a corrupt white man’s stooge. The
government refused. Shootings punctuated the days of stalemate, leaving
wounded on both sides. Two Indians were killed, and a federal agent was
shot and paralyzed.
When
it was over, Mr. Banks and Mr. Means were charged with assault and
conspiracy. After a federal trial, with the defense raising historic and
current Indian grievances, a judge dismissed the case for prosecutorial
misconduct, including illegal wiretaps and evidence that had been
tampered with.
By
then, Mr. Banks was a pre-eminent spokesman for Native Americans. He
mediated armed conflicts between Indians and the authorities in various
states. But his own legal troubles were not over.
Charged
with riot and assault with a deadly weapon for his role in the 1973
melee in Custer, he was found guilty in 1975. Facing up to 15 years in
prison, he jumped bail and fled to California.
With
1.4 million signatures on a petition supporting Mr. Banks, Gov. Jerry
Brown granted him asylum in 1976, rejecting extradition to South Dakota
by saying his life might be in danger if he were sent back. Mr. Banks
later became chancellor of Deganawidah-Quetzalcoatl University, a small
two-year college for Indians in Davis, Calif.
Deprived
of California sanctuary when Governor Brown was succeeded by a
Republican, George Deukmejian, in early 1983, Mr. Banks found a new
refuge on an Onondaga reservation near Syracuse. Federal officials said
he would be arrested only if he left the reservation. But in 1984, weary
of his confined life, he returned to South Dakota voluntarily and was
sentenced to three years in prison.
Paroled
in 1985 after serving only 14 months, he moved to the Pine Ridge
Reservation to work as a drug addiction and alcoholism counselor. He
also turned his life around, embracing sobriety, giving talks on public
service and organizing cross-country events that he called Sacred Runs,
which became popular among supporters of Native Americans in later
years.
“We
were the prophets, the messengers, the fire starters,” Mr. Banks said
in an autobiography, “Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the
American Indian Movement” (2005, with Richard Erdoes). “Wounded Knee
awakened not only the conscience of all Native Americans, but also of
white Americans nationwide.”
Dennis
James Banks was born on the Leech Lake Reservation on April 12, 1937.
He never knew his father. His mother abandoned him to his grandparents.
When
he was 5, he was taken from his family and sent to a series of
government schools for Indians that systematically denigrated his Ojibwa
(Chippewa) culture, language and identity. He ran away often, until, at
17, he returned to Leech Lake.
Unable
to find work, he joined the Air Force and was stationed in Japan, where
he married a Japanese woman, had a child with her and went absent
without leave. Arrested and returned to the United States, he never saw
his wife or child again. After being discharged, he moved to
Minneapolis, drifted into crime, was arrested in a burglary and went to
jail for two and a half years.
Released
in 1968, he founded the American Indian Movement with an Ojibwa he had
met in prison, Clyde Bellecourt, and others to fight the oppression and
endemic poverty of Native Americans. He became chairman and national
director as the group, based in Minneapolis, forged alliances and grew
rapidly. After two years it said it had 25,000 members.
Within
a year A.I.M., with its flair for guerrilla tactics, joined a lengthy
occupation of Alcatraz Island, the former federal prison site in San
Francisco Bay.
After
his fugitive years, Mr. Banks had a modest movie career. He had roles
in Franc Roddam’s “War Party” (1988), Michael Apted’s “Thunderheart”
(1992), Michael Mann’s “The Last of the Mohicans” (1992, with Russell
Means), and Georgina Lightning’s “Older Than America” (2008), which
explored the devastating effects of Indian boarding schools like those
Mr. Banks had been forced to attend.
Mr.
Banks also appeared in documentaries: “We Shall Remain, Part V: Wounded
Knee” (2009), a Ric Burns “American Experience” television film
directed by Stanley Nelson; “A Good Day to Die” (2010), directed by
David Mueller and Lynn Salt; and “Nowa Cumig: The Drum Will Never Stop”
(2011), directed by Marie-Michele Jasmin-Belisle.
Besides
his wife and child in Japan, Mr. Banks had many children with other
women. In addition to Ms. Banks Rama, he is survived by 19 children, 11
with the surname Banks: Janice, Darla, Deanna, Dennis, Red Elk, Tatanka,
Minoh, Tokala, Tiopa, Tacanunpa and Arrow. The others are Glenda
Roberts, Beverly Baribeau, Kevin Strong, D. J. Nelson-Banks, Bryan
Graves, and Pearl, Denise and Kawlija Blanchard. Mr. Banks is also
survived by more than 100 grandchildren, Ms. Banks Rama said.
Mr.
Banks was the 2016 vice presidential nominee of the California Peace
and Freedom Party, which identified itself as socialist and feminist.
The party’s presidential candidate was Gloria La Riva. As a single-state
ticket, they won 66,000 votes.
In
recent years, Mr. Banks lived with some of his children in Kentucky and
Minnesota. He was an honorary trustee of the Leech Lake Tribal College,
a two-year public institution in Cass Lake, Minn. Mr. Means, who also
appeared in movies and wrote a memoir, died on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 2012 at age 72.
In 1990, both men joined a ceremony at the Pine Ridge Reservation commemorating the centenary of the Wounded Knee massacre.
“Maybe
we opened up some eyes, opened some doors,” Mr. Banks told The Los
Angeles Times. “And it was at least an educational process here. Fifteen
years ago, there was no newspaper here, no radio station. Now there’s
more community control over education.”
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