On July 28, 1968, several hundred Native Americans in Minneapolis, Minnesota attend a meeting, organized by community activists George Mitchell, Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt, to discuss issues facing their local Indigenous community. This event marks the start of the American Indian Movement, or AIM, a primary proponent of the Red Power movement. Inspired by the gains of the Black civil rights movement, AIM sought to address the extreme suffering of Indigenous people and create a path for self-determination and empowerment.
For centuries, Native Americans had suffered relentless efforts by the U.S. government to make them disappear—through massacres, forced removal from their homelands and forced cultural assimilation. For attendees of the first AIM meeting, the most recent incarnation of those harmful policies was the 1956 passage of the Indian Relocation Act. Part of the government's effort to end its support for tribal nations and reclaim reservation lands, the act created a program of vocational training for Native Americans, incentivizing them to leave their reservations and assimilate into urban areas. Most who made the move struggled mightily with the compounded realities of low-wage labor, poor housing, diminished support networks and systemic discrimination.
AIM, rooted in the idea of spiritual renewal, focused its grassroots efforts on preserving Native American sovereignty through the building of Indigenous-centered organizations, such as schools, housing and employment services. One of AIM’s initial projects was AIM Patrol, a citizens’ patrol that responded to widespread police brutality against Native people by observing law enforcement interactions with the community and providing crisis-resolution alternatives and mediators to de-escalate violence. The group also created a Legal Rights Center to provide free legal representation to the poor, as well as the Indian Health Board, the first Indian urban-based healthcare provider in the nation.
Throughout its history, AIM has worked through the legal system to try and take the U.S. government to account for its long history of broken treaties with Indigenous nations. And they have opened national conversations by bringing Native perspectives to the broader public. In 1970, they organized a protest declaring Thanksgiving a national "day of mourning," calling attention to the colonial mythologies that whitewashed early encounters between settlers and the continent's Native inhabitants.
Several major protest actions put AIM and its causes in the national spotlight. In 1969, AIM participated in a 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island to reclaim the federal land for Indigenous people. In November 1972, it organized the “Trail of Broken Treaties,” a cross-country caravan to Washington to meet with lawmakers and demand that the government fulfill all its treaty commitments. The action culminated in an occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices that catapulted AIM to national attention. And in 1973, an occupation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, to protest government corruption resulted in a 71-day standoff and ultimately, a deadly battle with law enforcement. Such activities not only put AIM in the national spotlight, but also squarely in the sights of the FBI and the CIA, which were working covertly to discredit and disrupt domestic political organizations.
