Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement By Dennis Banks, Richard Erdoes
2005 | 352 Pages | ISBN: 080613691X | PDF | 5 MB
Dennis Banks, an American Indian of the Ojibwa Tribe and a founder of the American Indian Movement, is one of the most influential Indian leaders of our time. In Ojibwa Warrior, written with acclaimed writer and photographer Richard Erdoes, Banks tells his own story for the first time and also traces the rise of the American Indian Movement (AIM). The authors present an insider's understanding of AIM protest events-the Trail of Broken Treaties march to Washington, D.C.; the resulting takeover of the BIA building; the riot at Custer, South Dakota; and the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee. Enhancing the narrative are dramatic photographs, most taken by Richard Erdoes, depicting key people and events.A compelling account of one of the most influential Indian leaders in the United States, this autobiography describes how Banks was taken from his family as a young child and placed into a government boarding school by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in an attempt to "acculturate" him. Nine years later, he returned to the Ojibwa "rez" only to find that he had forgotten his native Anishinabe language and many of his culture's traditions. "My teachers ... had made me into an 'apple'-red outside but white inside." Nonetheless, Banks stayed for two years, reconnecting with family and relearning skills like rabbit trapping, before he joined the Air Force in search of "three meals and warm place to sleep." When he returned from his tour in Japan in the late 1950s, he re-experienced the prejudice, brutality and poverty that were preying upon his people in America. Angered by what he saw, Banks founded the American Indian Movement (AIM) with the help of his friends. His retelling of these events reads as seamlessly as a great campfire story (or a well-edited oral transcript). He takes readers deep inside the traditional Sun Dances and Sweat Houses of his Ojibwa Tribe and deep into the action of the Trail of Broken Treaties-a peaceful march on Washington that turned into a historic, six-day takeover of the BIA headquarters. Bank's 11-year run from the FBI, his many wives and children and the strategies of AIM all find their place in his winding narrative, making this volume an important addition to this history of Native American and civil rights movements in the United States.Banks opens his honest and moving autobiography with the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee, pondering how he got there, from his 1937 birth in Leech Lake, Minnesota, to a major confrontation with the U.S. government. He recalls being separated from his family, language, and traditions while he lived "a life of innumerable rules" at a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. He escaped at 16, joined the air force, and was later imprisoned for burglary. In prison, Banks studied the history of American Indian civil rights and became committed to the American Indian Movement (AIM), overseen by the spiritual leaders Mary Crow Dog and Leonard Crow Dog, subjects of previous books by coauthor Erdoes. The decision to make AIM confrontational but not violent led to the occupations of Alcatraz and Mt. Rushmore, the 1972 march on Washington, and Wounded Knee, which Banks considers "the greatest event in the history of Native America in the 20th century." For readers who can recall the spotty media coverage of these events, this powerful litany of AIM's accomplishments is especially provocative.