Part of GDC’s International May Day 2024 Campaign
The American Indian Movement (AIM) is a revolutionary grassroots Indigenous organization founded in Minneapolis in 1968 by Lakota, Dakota, and Anishinaabe people that fought for the sovereignty and liberation of Indigenous people. AIM’s militant, anticolonial class conscious movement formed out of Indigenous prisoner organizing. As a part of the Red Power movement, AIM fought against violations of numerous treaties by the US government, reasserted Indigenous cultural and spiritual traditions, and opposed assimilation into the US settler colonial state. AIM organized locally to address child removal, poverty, and police violence through community patrols and legal aid for Indigenous people facing racist police, vigilante, and state violence, fighting racist and sexual violence Native women faced from white men, and creating survival schools for Indigenous children. They worked with Soul Patrol, who confronted police officers that brutalized and killed Black and Brown people.
AIM widely organized occupations which co-founder Clyde Bellecourt called “confrontation politics.” The most well known action was the Wounded Knee occupation in 1972 on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where 83 years before, the United States army massacred 300 Lakota people as a continuation of the centuries-long genocide against Indigenous people by European/American powers. The occupation, lasting 71 days, protested the corruption in Oglala tribal government and collaboration with the U.S. government. Indigenous people across the country supported the militant occupation, including many Ojibwe people of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan. The occupation also gained international support from Palestine, Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Soviet Union.
AIM stood for Indigenous internationalism, meeting with the PLO, meeting with the Zapatistas, sending delegates to Nicaragua to inform the Sandinistas on Indigenous conditions, and supporting third world liberation struggles. AIM chapters remain active and the legacy of the AIM’s actions and firm stances on sovereignty are upheld today on Turtle Island as foundations for anti-imperialist struggles against US imperial expansion.
The FBI, using COINTELPRO tactics, waged a campaign to destroy AIM, to neutralize its leadership, and sow divisions in its membership – including the targeting of Leonard Peltier for his involvement in AIM actions. Leonard Peltier, a Anishinaabe Lakota and Dakota member of AIM, is the longest-held political indigenous prisoner in the US. Peltier was arrested in 1975 after a confrontation on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and was charged with killing two feds in a shoot-out. Convicted in an unfair trial, he is now 79 years old, imprisoned for 47 years in Florida, after repeatedly being denied parole. Support the fight to Free Leonard Peltier now!