The American Indian Rights Movement

What do you know about the American Indian rights movement? You may have heard about modern pipeline protests, but this resistance has its roots in the early years of the United States, when the government began stripping American Indians of their rights and forcing them off their lands onto reservations. What are the main concerns of the American Indian rights movement today? What challenges have activists faced throughout history? Find out about how important players like Sacheen Littlefeather and Russell Means paved the way for current activists and discover how activists are still fighting for better living conditions and environmental justice today.

American Indians have faced injustice from the moment Europeans came to the Americas to claim land and resources. This volume traces the history of injustice against American Indians, from losing their land, to moving to reservations, to having their culture stolen from them. Readers will learn how the movement for rights began, and the challenges and successes activists faced. Primary sources and photographs from the movement will bring readers back in time to fully grasp the importance of events. The book concludes by challenging readers to think about how they could help advance American Indian rights today.

Discusses events that took place before and after Native American activism began. Includes a chronology from 1887 to 1988.

While tribal-state relationships have historically been characterized as tense, most southern tribesparticularly non-federally recognized onesfound that Indian affairs commissions offered them a unique position in which to negotiate power. Although individual tribal leaders experienced isolated victories and generated some support through the 1950s and 1960s, the creation of the intertribal state commissions in the 1970s and 1980s elevated the movement to a more prominent political level. Through the formalization of tribal-state relationships, Indian communities forged strong networks with local, state, and national agencies while advocating for cultural preservation and revitalization, economic development, and the implementation of community services.

A powerful, insider's history of the first decade of the American Indian Movement.

For a brief but brilliant season beginning in the late 1960s, American Indians seized national attention in a series of radical acts of resistance. Like a Hurricane is a gripping account of the dramatic, breathtaking events of this tumultuous period. Drawing on a wealth of archival materials, interviews, and the authors' own experiences of these events, Like a Hurricane offers a rare, unflinchingly honest assessment of the period's successes and failures.

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 vivid description of the people, events, and issues that forever changed the lives of Native Americans during the 1960s and 1970s—such as the occupation of Alcatraz, fishing-rights conflicts, and individuals such as Clyde Warrior. Rising out of more than a century of poverty and pervasive repression, stoked by the example of the movement against the Vietnam War and the upheaval among black and Chicano civil-rights activists, the American Indian Movement shifted the debate over "the Indian problem" to a new level. Many Native peoples also took a stand for fishing rights, land rights, and formed resistance to coal and uranium mining on tribal land. This work tells the story of that movement, and provides the first encyclopedic treatment of this subject. Providing a vital documentation of a controversial and often surprising period in American Indian history, Bruce E. Johansen, an accomplished scholar and authority on Native American history, provides more than descriptions of historic events and careful analysis; he also frames what occurred in the American Indian Movement personally and anecdotally, drawing from individual stories to illustrate larger trends—and to ensure that the material is appealing to high school students, university-level readers, and general readers alike.