Native American activism

• TRIBES AFFECTED: Pantribal
• SIGNIFICANCE: In the mid-1960s, American Indians embarked on a new phase in their relationship with the US government. This was characterized by a proactive insistence that the United States honor the terms of previous treaties.

During the Eisenhower Administration (1953-1961), the official US government policy toward American Indians was called termination. Under this policy, the government sought to end the special legal status of American Indians and to encourage the assimilation of Native peoples into US citizenship. Under these terms, the government sought to end the special legal status of Indigenous people and encourage their assimilation into mainstream society. Alongside termination was a similar strategy called relocation. Under this plan, Indigenous Americans were to be taken off tribal lands and relocated to urban areas for training and employment. The necessary complement to termination and relocation, in the government’s view, was abolishing treaty rights for all Indigenous groups. By the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, however, some American Indians were adopting tactics and strategies used by Civil Rights protesters; because many believed that most treaties had been repeatedly violated, the path of active protest seemed a natural one.

Northwest Fish-ins

In 1964, the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) organized a fish-in in Washington State. Tribes there had increasingly been prohibited from fishing in waters granted to them by treaty. Sportspeople and commercial fisheries believed that Native fishers were interfering with their ability to fish for profit and fun. The Native fishers, however, were most often fishing either in observation of tribal ritual or for subsistence. The fish-ins attracted widespread notice, including the appearance of celebrities such as actor Marlon Brando and Civil Rights activist Dick Gregory, and managed to bring the fishing controversies to the national headlines. Case after case was adjudicated in the following years, from the Northwest to the upper Great Lakes. Many times, the decision came down on the side of the tribal treaty rights. These successes, especially between 1964 and 1966, galvanized many young American Indians. This was especially crucial because many elders of different tribes distrusted the course of activism. The success of NIYC leadership in the fish-in controversy legitimized more active protest.

Cornwall Bridge Blocked

Activism was not confined to the West and Midwest. In 1968, a group of Mohawk people blocked the Cornwall Bridge linking Canada with New York. Their complaint was simple: the Mohawk people were granted free movement between Canada and the United States by treaty with Great Britain, a treaty Canada had pledged to honor. Nevertheless, Canadian police had been interfering with free transit. The Mohawk group barricaded the bridge, resulting in the arrest of several of their leaders. The case was brought to trial, but the court found the treaty issue beyond its jurisdiction. All charges were dropped, and the police were advised to become more conciliatory.

Birth of the American Indian Movement (AIM)

In the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, in 1968, Native residents had noted the extremely high rates of arrest of American Indians relative to other groups. They also heard many stories of the rough and sometimes brutal police treatment of American Indians. Some Minneapolis American Indians began to follow police cruisers on weekends to document what happened. During the next ten months, police arrests of American Indians dropped to almost zero, demonstrating at least that having witnesses and advocates on the scene helped matters. This was the beginning of the American Indian Movement (AIM).

The Occupation of Alcatraz

None of these events was as dramatic as the November 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island, formerly the site of a federal penitentiary. The immediate reason for the seizure of Alcatraz was that the San Francisco Indian Center had burned to the ground. This left a visiting group, the American Indians United, without a place to stay. Fewer than twenty American Indians landed on Alcatraz and declared it Indian Territory under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which granted federal land to American Indians if it was no longer in use by the federal government. Although the island was empty two years later, the call for the restoration of land by lawful treaty was once again established. Though there were successes in land restoration (for example, the return of Blue Lake to the Taos Pueblo people and the return of Mount Adams to the Yakima people), the issue of land and treaty rights brought into the spotlight the US government’s history of treaty abridgment and effectively ended the policies of termination and relocation. There was, as yet, however, no movement toward what many activists wanted—a policy of self-determination for Indigenous people.

Early 1970s

These were watershed years for American Indian activism. In 1970, more than 150 Pit River tribespeople occupied parts of Lassen National Park and Pacific Gas and Electric land in Northern California. Other demonstrators took over Ellis Island in New York to protest treaty violations. The Lakota people briefly occupied Mount Rushmore, a sacred site.

It is the year 1972 that claims most notice. Early that year, the Chippewa people regained their right to police fishing within their reserve. That spring at Cass Lake, Minnesota, AIM convened to help decide how those rights would be allocated. During the convention, roads were blocked and guns were in evidence; the atmosphere was tense as AIM members battled what they saw as overly conservative traditionalists. The situation so unnerved local resort owners that they acceded to demands for absolute Chippewa control.

Shortly after the Cass Lake convention, an older Pine Ridge Sioux, Raymond Yellow Thunder, was murdered in Gordon, Nebraska, by five White men. Gordon officials did nothing about the situation. In response, the AIM convened one thousand American Indians, who descended on the town in protest. AIM also protested the murders of American Indians in California and Arizona. After the apparent public relations successes of these protests, AIM leaders began to plan a nationwide caravan, the Trail of Broken Treaties, for the fall of 1972, before the presidential elections.

The caravan had several purposes. First, it was hoped it would create favorable public sentiment for the cause of treaty enforcement. Second, the participants hoped, by their timing, to force the US government to deal with them. Third, they hoped to convert the national media to their cause.

About midway through the caravan, the group stopped in Minneapolis to release their agenda for Washington, the “Twenty Points,” to the media. Among the demands were a repeal of the 1871 ban on further treaty-making, the end of state court jurisdiction over American Indians, and a review of US treaty violations of the past and redress for those violations.

Once in Washington, D.C., on November 3, the caravan had grown to numbers well exceeding expectations. There was also a high percentage of participants from reservations (about 80 percent), something most media had not predicted, since AIM was regarded primarily as an urban group. There was also a high number of eastern tribes represented, perhaps unsurprising, since one of the Twenty Points demanded federal services for the eastern tribes not currently receiving them.

However, the number also exceeded organizers' expectations, leaving many travelers without accommodations. Eventually, the Department of the Interior’s auditorium was booked as a place for the activists to stay. As people began leaving the Bureau of Indian Affairs building, overzealous guards pushed them out through the doors. Believing that they might be turned over to a police riot squad on the outside, activists rushed back into the building and barricaded themselves in, breaking apart furniture to board windows and fasten doors.

For six days, they remained inside, despite occasional police attempts to breach their security. Finally, on November 9, negotiators reached a settlement of the problem. There would be no prosecution of the Indigenous people involved, and $66,000 was appropriated for return transportation. The Twenty Points would be considered, and a response would be made.

When the Nixon Administration replied to the Twenty Points in January 1973, the response was disappointing to the tribes. In essence, the administration rejected any notion of treaty enforcement or treaty reform. The response noted the first Nixon Administration’s accomplishments and promised more positive action. Still, the hope represented by the drafting of the Twenty Points was dampened.

Wounded Knee II

In January 1973, a Sioux, Wesley Bad Heart Bear, was killed under uncertain circumstances. When a White man was charged with manslaughter instead of murder, Dennis Banks and Russell Means led AIM supporters first into Buffalo Gap, South Dakota, and then into Rapid City, demanding justice. Though tension filled the air for several days, a promise of justice was finally extracted, and Banks addressed the South Dakota legislature, promising a new era in race relations between White and Indigenous Americans.

Banks and Means returned to the Pine Ridge Reservation to celebrate. This was unfortunate because Tribal Chairman Richard Wilson had declared (after the Raymond Yellow Thunder celebration and the occupation of the BIA office) that Means, Banks, and the AIM were never to celebrate on Pine Ridge again.

When they arrived, tribal police began to harass them. Events escalated to the point that tribal officials finally called in federal marshals to control the situation. On February 28, AIM occupied the Wounded Knee site on the reservation and announced political independence of Pine Ridge and Richard Wilson. More marshals arrived, and a number of AIM supporters from outside Pine Ridge arrived at the Wounded Knee compound, including a number of traditional holy people and a contingent from the Mohawk Nation.

The government issued several sets of ultimatums, culminating in an order during the second week that everyone leave Wounded Knee by six o’clock that day, or federal marshals would come in shooting. The National Council of Churches had representatives there, and they vowed that should such an order be implemented, they would stand between the marshals’ gunfire and the activists. The ultimatum was rescinded.

On March 11, Russell Means announced to a national television audience that the Oglala Sioux Nation had been formed and declared its independence from the US. He described the borders of the new nation and promised to shoot anyone who crossed those borders. This action seemed finally to shift the gears of the situation toward settlement. Hank Adams, a fish-in veteran who had helped negotiate the BIA occupation, met with high-level administration officials to bring about some of the changes desired by AIM. What had begun as a local controversy between AIM and Richard Wilson ended up having national effects. The occupation lasted seventy-two days.

The violent ending to the occupation led to many injuries and several deaths, including two Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams. Authorities implicated Leonard Peltier, an Indigenous activist and AIM member, in their murders, and he received two consecutive life sentences in 1977. However, many activists and human rights groups promptly raised concerns about Peltier’s legal representation, prosecutorial misconduct, due process violations, and trial fairness, including Amnesty International, the National Congress of American Indians, the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations Human Rights Council. In 2022, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found his conviction and confinement constituted arbitrary imprisonment. Many prominent figures also raised concerns about Peltier’s conviction and sentence, including Pope Francis, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama.

Despite decades of advocacy efforts on Peltier’s behalf, authorities continually denied his parole requests. He spent nearly fifty years in prison before President Joe Biden commuted his life sentence in January 2025, just before leaving office. Eighty-year-old Peltier returned to North Dakota’s Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, where he received a warm welcome from supporters and members of his community. ​In interviews, Peltier maintained his innocence throughout his time in prison and following his release. His incarceration became a symbol for the injustices and government oppression that Indigenous people experience.

Legislative and Judicial Activism

Indigenous American issues have frequently been adjudicated, and these decisions have played a large role in how Indigenous nations are or are not allowed to govern themselves. Because so much of American Indian activism gets its energy from the desire for self-determination, it is helpful to understand the US courts’ actions.

The principle of tribal sovereignty was established between 1823 and 1832 in a series of cases: Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), (1831), and (1832). In all these cases, the operative phrasing was that tribes were “dependent, domestic nations.” Though this doctrine was never challenged by subsequent courts, there was still no question of who held the power over Indigenous nations. In United States v. Kagama (1886), the Supreme Court ruled that the federal branch of the US government, specifically the Congress, held ultimate sovereignty over tribal nations. This solidified the “plenary power” of Congress, meaning that it could legislate American Indian affairs in any way it saw fit, without regard to constitutional review (in other words, what would be unconstitutional for other Americans might well be considered appropriate for American Indians). Similarly, in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903), the Supreme Court ruled that Congress may abrogate at will any treaty with any tribe.

The tide in adjudication turned somewhat in the early 1900s. In United States v. Winans (1905), the Court recognized that tribes (specifically the Yakima) have rights reserved for them (in this case, game) even if those rights are not specifically named in a treaty. In Winters v. United States (1908), the Court held that water rights are included even if not named in treaties.

These decisions form the basis of the law on which modern activism is based. The acknowledged beginning of the modern era of American Indian law is the landmark case Williams v. Lee (1959). In that case, the reserved rights by treaty were held to include the right of the Navajo to try a case in their own tribal courts. The state of Arizona’s position, that it alone had the right to try cases, was rebuffed.

By the 1960s, numerous organizations were dedicated to pursuing the rights of American Indians through the courts. These included the Indian Rights Association, the Association on American Indian Affairs, the Legal Services Corporation, and the Native American Rights Fund. As described earlier, one of the persistent cases was the battle over fishing rights. This issue came before the Supreme Court three times during the 1960s. This series of cases became known as the Puyallup Series. In United States v. Washington (1973), the Supreme Court upheld the American Indian right to share equally in the salmon harvest in the Northwest. A subsequent case, Washington v. Fishing Vessel Association (1979), modified the earlier ruling somewhat by granting American Indians only a “moderate” fishing livelihood.

During the 1970s, American Indians increasingly won judicial approval for many tribal and self-determining activities. These included education, taxes, tribal governance, adoption, and revenue-generating operations of all kinds. Two particular landmark cases are United States v. Mazurie (1975), in which tribal courts gained the right to try a non-Indian, and Fisher v. District Court (1976), in which it was held that the state of Montana could not intervene in a Northern Cheyenne adoption. Finally, in 1977, the decision in Delaware v. Weeks ended the doctrine of plenary power, as the Court applied constitutional review to an act of Congress regarding American Indians.

After this, three important congressional acts were passed that seemed to many to mark a new attitude toward American Indians. The 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act extended to American Indians the same religious freedom enjoyed by other Americans. The 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act opened the door to tribal revenue generation through the gaming industry, a boon to many tribes’ coffers. The 1990 Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act began to address a problem most American Indians believed to be a symbol of the American lack of respect for the First Nations.

Dakota Access Pipeline

In the twenty-first century, Indigenous American activism continued with protests over the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), also referred to as the Bakken Pipeline. In 2014, a consortium of oil producers announced plans to build a 1,200-mile pipeline originating in North Dakota and running through Illinois. The $4 billion project aimed to have the capacity to transport more than half a million barrels of crude oil every day. The proposal met immediate opposition from the Standing Rock Sioux Nation. A major point of contention was that the pipeline would traverse underneath the Missouri River and other freshwater reservoirs essential to the Standing Rock Sioux and other Indigenous lands. Also, according to activists, the pipeline violated the Fort Laramie Treaty, which stipulated the undisturbed use and occupation of reservation land. Supporters maintained that the pipeline was the most environmentally safe option for transporting this volume of petroleum across the continental United States.

The controversy over DAPL prompted a series of protests, many of which involved Indigenous nations and their members. In the ensuing months, incidents of violence were reported, as well as the arrest of protestors. In September 2016, the North Dakota Army National Guard deployed to assist with law enforcement activities.

In January 2017, President Donald Trump's administration approved the construction of the project, which was completed six months later. In 2020, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe garnered a legal victory that rescinded the federal permit while the US Army Corps of Engineers undertook a comprehensive environmental study. In February 2022, the US Supreme Court rejected a legal bid by oil producers to overturn the 2020 ruling. The DAPL continued operating through the 2020s.

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