Biography
Dennis Banks was an Anishinaabe organizer and a co-founder of the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis in 1968. With Russell Means he led the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties and the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation, and faced the same nine-month federal prosecution that ended in dismissal of all charges in September 1974. He later faced an unrelated South Dakota state prosecution arising from a 1973 protest at the Custer County courthouse; rather than surrender to that sentence he went on the run in 1975, living under sanctuary in California (granted by Governor Jerry Brown) and later on the Onondaga Nation in New York. He finally surrendered in 1984 and served 18 months at the South Dakota State Penitentiary at Sioux Falls.
The 1973 Wounded Knee occupation began on February 27, 1973, when approximately 200 members of the Oglala Lakota and the American Indian Movement seized the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation, demanding hearings on broken treaties and the removal of corrupt tribal president Dick Wilson. The occupation lasted 71 days, during which two AIM members were killed by federal gunfire, twelve were wounded, and approximately 1,200 people were arrested. The federal prosecution of Means and Banks ran for nine months; on September 16, 1974, Chief Judge Fred Nichol of the District of South Dakota dismissed all charges, ruling that the FBI had altered evidence, conducted illegal electronic surveillance, and that an FBI special agent had committed perjury on the stand.
