Introduction Movements Eras Organizations Index Contributions
About Organizations
Black Panther Party Black Liberation Army American Indian Movement FALN Weather Underground Earth Liberation Front Animal Liberation Front MOVE Republic of New Afrika Symbionese Liberation Army Los Macheteros United Freedom Front May 19th Communist Organization Young Lords George Jackson Brigade Students for a Democratic Society Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Industrial Workers of the World Communist Party USA Puerto Rican Nationalist Party Brown Berets Socialist Workers Party African People's Socialist Party Nation of Islam
About American Indian Movement
Founding in Minneapolis & the AIM Patrol (1968) Trail of Broken Treaties & the BIA Occupation (1972) The Custer Courthouse Confrontation (1973) The Occupation of Wounded Knee (1973) The Wounded Knee Leadership Trials (1974) The "Reign of Terror" on Pine Ridge (1973–1976) The Oglala Firefight & the RESMURS Prosecutions (1975) The Cedar Rapids Acquittal of Butler & Robideau (1976) The Leonard Peltier Case (1977– ) Later Prosecutions & AIM's Prisoner Legacy
THE "REIGN OF TERROR" ON PINE RIDGE (1973–1976)

In the three years after Wounded Knee, more than sixty AIM members and supporters died violently on and around the Pine Ridge Reservation, where tribal chairman Dick Wilson's private force — the self-named GOONs ("Guardians of the Oglala Nation") — operated with federal arms and near-total impunity. Pine Ridge's per-capita murder rate in those years was the highest in the country, yet the FBI, with its largest field presence anywhere, solved almost none of the killings of AIM people.

Among the dead was Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a leading Mi'kmaq AIM organizer found executed in early 1976 after being smeared by an FBI "snitch-jacketing" campaign; her murder remained officially unsolved for decades. The reign of terror is the essential context for the 1975 Oglala firefight and the Peltier case that grew from it.