Dennis Banks

• Born: April 12, 1937
• Place of birth: Leech Lake Reservation, Minnesota
• Died: October 29, 2017
• Place of death: Rochester, Minnesota

Category: Activist

Tribal affiliation: Chippewa (Ojibwa)

Significance: One of the founders and leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM), Dennis Banks drew attention to the plight of contemporary American Indians

Dennis Banks, born on the Leech Lake reservation in northern Minnesota, was one of the founders of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in 1968. During the summer of 1972, Banks and about fifty other American Indian activists met in Denver to plan a Trail of Broken Treaties caravan. Their hope was to marshal thousands of protesters across the nation to march on Washington, DC, dramatizing the issue of American Indian self-determination. Banks was also a principal leader of AIM in 1973 during the occupation of the hamlet Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation.

Banks eluded capture during a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) dragnet following the deaths of two agents at Pine Ridge in 1975. He went underground before receiving amnesty from Edmund G. Brown Jr., governor of California. Banks earned an associate of arts degree at the University of California’s Davis campus and, during the late 1970s, helped to found and direct Deganawida-Quetzacóatl University, an American Indian–controlled college.

After Brown’s term as governor ended, Banks was sheltered in 1984 by the Onondagas on their reservation near Nedrow, New York. In 1984, he surrendered to face charges stemming from the 1970s in South Dakota. He served eighteen months in prison, after which he worked as a drug and alcohol counselor on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Banks remained active in American Indian politics in the 1990s, although he was not as often in the national spotlight. He also had acting roles in several films, including War Party, The Last of the Mohicans and Thunderheart.

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, in addition to writing and publishing the autobiography Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement (2004), Banks was the subject of the documentary Nowa Cumig: The Drum Will Never Stop (2011), directed by Marie-Michele Jasmin-Belisle. Despite his advancing age, he also continued to take part in the political world, running for the vice presidency of the United States alongside presidential nominee Gloria La Riva on the ballot of the California Peace and Freedom Party in 2016; he was also the vice presidential candidate for the Party for Socialism and Liberation in the states of Iowa, New Mexico, and Colorado.

Not long after a successful open-heart surgery, Banks died due to complications of pneumonia at a hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, on October 29, 2017, at the age of eighty.

Bibliography

Banks, Dennis. "The Longest Walk 5: An Interview with Dennis Banks." Interview by April Chee. The National Museum of the American Indian, 8 July 2016, blog.nmai.si.edu/main/2016/07/longest-walk-v-dennis-banks.html. Accessed 5 Dec. 2017.

Banks, Dennis, and Richard Erdoes. Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement. U of Oklahoma P, 2004.

Domonoske, Camila. "Dennis Banks, Native American Activist and Wounded Knee Occupier, Dies at 80." NPR, 30 Oct. 2017, www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/10/30/560918855/dennis-banks-native-american-activist-and-wounded-knee-occupier-dies-at-80. Accessed 5 Dec. 2017.

Langer, Emily. "Dennis Banks, Founder of American Indian Movement, Dies at 80." The Washington Post, 31 Oct. 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/dennis-banks-founder-of-american-indian-movement-dies-at-80/2017/10/31/96767fb8-be40-11e7-97d9-bdab5a0ab381‗story.html?utm‗term=.4fee38a25a57. Accessed 5 Dec. 2017.

McFadden, Robert D. "Dennis Banks, American Indian Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 80." The New York Times, 30 Oct. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/obituaries/dennis-banks-dead.html. Accessed 5 Dec. 2017.