American Indian Movement

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Essay on the American Indian Movement

The American Indian Movement (AIM ) is a precise reflection of the continuing neglect and maltreatment by the white-dominated United States government of the original settlers of American land . The story of the beginnings of the movement eloquently mirrors the history of the 'problem of the American Indian ' and the largely inadequate , if not inimical policies adopted , aggravated by the poor quality of their implementation

The American Indian Movement traces its roots to Minneapolis , Minnesota in the late 1960s

when Native American activists George Mitchell , Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt rallied their people to discuss and speak out against the long-term federal government 's Indian policy and the discriminatory treatment they suffer . With the founding of the Movement the many problems and issues confronting the American Indians were articulated , including slum housing , the high level of unemployment racial discrimination , treaty rights and the reclaiming of Native Indian land

The nascent AIM members undertook many fervent protests and other activities including opening of the K-12 Heart of the Heart Survival School and the Trail of Broken Treaties march when they took over the headquarters of the Bureau of Indian Affairs . The 1975 Wounded Knee standoff became bloody violent when the FBI and the CIA set out to the South Dakota Indian Reservation to crush the Movement (Minnesota Historical ? 1-4 . Two years earlier , over 60 tribe folk were murdered by supposed goons despite a large FBI presence ( Leonard Peltier 3

The activist American Indian Movement is but an organized reaction to a century of racially prejudiced governance and neglect . The founders tribal members and supporters of the Movement have believed in the struggle to assert their inherent indigenous rights and culture and their claim not only to land rights but to a better life not as mainstream citizens but as proud American Natives . It is a sore note in the history of the United States how the government that had long mistreated the American Indians can meet AIM 's protests in the 1970s with vicious suppression and violence

It was probably unthinkable for the international community how the bastion of Western democracy and avowed supporter of human rights can treat its aborigines with easy neglect and quick violence . But as it would be , the Movement drew international support , along with the sympathies of other indigenous cultures of the world . The struggle for the causes of American Indians today reverberates through the international community

In the case of Leonard Peltier , no less than the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and Amnesty International are among the international individuals , groups and organizations that have called for his immediate release as they consider him a political prisoner . Peltier was a Native American and AIM organizer imprisoned for over 30 years now for the killing of two FBI agents during the 1975 Wounded Knee shoot-out ( Leonard Peltier ? 1 19

The continuing refusal of the United States government to release...