Dennis Banks

Ojibwa activist, born in Leech Lake, Minnesota, USA. Educated in Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools, he co-founded, with George Mitchell, the American Indian Movement (1968). He was a leader in such protest actions as the Trail of Broken Treaties (1972) and the occupation of Wounded Knee (1973). Convicted in 1975 on charges stemming from a South Dakota demonstration, he was granted asylum by California governor Jerry Brown the following year, but he returned to South Dakota (1984) to serve time in prison. In 1992 he appeared in the film The Last of the Mohicans.

Dennis Banks (born April 12, 1937), a Native American leader, teacher, lecturer, activist and author, is an Anishinaabe born on Leech Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota. Banks is also known as Nowa Cumig (Naawakamig in the Double Vowel System);

In 1968 he co-founded the American Indian Movement (AIM), and established it to protect the traditional ways of Indian people and to engage in legal cases protecting treaty rights of Natives, such as hunting and fishing, trapping, and wild rice farming.

He participated in the 1969 – 1971 occupation of Alcatraz Island. however, government officials refused to meet with delegates of this group which resulted in the seizure and occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs office.

He also spearheaded the movement on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1973 to oust the corrupt government-appointed chairman. Banks was the principal negotiator and leader of the Wounded Knee forces.

Under his leadership, AIM led a protest in Custer, South Dakota in 1973 against judicial proceeding that found a White man innocent of murdering a Native American. As a result of his involvement in Wounded Knee and Custer, Banks and 300 others were arrested and faced trial. Refusing the prison term, Banks went underground, organized a small armed AIM group including Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, who was suspected of being an FBI informant.

During his time in California from 1976 to 1983, Banks earned an associate's degree from the University of California, Davis and taught at Deganawida Quetzecoatl University (DQU), a Native American-controlled institute of alternative higher learning, where he became the first American Indian chancellor. After Governor Brown left office, Banks received sanctuary from the Onondaga Nation in upstate New York in 1984. While in New York, Banks organized the Great Jim Thorpe Longest Run from New York to Los Angeles, where the goal was to restore the gold medals Thorpe had won at the 1912 Olympics to the Thorpe family.

In 1985 Banks left Onondaga to surrender to law enforcement officials in South Dakota and served 18 months in prison. When he was released, he worked as a drug and alcohol counselor on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. During 1987, grave robbers in Uniontown, Kentucky were halted in their digging for artifacts in American Indian grave sites. Banks was called in to organize the reburial ceremonies.

He has had roles in the movies War Party, The Last of the Mohicans, and Thunderheart.

In 2006, Banks led Sacred Run 2006 a spiritual run from San Francisco's Alcatraz Island to Washington, D.C.

Current information on Dennis Banks' activities can be found on the websites of the Nowa Cumig Institute and SacredRun.org. Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement, Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press.