American Indian Movement (AIM) was a civil rights organization in the United States and Canada that was founded to protect equal rights for Native Americans and improve their living conditions. The group participated in efforts to establish indigenous (native) land ownership rights. AIM was founded in 1968. In 1993, the organization split into two main factions, with each group claiming to be the true inheritor of AIM’s founding principles.
AIM was often critical of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a U.S. government agency that works to promote the welfare of Native Americans. AIM believed the bureau had failed to eliminate widespread job and housing discrimination and poverty among Native Americans. The organization also demanded the return of property rights guaranteed by treaties between the U.S. and Canadian governments and various tribes.
AIM was founded in Minneapolis in 1968 by Dennis Banks, George Mitchell, and Clyde H. Bellecourt. Its original goals were to help improve the lives of the city’s Native Americans and to protect them from police actions that AIM considered brutality. AIM chapters began to be formed in other cities in 1970. AIM carried out several protests to call national attention to the problems of Native Americans. In 1972, members occupied the headquarters of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., for several days. The following year, AIM members and others seized the village of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, where the U.S. Cavalry massacred as many as 300 Sioux in 1890 (see Wounded Knee).
During the 1970’s, AIM established and operated a number of organizations to help Native Americans develop a sense of self-determination. These groups, consisting only of indigenous people, worked to improve schools, legal services, employment programs, and health services for Native Americans.
In the mid-1970’s, the U.S. government brought many of AIM’s leaders to trial for their activities. In response, AIM decentralized. The national chairmanship disbanded, but local chapters continued to function. Problems among AIM leaders contributed to the group’s decline in the 1980’s. In 1993, AIM split into two main groups, the American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council (AIMGGC) and the International Confederation of Autonomous Chapters of the American Indian Movement (Autonomous AIM). AIMGGC—led by Banks, Bellecourt, and Bellecourt’s brother Vernon Bellecourt—formed a centralized organization with local chapters. Its national headquarters is in Minneapolis. Autonomous AIM opposed any centralized decision-making body or national headquarters. It consists of autonomous (self-governing) local chapters. Russell Means, the first national director of AIM, was an important spokesperson for Autonomous AIM’s chapters.
See also Mankiller, Wilma.
