For this blog I would like to take a look at the American Indian Movement, or AIM for short.
Before I did my research on the organization, I felt that they had been branded as an extremist Indian movement. I consulted my good friend the World Wide Web for information.
To those of you of who are aware of AIM, you know that they have been linked to a man named Leonard Peltier, who is an activist and member of AIM. He is currently serving a prison sentence for the 1975 Pine Ridge Indian Reservation shooting that killed two FBI agents.
Peltier is believed by many to be innocent of the crime, but that will be for another blog on another day.
AIM was founded in 1968 by George Mitchell, Herb Powless, Clyde Bellecourt, Dennis Banks and Harold Goodsky, and their official website declares them to be “the catalyst for Indian Sovereignty, AIM is first, a spiritual movement, a religious re-birth, AIM succeeds because they have beliefs to act upon.”
AIM’s website also includes declassified documents from the FBI that searched for evidence to pin the movement as criminal.
The history the two organizations share is a one typical of ‘minority seeks to strengthen itself in numbers against majority looking to assimilate, annihilate and erase from history our importance in the settling of this continent’ in short, of course.
Again, I have no answers as to why such a large organization like the FBI feels it is necessary to keep tabs on – and engage in conflicts against – the well-being of their country’s First people.
My journey into doing these blogs has made me distrust a lot of information from organizations on both sides of the border. From the incarceration of Leonard Peltier, to the body bags, to the 1981 Quebec Provincial Police raid, to the countless injustices against us, it is a depressing area to delve into.
It seems at this point that our history is a long way from being written by us again, but hopefully with raised awareness of these resources and movements we can step forward on our own terms, sooner rather than later.
Sometime in the near future, our time will come again.
I encourage anyone interested to visit the AIM website and learn about our people living on the other side of the border.
Any thoughts? I am always up for discussion. My email is [email protected], so feel free to email me your thoughts, questions, comments or complaints (put Native Issues in subject box) and I will get back to you as fast as I can.
