1 ene 1969 año - AMerican Indian occupation of Alcatraz

Descripción:

AIM: Organization established in 1968 to address the problems Indians faced in American cities, including poverty and police harassment. AIM organized Indians to end relocation and termination policies and to win greater control over their cultures and communities.

American Indians, inspired by the Black Power and Chicano movements, organized to address their unique circumstances. The country’s nearly 800,000 Native people were (and are) exceedingly diverse — distinguished from one another by language, tribal history, region, and degree of integration into American life. As a group, they shared a staggering unemployment rate — ten times the national average — and huge deficits in housing, health, and access to education. Native people also had a fraught relationship with the federal government. In the 1960s, the prevailing spirit of protest swept into Native communities. Young militants challenged their elders in the National Congress of American Indians. Beginning in 1960, the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), under the slogan “For a Greater Indian America,” promoted the ideal of Native Americans as a single ethnic group — a challenging task given the importance of individual tribal culture.
he NIYC had substantial influence within tribal communities, but two other organizations, the militant Indians of All Tribes (IAT) and the American Indian Movement (AIM), attracted more attention in mainstream culture. These groups embraced the concept of Red Power, and beginning in 1968 they staged escalating protests to draw attention to indigenous issues, especially the concerns of urban Indians, many of whom had been encouraged, or forced, to leave reservations by the federal government — and faced poverty and police harassment, among other ills, in their new urban environs. In 1969, members of the IAT occupied the deserted federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and proclaimed: “We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for twenty-four dollars in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white man’s purchase of a similar island [Manhattan] about 300 years ago.” In 1972, AIM members joined the Trail of Broken Treaties, a march sponsored by a number of Indian groups. When AIM activists seized and ransacked the headquarters of the hated Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., older tribal leaders denounced them.


Members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and local Oglala Sioux stand guard outside the Sacred Heart Catholic Church after taking control of the town and eleven hostages during a seventy-one-day standoff with the FBI and U.S. Marshalls. Founded in 1968, AIM was among several Native American groups fighting for indigenous rights in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1973 action pictured above, AIM activists occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, one of the poorest such Native reservations in the country.


AIM drew national media attention with a siege at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in February 1973. The site of the infamous 1890 U.S. military massacre of the Sioux by the U.S. military, Wounded Knee was part of the Pine Ridge Reservation, where young AIM activists had cultivated ties to sympathetic elders. For more than two months, AIM members occupied a small collection of buildings, holding off detachments of FBI agents and U.S. marshals. Several gun battles left two dead, and the siege was finally brought to a negotiated end. Although AIM’s tactics were upsetting to many white onlookers and Indian elders alike, their protests attracted widespread mainstream coverage and spurred government action on tribal issues.

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