Ojibwa Warrior or In Reckless Hands

Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement

Author: Dennis Banks

Dennis Banks, an American Indian of the Ojibwa Tribe, is probably the most influential Indian leader of our time. In Ojibwa Warrior, written with acclaimed writer and photographer Richard Erdoes, Banks tells his own story for the very first time and reveals an inside look at the birth of the American Indian Movement.

Born in 1937 and raised by his grandparents on the Leach Lake reservation in Minnesota, Dennis Banks grew up learning traditional Ojibwa lifeways. As a young child he was torn from his home and forced to attend a government boarding school designed to assimilate Indian children into white culture. After years of being white man-ized in these repressive schools, Banks enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, shipping out to Japan when he was only seventeen years old.

After returning to the states, Banks lived in poverty in the Indian slums of Minnesota until he was arrested for stealing groceries to feed his growing family. Although his white accomplice was freed on probation, Banks was sent to prison. There he became determined to educate himself. Hearing about the African American struggle for civil rights, he recognized that American Indians must take up a similar fight. Upon his release, Banks became a founder of AIM, the American Indian Movement, which soon inspired Indians from many tribes to join the fight for American Indian rights. Through AIM, Banks sought to confront racism with activism rooted deeply in Native religion and culture.

Ojibwa Warrior relates Dennis Banks's inspiring life story and the story of the rise of AIM—from the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties march to Washington, D.C., which ended in the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building, to the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee, when Lakota Indians and AIM activists from all over the country occupied the site of the infamous 1890 massacre of three hundred Sioux men, women, and children to protest the bloodshed and corruption at the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation.

Banks tells the inside story of the seventy-one day siege, his unlikely nighttime escape and interstate flight, and his eventual shootout with authorities at an FBI roadblock in Oregon. Pursued and hunted, he managed to reach California. There, authorities refused to extradite him to South Dakota, where the attorney general had declared that the best thing to do with Dennis Banks was to put a bullet through his head.

Years later, after a change in state government, Banks gave himself up to South Dakota authorities. Sentenced to two years in prison, he was paroled after serving one year to teach students Indian history at the Lone Man school at Pine Ridge. Since then, Dennis Banks has organized Sacred Runs for young people, teaching American Indian ways, religion, and philosophy worldwide. Now operating a successful business on the reservation, he continues the fight for Indian rights.

This account is enhanced by dramatic photographs, most taken by Richard Erdoes, of key people and events from the narrative.

Edna Boardman - KLIATT

At the time when the push for African American racial justice and the campaign to end American involvement in the war in Vietnam were shaking the nation, American Indians also sought to right grievances that had long haunted them. In this autobiographical account, Dennis Banks, one of the leaders of a group called the American Indian Movement, opened his eyes to the possibility for dignity and freedoms enjoyed by other citizens but, incredibly, denied to America's first residents. This book is both a history of AIM and the story of Banks's personal quest. Banks provides a valuable perspective on the fight for autonomy that took place in the 1960s and 1970s, and into the 1980s. He tells of the "lack of spiritual connection" among Native Indians and how it led to the revival of the Sweat Lodge, which helped them to reestablish that connection; he gives an account of the Sun Dance, long outlawed, which he describes as a rite of healing and survival, a "ceremony that transcends all others." He tells of his own participation in both of these ceremonies. He also informs readers about the Ghost Dance, which came into existence as white settlers and armies increased pressure on the Native American way of life. Using the tools of civil disobedience they had observed in the fight for African American equality, they fought to reclaim ancestral lands and sacred sites such as the Black Hills and fought restrictions on hunting and fishing rights. He and other Indian leaders led the campaign against the "lack of power, our inability to run our own lives," and the control the Bureau of Indian Affairs continued to exercise on them. They challenged the disdain for treaties by the government, limitations(some of them social) on where Indians could go, and police brutality very much like that visited on black Americans. Banks gives an interesting description of the 1973 Wounded Knee shootings. He spent time in prison, but has been released. This is an absorbing, well-written book, a useful Indian perspective on the life-changing events of the 20th century. KLIATT Codes: SA--Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2004, Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 362p. illus., Ages 15 to adult.

Library Journal

The American Indian Movement's (AIM) initial purpose upon its founding in 1968 was to protect the civil rights of Native Americans living in urban areas. Its scope quickly expanded as AIM turned to the problems of native peoples throughout the United States, especially on reservations. Banks, one of the founders of AIM, details the emergence of the organization and its national leaders, including Russell Means, Clyde Bellecourt, and George Mitchell. He also examines events that grabbed national headlines, such as the 1969-71 occupation of Alcatraz and the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee. Evident throughout is the belief that tribal governments aided the federal government in oppressing native peoples; in order for true reform to occur, entrenched accommodationist tribal leadership would have to be uprooted. Particularly enlightening is Banks's discussion of the role of spiritual leaders within AIM. Their vital role in the organization is often overlooked in discussions of AIM's activities. This autobiographical account by an important Native American leader is highly recommended for public and academic libraries.-John Burch, Campbellsville Univ. Lib., KY Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

	List of Illustrations	ix
1.	A Night to Remember	3
2.	At the Center of the Universe	12
3.	The Yellow Bus	24
4.	Interlude	32
5.	Machiko	43
6.	We AIM Not to Please	58
7.	Crow Dog	95
8.	On the Warpath	105
9.	Yellow Thunder	114
10.	Fishing in Troubled Waters	121
11.	One Hell of a Smoke Signal	126
12.	The Town with the Gunsmoke Flavor	145
13.	A Place Called Wounded Knee	157
14.	The Siege	167
15.	A Nation Reborn	181
16.	The Stand Down	196
17.	The Waters of Justice Have Been Polluted	210
18.	The Symbionese Liberation Army	228
19.	The Informer	266
20.	Fields of Terror	284
21.	Outlawed	299
22.	Exile	312
23.	Onondaga	329
24.	Freedom	338
25.	Suddenly I Am an "Elder"	348
26.	Looking Back	354

New interesting textbook: Living with Spina Bifida or Modern Primitives

In Reckless Hands: Skinner V. Oklahoma and the Near-Triumph of American Eugenics

Author: Victoria F Nours

The disturbing, forgotten history of America's experiment with eugenics.

In the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of men and women were sterilized at asylums and prisons across America. Believing that criminality and mental illness were inherited, state legislatures passed laws calling for the sterilization of "habitual criminals" and the "feebleminded." But in 1936, inmates at Oklahoma's McAlester prison refused to cooperate; a man named Jack Skinner was the first to come to trial. A colorful and heroic cast of characters—from the inmates themselves to their devoted, self-taught lawyer—would fight the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Only after Americans learned the extent of another large-scale eugenics project—in Nazi Germany—would the inmates triumph.

Combining engrossing narrative with sharp legal analysis, Victoria F. Nourse explains the consequences of this landmark decision, still vital today—and reveals the stories of these forgotten men and women who fought for human dignity and the basic right to have a family. 11 photographs.

Publishers Weekly

The shocking story of the American eugenics movement has been told before, but Nourse's first book focuses on the Supreme Court case that dealt the movement its death blow: the 1942 decision in Skinner v. Oklahoma. Nourse conveys the popular acceptance of the idea of "race betterment" in the 1920s and '30s: in the permanent Eugenics Pavilion at the Kansas Free Fair, for instance, flashing lights toted up the cost to society of the criminal and the "feebleminded." Against this background, Nourse, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin, conveys the magnitude of the constitutional challenge facing Jack Skinner, an Oklahoma convict ordered sterilized pursuant to a eugenic statute aimed at "habitual criminals." Nourse is equally effective depicting the legal strategies and the impact of the Depression and the growing awareness of Nazi atrocities on the High Court. A bit more challenging is Nourse's analysis of Skinner's theoretical underpinnings. She argues convincingly that today, when genes are viewed as the "cause for everything from criminality to spirituality," America's flirtation with eugenics is a cautionary tale worth remembering. 11 photos. (July)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Reviews

Memorable account of a landmark case that stymied the practice of forced sterilization. The original 1934 plaintiffs were three men jailed in Oklahoma's McAlester prison; each had at least three felony convictions, which made them eligible for sterilization under the state's broad 1933 law. Similar laws around the country drew their rationale from the pseudo-science of eugenics, which claimed that insanity, feeble-mindedness, promiscuity and criminality were inherited traits. Pseudonymous, frequently flawed family studies in the late 19th- and early-20th century had made names like Jukes and Kallikak synonyms for generations of imbeciles and criminals. Two crusading Oklahoma lawyers took the McAlester inmates' case and managed to delay implementation of the law as they lost appeal after appeal to higher courts-losses that occasioned prison riots and breakouts. At the 11th hour, two additional lawyers filed for consideration of Skinner v. Oklahoma by the U.S. Supreme Court. By that time, in late 1941, the court was headed by Harlan Stone and included Roosevelt appointees Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black and William O. Douglas. The world was at war, and even the self-righteous who saw eugenics as the path to society's betterment were having second thoughts in light of Nazi atrocities. Douglas wrote in the deciding opinion on June 1, 1942, that "in reckless hands," entire "races or types" might "wither and disappear." Moreover, the law violated equal protection because it did not mandate sterilization for embezzlers or tax cheats (non-felons). Perhaps the most visionary language, however, came in the justice's reference to procreation as "an area of human rights." In a nuanced discourse, Nourse(Criminal and Constitutional Law/Univ. of Wisconsin) recounts how legal thinking concerning race, liberty, constitutionality, equal protection and civil rights has changed dramatically since Skinner. However, she warns, society may once again be looking for "the 'natural' secret to criminal tendencies," this time in the form of bad genes. A legal tale that reads like a cliffhanger. Agent: Cecelia Cancellaro/Idea Architects