American Indian activist Dennis Banks dies at age 80

Associated Press

Dennis Banks, a co-founder of the American Indian Movement and a leader of the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation, has died, his family announced today. He was 80.

Banks was one of several activists who founded the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis in 1968, and he was a leader of AIM's armed takeover of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1973, in a protest against both the tribal and U.S. governments.

The village had been the site of a massacre by U.S. soldiers in 1890 that left an estimated 300 Indians dead. The occupiers held federal agents at bay for 71 days.

Banks died Sunday night, his family wrote on his Facebook page . He had developed pneumonia after heart surgery, and his family said they honored his wishes not to be put on life support. Daughter Arrow Banks told The Associated Press the family would have more to say after a family meeting later today.

Banks, whose Ojibwe name was Nowacumig, lived near the town of Federal Dam on the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. His family said that as Banks took his last breaths, son Minoh Banks sang him four songs for his journey.

"All the family who were present prayed over him and said our individual goodbyes," the family said. "Then we proudly sang him the AIM song as his final send off."

Banks and fellow AIM leader Russell Means faced charges stemming from the Wounded Knee occupation, but a judge threw out the case. Banks, however, spent 18 months in prison in the 1980s after being convicted for rioting and assault for a protest in Custer, S.D., earlier in 1973.

He avoided prosecution on those charges for several years because California Gov. Jerry Brown refused to extradite him, and the Onondaga Nation in New York gave him sanctuary.