A closer look

The American Indian Movement

How did the American Indian Movement resist assimilation and revitalize Indigenous culture?

by Pennee Bender, American Social History Project, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Local Organizing and the American Indian Movement

Native American activism in the 1960s and 1970s is most often associated with the American Indian Movement (AIM) and its dramatic occupations of federal land and marches that received national media coverage, such as the takeover of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., the siege at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, and the cross-country Longest Walk. But AIM began as a local community organization and developed a range of strategies to counter U.S. government policies. From its inception, the United States followed a system of settler colonialism that sought to displace Indigenous nations, take over their land for new settlers, and force cultural assimilation. While an upsurge of civil rights activism in the 1960s garnered national attention and support for the issues faced by Indigenous people, examining the community-based activities of the movement can illuminate both the profound changes AIM sought to achieve and how it created long-term institutions that changed conditions for many urban American Indians.

Government Policies in the 1950 and 1960s

In the 1950s, a series of state laws and congressional acts established the government’s policy of terminating over one hundred Indigenous nations and eliminating their sovereign status, including removing over one million acres of Native lands from federal trust status. As part of this termination policy, the U.S. government set up a Voluntary Relocation Program to encourage hundreds of thousands of Native Americans to relocate from reservations to urban areas. The program set up relocation offices in seven major cities and provided transportation to the cities, assistance in finding employment and housing, and a small stipend to aid the transition. But many of those who left their reservations for promised opportunities found inadequate housing options, discrimination in employment, a lack of health care, and hostility toward Native Americans by social service agencies, the police, and the court system. Police harassment and brutality, high arrest rates, and gross disparities in prison terms for Native Americans became a key factor in the creation of the American Indian Movement.

AIM’s Formation and National Activism

Intertribal resistance to government assimilation policies and treaty violations has a long history dating back to nineteenth-century cultural revitalization movements such as the Ghost Dance movement. In the early and mid-twentieth century, a number of national American Indian organizations formed, including the National Congress of American Indians (1944), National Indian Youth Council (1961), and Survival of American Indians Association (1964), to fight for improved conditions and regional land and fishing rights. At the same time, local grassroots groups of urban Native people from different nations were meeting in homes, churches, and cultural centers to provide moral support and maintain Native social and cultural traditions. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, discrimination in the schools and social service agencies and police harassment spurred almost two hundred Native Americans to attend a July 1968 community meeting called to improve opportunities and conditions for Native people in urban areas. The group created AIM and established a set of objectives. Inspired in part by the activism of the Black Power movement, AIM quickly set up an Indian Patrol to intervene in cases of police brutality, a legal rights center to provide assistance to those arrested, and a community health clinic. As AIM members attended national intertribal conferences, joined the occupation of Alcatraz, and began organizing national protests, AIM chapters began to form in cities across the country. By 1973, there were seventy-nine AIM chapters in the United States and Canada. AIM had become the most prominent Native American activist organization and soon faced infiltration and harassment by the Federal Bureau of Investigations.

Survival Schools Foster Indigenous Cultures in the Twin Cities and Beyond

Despite the FBI interference in AIM’s activism and the legal battles waged against several AIM leaders, the organization continued its work on the local level. The government’s termination policy shifted social support systems from the BIA and reservation to urban social services and public schools, yet few cities’ welfare and school systems had any cultural understanding or experience in serving Indigenous people. Across the country, schools were alienating or failing Native students in alarming numbers as the students faced discrimination and harassment. In some regions, the high school dropout rates for Indigenous students reached 80 percent. Similarly the state-based child welfare systems broke up Indigenous families at what was considered an epidemic rate—nationally 25 to 35 percent of Native children were removed from their homes. School attendance rules were a significant factor in deciding to remove Native children from their families. In the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, AIM activists responded to the threat to place truant students in foster homes by establishing two AIM survival schools, in which students could be surrounded by other Indigenous students, teachers, and their families, and with administrations and curriculum designed to meet the needs of Native students. Native women activists played major roles in founding and maintaining the two institutions. The schools adopted new open educational approaches that gave students more freedom in structuring their own education. They also emphasized building Indigenous identities and cultures in a multigenerational environment that included extended families and tribal elders. The survival schools both opened in 1972. The Red School House in St. Paul operated for almost twenty-two years, closing in 1994, and the Heart of the Earth Survival School educated Native students for over thirty-five years, closing in 2008. The survival school movement spread beyond the Twin Cities; sixteen AIM schools opened across the country, and other Indigenous-controlled alternative schools opened on reservations as well as in urban centers. Education has been a key force in assimilating Indigenous people in the American hemisphere from the time it was colonized until the present. From forced Christian indoctrination by missionaries to the use of boarding schools to erase Native languages and traditions, settler colonialism has tried to annihilate Indigenous cultures. But the AIM survival schools worked to reclaim Indigenous knowledge, identities, and cultures, and support students and their communities in resisting assimilation.

Additional Reading

Julie Davis, Survival Schools: AIM and Community Education in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. (New York: Verso, 2019).

Douglas K. Miller, Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

Heather Dorries, Robert Henry, David Hugill, Tyler McCreary, and Julie Tomiak, eds., Settler City Limits Indigenous Resurgence and Colonial Violence in the Urban Prairie West (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2019).

Related Chapters

The Rights Conscious 1960s, 1960-1973