Red Power: The Native American Civil Rights Movement (Landmark Events in Native American History)

The 71-day occupation of the village at Wounded Knee—February 27 to May 8, 1973—is a watershed event in the chronology of American Indian activism because it reflects both the height of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the beginning of the end of the power of that organization. It was at Wounded Knee Village where government forces surrounded a small, poorly armed band of AIM members who were protesting the death of Raymond Yellow Thunder and Wesley Bad Heart Bull and the subsequent court trials that meted out only minimal sentences for involuntary manslaughter to the non-Indian defendants. AIM members confronted local law enforcement and violently protested against the charges. As a result, the government declared a concentrated, no-holds-barred campaign to remove AIM leadership and to bankrupt the organization. The forceful text, detailed sidebars and chronology, and powerful images presented in Red Power transport readers back to this tense moment in recent American history.