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Example research essay topic: American Indian Movement Bureau Of Indian Affairs - 1,622 words

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One of the modern Native Americans' most prominent leaders, Leonard Peltier, was arrested in the summer of 1975 and eventually sentenced to two life terms for a crime many believe he did not commit. The conviction and imprisonment of Leonard Peltier is an injustice. His prosecution by the United States government represents yet another attempt to snuff out American Indian culture and leaders. The outspokenness of Peltier and other AIM members may be the only reason why Leonard Peltier has sat in prison for the last 24 years.

Leonard Peltier is a Native American of mixed blood, being approximately 75 percent Sioux blood. His early life could be there story of almost any Native American growing up in the 1960 's. Born in Grand Forks, ND, he was raised in poverty on "the res, " as Peltier says in his book, My Life Is My Sundance, "My Grandfather used to come home from the store with our rations, and I would always ask him why he couldn't bring more" (24). Peltier was later removed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to a boarding school after his grandfather passed away. This unsanctioned removal was Leonard's first taste of the intrusion of the US Government into Native American life. At the school, the BIA attempted to strip all Indian qualities, including cutting the boy's long hair.

The school was ruled by a strict superintendent, which meant frequent and excessive punishments. "The sound of a child being struck and the screaming and crying that follows still haunts me today. I can't bear to see a child spanked" (Peltier, 26). A few years later, a teenaged Peltier was allowed to call home and go back living with his family on the Turtle Ridge Reservation in North Dakota. He soon received his first taste of racism when a group of white boys began throwing rocks at him. As Leonard relates in Peter Matthiessen's In The Spirit Of Crazy Horse, "One of the older ones said, 'He's a dirty Indian, ' and they started throwing rocks at me. I tried not to throw any back, but after a while I couldn't avoid being hit.

So I threw a marble-sized rock and it hit one of the boys and made him bleed" (56). This story would foreshadow Leonard's future incarceration. Turtle Ridge was one of three reservations in the country on which "the government had decided to test out its new termination policy" (Matthiessen, 63). The termination policy attempted to assimilate and "de-indianize" Native Americans by banning aspects of their culture such as the Sun Dance, and moderating the supposed self-governing tribal councils. The Indians on the Turtle Ridge Reservation reacted vocally, resulting in numerous protests and demonstrations against this revival of enfranchisement by the US Government.

When the BIA finally noticed the demonstrations, social workers were dispatched to see if things were really as band as the Indians claimed. Leonard, with another young organizer, sprang into action. "I ran from house to house, telling the families to hide what food they had. When I came to the first house, and told them to hide their food, they looked at me and said 'What food'" (Matthiessen, 64)? The demonstrations, including one about the lack of food on the reservation, whetted Leonard's young appetite for activism on the reservation. After attending his first Sun Dance, Leonard was arrested for being under the influence. "The reservation police knew what was going on, but they wouldn't come onto private property.

When we came out, they charged us all with being drunk, even though no one had been drinking" (Peltier, 41). His experience with police corruption later turned Leonard into an outspoken opponent of corrupt police. Often, trucks with Mexican immigrants would pull up to the reservation looking for workers, and Leonard and his father frequently joined them. From this experience, he learned about the struggles not only in his race, but also how racism, government relocation, and poverty were affecting all minorities.

In the next decade, Leonard spent a lot of his time moving around. He first moved to Seattle in 1965 where he owned a fender and car body parts shop. While in Seattle, he also established a safe house for battered women, and a counseling program for Native Americans. He later lived in Wisconsin and Denver as a carpenter and welder, and through his contacts as a community counselor became involved with the American Indian Movement. Rex Weyler relates in Blood Of The Land, "Whatever the American Indian Movement's origins, excesses and mistakes; that warrior spirit had restored identity and pride to thousands of defeated people and inspired attempts to resurrect the dying languages and culture" (11). Clyde Bellecourt, an Ojibwa Indian, founded the AIM.

At the time of his idea, he was an inmate at Stillwater State Prison in Minnesota. Bellecourt was outraged that even though Native Americans only comprise 1. 3 percent of Minnesota's population, they are 6 percent of the convict population. "The problem was not with the Indian population, but with the judicial system and US government interference. " Bellecourt recruited and united fellow Indians while in jail, and upon his release he formed the Conservative Indian Movement (which was quickly changed because of its acronym) with fellow ex-convicts Eddie Benton Bank, George Mitchell and Dennis Banks. The AIM quickly grew, pressing for equal rights and an end to corruption. Native American arrests in Minnesota quickly dropped significantly as a result. By 1965 the AIM offered social services and legal rights programs such as providing lawyers and making sure Indians knew they did not have to plead guilty if arrested, as many did at that time (Matthiessen, 110).

During Peltier's involvement as an activist, the AIM gained national recognition by being funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity (Peltier, 76). Peltier's participation in the AIM lead him to become a visible leader in the 1972 Native American rights campaign, The Trail of Broken Treaties. This movement called on the US Government for the restoration of treaty making powers to Indian nations, along with nineteen other grievances. In order to attract attention to their cause, Leonard and other AIM leaders occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D. C (Peltier, 133). They barricaded themselves in the very building of the program they were fighting against.

After many days of a peaceful occupation of the building, surrounded by riot squads the AIM leaders finally emerged; having attracted attention, but without their issues recognized. The Justice Department files would later turn up statements regarding the occupation such as, "An Indian behind a bureaucrat's desk did not look like a protector of civil rights, he looked like a burglar" (Matthiessen, 143). Some of the attention they gathered was from unwanted channels. Following the Trail of Broken Treaties, the FBI classified the AIM as an extremist organization and placed its leaders on the list of "key extremists", along with terrorists and war criminals as discussed in American Indians and Their Federal Relationship, a packet published by the US Government.

The AIM also began to be investigated by the FBI's secret COINTELPRO section. The COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) was a frightening program whose sole purpose was to disrupt civil right organizations, namely the AIM, Black Panthers and Martin Luther King, Jr. (US Gov. , 4). Their documents were recently made public through the Freedom of Information Act, and show shocking efforts by the US Government to undermine the AIM. One such document referring to the AIM leaders reads, "Through counterintelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them... " (Weyler, 68).

Peltier was then attracted to the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1973 by what would later be called Wounded Knee II. Leaders of the AIM occupied Wounded Knee, seizing among other things a Catholic Church, in remembrance of the Wounded Knee Massacre of Indian families and corruption on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Once again the FBI surrounded the protesting AIM leaders and traditional Indians, and 72 days later the standoff ended after much media attention. Soon after Wounded Knee II ended, the FBI began large-scale mobilization in and around the Pine Ridge Reservation (Peltier, 153). Fearing for their safety, the Oglala Sioux Nation elders asked the AIM to help protect their community. The AIM obliged, and came to Pine Ridge to protest the actions of Assistant Secretary of Interior Harrison Loesch, and the corrupt tribal chairman of the Pine Ridge Reservation, Dick Wilson.

Peltier and others were disgusted by the actions of Loesch, who used his position to withhold any support of the AIM, and also approved numerous gas and oil leases on Indian lands. As stated in Incident At Oglala, "State and government authorities were concerned less with Law and Order than with the obstacle to Black Hills mining leases that AIM insistence on Indian sovereignty might represent" Essentially, Loesch was selling off land to energy companies that didn't belong to him, something Native Americans were all too familiar with. Dick Wilson was largely the reason why the AIM targeted Pine Ridge. The tribal chairman's tactics were the motive behind the AIM's occupation of Wounded Knee. The list of the chairman's injustices is long, but included fixing tribal elections including his race, and hiring "goon squads" to enforce his power. These FBI-backed goon squads have been held accountable for 60 murders and over 300 beatings in Pine Ridge alone, most of whom were AIM supporters (Weyler, 177).

When election time would come, Wilson would coerce voters with the help of his goons. He would contest elections that he did not win; every time, he managed to stay in power. Coupled with the help of the FBI, who saw him as anti-AIM and non-threatening, Wilson was...


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Research essay sample on American Indian Movement Bureau Of Indian Affairs

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