There were Anna Mae Aquash, a Mikmaq woman and mother killed in 1976, and Richard Oakes, a Mohawk leader of the Alcatraz occupation, murdered in 1972. On Pine Ridge alone, more than three dozen AIM members and supporters were killed between 1973 and 1976. One result of this repression and of the government occupation of Pine Ridge was that Leonard Peltier, an AIM warrior, would be sentenced to two consecutive life terms on frame-up charges that he shot two FBI agents at Pine Ridge on June 26, 1975. Twenty-five years after the Wounded Knee occupation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs is still disgustingly corrupt, as are all too many of its tribal governments. The United States still refuses to recognize the sovereignty of Native nations.
Most Native people continue to live in the deepest poverty.
The Lakota of Pine Ridge, in 1998 as in 1973, have the lowest life expectancy and lowest per capita income in the country. Leonard Peltier remains in prison. Mass. The victory of the Native struggle is as inevitable as the tide and the dawn. Permission to reprint granted if source is cited.