[Bellecourt and the American Indian Movement taught us that
colonizing society is weak because of its sense of superiority. It has
God, guns, and gold, but its soft underbelly is glory. ]
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DAMN HARD WORK: THE LIFE OF CLYDE BELLECOURT (1936–2022)  
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Nick Estes
January 21, 2022
American Indian Movement Interpretive Center
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_ Bellecourt and the American Indian Movement taught us that
colonizing society is weak because of its sense of superiority. It has
God, guns, and gold, but its soft underbelly is glory.  _

Clyde Bellecourt speaking outside the Ebenezer Baptist Church,
Atlanta, GA, 1974, American Indian Movement Interpretive Center

 

I HAD SHORT HAIR the first time I met Clyde Bellecourt. It was Native
American Heritage Month in 2005. Native students had invited him and
fellow members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) to the University
of South Dakota after police plastered posters on campus depicting a
poorly drawn “Native American male” who had allegedly attacked a
woman. The description was vague enough to implicate just about
anyone; several students and university workers were called in for
questioning. The posters were vulgar because of their bluntness: they
appeared to confirm the worst stereotypes of savage Indians attacking
innocent women. 

So AIM called a press conference. They brought in the big drum. The
AIM song, known as the “Raymond Yellow Thunder Song,” boomed so
loudly from the campus dining hall I heard it in the parking lot. And
a prayer was said with the canupa, a ceremonial pipe. The event
quickly turned into a demonstration, as AIM leaders sat in judgement
of university and law enforcement officials. Bellecourt likened the
actions of police to “that old John Wayne frontier mentality.” It
didn’t help that the chief of police, Art Mabry, had an unfortunate
resemblance to the Duke, that Hollywood cowboy who spent a lot of time
on-screen killing Indians. Mabry’s face flushed red as several
people from the crowd snickered. One by one, community members
testified to the daily humiliations they faced at the hands of white
authority. It was an AIM signature, the Red Ribbon Grand Jury, a
people’s court, that was first hosted in 1968 to hold government
officials to account. 

The tables had turned that evening. No concrete actions or apologies
came from either side, but attitudes shifted. Bellecourt and AIM
taught us something that they had been teaching Native people for
nearly half a century: colonizing society is weak because of its sense
of superiority. It has God, guns, and gold, but its soft underbelly is
glory. 

Like many of the founders of AIM, Bellecourt was profoundly shaped by
his experience of being stolen away from his family to church- or
state-run schools.

That memory came rushing back to me last week when I learned of
Bellecourt’s death. He passed at his home in Minneapolis at the age
of eighty-five. AIM has been largely caricatured in the media as a
group of violent, larger than life men with braids and shades. (Women
in the movement have largely been ignored, if not nearly forgotten.)
It’s true that armed takeovers and occupations—such as at Wounded
Knee 1973, which Bellecourt helped organize—launched AIM to
international prominence. Those actions were no doubt important. But
perhaps AIM is really defined by what Bellecourt called “the damn
hard work,” which doesn’t make headlines, of fighting for
affordable housing, youth educational and cultural programs, and legal
aid for poor and urban Indians. That work began well before Wounded
Knee and has carried on since. “We were just getting going,”
Bellecourt said of AIM after Wounded Knee.

Cyle Bellecourt and Muhammad Ali during The Longest Walk, 1978.
| American Indian Movement Interpretive Center
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Bellecourt was born in 1936 on the White Earth Indian Reservation in
present-day northwest Minnesota. He was the seventh of twelve children
growing up in a home with no electricity or running water. Both of
Bellecourt’s parents suffered lifelong physical disabilities. His
father Charles, a survivor the notorious, government-run Carlisle
Indian Industrial School, was wounded in World War I. As punishment
for speaking Anishinaabe, nuns crippled his mother Angeline when she
was a child by making her scrub floors for hours while kneeling on
bags of marbles. She walked with a limp for the rest of her life. 

Like many of the founders of AIM, Bellecourt was profoundly shaped by
his experience of being stolen away from his family to church- or
state-run schools. As a boy, he attended a Catholic school run by nuns
from St. Benedict’s Mission. His hands bore the scars of a nun’s
ruler. He often cut class, escaping to nearby forests and lakes for
hunting and fishing. Later, a judge sentenced him to a correctional
school off-reservation for truancy. In the book _The Thunder Before
the Storm_ which he co-wrote with Jon Lurie, Bellecourt recounts
being sexually abused by a Catholic priest and forced into hard labor.

When he was sixteen, his family moved to Minneapolis, where Bellecourt
dropped out of high school and struggled to find a job. He turned to
drinking, burglary, and robbery and was jailed. At Stillwater Prison,
after a harrowing stint in solitary confinement, he met Eddie
Benton-Banai, an Ojibwe from Wisconsin. The two began running cultural
programs and sweat lodge ceremonies for Native inmates. The Indian
Folklore Group, as it was known, taught Native history and language.
For the first time in the prison’s history, spiritual leaders were
allowed to conduct Midewin ceremonies and purification rites that
Bellecourt described as leading him “down a healing path.”
Reconnecting with culture and spirituality was transformative for him
and hundreds like him. “There was an Indian renaissance going on in
that prison,” he recalled. 

After his release in mid-1968, Bellecourt teamed up with former
inmates, including Benton-Banai and a charismatic Ojibwa named Dennis
Banks, to “transpose our Native American studies program to the
streets of Minneapolis.” They formed the American Indian Movement
that July with others like Pat Bellanger, Annette Oshie, Harold
Goodsky, and George Mitchell. Bellecourt was its first chairman. AIM
started out as a community forum, where Native people brough their
problems and complaints about police, schools, housing, jobs, and
discrimination. Their quick response and organizing earned them the
respect of their base. Bellecourt had worked for a utility company
after prison, but he soon quit to dedicate himself full-time to the
movement. While protesting the Vietnam War, he met his future wife
Peggy Sue Holmes, the daughter of an Anishinaabe woman and a Japanese
man who was once interned in a war relocation camp. They had four
children together.

The credo of AIM became “anytime, anywhere, any place.”

AIM set its sights on combating Indian child removal, police violence,
and poverty. (Later, its objectives evolved to include tribal
sovereignty and the unification of all Indian people.) Federal
policies of termination and relocation pushed Native people to cities
promising jobs and the American dream. What they found were dire
conditions—unemployment, poor housing, and rampant
discrimination—that were sometimes worse than reservation life.
Relocation wasn’t the only form of elimination. Indian child removal
was just as devastating. Two studies by the Association on American
Indian Affairs conducted in 1969 and 1974 found that 25 to 35 percent
of all Native children had been separated from their families and
placed into foster homes or adoptive institutions. In Minnesota in
1978, more than ninety percent of nonrelated adoptions of Indian
children were made by non-Indian couples. “We had been raised in the
foster system, the boarding school system, the criminal justice
system, and by parents who’d had the Indian beaten out of them,”
Bellecourt wrote of the people he organized with during those early
years. “The thing that bothered me the most was not knowing where my
nephews and my nieces and my family were,” he told the Osage
historian Amy Lonetree in 2012. “So this was burning inside me when
the American Indian Movement formed.” 

The credo of AIM became “anytime, anywhere, any place.” The AIM
Patrol, which kept an eye on cops in Indian neighborhoods, deployed at
a moment’s notice, often intervening during raids on Indian bars.
The confrontational tactics that were effective at curbing the most
egregious forms of police violence became a mainstay of the
organization. In 1970, AIM occupied the Denver Bureau of Indian
Affairs (BIA) office to protest its not hiring Native employees. The
action snowballed as BIA offices were occupied in Chicago, Alameda,
Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Dallas, Los Angeles, and
Albuquerque—AIM “became a national movement overnight,”
according to Bellecourt. The actions earned them a reputation as
vanguards for the Indian revolution that seemed to be underway. One
year earlier, Native students had taken over the federal prison at
Alcatraz Island declaring it Indian territory.

During those tumultuous years, from 1970 to 1971, Banks and Bellecourt
traveled the country at the invitation of the government-run program
through the National Council on Indian Opportunity, as part of a
national survey of Indian economic conditions on- and off-reservation.
They made national connections that helped spread the message of AIM,
and the experience was eye-opening. They discovered that Natives had
the highest infant mortality rate and terrible rates of suicide; that
they suffered substandard housing and lack of running water; that high
school dropouts and unemployment were rampant; that police violence
and incarceration were disproportionate. “The information was
shocking,” Bellecourt recalled, “even to those of us who lived
it.” In the Twin Cities, they collaborated with Black activists to
establish the Legal Rights Center to provide poor Black, white, and
Native families with legal aid. (Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s current
Attorney General, was the Center’s former executive director.) They
took control of the Little Earth Housing Project, which provided
affordable housing to Native families, and helped set up survival
schools like Heart of the Earth and Red School House, teaching youth
Native culture and history as an alternative to the public school
system. Nearly forty AIM schools sprung up throughout the United
States and Canada.

By 1972, AIM had tens of thousands of members and chapters in every
region of the United States. That year, Bellecourt organized a
coast-to-coast march to Washington, D.C. The Trail of Broken Treaties,
which was mostly written by Hank Adams, was a twenty-point indictment
of U.S-Indigenous relations that also offered solutions such as
beginning a new era of treaty-making. A coalition of Native
organizations planned to deliver the document to the Nixon
administration. AIM ended up leading a take over the BIA headquarters
in Washington, renaming it “The Native American Embassy.” 

The action riled tribal officials and the political elite. But it won
AIM respect among reservation-based elders and traditionals, who
called them to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, first to address
rampant border town violence, such as the killings of Raymond Yellow
Thunder in Gordon, Nebraska, and of Wesley Bad Heart Bull in Hot
Springs, South Dakota. The demonstration in Gordon led to the
conviction of Yellow Thunder’s killers; a second action in Custer,
South Dakota, ended in a riot at the courthouse. It was in Lakota
Country in 1970 that Bellecourt experienced another spiritual
awakening revitalization. He was introduced to the young Lakota
medicine man Leonard Crow Dog, who became the movement’s spiritual
advisor. Bellecourt made his vows on the canupa and attended his first
sun dance with Russell Means, whose star as an AIM leader was fast
rising.

Bellecourt strengthened international relationships with liberation
organizations like the Sandinistas and Irish Republican Army.

In February 1973, Bellecourt and AIM leadership led an armed takeover
of the Wounded Knee Massacre site. They declared independence from the
United States and demanded the restoration of treaty rights to the
Great Sioux Nation, or the Oceti Sakowin. Bellecourt claimed it was a
“non-violent” action that turned violent because of state
aggression. Federal troops fired tens of thousands of rounds on AIM,
who had hunting rifles and shotguns. Two members were killed and
hundreds arrested, as the organization’s leadership was tied up. A
medicine man gave Bellencourt the Anishinaabe name
Neegawnwaywidung—“Thunder Before the Storm”—after the
seventy-one-day siege.

During the Wounded Knee trials of Dennis Banks and Russell Means, it
became increasingly clear that the FBI was out to destroy AIM. (In
1974, their case was dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct, a
decision upheld on appeal.) Tensions and suspicions rose about
suspected infiltration. Nearly sixty AIM members died during the
FBI’s “Reign of Terror” following Wounded Knee. Factional
disputes also intensified. Carter Camp, a Ponca AIM leader from
Oklahoma, shot Bellecourt on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in 1973,
nearly killing him. Bellecourt suspected that Camp was working for the
FBI but refused to testify, instead opting to handle it the
“traditional way.” Police surveillance and political pressures
mounted causing splinters in AIM, turning relatives and former friends
against each other.

It seemed like the AIM was on the brink of collapse when it formed the
International Indian Treaty Council in 1974, transposing a largely
U.S.-based struggle into an international Indigenous movement. The
twenty points Bellecourt and others drafted for the Trail of Broken
Treaties became the basis for four decades of work at the United
Nations and led to the 2007 UN Declarations on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples. With his older brother Vernon Bellecourt and
longtime confidant Bill Means, Bellecourt also strengthened
international relationships with liberation organizations like the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua and Irish Republican Army and Sinn Fein in
Ireland. Vernon died in 2007, not long after visiting Venezuela, where
he spoke to Hugo Chavez about providing heating assistance to Indian
reservations. (In 2007, Montana and South Dakota tribes received over
a million dollars in a private donation from from CITGO Petroleum
Corporation, which is majority-owned by the Venezuelan state.) 

In 1991, the Bellecourt brothers formed the National Coalition on
Racism in Sports and Media. Their actions included filing lawsuits
against sports teams with racist logos and mascot and marches in
protest. A measure of their success is that in recent years, the
Washington Football Team and Cleveland Baseball Team have both retired
racist mascots.

Cyde Bellecourt at Liberation Day 4 Direction Walk 2014. | Flickr
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I had long hair, wearing it in the style of my ancestors, the last
time I saw Cyde Bellecourt. It was at the Standing Rock prayer camps
erected in 2016 against the Dakota Access Pipeline. A journalist with
a camera was asking Bellecourt, now an old man, why he was there. He
seemed annoyed. “Because this is what we do,” he told her, letting
out a smile. 

After Bellecourt left this world for the next, the damn hard work
continues.

Bellecourt balked at being called a “civil rights leader.”
“Indian people were demonstrating for a hell of long time before
Martin Luther King and before the Constitution was ever enacted in
this country,” he said at a talk in 1971. “And Indian people have
been demonstrating to this system . . . at least since the white man
got here.” If journalists are the first to write history, they can
also be guilty of getting that history wrong. Bellecourt’s hometown
newspaper the_ Star Tribune _called him a “longtime civil rights
leader” in the headline announcing his death. I imagine him smiling
about that one, too.

After the camps left Standing Rock, the damn hard work continued on
other frontlines, like Line 3 in Bellecourt’s homelands. George
Floyd was murdered by police not far from where Bellecourt lived with
his wife Peggy Sue. A new generation picked up where he left off, and
the AIM Patrol got to work during the uprising of 2020. After
Bellecourt left this world for the next, the damn hard work continues
with the urban Indian housing projects, language schools, the Legal
Rights Center, and Indian health boards—the living legacies of AIM
in Minneapolis.

_Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is an
assistant professor of American studies at the University of New
Mexico and is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock
Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of
Indigenous Resistance._

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