“A Movement of Families”: The Legacy of Wounded Knee, 1973 and an Oral History of the American Indian Movement

A plenary panel featuring the oral histories and perspectives of esteemed Native elders, AIM activists, and Wounded Knee veterans

This session is Sponsored by the South Dakota Humanities Council and is free and open to the public

Saturday, September 30, 2023 at 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

Falls West Room, City Centre Holiday Inn

Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Panelists:

Dorothy Ninham is a Wolf Clan member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. She is best known for her work in the early 70s as a founder of the American Indian Alcohol Treatment Council after joining the American Indian Movement. With her husband Herb Powless, she worked with an advocate in Washington to secure a grant that is funded in perpetuity. Ninham was part of the occupation of the McKinley Coastguard station that led to a land-back deal.  Termination programs were ended due in part to the activism of the American Indian Movement in Milwaukee, and the story of which is featured in reports from NPR, USA Today, and NBC TV. Her activism led her to join the occupation of Wounded Knee, in 1973. She held two tribunals on the Oneida reservation which included AIM co-founders Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt and Leonard and Bill Means. The Children’s Tribunal gave centerstage to survivors of the Boarding School system and abuses, and many AIM members spoke publicly about it for the first time.

Presently the director of Blue Skies Foundation, Ninham is part of fighting the heroin addiction problems in her community, today and has a vision for a model for a sober house, a place of healing, again using traditional medicines, counselors, integrating family, and healing right in her own community. She was recently featured in a book, I Will which was honored with the prestigious Midwest Book Review’s first place in recommendation for Native American studies in libraries. American History TV recently featured Ninham in its program Inside the American Indian Movement.

Madonna Thunder Hawk, an Oohenumpa Lakota, is a veteran of every modern Native occupation from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee in 1973 and more recently the NODAPL protest at Standing Rock. Born and raised across the Oceti Sakowin homelands, she first became active in the late 1960s as a member and leader in the American Indian Movement and co-founded Women of All Red Nations and the Black Hills Alliance. In 1974, she established the We Will Remember survival group as an act of cultural reclamation for young Native people pushed out of the public schools. An eloquent voice for Native resistance and sovereignty, Thunder Hawk has spoken throughout the United States, Central America, Europe, and the Middle East and served as a delegate to the United Nations in Geneva.

In the last three decades at home on Cheyenne River, Thunder Hawk has been implementing the ideals of self-determination into reservation life. She currently works as the tribal liaison for the Lakota People's Law Project in fighting the illegal removal of Native children from tribal nations into the state foster care system. She established the Wasagiya Najin "Grandmothers' Group" on Cheyenne River Reservation to assist in rebuilding kinship networks and supporting the Nation in its efforts to stop the removal of children from Native families.  

William Means is an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. He was a co-founder of the International Indian Treaty Council and former president of the board. During his 9 years as Executive Director, he was responsible for the establishment of a system for documenting human rights violations against Indians. He is co-founder of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations and an expert on U.S. and Indian Treaty relations. He was Executive Director of American Indian OIC., a job center that has placed over 14,000 people in full-time employment. He was a former member of the Grand Governing Council of the American Indian Movement. He is a veteran of Wounded Knee 1973 and helped coordinate legal defense work on over 500 Wounded Knee federal indictments. Means has extensive negotiating experience with tribal, city, state, federal and international agencies. For five years he was Executive Director of the Heart of The Earth Survival School for Indians. He is on the Board of the World Archeological Congress and has lectured extensively at major universities here and abroad. He has been in many environmental campaigns including the Black Hills Alliance and is a Vietnam combat veteran.

The panel will moderated by Nick Estes

Nick Estes is a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and an Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of the award-winning book, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019), co-editor with Jaskiran Dhillon of Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement (University of Minnesota, 2019), and co-author with Melanie K. Yazzie, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, and David Correia of Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation (PM, 2021). In 2014 he co-founded The Red Nation and is cohost of the podcast by the same name. His writing has been featured in the The Guardian, Intercept, Jacobin, Indian Country Today, High Country News, NBC News, and elsewhere. Estes was the American Democracy Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in History at Harvard University (2017-2018), the Lannan Literary Fellow for non-fiction (2019), a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Fellow (2020-2021), and a National Archives Distinguished Scholar at Boston University (2022-2023).