American Indian Movement (AIM)

In the late 1960s, Native Americans in both Canada and the United States, reacting to centuries of oppression and mistreatment by whites, began to organize and protest in many isolated regional events, and in 1968 four men established the American Indian Movement (AIM). However, as Vine Deloria, Jr. noted in his book God is Red: A Native View of Religion, these smaller events "inspired Indians across the continent to defend their rights, but what was needed was some national symbol, a rallying point, that could launch a national movement." In 1969, Native Americans got their wish. After a convention in San Francisco to discuss Native-American issues, the Indian center where tribal representatives were meeting caught fire and burned to the ground. Realizing that there were no government funds to build a new Indian center, a group of Native Americans, supported by AIM and calling themselves the...