Brief (Very Brief) History of the American Indian Movement |
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pancho
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- Wednesday, February 22 2012, 1:40:11 (UTC) from *** - *** - Windows XP - Mozilla Website: Website title: |
American Indian Movement (AIM) AIM—the American Indian Movement—began in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the summer of 1968. It began taking form when 200 people from the Indian community turned out for a meeting called by a group of Native American community activists led by George Mitchell, Dennis Banks, and Clyde Bellecourt. Frustrated by discrimination and decades of federal Indian policy, they came together to discuss the critical issues restraining them and to take control over their own destiny. Out of that ferment and determination, the American Indian Movement was born. AIM's leaders spoke out against high unemployment, slum housing, and racist treatment, fought for treaty rights and the reclamation of tribal land, and advocated on behalf of urban Indians whose situation bred illness and poverty. They opened the K-12 Heart of the Earth Survival School in 1971, and in 1972, mounted the Trail of Broken Treaties march on Washington, D.C., where they took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), in protest of its policies, and with demands for their reform. The revolutionary fervor of AIM's leaders drew the attention of the FBI and the CIA, who then set out to crush the movement. Their ruthless suppression of AIM during the early 1970s sowed the seeds of the confrontation that followed in February, 1973, when AIM leader Russell Means and his followers took over the small Indian community of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in protest of its allegedly corrupt government. When FBI agents were dispatched to remove the AIM occupiers, a standoff ensued. Through the resulting siege that lasted for 71 days, two people were killed, twelve wounded, and twelve hundred arrested. Wounded Knee was a seminal event, drawing worldwide attention to the plight of American Indians. AIM leaders were later tried in a Minnesota court and, after a trial that lasted for eight months, were acquitted of wrongdoing. ...there is no mention of the incidents at Pine Ridge Reservation where Peltier was involved, but this will do. Now...are there any similarities to the assyrian claims? No one who lives in America and reads only a little history doubts that Native Americans were stripped of their lands illegally, their families butchered and the remnant heavily discriminated against for centuries...who admits to such a thing where Iraq and Christians are concerned? On the contrary the Ottomans are credited with providing fair treatment for minorities...and in Iraq, fleeing assyrians from Urmia were taken in and SAVED...land was given them for homes at public expense...and their churches have been ringing their fucking bells for centuries, nay for over 1000 years...so where's the discrimination...where is the second-class status? What HAS occurred is that whenever groups of assyrian nationalists have attempted to slander the lawful government of Iraq, or encourage defiance against it, those assyrians have paid the price...as did Native Americans when they tried the same thing, in AMERICA. So, give us a break...our pointy-headed assyrians are NOT Jews...and they are NOT Native Americans....those in Iraq are Iraqis who happen to be Christians, who though they found a clever way to disguise themselves as a "nation" and demand and beg "national rights" have never been "PERsecuted for being Christian OR assyrian", but PROsecuted for engaging in sedition i.e., for what they have DONE and not for what they supposedly ARE...they have fooled no one but themselves. --------------------- |
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