Russell Means

Russell Charles Means, known in Lakota as Waŋblí Ohítika (Brave Eagle), was born November 10, 1939, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Porcupine, South Dakota. His mother, Theodora Louise Feather, was Yankton Dakota; his father, Walter "Hank" Means, was Oglala Lakota. He had three brothers: Dace, and twins William and Theodore. In 1942, the family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to escape reservation poverty. His father worked in a Vallejo shipyard. Means graduated from San Leandro High School in 1958, attended four colleges without graduating, and later described a difficult childhood marked by his father’s alcoholism and his own years of truancy, crime, and drugs. After his father died in 1967, Means lived on several reservations seeking work. While at the Rosebud Indian Reservation, he developed severe vertigo. Reservation clinic staff initially assumed he was drunk and refused to examine him for days, eventually diagnosing a concussion from a presumed bar fight. A visiting specialist later found a common ear infection had been overlooked, costing Means hearing in one ear. After recovery, he worked for a year at the Office of Economic Opportunity, where he met legal activists handling Lakota cases. Following a dispute with his supervisor, he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and worked with Native community leaders amid the Civil Rights Movement.

Means joined the American Indian Movement in December 1969 and quickly became a prominent figure. In 1970, he was named AIM’s first national director. He had previously participated in a 24-hour occupation of Alcatraz in March 1964, led by his father and a few other Lakota men, and later joined the longer 1969 Alcatraz occupation. On Thanksgiving Day 1970, Means and other AIM activists seized the Mayflower II replica in Boston to protest Puritan and U.S. mistreatment of Native Americans. In 1971, he helped lead AIM’s takeover of Mount Rushmore, a federal monument in the sacred Black Hills. In November 1972, he took part in the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, D.C., where records were taken or destroyed and over $2 million in damage occurred. In 1973, Means served as a spokesman and prominent leader during AIM’s 71-day armed standoff at Wounded Knee, alongside Dennis Banks and Carter Camp. Two activists, Frank Clearwater and Lawrence “Buddy” Lamont, were killed; African-American activist Ray Robinson disappeared and is presumed buried in the hills.

In 1974, Means resigned from AIM to run for president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe against incumbent Richard Wilson. The official count gave Wilson a victory by over 200 votes. Residents reported intimidation by Wilson’s private militia, and a government investigation confirmed election problems, but a federal court upheld the results. In the late 1970s, Means shifted to international indigenous rights work, collaborating with Jimmie Durham at the International Indian Treaty Council to engage the United Nations in 1977. On the Pine Ridge Reservation, he helped establish KILI radio station and the Porcupine Health Clinic. He traveled to Germany, behind the Iron Curtain to meet East German AIM supporters, and to Switzerland for a Geneva human rights conference. By the mid-1970s, Means and Dennis Banks were the most recognized Native Americans since Lakota leaders of earlier eras.

Means began acting in 1992, appearing in television series and films including *The Last of the Mohicans*, *Pocahontas*, and *Curb Your Enthusiasm*. He released a music CD and published his autobiography, *Where White Men Fear to Tread*, in 1995. He remained active in state and national politics, as well as at Pine Ridge. Means died on October 22, 2012.