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anarcho-queer:

Russell Means Dies At 72

Russell C. Means, the charismatic Oglala Sioux activist who held guerrilla-tactic protests in the 1970s that called attention to the nation’s history of injustices against its indigenous peoples, died on Monday at his ranch in Porcupine, S.D., on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. He was 72.

In 1968, he joined the American Indian Movement and soon became one its prominent leaders.

Russell subsequently took part in an occupation of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington in 1972. But it was his leadership of an armed, 72-day standoff against federal authorities at Wounded Knee on Pine Ridge in 1973 that made him a national figure.

The siege at Wounded Knee, protesting what Means believed to be a corrupt tribal government and maltreatment of American Indians by federal authorities, left two demonstrators dead, a U.S. marshal paralyzed and numerous others injured.

Nearly 80 years earlier, Wounded Knee was the site of an 1890 massacre of scores of Lakota men, women and children by U.S. cavalry troops in what was the final major clash of the American Indian wars.

(via realworldnews)