Russell Means, 1939–2012

last updated 8 January 2015

Russell Means became the late-20th century’s most famous American Indian at Wounded Knee, where the U.S. Cavalry had massacred more than 150 Lakota Sioux men, women, and children in 1890. To protest past and current injustices, in 1973 Means and some 200 other activists of the American Indian Movement occupied the historical site, on South Dakota’s impoverished Pine Ridge Reservation, leading to a tense 71-day standoff with heavily armed federal forces. Two activists died and a U.S. marshal was left paralyzed in the confrontation, and the following year Means’s highly publicized trial ended when a federal judge dismissed felony charges on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct. Though conditions for Indians didn’t improve, Means considered the occupation a historic success. “Wounded Knee restored our dignity and pride as a people,” he later said.

Born on the Pine Ridge Reservation, “Means was, by his own account, a magnet for trouble,” said The New York Times. He grew up around San Francisco and “drifted into delinquency, drugs, alcoholism, and street fights.” After years of wandering the West, he moved to Cleveland in 1969 to head a center serving the city’s Indian residents. There he met Dennis Banks, who had recently co-founded the American Indian Movement, and he soon became its national director.

With AIM, Means later wrote, he found his purpose: “to get in the white man’s face until he gave me and my people our just due,” said the Los Angeles Times. In 1970 alone, Means “infamously urinated on the top of the head of George Washington” at Mount Rushmore and helped seize control of a replica of the Mayflower in Massachusetts. In later years, Means was imprisoned on obstruction of justice charges; he was stabbed once and shot three times. But he went on to embody American Indian characters in more than 30 films, including The Last of the Mohicans and Natural Born Killers. Acting was just another way, he later said, for him to be a voice for “freedom-seeking Indian people.”