On a cold night in February 1973, a caravan rolled through the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

The cars were packed with 200 Indians, men and women, local Oglala Lakota and members of the Urban Milligent Group, the American Indian Movement.

They headed toward the hallowed brown to Guamjit Nguyen, the site of the last massacre of the Indian Wars.

Going into Wounded Knee that night, when it was dark and scary, we were clinging to our weapons tightly.

There was a full moon and we knew that a battle was going to come.

I was sitting there thinking of some of these young men that are around me, am I committing them to die?

I was ready to do whatever it takes for change. I didn't care. I had children and for them, I figured I could make a stand here.

They were up to no good. Why would they be traveling in a caravan with all these weapons and all these Molotov cocktails if they weren't going to engage in some kind of destructive activity?

By the 1970s, native people, once masters of the continent, had become invisible, consigned to the margins of American life.

Their anger and frustration would explode in Wounded Knee.

We were about to be obliterated, cultured. Our spiritual way of life, our entire way of life was about to be stamped out.

And this was a rebirth of our dignity and self-pride.

For the next 71 days, Indian protesters at Wounded Knee would hold off to federal government at gunpoint.

Media from around the world would give the siege day by day coverage, and Native Americans from across the nation would come to Wounded Knee to be part of what they hoped would be a new beginning.

The message that went out is that a band of Indians could take on this government. To come so high this day, a Geronimo sitting bull, crazy horse, and we had ours.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode we have a really, really fascinating one for you.

We have on the historian and author of our history is the future Nick Estes to talk about the American Indian movement and more broadly than that, the massive history that goes back centuries in this country of settler colonialism and the historical place that movements like aim played and continue to play in that broader history.

We even connect aim up with current day movement, the George Floyd protests for example, exploded out of Minneapolis. That's the same city of course that aim was founded in.

And it's just a fascinating deep dive into the history of one of I think the most important movements in American history, especially a revolutionary movement in American history.

Nick Estes is of course also one of the co-founders of the Red Nation and Indigenous Resistance organization which we here at Rev. Left obviously love and support.

And so yeah, this is a fascinating episode. I'm extremely excited to get this out to listeners and I think it's absolutely essential to understand all of this history for anybody who claims to be on the left in this country and really around the world.

Before we do that though, I do want to say that in this episode, we talk about Zachary Bearheals, long time listeners of the show particularly patrons are probably familiar with Zachary Bearheals who was murdered by police here in Omaha.

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