Native Americans Fight Exploitation

Jun 9, 2025

Fifty years ago, on June 26, 1975, FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams were shot near the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Town residents are Native American, members of the Oglala subtribe of Lakota Sioux. A federal court sentenced American Indian Movement (AIM) activist Leonard Peltier to two life terms and imprisoned him for nearly half a century. This was punishment for his activism.

The supposed eyewitnesses, and an FBI agent who testified, later took back their stories, and the bullet casing presented as evidence later turned out not to come from his gun. Peltier was released this February at the age of 80 to live out the rest of his sentence in home confinement, at Joe Biden’s request. Violence to Native Americans continues … and began long ago.

When Europeans began colonizing North America in the mid 1500s and early 1600s, they tried to force many of the millions of Native Americans who survived Old World infectious diseases to labor for them. But the Native Americans’ tribal societies were based on egalitarian, collective hunting and gathering and planting. They used land, tools, and necessities in common. Many fought back against the settlers’ drive to own, buy, and sell everything, including human work.

The colonizers and then the U.S. government violently drove Native Americans off their homelands and onto land considered worthless, promising them autonomy. But when lucrative minerals were discovered on those reservations, capitalists and governments demanded mining access. What happened at Pine Ridge is a symbol of what happened across the continent.

The Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires, or “Sioux” as the settlers called them) had long lived on the richly wooded Paha Sapa or Black Hills in what is now South Dakota. The U.S. invaded, but the Sioux defeated General George Custer in battle in 1868 and forced the government to cede the land back to them. Six years later, gold was discovered. The U.S. outgunned the Sioux and forced them onto the Pine Ridge prairie reservation. Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills was carved with presidential faces. The Sioux launched a federal lawsuit in 1922 to regain the land.

During World War II, the military came onto Sioux land yet again, searching for valuable minerals, and found uranium and molybdenum in the Black Hills. The government cut a secret deal with corrupt Oglala president Dick Wilson in 1972 to develop mining there. But in the meantime, militant young Native Americans had built AIM to defend their communal heritage. AIM militants confronted Wilson, his goons, and 2,500 FBI agents. For three years before and after the Wounded Knee shootout, at least 69 AIM members and supporters were killed and 350 wounded by shootings, stabbings, and beatings. To this day the Oglala insist, “The Black Hills are not for sale.”

In fact, more than half of U.S. uranium is on Native American reservations, as is a quarter of low-sulfur coal, a fifth of oil and natural gas, and much copper. On the Navajo reservation in Arizona, nearly 30 million tons of uranium ore were extracted from leased mines between World War II and the mid-1980s, when mining finally stopped there, after hundreds of cancer deaths among thousands of Navajo miners and their families. Just this May, the U.S. Supreme Court authorized the excavation of a two-mile-wide crater for a copper mine in the Tonto National Forest in Arizona, exactly where the San Carlos Apache Tribe holds sacred ceremonies.

AIM militants like Leonard Peltier had no choice but to fight back! But it will take a fight by the whole working class to end this capitalist system which sees land and people as nothing but resources to exploit.