AIM Trial Summary

Words: 802
Pages: 4

Regardless of whether this trial may be used as evidence for governmental bias, it does portray the governmental view of AIM. Before the hearing even began, FBI agents would regularly scan the judge’s rooms for listening devices believed to have been put there by AIM. Curtains were installed on the bus that transported the jury and explained to them as a prevention against AIM members attempting to shoot them. An Indian woman, along with a friend and their children, were told by the FBI to wait behind a building while the jury left the courthouse. She believed the reason to be that the FBI did not want the jury to see Indian women and children, lest they began to see them more as people and not the dangerous militants the prosecution was portraying …show more content…
This is why Indian movements like AIM came into existence. They did not want their reservations terminated, but instead sought self-determination, to be autonomous nations no longer dependent upon the U.S. government. They specially desired that their cultures be preserved, more than that that their cultures flourish. Towards this end, AIM in 1972 established two survival schools in order to address the exceptionally high drop-out rate among Indian students and the lack of native culture being taught. They were the first models of community-based, student-centered teaching with ethnically correct curriculum operating under parental …show more content…
They wanted to draw the attention of the dominant society to what was transpiring on reservations and for a time they had the focus of the nation, but what would prove to be more beneficial over time was not that they attracted notice form white society but that they drew the awareness of their own people. This activism prompted more and more Native Americans to protect and cherish their traditional practices and beliefs because the American Indian Movement was never only a social crusade, it was also concerned with a renewal of spirituality. They wished to perpetuate not just language, or history, or traditions, but native religious beliefs as well. AIM members believed that only through religion would their people find the resolve to overcome detrimental government