Dennis Banks, American Indian leader, teacher, lecturer, activist, and author, was born in 1932 on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota. At age five he was separated from his family and placed at Pipestone Indian Boarding School. He left boarding school at age 17 and went on to serve in the U.S.Military and was stationed in Japan. In 1968 Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, and Russell Means helped found the American Indian
Movement (AIM), which was established to help end racism, police brutality against indigenous peoples and protect the traditional ways of Indian people. In the past, AIM has helped in legal cases protecting treaty rights of Native Americans, such broken treaties and the right of native to hunt, fish, trap, and gather wild rice. As one of the founders of the American Indian Movement (AIM), Dennis Banks has spent much of his life protecting the traditional ways of Indian people and engaging in legal cases protecting treaty rights of Native Americans. He started to travel the
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Between 1976 and 1983, while in seeking asylum in California Banks earned an associate of arts degree at the University of California, Davis, and taught at Deganawidah-Quetzecoatl (DQ) University (an all native american school), where he soon rose to become the first native american university chancellor. In the spring of 1979, he taught at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. In 1987, Banks was active in convincing the states of Kentucky and Indiana to pass laws against desecration of Indian graves and human remains. Banks organized the reburial ceremonies for just over twelve-hundred Native American grave sites that had been desecrated by graverobbers and people vandalizing graves in Uniontown, Kentucky. Banks organized and led a spiritual run called the Sacred Run from New York to San Francisco, he also ran in