Naawakamig — “In the Center of the Universe ” — was his Anishinaabe name. But to most, he was known by his Anglo name: Dennis J. Banks.

Born on the Leech Lake Reservation in 1937 — Ojibwe territory in present-day Minnesota — Banks became a force in a world where Native people rarely mattered.

He cofounded the American Indian Movement (AIM) in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1968 and, along with AIM, played a starring role in the liberation of Wounded Knee in 1973 — a radical, insurgent moment of indigenous revolution. Under Banks’s leadership, AIM became the most powerful Native movement of the twentieth century, galvanizing indigenous people throughout the United States, Canada, and beyond.

“We were the prophets, the messengers, the fire-starters,” Banks wrote in his autobiography, Ojibwa Warrior, cowritten with Richard Erdoes. “Out of AIM came a new breed of writers, poets, artists, actors, and filmmakers.”

Banks — who passed away last week in Rochester, Minnesota at the age of eighty — spent his earliest years crammed into a small house with his extended family on the reservation. The lone luxury item in his grandmother’s home was a battery-powered radio that delivered news of the World War his father, Walter Chase, a man he only met a few times, was off fighting.

When Banks was just five years old, a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) agent kidnapped him and his siblings, wrenching them from their grandmother’s home, kicking and screaming, and taking them three hundred miles away to an Indian boarding school. When they arrived, they were stripped of their clothes and doused with DDT. Their long hair was cut. Over months and years, their Anishinaabe language was quite literally beaten out of them.

“I could not wait to go to bed,” Banks later wrote in his autobiography. “I pretended in my daydreams that I could fly — fly through the air to my old Indian home.”

Scores of Native families and children had the same horrifying experience. Removal was standard government policy, the latest front in a centuries-long war against Indians.

Banks did not see his family for nine years after his abduction, and it took even longer before he could return to his old Indian home with the battery-powered radio.

In 1954, at the age of seventeen, Banks enlisted in the Air Force to escape dire poverty. While stationed in Japan, he witnessed protests against the United States’ occupation. He abandoned his post in the occupying force and fell in love with a Japanese woman, Machiko Inouye, whom he married. They had a daughter together, Michiko. He was eventually arrested, court martialed, and shipped back to the United States for going AWOL, leaving behind his Japanese family, whom he never saw again.

Banks returned to Minneapolis, remarried, this time to Jeanette Banks, and had four more children. But money and jobs were scarce in the Twin Cities — especially for the Native underclass. Banks was arrested multiple times, often in violent police raids on the Indian bars that dotted the blocks of the “Red Ghetto.” Like hundreds of other Native people, mostly young men, Banks churned in and out of the criminal justice system. The jail cells of adulthood replaced the boarding schools of his youth.

In 1966, he was indicted on burglary charges for stealing groceries to feed his family. When he violated parole, he was sent upstate to Stillwater prison. There he read about indigenous history and was inspired by the revolutionary zeitgeist of the late 1960s.

“Sitting in that jail cell I began to understand there was a hell of a goddamn movement going on that I wasn’t a part of, the antiwar movement, the Black Panther movement, the civil rights movement, the Students for a Democratic Society,” Banks remembered. “I began to see that the greatest war was going to go on right here in the United States, and I began to realize that there was a hell of a situation in this country — all these different kinds of people trying so hard to straighten this country out.”

The war against Native life — which permanently shaped his own life — weighed on Banks’s soul. “The chances for creating an effective Indian rights organization were passing us by,” he recalled. “Are we going to sit here in Minnesota and not do a goddamn thing?”

On the evening of July 28, 1968, just two months after Banks got out of prison, two hundred people packed the basement of a rundown Minneapolis church for a meeting about Indian civil rights. Heated conversation turned, almost immediately, to a radical plan to stop police brutality. It was out of this discussion that the American Indian Movement was born.

AIM’s founders — Banks, Pat Bellanger, George Mitchell, and Clyde Bellecourt — envisioned more than just a protest movement. They aimed to not only end police brutality, but also poverty, housing, and employment discrimination, and the forcible removal of Native children from their homes.

Before the braids and shades, AIM was an institution builder in the urban communities it served, founding survival schools that taught Native history and culture and provided employment, housing, and legal advocacy for Native families. After AIM arrived on the scene, police raids on Indian bars all but stopped. At the same time, a more subtle cultural transformation was afoot: the downtrodden of the Red Ghettos were proud to be Indian again.

Part of that newfound confidence sprung from a new generation of strong leaders. In 1969, at an education conference, Banks befriended Russell Means, a firebrand Oglala orator and organizer. The two men, handsome and sharp, became the spokesmen of the movement (often overshadowing the central roles of women like Phyllis Young, Madonna Thunderhawk, Nilak Butler, Mabel Anne Phillips, and many more).

Soon, AIM would begin to make its mark outside of Minneapolis.